by Max Hastings
The prevailing theme was soon plain, however. The Germans were winning. In Greece and the Aegean they deployed 362 aircraft, many of which were available to operate in the Dodecanese. The South African Spitfire squadron on Kos was hacked to pieces in the air and on the ground by Bf-109s. RAF Beaufighters lost heavily in antishipping strikes which inflicted little damage upon the enemy. German bombing demoralised the British—and still more, their new Italian allies—as well as destroying Dakotas shuttling to Kos. The Royal Navy was dismayed by the difficulties of sustaining supply runs to tenuously held islands while under German air attack. British troops in the area were a hotchpotch of special forces, intelligence personnel, gunners, infantry and “odds and sods” lacking mass, coherence and conviction. The main force, the 234th Brigade, had spent the previous three years garrisoning Malta, where its soldiers gained much experience of bombing, hunger and boredom, and none of battle. In the fifth year of the war, when in almost every other theatre the Allies were winning, in the eastern Mediterranean Churchill contrived to create a predicament in which British forces were locally vulnerable on land, at sea and in the air.
On the morning of October 3, the 680 soldiers, 500 RAF air and ground crews and 3,500 Italians on Kos awoke to discover that German ships offshore were unloading a brigade-strong invasion force whose arrival had been unheralded, and whose activities were unimpeded. It was a tribute to German improvisation that such an operation could be staged with little of the training or specialist paraphernalia which the Allies deemed essential for amphibious landings. The Germans mounted the Kos invasion with a scratch force, supplemented by a paratroop landing, against which the RAF launched ineffectual air strikes. The British defenders lacked both mobility and the will to leave its positions and mount swift counterattacks.
The island was twenty-eight miles long by six wide, with a local population of twenty thousand. Its rugged hills, impervious to entrenchment, rose to a height of 2,800 feet. In two days’ fighting, 2,000 Germans supported by plentiful Stuka dive-bombers secured Kos for a loss of just 15 killed and 70 wounded. Some 3,145 Italians and 1,388 British prisoners fell into their hands, along with a mass of weapons, stores and equipment. Neither the Italians nor RAF personnel on the island showed much appetite for participation in the ground battle. It was a foolish delusion in London to have supposed that Italian troops, who for three years had shown themselves reluctant to fight the Allies, could any more readily be motivated to take on the Germans. The men of the Durham Light Infantry were outnumbered, inexperienced and never perceived much prospect of success. Churchill described the defence of Kos as “an unsatisfactory resistance.” While this was true enough, responsibility rested overwhelmingly with those who placed the garrison there. The worst victims were the Italians, who paid heavily for their brief change of allegiance. On Kefalonia, in the Ionian Islands, the Germans had already conducted a wholesale massacre of four thousand “treacherous” Italian troops who surrendered to them. On Kos, the victors confined themselves to executing eighty-nine Italian officers. A few dozen determined British fugitives escaped by landing craft and small boat.
In the days and weeks following the loss of Kos, Churchill in vain pressed Eisenhower to divert resources from Italy to recapture it. A game of hide-and-seek persisted on other islands, between Hitler’s units and British special forces. The Germans staged a further airborne landing on Astipálaia. Luftwaffe aircrew, accustomed to the depressed spirits of their countrymen who knew that the war was being lost, were amazed to find exuberant paratroopers in Junkers transports en route to a drop zone singing “Kameraden, today there is no going back.” At this late stage of the war, the obliging British had provided the Fallschirmjäger with a field on which there were still victories to be won.
The Long Range Desert Group, whose men were not organised, trained or equipped to fight as infantry, suffered heavily in desultory battles. The main British force left in the Dodecanese was now based on Leros, an island much smaller than Kos and twenty miles farther north. When the British commander there heard that German prisoners on nearby Levitha had overpowered their captors and seized control, he packed fifty LRDG men onto two naval motor launches, and dispatched them to retake it. Once ashore, the LRDG fought a series of little actions with the Germans in which four raiders were killed and almost all the others captured. Just seven escaped at nightfall, by courtesy of the Royal Navy. Levitha remained firmly in German hands.
Churchill was dismayed by the unfolding misfortunes in the Aegean, as well he might be. Brooke wrote on October 6: “It is pretty clear in my mind780 that with the commitments we have in Italy we should not undertake serious operations in the Aegean … [but] PM by now determined to go for Rhodes without looking at the effects on Italy.” Churchill chafed to travel personally to North Africa to incite the Americans to address themselves to Aegean operations. Cadogan wrote: “He is excited about Kos781 and wants to lead an expedition to Rhodes.” The prime minister tried in vain to persuade Washington that Marshall should fly to meet him in Tunisia, there to be persuaded of the virtues of the Aegean commitment. On October 7, he wrote personally to Roosevelt: “I have never wished to send an army into the Balkans782, but only by agents and commandos to stimulate the intense guerilla activity there. This may yield results measureless in their consequence at very small cost to main operations. What I ask for is the capture of Rhodes and the other islands of the Dodecanese … Leros, which at the moment we hold so precariously, is an important naval fortress, and once we are ensconced in this area air and light naval forces would have a fruitful part to play … I beg you to consider this.” He argued that operations in the eastern Mediterranean were “worth at least up to a first-class division.”783 The Americans disagreed. They transferred some Lightning squadrons to Libya, to operate in support of the Royal Navy in the Aegean. But, as other priorities pressed, after only four days these aircraft were withdrawn. Since the Germans were operating much superior Bf-109 single-engined fighters, it is anyway unlikely that the twin-engined Lightnings could have altered the local balance of airpower any more than did the RAF’s Beaufighters. But the British were bitter that they were left to fight alone.
In London on October 8, the Times said of the fall of Kos: “It cannot be expected that every allied venture will be successful: but there is no denying that the state of affairs in the Dodecanese is causing disquietude.” The paper asked pertinent questions about why stronger allied forces had not been committed. That day, Brooke wrote in his diary:
I am slowly becoming convinced that in his old age784 Winston is becoming less and less well balanced! I cannot control him any more. He has worked himself into a frenzy of excitement about the Rhodes attack, has magnified its importance so that he can no longer see anything else and has set his heart on capturing this one island even at the expense of endangering his relations with the President and with the Americans, and also the whole future of the Italian campaign. He refuses to listen to any arguments or to see any dangers! … The whole thing is sheer madness, and he is placing himself quite unnecessarily in a very false position! The Americans are already desperately suspicious of him, and this will make matters far worse.
All that Brooke said was true. That same day, October 8, Churchill wrote again to the Americans, addressing himself to both Eisenhower and the president: “I propose … to tell Gen. Wilson that he is free785 if he judges the position hopeless to order the garrison [of Leros] to evacuate … I will not waste words in explaining how painful this decision is to me.” But Leros was not evacuated, as it should have been. Churchill cabled Maitland Wilson on October 10: “Cling on if you possibly can … If after everything has been done you are forced to quit I will support you, but victory is the prize.”
On October 13, John Kennedy wrote: “It does seem amazing that the PM786 should spend practically a whole week on forcing forward his ideas about taking an island in the face of all military advice … Jumbo [Maitland Wilson] chanced his arm in occupying Kos and the
other Aegean islands.” Churchill cabled Maitland Wilson on October 14: “I am very pleased with the way you used such poor bits and pieces as were left to you. Nil desperandum.” And again to Maitland Wilson, copied to Eden: “Keep Leros safely.” Churchill referred to Leros, absurdly, as a “fortress,” even less meaningful in this case than when he had used the same word of Singapore and Tobruk. The C-in-C, desperate not to disappoint the prime minister, persevered. Given the scepticism of Brooke, why did not the CIGS assert himself, and insist upon withdrawal from the Aegean? The most plausible answer is that, when he was fighting Churchill almost daily about much bigger issues, notably including the prime minister’s enthusiasm for an invasion of Sumatra, Leros seemed insufficiently important to merit yet another showdown. Win or lose, the campaign represented only a marginal drain on resources. Brooke could not hope to overcome the prime minister’s passions on every issue. Instead he stood back, and watched the subsequent fiasco unfold.
For five further bloody weeks, the British struggled on in the Aegean. The battles which took place in that period at sea, in the air and on land more closely resembled those of 1941 than most Allied encounters with the Germans in 1943. The Royal Navy’s cruisers, destroyers, submarines and small craft sought to sink German shipping and to bombard ports and shore positions, while subjected to constant air attacks by the Luftwaffe’s Ju-88s. With the loss of the field on Kos, the RAF’s nearest base was now three hundred miles away. Even old Stuka dive-bombers, powerless in the face of fighter opposition, became potent weapons when they could fly unchallenged.
There were many savage little naval actions in the narrow waters between the islands. On October 7, for instance, the submarine Unruly conducted an unsuccessful torpedo attack on a German troop convoy, then in frustration surfaced and engaged the enemy with its 4-inch deck gun until driven to submerge by the appearance of the Luftwaffe. Unruly later torpedoed a minelayer carrying 285 German troops. The cruisers Sirius and Penelope were caught by German bombers while attacking shipping, and Penelope was damaged. The destroyer Panther was sunk on October 8, and the cruiser Carlisle so badly damaged by bombers that after limping back to port she never put to sea again. The Luftwaffe sustained constant attacks on Leros’s port facilities, so that British warships had to dash in, dump supplies, and sail again inside half an hour. The RAF’s antishipping skills were still inferior to those of the Germans, and Beaufighter strikes cost the British attackers more heavily than their enemies. Even when raids were successful, such as one by Wellington bombers on the night of October 18, the results were equivocal: the Wellingtons dispatched to the bottom ships carrying 204 Germans, but also 2,389 Italian and 71 Greek prisoners. By October 22, a total of 6,000 Italian prisoners had drowned when their transports succumbed to British air strikes, while 29,454 Italian and British POWs had been successfully removed to the Greek mainland, and thence to Germany.
The cruisers Sirius and Aurora were badly damaged by Ju-88s, while German mines accounted for several British warships, including the submarine Trooper, which disappeared east of Leros. Almost every ship of the Royal Navy which ran the gauntlet to the Dodecanese, including launches, torpedo boats and caiques, had to face bombs, heavy seas in the worsening autumn weather, and natural hazards inshore. The destroyer Eclipse was sunk on October 23, while carrying two hundred troops and ten tons of stores. The navy reluctantly decided that it could no longer sail destroyers in the Aegean during daylight, in the face of complete German air dominance. The RAF continued to suffer heavily—in a single day’s operations on November 5, six Beaufighters were destroyed, and four crews lost.
On October 31, the senior British airman in the Mediterranean, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, wrote: “We are being pressed787 to throw good money after bad. The situation is fundamentally unsound.” John Kennedy urged Alan Brooke on October 28 that “the price we were paying [for Leros was] too great788 and the return too small to justify retention.” Brooke professed to agree, but told Kennedy that at that day’s Chiefs of Staff meeting the decision had been made to hang on. It had now become too difficult to withdraw the garrison in the face of German air superiority. In his own diary, Brooke called Leros “a very nasty problem, Middle East [Command]789 have not been either wise or cunning and have now got themselves into the difficult situation that they can neither hold nor evacuate Leros. Our only hope would be assistance from Turkey, the provision of airfields from which the required air cover could be provided.” Such aid was not forthcoming.
The final act of the Aegean drama began on November 12, when the Germans attacked Leros. The British garrison there, some 3,000 strong together with 5,500 Italians, had had several weeks to prepare for the inevitable. Nonetheless, when the moment came, everything that could go amiss did so. Before the landing the 234th Brigade was commanded by a short, red-faced and heavily moustached officer named Ben Brittorous, who embodied almost every deficiency of the wartime British Army. Brittorous was obsessed with military etiquette, and harassed officers and men alike about the importance of saluting him. In his weeks on Leros, he made himself loathed by his troops, and made few effective preparations to meet a German landing. When the Luftwaffe started bombing in earnest, he retired to his tunnel headquarters, and stayed there until relieved of his command a week before the German descent, to be replaced by a gunner officer, Brig. Robert Tilney. Tilney, newly promoted to lead in battle men whom he knew only slightly, was less disliked than Brittorous, but also seemed to lack conviction. He immediately redeployed his three infantry battalions around the island, with the intention of repelling a German landing on the beaches. Not only did this plan spread the defenders thin, but the brigade was very short of radios and telephones, so communication between Tilney and his units was tenuous, even before the Germans intervened.
On November 11, Ultra informed the British that a landing on Leros, Operation Typhoon, would be launched on the following day. Some 2,730 German troops were committed, a force inferior in size to that of the defenders. Yet the RAF and Royal Navy found themselves unable to do anything effective to interfere with enemy arrangements. Bad weather frustrated planned British bombing attacks on the Luftwaffe’s Greek airfields. The commander of a Royal Navy destroyer flotilla in the area declined to brave a suspected minefield to attack the invasion convoy. The British official historian, Capt. Stephen Roskill, wrote later: “The enemy had boldly discounted790 any effective threat to the convoy by day, and by night he had concealed his vessels very skilfully; yet it seems undeniable that it should not have reached its destination virtually unscathed.”
Cairo, August 1942. Front row, left to right: Smuts, WSC, Auchinleck, Wavell; (back row, left to right) Tedder, Brooke, Harwood, Richard Casey
Arrival in Moscow: The bespectacled Molotov stands beside Harriman and Churchill in front of their Liberator.
A British fiasco is matched by a Soviet triumph. A scene on the beach at Dieppe after the disastrous August 1942 raid.
A British fiasco is matched by a Soviet triumph. Soviet troops advance towards their great victory at Stalingrad at the turn of the year.
Out of the desert at last. The British advance at El Alamein in November 1942.
Out of the desert at last. American war leaders at Casablanca in January 1943: Marshall and King sit on either side of Roosevelt, while behind them stand (left to right) Hopkins, Arnold, Somervell and Harriman.
Clockwise from top left: Politicians, admirable and otherwise: Bevan, Cripps, Attlee, Bevin and Beaverbrook
Churchill with General Anderson at the Roman amphitheatre at Carthage, where he addressed men of Britain’s desert army in May 1943
The agony of Italy: U.S. troops advance through characteristically intractable terrain.
Churchill’s folly in the Dodecanese. Beaufighters attack German shipping off Kos on October 3, 1943.
Churchill’s folly in the Dodecanese. German troops land on the island, to achieve one of their last gratuitous military successes of the war.
At Algiers in June 1943 with (left to right) Eden, Brooke, Tedder, Cunningham, Alexander, Marshall, Eisenhower and Montgomery
With Clementine in the saloon of his special train in Canada in August 1943
The “Big Three” at Tehran on November 30, 1943, Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday, with the U.S. president visibly ailing
Churchill’s last major personal strategic initiative of the war, the Anzio landing of January 1944
While the German main body landed from the sea, Fallschirmjäger staged another superbly brave and determined air assault. RAF strikes against the landing ships were notably less effective than the Luftwaffe’s close support of the invaders. A fourth British battalion, landed to reinforce the 234th Brigade during the battle, failed to affect its outcome. Some of the island’s defenders fought well, but others did not. The limited scale of British casualties indicates that this was no sacrificial stand. On Leros, from battalions of five hundred men apiece, the Royal West Kents lost eighteen killed in action, the Royal Irish Fusiliers twenty-two, the King’s Own forty-five, the Buffs forty-two.
When the German parachutists landed, the defenders—in much superior numbers—should have launched an immediate counterattack on the landing zone before the invaders could reorganise. Instead, British infantry simply sat tight and fired from their positions. As the Germans advanced across the island, one British officer was dismayed to see men of the King’s Own fleeing for their lives in the face of mortar fire. At 1800 on the first day, call sign Stupendous of the Long Range Desert Group signalled bitterly from Leros: “Lack of RAF support absolutely pitiful791: ships sat around here all day, and Stukas just laughed at us.” The defence lacked mobility and, more important, motivation and competence to match that of the Germans. Jeffrey Holland, who served as an infantry sergeant on Leros, wrote later: “As the battle progressed, it was evident that the enemy792 had deployed … first-class combat troops, who demonstrated consummate skill, courage and self-reliance.” An SBS man wrote of one scene he observed: “We were amazed to see groups of British soldiers793 in open route order proceeding away from the battle area … The colonel stopped and interrogated them, and they said they had orders to retire to the south. Many were without arms, very dejected and exceedingly tired.”