Cruiser

by Mike Carlton

  At Alexandria, Cunningham was counting the cost of the withdrawal from Greece and balancing that against the tasks that lay ahead. The toll was appalling. In all, 26 ships had been sunk in less than a week, including five hospital ships. Most of them were Greek, but five were British. Cunningham’s warships and transports were being depleted by attrition. They were overworked and worn, in urgent need of maintenance, and their crews were exhausted. Yet he now faced a daunting array of obligations.

  The troops who had regrouped to Crete, and the garrison already there – a total of some 40,000 men – had to be supplied by sea. So, too, the island of Malta and the beleaguered defenders of Tobruk. The Suez Canal had to be kept open. And Churchill and the Admiralty were also pressing him, with mounting urgency, to interrupt the German and Italian convoys from Sicily carrying supplies and reinforcements to Rommel through the Libyan port of Tripoli.

  Relations between Cunningham and his masters in London became strained and tetchy as Churchill once again began to meddle. At one point, the Prime Minister suggested scuttling the battleship Barham to block the enemy’s entrance to Tripoli harbour – a hare-brained idea that Cunningham angrily rejected. The Admiralty, too, was quick to offer unwanted advice. As Cunningham wrote later in his memoirs:

  I was beginning to get seriously annoyed. This constant advice, not to say interference, in how to run our own business from those who seemed to be unaware of the real facts of our situation did not help us at all. They were a mere source of worry.2

  Cunningham made constant pleas for more air support, for reconnaissance aircraft to inform him of the enemy’s whereabouts and movements, for bombers that would take the fight to the Luftwaffe’s air bases in Italy and later in Greece, and for shore-based fighter aircraft that could help protect his ships from air attack. The RAF in the Middle East and the Mediterranean did its best with the scant resources available, but these were pathetically inadequate for the task.

  Churchill had decreed that the bombing of Germany was to have top priority. Cunningham and the RAF Commander-in-Chief in Cairo, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore, were sent a few more fighters, but, otherwise, they would have to make do.

  There was better news in reinforcements for the fleet. In early May, a big new convoy, code-named TIGER, was passed eastwards through the Mediterranean from Gibraltar. It comprised five merchant ships laden with tanks and crated fighter aircraft, accompanied by the battleship Queen Elizabeth – a sister ship to Warspite – with a substantial number of additional cruisers and destroyers. Cunningham sailed from Alexandria to meet it. The convoy was attacked by the Luftwaffe, but heavy weather helped shield the ships. One of the five transports was sunk by a mine, with the loss of 57 tanks and ten crated Hurricane fighters on board, but the rest got through to Alexandria on 12 May. This was a fillip for morale. As well as deploying Queen Elizabeth, Cunningham could now call on fresh cruisers and an additional flotilla of six destroyers based on Malta and commanded by none other than Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten, a cousin of the King. Two brand-new Australian destroyers, HMAS Napier and Nizam, were also sent to him.

  Perth had been with the escort for the TIGER convoy, and the day after its safe arrival on 13 May she sailed again with the newly strengthened 7th Cruiser Squadron to take up the fight once more, with a bombardment of the port of Derna on the Libyan coast, west of Alexandria. That day, Reg Whiting’s diary recorded the new ferocity of the attack from the air:

  Proceeded to sea at midnight. Orion, Ajax, Perth and three destroyers. The object was bombardment of Derna. Air raid 2 pm. Have been working continually from 8 am right through twenty four hours. Time at present 3.45 pm, tea time, and I hope a couple of hours sleep before the session tonight, which is due to start around midnight. Full moon to strafe it. Fierce air raid at 5 pm. Up to twelve planes, Junkers 88s. One plane shot down, two believed to have been hit. Bombs dropped. Planes flew right across ship.

  During the afternoon a determined attack by twelve JU88s was experienced, but the ships succeeded in destroying two and damaging two more without suffering any damage. We combined fire with Orion and Ajax and put up a terrific barrage right underneath their bellies. We broke their formation up and they began diving singly … I could hear the shrill whining of the bomb as it hurtled down at us, and then a thousand tons of high explosive landed just off our starboard beam. What an explosion, the whole ship bounced sideways with the force of the explosion and the concussions. Once again Captain Bowyer-Smyth’s skill and luck saved the ship from being hit.3

  Jim Nelson wrote of that nightmare as well:

  Bombs are near missing all around us with most really close and I mean close! The skill of our Captain is nothing short of miraculous. He is handling this ship like a destroyer, coaxing her to do high speed turns and manoeuvres that cruisers were never meant to do and she is responding.

  These boys are deadly serious and playing for keeps today, one plane came in low skimming the water at about twenty feet. He was on our port side aiming directly at the bridge and about one hundred yards away. There was nothing we could do and had all but given up hope except Able Seaman Bill Ranger,4 our gunner on the port pom-pom. He kept his nerve directing a steady stream of tracer shells straight at the plane.

  We on the bridge were silent onlookers to this drama being unfolded when Bill struck home!!! His target exploded with a deafening roar and burst into flames, crashing into the sea not more than fifty yards short of us. Bill turned to the bridge, put his arms up in the air with the victory sign to the cheers of all on the bridge. Minutes later he was fighting off another attack sending two more away with smoke streaming from astern. Ajax nearly copped it with two bombs straddling her amidships, one on port, one on starboard. I watched her disappear amid the explosion, black smoke and water geyser to see her steam out into view with guns still blazing.5

  Alexandria had once provided a haven of sorts, a rest from the dangers at sea, but the German advance had brought the city within easier range of the Luftwaffe. The occasional desultory raids by the Regia Aeronautica gave way to a concerted German attack. Air raid followed air raid, by day and night. Roy Norris and a mate were caught in one as they returned to the ship after an evening ashore. As the sirens wailed, they scrambled for shelter behind a low wall, the only protection they could find. Searchlights on the ships in the harbour pierced the sky, hunting for the bombers through a storm of anti-aircraft fire. The noise split the heavens. Norris watched as the searchlights locked on to one of the attackers:

  We had thought the firing intense previously but now Hell itself broke loose – they hurled everything at the plane. The sky was lurid with tracers from the Bofors and Bredas, to say nought of the shell bursts from the A. A. guns. He kept steady course directly overhead, passing above as if it were merely put up for his entertainment. The sailors screamed themselves hoarse, and when three parachutes were seen to leave the plane they thought the crew had bailed out, but they were acoustic mines,6 it is thought, as the plane kept steady course and finally vanished out to sea. He must have been at a great height as nothing could possibly have been in range and lived through that – it was the greatest barrage I have ever seen put up. We eventually reached the ship at midnight, thankful indeed to escape that little lot. It is expected that we may look forward to quite a lot more of this now. The moon is just waxing to its first quarter. No place seems safe to relax in these days – it is time they sent us home out of it all.7

  The Allied force on Crete was commanded by a New Zealander, Major-General Bernard Freyberg.8 A muscular bull, invariably described by his contemporaries as ‘larger than life’, he had fought with bravery at Gallipoli, had famously swum the Hellespont as Lord Byron had done a century before, and had been one of the mourning party that buried the poet Rupert Brooke on the Greek island of Skyros in that ‘corner of a foreign field That is forever England’. Freyberg had won a Victoria Cross on the Somme in 1916 and had been wounded nine times – a fact that fascinated Churchill, who onc
e made him strip naked to display his scars. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was offered command of the New Zealand Army’s 2nd Division. Churchill, always attracted to men of valour, treated him as a favourite.

  On the face of it, the defence of Crete was simple enough. The island is long and narrow, some 250 kilometres from west to east, and shaped like a sausage, as the Germans said. Much of it is mountainous, with a long backbone of ragged ranges that fall steeply to the sea on the southern coast. To the north, the land is flatter, with farms and olive groves. In 1941, there were three main towns. The capital, Canea, of about 36,000 people, was on the coast near Suda Bay, with an airfield nearby at Maleme, further to the west. Retimno and its airfield were some 48 kilometres to the east of Suda and inland. Heraklion, which had both a port and an airfield, was further east again. Any invasion would obviously come in the north. But it was there, too, that the island would have to be supplied by the British, for there was no suitable port on the steep southern shores.

  Freyberg was ready for the battle; the troops he commanded, designated Creforce, patently were not. There was one fresh British infantry brigade of around 15,000 men that had been sent from Egypt but which, apart from a battalion of the Black Watch, was barely trained. There were 7750 New Zealanders and 6500 Australians, all of them refugees from the Greek disaster, exhausted men who had left most of their equipment behind in the rout. Even the most basic necessities were missing. With few tents, they slept in the open beneath the olive trees, huddling under greatcoats or sharing a blanket, itching with lice. Army rations seemed to consist entirely of cold tinned herrings in tomato sauce, which were christened ‘goldfish in blood’. Cooking was done in petrol tins, and some of the diggers had to eat with their hands until they could carve forks and spoons from wood. Cretan villagers provided eggs and a few lambs every so often, and there was some consolation in the local rough red wine.

  The rest of Creforce consisted of around 10,000 Greeks. Many of them were local peasants armed with ancient hunting rifles. And the Commonwealth troops were little better provided with arms and ammunition. There were rifles and some machine guns and a few dilapidated Matilda tanks. Cairo had promised to send 100 artillery pieces, but only 49 French and captured Italian field guns ever arrived, some of them without sights. Communications between various army units were primitive at best, relying on kilometres of telephone cable wound out along the ground. For air cover, the RAF could offer only six modern Hurricane fighters and another dozen or so antiquated Gladiator fighters and Blenheim bombers. As it turned out, these aircraft were withdrawn to Egypt the day before the German invasion for fear they and their pilots would be destroyed within hours. Their ground crews were left behind. By day, the men of Creforce crouched in the olive groves as the Luftwaffe began to soften them up with air raids. Freyberg signalled Wavell:

  Forces at my disposal are totally inadequate to meet attack envisaged. Unless fighter aircraft are greatly increased and naval forces made available to deal with seaborne attack I cannot hope to hold out with land forces alone, which as a result of campaign in Greece are now devoid of any artillery, have insufficient tools for digging, very little transport and inadequate war reserves of equipment and ammunition. Force here can and will fight, but without full support from Navy and Air Force cannot hope to repel invasion.9

  In London, however, Winston Churchill remained as blindly optimistic as ever, his mind locked in the tactics of the First World War. He cabled the New Zealand Government that:

  Our information points to an airborne attack being delivered in the near future, with possibly an attempt at a seaborne attack. The Navy will certainly do their utmost to prevent the latter, and it is unlikely to succeed on any large scale. So far as airborne attack is concerned, this ought to suit the New Zealanders down to the ground, for they will be able to come to close quarters, man to man, with the enemy, who will not have the advantage of tanks and artillery, on which he so largely relies.10

  Churchill was at least correct about the air attack. Reading the Luftwaffe signals, British code-breakers had assembled a formidable file of ULTRA intelligence on Operation MERKUR. They knew the strength of the forces that would be hurled against Crete from the air, and that there would be three major landings to take the airfields at Maleme, Retimno and Heraklion. They knew dates and times. They knew that General Student had postponed his attack from 17 May to 20 May. Freyberg, who was privy to the existence of ULTRA, was told all that and more. Churchill personally despatched a British intelligence officer, a brigadier, to Crete, to ensure that his favourite had every known detail at his fingertips.

  But to no avail. For all his courage, Freyberg was no strategist. He was a fighter, not a thinker. Despite the ULTRA information handed to him on a plate, he had convinced himself that the Luftwaffe’s airborne assault would be only a diversion. The main invasion would have to come from the sea. He disposed his forces to repel a landing on the coast near the capital, Canea. Appalled, Churchill’s emissary noted that he had found Freyberg to be ‘a Bear of Little Brain’. Unknowing or unheeding, on 18 May Churchill sent another of his stirring cables to his Creforce Commander:

  …All our thoughts are with you in these fateful days. We are glad to hear of reinforcements which have reached you and strong dispositions you have made. We are sure that you and your brave troops will perform in deeds of lasting fame. Navy will do its utmost. Victory where you are would powerfully affect world situation.11

  In Athens, the Hotel Grand Bretagne hummed with activity. In the vast ballroom, beneath its art-deco chandeliers and heavily curtained windows, desks of Luftwaffe staff officers beavered away at the invasion plans. Telephones rang incessantly, typewriters clattered, teleprinters chattered, despatch riders came and went. A huge wall map of Crete displayed the principal landing zones for the parachutists and the gliders. The invasion would begin with a massive bombing attack, to soften up the defences, just after dawn. Then there would be landings in three stages: in the early morning at Maleme, in the west; at midday at Retimno, more or less in the central sector; and finally in the late afternoon at Heraklion, in the east. When the Fallschirmjäger had taken the island, there would be follow-up landings from the sea by infantry troops and equipment. Every small detail was attended to with Teutonic thoroughness.

  But German intelligence was wildly off the mark. Where Freyberg had been given accurate information of his opponent’s intentions, General Student was operating on little more than optimistic guesswork. The Germans believed there were only about 5000 British troops in the garrison on Crete. They thought all the Australians and New Zealanders from Greece had been evacuated to Egypt, and they took little account of the Greek forces on the island. More ludicrous still, they had deluded themselves that a large pro-Nazi element in the local population would rise up to give them an enthusiastic welcome.

  Tuesday 20 May began with a morning of brilliant blue Mediterranean skies. At 6.45 am, not long after breakfast, Freyberg emerged from his headquarters in a small villa overlooking Suda Bay to see swarms of Stukas diving, sirens screaming, in a thunderous attack on his anti-aircraft defences. Bombs were bursting in billowing orange flames, leaving choking clouds of smoke and dust. Freyberg recorded the scene in his memoirs:

  I stood out on the hill with other members of my staff enthralled by the magnitude of the operation. While we were still watching the bombers, we suddenly became aware of a greater throbbing in the moments of comparative quiet, and, looking out to sea with the glasses, I picked out hundreds of planes tier on tier coming towards us – here were the huge, slow-moving troop carriers with the loads we were expecting. First we watched them circle counter clockwise over Maleme aerodrome and then, when they were only a few hundred feet above the ground, as if by magic white specks mixed with other colours suddenly appeared beneath them as clouds of parachutists floated slowly to earth.12

  The battle for Crete had begun, exactly as ULTRA had warned. The fight would be fast and deadly. Over the
western Maleme sector, the lumbering JU52s – oddly boxy aircraft with corrugated steel bodies that looked like flying cattle trucks – droned in from the sea at around 300 feet, to disgorge their human cargoes like clouds of insects.

  The Fallschirmjäger jumped in a spreadeagled posture they called the ‘crucifix’. It was an apt description. As these black specks came closer to the ground, dangling helplessly beneath their parachutes, they were met with a murderous fire that killed scores of them. Many more sprawled wounded where they landed, trapped in their harnesses and heavy jumpsuits designed for colder northern climates, to be picked off individually as the morning wore on. Several hundred dropped directly on top of a concealed New Zealand battalion and were massacred almost to a man as they struggled to free themselves from their webbing. One Luftwaffe assault battalion had 400 of its 600 men killed. Other paratroops – far from being welcomed by the local population – were slaughtered by hunting groups of Cretan peasants who ambushed them in the olive groves and shot them with hunting rifles or slit their throats with knives.

  The gliders fared a little better. One, carrying a general and his staff, had already crashed onto a small Aegean island after its tow rope had snapped. Others were shot down as they approached the Cretan coast, or broke up as they crunched into a dry river bed to the west of Maleme. But some 40 of them did make it. Their men, shocked but not beaten, regrouped to take the airfield there.

  The result for the Germans at Retimno and Heraklion later that day was much the same – a slaughter of men floating in the air or struggling on the ground. If anything, it was worse at Heraklion than at Maleme. The Australians of the 2/4th Battalion, well concealed on high ground near the Heraklion airfield, were almost at eye level with the JU52s as they rumbled past. They shot the tumbling paratroopers at point-blank range.