The evacuation from Greece

On the night of 24–25 April 1941, a few hours after the New Zealand and Australian rearguards had fought the last big battle on the Greek mainland at Thermopylae, British warships closed the beach at Porto Rafti on the east coast of Attica and the bay off Nafplio in the Peloponnese. Boats and landing craft began taking off the first soldiers of the corps which a month and a half earlier had landed in Greece to defend it against the Germans. More than 12,000 men sailed that night. So began Operation Demon, which over the next seven nights, under constant Luftwaffe attack, carried some 50,000 British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers out of Greece – but without their guns, tanks and lorries.

Popular chronologies spread the start of the evacuation over three days. Under 22 April they state that the British, military and civilian, “begin to evacuate Greece”; under 23 April, that the Greek government moved to Crete, which Winston Churchill had decided to defend; and under 24 April, that British and Australian troops were leaving Greece for Crete and Egypt. This sequence needs one clarification. On 22 April the evacuation was already under way in an organisational sense: rear units were being withdrawn southwards, the air force was moving to Crete and the first civilians were leaving Athens. The ground troops, however, did not begin to embark until the night of 24–25 April, and it is that day which opens the operation proper.

The decision

Cairo had been thinking about an evacuation since 13 April, when the Germans entered Belgrade, a day after they had broken the left wing of the British and Greek defence line at Vevi. The situation in the Balkans had become, as the British official history puts it, “extremely serious”. On 16 April the Commander-in-Chief of the Greek army, General Alexandros Papagos, himself suggested to the commander of the British corps, Lieutenant General Henry Maitland Wilson, that the British should consider leaving Greece and spare it destruction. General Archibald Wavell then halted the dispatch of supplies and asked London for instructions. On 17 April Churchill replied that if the Greek government endorsed Papagos’s proposal, the evacuation should go ahead, and that Crete was “to be held in force”. That same day Rear Admiral Harold Baillie-Grohman was sent to Athens to prepare the naval side of the operation.

The British could not, however, announce their departure on their own. The request had to come from the Greeks, and after the suicide of Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis on 18 April the Greek government practically ceased to exist for three days. On 19 April Wavell flew to Athens and, at a conference with Wilson, Baillie-Grohman and the air commander in Greece, Air Vice-Marshal John D’Albiac, concluded with great reluctance that they had to go: German air superiority was overwhelming, and the army would also have had to feed the population. On the morning of 21 April King George II admitted, in the presence of the new Prime Minister, Emmanouil Tsouderos, that no organised Greek unit would be able to cover the left flank of the Thermopylae position in time. Wavell then declared that it was his duty to prepare at once to embark as many troops as possible. The King agreed and, as the British recorded, spoke with deep regret of having placed them in such a position. Tsouderos afterwards wrote to the British Minister, Sir Michael Palairet, that after six months of victorious fighting the Greek army was exhausted and that any further sacrifice of the British corps would be in vain.

That same day came news that made haste imperative. The commander of the Greek Army of Western Macedonia, General Georgios Tsolakoglou, had pushed aside the commander of the Army of Epirus and on 20 April, against Papagos’s wishes, offered the Germans a capitulation, which the chief of staff of the German 12th Army accepted on the evening of 21 April. The left flank at Thermopylae lay open. The evacuation, planned for 28 April, two days after the new moon, and spread over three nights, was brought forward by four days – to the earliest night on which ships could reach Greece, 24–25 April – by Wilson, the commander of the ANZAC Corps, General Thomas Blamey, and Baillie-Grohman at a roadside conference near Thebes.

The Demon plan

The operation fell on Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s Mediterranean Fleet at the worst possible moment. For seven weeks the fleet had been carrying the corps and its supplies to Greece; in March it had fought the Battle of Cape Matapan, and on 21 April it was returning from the bombardment of Tripoli. Vice Admiral Henry Pridham-Wippell took command at sea and Baillie-Grohman ashore. They had at their disposal four cruisers (Orion, Ajax, Phoebe and the Australian Perth), three anti-aircraft cruisers, some twenty destroyers, three sloops, two landing ships, Glenearn and Glengyle, with their motor landing craft, nineteen medium-sized transports, a few tank landing craft, and caiques and motor boats gathered in Greek ports. Cunningham left his battleships in Alexandria, because screening them would have required destroyers, which were already too few for taking off the men.

Piraeus, the only port capable of handling heavy equipment, had been wrecked since the first night of the campaign by the explosion of the ammunition ship Clan Fraser, and was bombed incessantly. It was therefore decided to take the troops off open beaches and small harbours, dispersed so as to make German air attacks more difficult: from Rafina and Porto Rafti on the east coast of Attica, from Megara between Athens and Corinth, and from the area around Nafplio in the Argolic Gulf. Each brigade was to drive by night to a concealed lying-up area, wait out the day there, destroy at dusk the equipment that could not be taken, and go down to the beach when summoned by the embarkation officers. The ships were to close the shore an hour after dark and sail by 3 a.m. at the latest, so as to be as far as possible from the German airfields at dawn. The soldiers were to take their personal weapons and light, valuable equipment such as gun sights. Stores useful to the population were to be handed over to the Greeks and the rest destroyed. To shorten the voyages, the transports and cruisers were to sail only as far as Suda Bay on Crete, not to Egypt.

Protection came almost entirely from the army itself. The RAF in Greece had been all but destroyed. On 20 April the last fifteen Hurricanes fought a large German formation over Athens and lost five aircraft; on 22 April D’Albiac sent the obsolete Gladiators off to Crete, and on 23 April a German raid on the airfield at Argos destroyed fourteen Hurricanes. The six survivors also flew to Crete. From then on only a few Blenheims from Crete could appear over the beaches and the ships. The Luftwaffe had complete freedom of action: on 21 and 22 April its aircraft sank 23 Greek vessels in Greek coastal waters, including a destroyer and a hospital ship. The Germans did not fly at night, however, which allowed lorry convoys to move after dark on sidelights and gave the ships a few hours of relative calm.

The King on Crete

On 22 and 23 April the corps prepared to leave. On the night of 22–23 April the New Zealand 4th Brigade fell back to Erythres, about thirty kilometres from Athens, to become the main covering force for the evacuation. Base units and headquarters were moved to the Peloponnese to make room for the fighting troops. Airmen, above all aircrew and skilled mechanics, were flown out to Crete in transport aircraft and flying boats. Also to be taken off were the sick and wounded from the hospitals, British civilians, Yugoslav refugees who had made their way to Greece after the fall of their country, and the Greek royal family and government.

On 23 April RAF aircraft flew King George II, Prime Minister Tsouderos and Minister Palairet to Crete. Some accounts, including a number of English-language ones, date the King’s departure to 25 April, but the Greek historian Ioannis Koliopoulos and the British official history give 23 April. A government on the island of Eleftherios Venizelos, with a Cretan and a Venizelist as prime minister, was to preserve the continuity of the Greek state and its part in the war. For Churchill, Crete was the most important prize that could be salvaged from the campaign. Since November 1940 the British had had an advanced fleet base in Suda Bay, and from the island’s airfields the Axis sea lanes in the Aegean could be attacked. In German hands those same airfields would bring the Luftwaffe closer to Alexandria, Egypt and the routes by which the fleet supplied Malta and Tobruk. From the first days of the evacuation, therefore, the island was for the British Prime Minister not a staging post but another position to be defended.

The first nights

24 April was the day on which, at Molos and on the Brallos Pass, the New Zealand and Australian brigades held off German tanks and mountain troops while the embarkation began behind them. In the evening the anti-aircraft cruiser Calcutta and the landing ship Glengyle, which took soldiers straight off the beach in her own landing craft, arrived off Porto Rafti. Some 5,700 men left from there that night, mainly from the New Zealand 5th Brigade. From Nafplio, where the cruiser Phoebe and Glenearn had arrived, about 6,700 headquarters troops, airmen and men of base units were taken off. There were also the first losses. At Nafplio the transport Ulster Prince ran aground across the fairway and blocked the destroyers’ access to the quays, and the next day German bombs turned her into a burning wreck. At Piraeus the Germans sank the yacht Hellas, and most of the civilians and wounded soldiers on board were killed. About 500 airmen flew to Crete in flying boats from the bay off Eleusis and from Nafplio, Gythio and Kalamata, and nearly 2,000 others sailed with the troops. On 24 April D’Albiac closed his headquarters in Athens and moved to Crete.

Wilson’s plan provided for the early departure of the headquarters of the corps and of both divisions. Blamey flew to Alexandria on 24 April to report to Cunningham on the progress of the evacuation, and the commander of the 6th Australian Division, General Iven Mackay, left for Crete the following day. The commander of the New Zealand Division, Major General Bernard Freyberg, refused to go. He judged that, since one of his brigades was fighting at Molos and another was to form the main rearguard, it was his duty to stay. His staff sailed as ordered, but he himself remained in Greece.

Since the covering air force had practically ceased to exist, Wilson and Baillie-Grohman decided to shift some of the embarkations to the more distant harbours of the Peloponnese, Kalamata and Monemvasia, from which the voyage to Crete was much shorter, though the roads were 110–160 kilometres longer and winding. The Australian 16th and 17th Brigades, so weakened in the retreat that they were counted as one, were sent first from Megara to Argos and then to Kalamata. On 25 April, Anzac Day, the anniversary of the Gallipoli landing of 1915, some 10,000 Australians, according to some returns, were taken off from Megara and Nafplio, including the 19th Brigade from Brallos. The transport Pennland, bound for Megara, was sunk by aircraft, but three destroyers were quickly sent in her place and only about 500 men were left ashore.

Paratroops over the Corinth Canal

On the evening of 25 April Wilson closed his headquarters in Athens and left for the Peloponnese. He crossed the bridge over the Corinth Canal about two hours before dawn. At 7 a.m. on 26 April, after a heavy air attack, two battalions of German paratroops landed on both sides of the canal and overwhelmed its defences. British sappers nevertheless managed to blow the bridge, and German losses, according to the British official history, amounted to 285 men. The airborne landing cut off from the Peloponnese all the units north of the canal, including the New Zealand 4th Brigade, which was to have crossed southwards and embarked with the rest. The brigade had no wireless contact, and for a whole day nobody knew where it was. Only through the wireless set of the 1st Armoured Brigade did an order reach it to embark at Porto Rafti on the night of 27–28 April.

On 26 April Wilson flew to Crete. Command of the forces remaining in Greece, roughly the equivalent of a division scattered across a dozen or so beaches, passed to Freyberg. The British official history admits that in practice he could not command them: he had scanty information from the beaches, an uncertain picture of the situation and almost no means of communication.

Slamat

The night of 26–27 April brought both successes and the heaviest losses. Some 8,000 men were taken off from Kalamata, including almost the whole of the Australian 16th and 17th Brigades, but so many other units had been directed there that about 7,000 still remained on shore. At Rafina a heavy swell delayed the embarkation, and about 800 soldiers had to wait until the last night. Glenearn, on her way to Nafplio, was bombed and towed to Suda Bay, and the cruisers Orion and Perth with the destroyer Stuart had to take men off with their own boats and a single caique. It went so slowly that about 1,700 soldiers were left on the beach.

The Dutch transport Slamat, a former passenger liner of the Rotterdamsche Lloyd line, wanted to take a full load and, against explicit orders, stayed off Nafplio until a quarter past four, more than an hour longer than the other ships. She had about 500 soldiers on board. At dawn on 27 April, as the convoy steamed south through the Argolic Gulf, she was caught by German fighters and Ju 87 dive-bombers. A bomb struck between the bridge and the forward funnel and the ship caught fire. The destroyer Diamond picked up some 600 survivors from the water, and the destroyer Wryneck was sent to help her. At about 1.15 p.m. a group of Ju 87s attacking out of the sun sank both warships within minutes. According to the British official history, only fifty men survived from the three vessels, including eight soldiers from Slamat. Later counts give somewhat higher numbers of survivors, but agree that close to a thousand sailors and soldiers died. It was the single greatest disaster of the evacuation.

Kalamata

On 27 April the Germans entered Athens, and on the night of 27–28 April the cruiser Ajax and two destroyers took off from Porto Rafti the New Zealand 4th Brigade, which had been bombed during the day but without serious losses. A small German column that appeared in the evening was driven off. The following night the ships took off from Monemvasia the New Zealand 6th Brigade from Molos, which had lain hidden all day while German aircraft circled overhead. Baillie-Grohman and Freyberg left with the last boat. Sloops took off from the island of Kythira about 800 men who had made their own way there by boat.

At Kalamata it ended differently. Between seven and eight thousand soldiers were waiting there, including about 1,500 Yugoslavs. Brigadier Leonard Parrington had at his disposal some 800 New Zealanders from a reinforcement battalion, about 380 Australians and 300 cavalrymen of the 4th Hussars. The remaining 6,000 came from rear units, most of them unarmed. On the evening of 28 April, as the troops began moving down to the embarkation points, an advanced detachment of the German 5th Panzer Division, which had crossed the Corinth Canal and pushed through the Peloponnese, burst into the town. The Germans seized the quay and captured the naval officer responsible for communications with the ships. Soldiers from various units counter-attacked and by 1 a.m. had driven the Germans out of the town. A New Zealand sergeant, John Hinton, who destroyed two German gun positions with grenades, was badly wounded and taken prisoner, and was later awarded the Victoria Cross for this action.

The naval force led by Perth was then some ten or fifteen kilometres offshore. Its commander received the signal “Boche in harbour”, saw tracer and heard explosions. A message from an officer of the destroyer Hero saying that embarkation from the beach was possible reached him late because of a wireless failure, and before that, at 9.29 p.m., he had judged the risk to the ships too great and turned back. Hero and three destroyers that arrived later took off about 300 men by boat. The rest, without ammunition or food, did not know why the ships had gone. At 5.30 a.m. on 29 April Parrington surrendered. Some 7,000 soldiers were taken prisoner, including about 2,000 Palestinians and Cypriots from auxiliary units. On the next two nights the ships took off a few more small groups from beaches near Kalamata and about 700 men from the island of Milos. With that the organised evacuation came to an end. In the months that followed, only individual escapers got out of Greece.

The balance sheet

According to the British official history, 50,732 men were taken off the beaches of Greece between 24 April and 1 May. This figure includes an unspecified number of Greeks and Yugoslavs. Over the whole campaign some 62,000 British and Dominion troops had been shipped to Greece, and the corps’ losses from all causes, including the prisoners taken at Kalamata, came to about 12,000 men. Some 8,000 lorries, all the tanks and almost all the artillery were left behind in Greece. The RAF lost 209 aircraft. The Royal Navy lost two destroyers, and the Luftwaffe sank four large transports and dozens of Greek vessels. Churchill later wrote that of the 26 ships sunk during the evacuation, 21 were Greek. The British official history stresses that the Greeks, although their allies were leaving after a few weeks having apparently achieved nothing, showed them kindness and help to the very end.

Place in the war

The evacuation from Greece was the next great operation after Dunkirk in which the Royal Navy brought a defeated British army off the Continent. It saved the men, but not the corps as a fighting force. Many of the soldiers, instead of returning to Egypt and rebuilding their divisions, were landed at Suda Bay without heavy weapons or transport and often without their own officers. Churchill saw this as an opportunity: on 28 April he cabled Wavell that the Germans were preparing a large airborne attack on Crete and demanded that the island be defended stubbornly. On 30 April Wavell gave command of the entire defence of Crete to Freyberg, who had arrived from Monemvasia the day before.

Three weeks later, on 20 May, the Germans struck at Crete from the air. The Battle of Crete was fought largely by the same New Zealanders, Australians and Britons who had been evacuated from Greece, and at the end of May Cunningham’s fleet had to evacuate them a second time, this time with even heavier losses in ships. The Greek and Cretan campaigns cost the British tens of thousands of men and overstretched the Mediterranean Fleet at a time when, in the Libyan desert, Erwin Rommel stood before Tobruk. The argument over whether the expedition to Greece had made sense went on among historians and politicians for decades. For Australians and New Zealanders the evacuation under German bombs was a repeat of Gallipoli, and the memory of the Greek beaches and of the help given by the Greeks became a lasting part of their history of this war.