Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

So far, Perth’s luck was holding. The next day, Perth and Orion, with Waller’s Stuart in company, were despatched with a convoy of troopships to pick up men from the port of Navplion, on the Corinth Peninsula of southern Greece. At sea, Bowyer-Smyth spoke to the ship’s company over the public-address system. Bill Bracht took notes:

  D’you hear there. This is the captain speaking. The German army is in control of Greece. Most of the surviving allied forces have been evacuated to Crete. Tonight Orion and Perth are to take off the remaining units fighting the rearguard action. At 11.30 tonight we are to be off shore at Salamis; we will be close to the enemy forces and it is known that they have torpedo boats stationed at Piraeus, so absolute quiet must be maintained as we must not jeopardise this evacuation. The ship will be closed up at full action stations from 7 o’clock.16

  Navplion had been bombed and strafed by day, and its streets were strewn with rubble and glass. Buildings were still smouldering. Australian, New Zealand and British soldiers, around 8000 of them, had arrived in small groups at night, gathering along the harbour front. The weather was closing in, with an occasional shower of cold rain, and from the docks the soldiers could see the blackened wreck of the Ulster Prince, a troopship that had run aground a couple of days before and had been bombed by the Luftwaffe ever since.

  That wreck, and a choppy sea blowing straight into the harbour, made it impossible for the convoy to enter. Perth and the other ships lay off the port and sent in their boats, in the rain and the starless dark, to bring off as many men as they could, loading them as deeply as they dared. They had orders to sail at 3 am, to be well clear of the land before dawn and the start of the air raids.

  Perth had nets and a ladder slung over the side for the soldiers to climb, and the cooks laboured in the galleys to give them something hot to eat and drink. The sailors, who had been through their own ordeal at sea, gave their guests the best welcome they could, ministering to them with that earthy tenderness that warriors have for men who have shared similar horrors. A digger of the 6th Division, Frank de Silva, was grateful he had made it:

  As we scrambled aboard, I could hear a very clear and precise voice in muffled tones coming down from the bridge: ‘Get those men on board as quickly as possible, I am moving out at first light.’ Just how they, the Navy, managed to get into those small bays in the dark I will never know. The pilots and navigators must have been wizards. As we came up on deck from the gangway a sailor came up to our group of about 15 men and said, ‘Right, fellas, come with me.’ He took us down to the forward mess then he said, ‘I suppose you fellas are hungry.’

  We had not had a decent feed in days, only what we could scrounge, mostly tinned food and dog biscuits. Well we lined up at the galley, the cooks were marvellous, this sailor said, ‘Come and eat with me.’ We put our food on the table and sat down together. The sailor moved his plate, I started to eat and then he laid his head on the table and in seconds flat he was sound asleep. I thought, ‘Well, look at that! These poor buggers are out on their feet. They are really working round the clock.’ I felt very sorry to see him like this. It made me realise that these men from the Captain down were pushing themselves to the limit.17

  Jim Nelson helped Perth’s doctor and Sick Bay attendants to treat the wounded:

  All had been through hell in the retreat and many had untreated bullet wounds, some gangrenous. One person, whom I tended, had seven bullet wounds in his left shoulder that had not been treated for seven days. I escorted him down to the Sick Bay for immediate attention. They were tired, hungry, had little clothing, some no footwear, and had by cause jettisoned their army accoutrements. Despite all that they are smiling and morale is high!18

  Perth collected exactly 911 men that night, most from Navplion and some from a little further down the coast at a place called Tolos. Stuart evacuated 109. The soldiers found what comfort they could in the mess decks and passageways, glad to be alive but falling asleep almost as soon as they had eaten. They sailed well before dawn and were back in Suda the next morning, in time for yet another two air raids, which Reg Whiting recorded:

  Troops everywhere. Jove it is great to see the Aussies on board. Though dangerous it is a wonderful cause. First raid at 8 am. Number of air raids to date ninety five. Convoy very large. Ships everywhere. Number of troops must be 20,000. Our trigger happy pal Ajax joins up, comes over horizon firing. Arrived Suda Bay at 11 am … Air raid. Disembarked troops. More air raids. Oiled ship. Air raid. Willpower sorely tried overcoming jitters. Dog fight over harbour. Two planes brought down. Weary from lack of sleep. What I would give for a peaceful sleep.19

  Not everyone made it. One of the troopships at Navplion, an old Dutch passenger liner, the Slamat, sailed after the 3 am deadline. She had been taking men on board all night and her master had lingered on, not having the heart to turn his back on the hundreds more waiting ashore. He did not sail until 4.15 am. It was a disastrous mistake. The bombers found her not long after dawn, zooming out of the rising sun. Within minutes, they had scored direct hits and she was on fire and sinking, men tumbling from her into the sea, searching frantically for rafts or anything that might help them stay afloat.

  The Slamat’s wireless operator got away a distress call, and two destroyers, HMS Diamond and Wryneck, were ordered to help. But now tragedy piled upon disaster. The Luftwaffe returned. Diamond reported that she had picked up most of the survivors and was heading for Suda. Then Wryneck requested fighter protection. It was the last ever heard or seen of all of them. All three ships were sunk by the bombers. Another destroyer, searching the next day, found a pathetic handful of wretched figures clinging to each other amidst the wreckage in the oily water. Of perhaps 700 men who had sailed the night before, exactly one officer, 41 ratings and eight soldiers were saved.

  For Perth’s ship’s company, there was no time to grieve. By this stage of the war, death was a commonplace. It touched you, and when there was some particularly atrocious piece of news you thought ‘There but for the Grace of God …’, but in the end you just got on with it. The luxury of thought, of contemplating the crudities and the terrors of the life they were leading, was simply not an option. Exhausted resignation was the name of the game. Other sailors were dying; other Australians were dying. You hoped you would not. But if the bomb or the torpedo had your number on it, there was nothing you could do about it. The only link with normality now was mail from home, which everyone from the Captain down looked forward to with a longing that was almost physical. Sometimes, there would be bags of it when they arrived at Alexandria; sometimes not. But you couldn’t do anything about that, either. When letters did arrive, precious as they were, they were often weeks and even months old.

  April had begun cruelly and it would end that way. On the night of the 28th, Perth and another cruiser, HMS Phoebe, and a squadron of destroyers were off the little port of Kalamata, on the Peloponnese Peninsula, to evacuate more men by night. Bowyer-Smyth, as the senior officer, was in command of the operation afloat. His ships were known as Force B.

  Waiting ashore was what the army would probably have called a collection of odds and sods – some 8000 men, many of whom were more or less lost and leaderless. There was a battalion of New Zealanders, and a mixed bunch of Australian gunners and transport drivers, and about 300 men from a British cavalry regiment – the 4th Hussars, who had fought alongside the Australian 6th Division. These men were hungry and exhausted but retained their military discipline. The others were Greek and Yugoslav soldiers, Palestinian and Cypriot labourers, and Asian seamen from various sunken ships who, in the words of the official Australian Army history, were ‘now officerless and disorganised, and there was evident danger of a panic among them’.20

  That afternoon, the Hussars were sent to patrol north of Kalamata to search for the advancing enemy. They were ambushed and either killed or captured to a man. Two companies of German infantry, with two field guns, then drove into Kalamata itself and onto the small quay where the Allied soldiers were grouped
in the gathering dusk to embark. In a fierce melee, the Australians and New Zealanders fought them off, killing around 40 and capturing another hundred.

  But, at that point, the fog of war descended. At sea, Bowyer-Smyth sent the destroyer HMS Hero on ahead to assess the scene before the rest of his ships arrived. By this time, it was 8.45 pm. Someone on land signalled to Hero by lamp that the Germans were in the town, and on board the destroyer they could hear furious gunfire and see the arcs of tracer bullets. Hero sent her First Lieutenant ashore to find out what was happening, and then signalled Perth: ‘Harbour occupied by Germans. British troops south-east of town.’

  Bowyer-Smyth was still some 12 kilometres out to sea. He too could see tracer fire and large explosions on the horizon. Pacing his bridge, the decision was his and his alone. It was, perhaps, the loneliest moment of his command so far. There were thousands of men awaiting salvation. But, for all he knew, they had already been killed or captured by the Germans. Should he risk his ships close inshore, on a dark and hostile coast, when the reason for their being there had evidently vanished? And, worse, what if he was attacked from seawards by an enemy naval force? The decision preyed on his mind as he drew closer to Kalamata, where he could still see the occasional sudden ball of flame and smoke. As he would write four days later:

  As soon as I saw these explosions I realised that during embarkation Force B would be in an extremely hazardous tactical position in the event of an attack from seaward. Ships would be silhouetted against explosions and fires on shore, would be embayed and unable to scatter, and there was no covering force in the offering.21

  Bowyer-Smyth decided to withdraw. At 9.29 pm, he signalled his squadron to head back to Suda at 28 knots, ordering Hero to rejoin him. Tragically, it was the wrong decision. Even as his ships were turning out to sea, Hero radioed again that the beach was now clear and that the evacuation could go ahead. But some fault in Hero’s wireless meant that Perth did not receive that message until after 10 pm. By then, Bowyer-Smyth decided it was too late to turn back, and he pressed on for Crete. ‘It was a regrettable result,’ Brian Sheedy noted. ‘Perth’s people felt they had let the army down.’22

  Sheedy was right. They had indeed let the army down. Bowyer-Smyth should have drawn closer to Kalamata to assess the situation for himself, or perhaps have sent in another destroyer to support Hero before committing the rest of Force B. And it is difficult to see why he feared an attack by sea. The Germans had no naval force in the Mediterranean. The Regia Marina was still licking its wounds after Matapan and had shown no stomach for a fight since. Kalamata lay at the head of a long and narrow bay – exactly the sort of place the Italian Navy would have been most unwilling to enter.

  There was no question of a lack of courage. Bowyer-Smyth had endured his time in the Mediterranean with the same fortitude as his men, bearing in addition the heavy burden of command. In all that has been written about him by his shipmates, both officers and men, there is only respect, no hint of a lack of resolve. In the end, he had just called it wrong, as a man in his position, under such stress and strain, might easily do.

  Cunningham, though, was not forgiving. In his memoirs, he labelled the decision ‘unfortunate’, which is an admiral’s way of expressing considerable displeasure. Hero did bring off a few hundred men that evening, and so did a couple of other destroyers quickly despatched to Kalamata over the next couple of nights, but 6000 troops were left ashore to surrender. It was a melancholy postscript to a campaign that had been dogged by failure from its very beginning, less than a month before.

  The swastika was hoisted in triumph over the Acropolis on 28 April. Operation LUSTRE had been a disaster. It cost the British and Commonwealth Armies some 12,000 men, of whom 9000 were taken prisoner. The Australian contingent alone, infantry and gunners of the 6th Division, lost 320 men killed, and 2030 men into German captivity. But, in six days, Operation DEMON had evacuated more than 50,000 troops from mainland Greece. Beaten and battered, with much of their equipment left behind, about half regrouped on Crete. Their rescue had been a remarkable achievement by the navy, assisted by the Luftwaffe’s inexplicable reluctance – this time anyway – to bomb at night. But Churchill’s obsessive adventuring in the Balkans had served only to turn the tide of war against Britain and the Commonwealth.

  As April turned to May and spring came at last to the Mediterranean, the year that had begun with such hope was now turning sour and infinitely dangerous.

  CHAPTER 12

  AEGEAN TRAGEDY

  Perth emerged from the Greek debacle in one piece, but she was battle-scarred and unmistakably shabby, salt-stained and patched with rust. The paint on the barrels of her guns was blackened and peeling from constant firing, and her boilers and engines were worn from endless steaming at high speed. Her very being, from her mastheads to her bowels, had been wrenched beyond her designers’ imaginings by the enormous strain of her violent twists and turns to avoid the bombs directed at her. But she was tougher than ever now, seasoned and still seaworthy, and the same went for her crew.

  Her men had taken everything the enemy and the weather had thrown at them and they had come through, when other ships and crews had not. Many of them thought they had seen it all, that not much worse could fall upon them in this war, and, stoically, they told their families so in letters home. Every so often, a buzz would go around the mess decks – they were heading back to Australia any day now, at the end of the week, the end of the month. They prayed for each new rumour to be true, but it was not. All the trials they had endured since Christmas were but a prelude to the onslaught to come. The Allied defeat had fundamentally changed the balance of power in the Mediterranean. The weights were heavily against them.

  Adolf Hitler followed the war in Greece from his private train, which he had ordered to the small Alpine resort of Mönichkirchen, in southern Austria. He remained obsessed by Operation BARBAROSSA – the onslaught upon Russia planned for the coming summer – but the scale and speed of his victory in the Balkans surprised and pleased him. He did not take much convincing to press on in both the Mediterranean and North Africa. Rommel and the Afrikakorps clearly held the upper hand in their desert offensive. And members of his inner circle were urging him to strike again at the Allies on Crete.

  Goering was especially insistent that the capture of Crete should begin without delay. The Reichsmarshall was still smarting from his failure to crush the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain and fretting, too, that BARBAROSSA would be primarily an army affair with only a subsidiary role for his air fleets. The Luftwaffe had proved its value in Greece, he argued, and would do so once more against Crete. There was some opposition to this within OKW, which was arguing for an attack on Malta to take the pressure off Rommel’s supply routes, but Goering produced a masterstroke and the man to effect it.

  Generaloberst (Colonel General) Kurt Student was the Commander of Fliegerkorps XI, the Luftwaffe’s elite parachute forces. They were known as the Fallschirmjäger, which translates into English as the ‘Parachute Huntsmen’. They had fought well in the blitzkrieg through the Low Countries of Europe, and Student, an able officer, was passionately convinced they could now take Crete from the air. The RAF in the Mediterranean, weak and divided, would put up negligible opposition, and the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet could be bypassed. Goering seized the idea and, with Student in tow, took it to Hitler on 21 April, the day after the Führer’s 52nd birthday. Hitler mulled it over for a few days and then, on 25 April, he issued Führer Directive No. 28, for Operation MERKUR, or Mercury, which began with the words:

  The occupation of the island of Crete is to be prepared in order to have a base for conducting the air war against England in the Eastern Mediterranean.

  Student swung into action. He flew first to Berlin and then on to Athens, where he set up his headquarters in the crumbling white splendour of the Hotel Grand Bretagne – only newly abandoned by the fleeing British commanders – and began to assemble an air armada. There wou
ld be 600 Junkers JU52 transport aircraft, some of which would tow 80 gliders, all packed with parachute troops. These would be supported by heavy bombers, Stukas and fighter aircraft based in mainland Greece and on the islands of Scarpanto and Rhodes in the Aegean, north-east of Crete.

  MERKUR would be launched on 17 May. In the meantime, the Luftwaffe would intensify its attacks on the Royal Navy both at sea and in harbour at Suda and Alexandria. After the paratroop landings, there would be a seaborne assault on Crete by some 6000 troops carried in two fleets of caiques. Hitler’s only caution to his commanders was that MERKUR must not divert resources from the coming Russian campaign. Well pleased, he returned to Berlin. On 4 May, he delivered a gloating speech to the Reichstag, which began with the usual rant about the international Jewish conspiracy and Germany’s sincere desire for peace, and then turned to a savage sneer at Churchill:

  The reverses suffered by the Italian Army in North Africa, owing to a certain material inferiority of their tanks and anti-tank guns, finally led Mr Churchill to believe that the time was ripe to transfer the theatre of war from Libya to Greece. He ordered the transport of the remaining tanks and of the infantry division, composed mainly of Anzacs, and was convinced that he could now complete his scheme, which was to set the Balkans aflame.

  Thus did Mr Churchill commit one of the greatest strategic blunders of this war. As soon as there could be no further doubt regarding Britain’s intentions of gaining a foothold in the Balkans, I took the necessary steps …1

  Hitler himself was about to commit the mother of all strategic blunders, in BARBAROSSA. But there was some truth in his boast about Churchill’s conduct of the war in the Balkans and the Middle East. Britain was now on the back foot, reeling beneath the onward march of a Germany rampant on two fronts.