by John Sadler
… knew that I was taking part in a retreat; in fact I wondered if it should not be called more correctly a rout as, on all sides, men were hurrying along in disorder. Most of them had thrown away their rifles, and a number had even discarded their tunics, as it was a hot day … Nearly every yard of the road and of the ditches on either side was strewn with abandoned arms and accoutrements, blankets, gasmasks, packs, kitbags, sun-helmets, cases and containers of all shapes and sizes, tinned provisions and boxes of cartridges and hand grenades.10
By the evening of 27 May Creforce HQ had evacuated Souda and was on its way to Sphakia. No possibility of stemming the tide of the German advance now remained and Weston was left in local control. Laycock and Waugh were not alone in having formed a rather poor opinion of the general. Such was the magnitude of doubt that neither Hargest nor Vasey was prepared to await orders that might never come or would come too late.
Accordingly, with the fear of an outflanking move from the south, the surviving Australians and New Zealanders slipped away from the 42nd Street line during the evening, as their Commander-in-Chief and his HQ motored over the barren strip of the Askifou Plateau. The attack the Maoris had put in that afternoon had given the pursuers a sufficiently bloody nose and the withdrawal was not contested.
Another was to follow. The objective of the Allied withdrawal was the village of Stilos which lay on the northern approaches to the Askifou Plateau. As dawn broke on the 28th and the warm sun began its ascent toward the midday furnace, the Alpine troops renewed the chase.
Two companies of the 23rd, who were sleeping like the dead, had to be robustly roused by their officers when the German scouts were glimpsed. The New Zealanders crowded behind a dry stone wall, a perfect fire position and, as the Axis thundered on, began shooting at point-blank range. Many casualties were inflicted in the hot exchange and Sergeant Hulme earned his VC. Again the biters had been bitten.
While this action was being fought another engagement flared up further to the north, where the coast highway met the road heading at right angles southward toward Askifou, at Megala Khorion. Here the commandos, now dubbed Layforce, together with the Maoris, took on a mechanised column surging eastwards.11 The 28th, as ever, gave a good account of themselves but the commandos, who comprised Republican remnants from Spain’s civil war, serving with Young’s ‘D’ Battalion, proved less enthusiastic.
Colvin’s ‘A’ Battalion fared even worse. A number of the men were taken prisoner in the course of a couple of rather confused skirmishes around Souda. Their commander’s performance was so dismal Laycock sacked him and amalgamated the rump of the battalion with Young’s.
As the 28th drew on into the afternoon, the long, normally languid hours where the great heat lay like a stifling blanket, the commandos who had now fallen back to a second line at Babali Hani came under renewed pressure. Layforce was stiffened by the 2/8th Australians and, later, by two Matildas from Heraklion. The late but timely arrival of the armour helped the composite force see off an attack put in by two of Ringel’s alpine battalions.
Laycock, who’d narrowly avoided capture, managed to get through from Stilos to establish an HQ at Babali Hani. With due deference to their general’s injunction that ‘Sweat saves Blood’ the mountain troops, once they’d probed a position, would then simply attempt to achieve fire superiority from the flanks, typically by seizing whatever high ground offered as a base for their machine guns and mortars. An eminently sensible tactical doctrine, and the mountainous terrain of the island provided ample scope.
With the Alpine troops edging around their flanks the Australians and commandos fell back, immobilising the two tanks which had run dry and a third which had appeared later. As light thickened in the thyme scented dusk, the sweet smells of the East Mediterranean spring tarnished by the tang of cordite, burning metal and rubber, the defenders slipped free to begin the long slog up toward the northern rim of the plateau. Ahead of them tramped the mass of the Allied survivors, ragged, weary, hungry and dispirited; an army that had coalesced into something very much resembling a leaderless mob, the stink of defeat hard upon them.
As a line of retreat, the road to Sphakia was far from being an ideal choice. From Vrysses the road climbed upward in a series of relentless hairpins, all signs of cultivation withered from the barren rock and scrub. There was no water, the stiffness of the climb a torment for a parched and exhausted man who stumbled along in a daze with his tattered footwear further disintegrating. The Stukas were frequent visitors, swarming like angry bees around the stricken carcase of the Allied Army:
As we were retreating, the Stukas would come along and dive and strafe and we would disintegrate into the water table or into the bushes along the side of the road and I remember one morning this happened and after it was over we got out of the ditch very shaken and looking round to see if there were any killed or wounded, and two hard-boiled soldiers Bill and Les. And Les said to Bill: ‘My God, I prayed for you when the Jerries were strafing us and you were in that ditch,’ and Bill said: ‘Sorry Les, too late, I prayed this morning.’ And all the others looked around and thought that if old Les prayed there must be room for everybody else to pray.12
Lawrence Pumphrey, struggling up the hard, steep ascent, was finding the going murderously tough. His own boots had been with the local cobbler on 20 May and he’d been marching in a pair of desert boots he’d found chucked in a ditch. He soon realised why the previous owner had cast these aside so disdainfully. By now his feet were badly blistered and each step was agony. He made it as far as Sphakia only because his brother, John, managed to liberate a motorcycle with sufficient fuel still in the tank.
Bad as the roaring Me109s were, there were actually less of them; the relentless timetable for Barbarossa had denuded the available aircraft – Russia’s impending misery at least partially spared the survivors on Crete as they wound their grim and weary passage up the mountain.
Although the rearguard and the fighting troops were able to maintain their morale, the less cohesive units, British and Middle Eastern support personnel, were disintegrating, plundering such dwindling stockpiles of foodstuffs as could be found. The Australians and commandos, being the last, thus fared badly. Freddie Graham, the brigade major, performed miracles of logistics but even so, hunger began to bite.
Kippenberger saw the padre, heavy laden with water bottles which he carried to sustain his flock, his own lips dry and cracked. Other survivors remember the endless, cruel succession of hairpin bends, each one promising the summit, only for the corner to reveal yet another, uphill and ahead. Vehicles which ran out of fuel or broke down were ruthlessly trundled over the edge to crash, tumbling and spinning, down the steep, rock strewn slopes. Graham recorded his own view of the march:
The road was jammed with troops in no formed bodies shambling along in desperate haste. Dirty, weary and hungry, they were a conglomeration of Australians, a few New Zealanders and British, and Greek refugees. They had only one thing in common and that was a desire to get as far as possible from Canea – a rabble one could call them, nothing else … desperately we pushed our way on to the road and tried to push past the motley throng which straggled all over it. All day the sky was thick with enemy aircraft in many cases flying at only a few hundred feet and every now and again coming down to bomb and machine gun the troops trudging along the road. All day the stream of the retreat flowed steadily but wearily on. When enemy aircraft approached the bulk of the men tried to scatter off the road or hid in the ditches; some impervious to threats such as: ‘Lie down you bastard or I’ll fucking shoot you,’ bore steadily on.13
Desperate for food the men resorted to foraging, some living like outlaws in caves and abandoned farmsteads; the Spanish Republicans, survivors of three brutal and hungry years of bitter civil strife, proved particularly adept, even inviting Laycock and Waugh to an impromptu feast. When men did lie down to snatch a few hours or even minutes of rest, they sank into such a stupor of exhaustion they could not, even by
the most robust methods, be roused.
While the bulk of the Allied forces were beginning the gruelling ascent toward the plateau and, from there, down the steep crevice of the Imbros Gorge to Sphakia, the garrisons at Rethymnon and Heraklion remained largely unaware of the unfolding disaster in the west. They, for their part, had acquitted themselves triumphantly: the lodgement at Rethymnon had steadily been eroded and the German survivors further east around Heraklion were depleted, demoralised and completely isolated without the consolation of having attained any of their objectives.
It came as a singularly rude awakening then when Brigadier Chappell summoned his battalion commanders to a conference at his HQ on the morning of the 28th and advised them that they and their men were to be taken off by ship from the port that evening. Total secrecy was to be maintained and the Greek survivors who had fought so valiantly alongside the Allies were to be left in ignorance – there were simply not enough boats available.
This was galling for the British and Australian officers, to abandon these brave Allies to the summary justice of the Fallschirmjäger. One of the most popular officers in the Black Watch, whose companies had fought Brauer to a standstill, Major Hamilton, who had vowed that ‘the Black Watch leaves Crete when the snow leaves Mount Ida’ ,had become a casualty that very morning.
As Chappell and his HQ staff set about the dispiriting business of burning and destroying, one of Pendlebury’s partisan contacts appeared and made a passionate appeal that the Allies hand over any equipment they could; there was no rebuke for the abandonment. The brigadier was deeply moved by the man’s courage and bearing, and promptly complied. Everything that could be used was given to the Cretans.14
That evening the troops, astonished that they were now to flee from a field they believed won, went about the grim chores of disabling guns and vehicles, burying ammunition stocks, destroying and contaminating anything that might succour the invaders. In the event the evacuation proceeded in text book fashion. Silently the battalions filed down toward the port, leaving behind all of the familiar landmarks they had thought safe. The city was in little better state than Chania, the bombing had devastated large areas, with the stink of raw sewage and the pervading reek of decaying corpses heavy in the night air.
Patrick Leigh Fermor15 noticed what appeared to be a nervous, rather boyish soldier who turned out to be a Cretan sweetheart. He simply decided to look the other way. This young lady was not unique for a number of others and a few civilians managed to get aboard the rescue vessels. These were under the command of Rear Admiral Rawlings with the cruisers Orion and Dido16, escorted by half a dozen destroyers. In all the ships took off 3.486 troops; the entire garrison.17
Inevitably, small groups from outlying posts and the wounded crowded into the hospital at Knossos were left behind, only hearing the news of their abandonment from locals. Some simply waited for captivity, others prepared to cross the mountains to reach the south coast and some took to the hills with Cretan partisans.
It was now the early hours of 29 May after a flawless evacuation but the destroyer Imperial had suffered undetected damage during the earlier bomb attacks and her steering gear jammed completely. Hotspur was instructed to take off the complement of crew and soldiers. This too, was carried out with great efficiency but a small cadre of Australians who had earlier sought solace in liquor were by now utterly insensible. When the stricken ship was sunk by torpedos, they went to the bottom with her.
As the heavily laden Hotspur struggled to catch up, the remainder of the squadron was obliged to cut their speed to no more than 15 knots. In a grim replay of the previous action at sea the first bright rays of daylight found the ships north of the Kaso Strait. Almost immediately the dreaded siren wail of the Stukas pierced the clear morning air; an overture for six hours’ relentless hammering from above.
Orion was hit twice and bracketed by half a dozen near misses. Bursting through the armour plate, the bombs tore into the bowels of the vessel and exploded amongst the densely packed evacuees, nearly 300 were killed outright in the inferno and as many more injured. Ironically it was those who’d volunteered to chance the deck and man Bren guns that escaped.
At first light the Stukas started their dive bombing. With hundreds of others I was packed like a sardine down in a mess deck. The enemy pressed home their attack and Orion was hit twice. The second bomb came down between decks and there was indescribable horror among the hundreds of men there. I blacked out from cordite fumes in my lungs and must have been unconscious for some hours. I owe my life to my pal Frank Humphrey who hauled me to safety after the stair had been blown away and just in time before the watertight doors were closed, sealing that part of the ship.18
Dido was also struck with similar results as a bomb penetrated the crowded canteen, leaving another 100 men dead. Some wounded survivors were drowned as the area was flooded to contain the flames. Hereward, too had become a casualty. It was evening by the time the damaged flotilla steamed, battered and gaping, into Alexandria; almost 20 per cent of the garrison, taken off without loss, had been lost in the sea chase.
The situation which unfolded at Rethymnon was somewhat different. Campbell had succeeded in eliminating or severely shaking the two German lodgements to the east and west of his sector; that aside, matters had been reasonably stable. Like Chappell he had no immediate appreciation of just how bad things were generally and the Naval officer, commanding a supply drop from Souda on the 28th, carried no fresh orders. Lieutenant Haig could, however, intimate that he was ordered to make for Sphakia and that some kind of a general retreat southwards appeared to be in the offing.
In fact no orders reached Campbell. He had not completely destroyed the German positions to the west and ruled out a concerted attack to re-open the coast road; both of his tanks had been written off in the attempts. His orders were to hold the airstrip; that he had done, most admirably, and would continue to do. By now, however, Wittman’s Advanced Guard was steaming eastwards, the 85 and 141 Alpine Regiments were following on and, at last, Ringel could call on full armoured support – tanks from 31 Armoured Regiment had been successfully disembarked at Kastelli.
This powerful battle group, far stronger than anything the Allies could now scrape together, was to relieve firstly Rethymnon and then Heraklion. As previously noted it was this entirely logical appreciation that had allowed the tattered tail of Freyberg’s army to turn southward, largely unmolested, but it spelt the end for the garrison at Rethymnon. It was only around dusk on the 29th that Campbell heard the shocking news that Heraklion was abandoned. Worse still, German patrols were already probing the town of Rethymnon and ranging shells from their artillery were beginning their drumming dirge. That night the Australians held sad vigil by the beach, flashing torches into the darkness in the hope that the Navy had vessels lying offshore but none came. Next morning the pressure was swiftly increased. Campbell was clinging to the aerodrome with the 2/1st – Sandover commanded the 2/11th. Evidence of the German strength was all too obvious; the outposts were already being driven in.
Campbell came to the conclusion that there was little point in going on and that there was no option but the bitter pill of capitulation. Sandover disagreed. He believed that anyone prepared to take the chance should be given leave to take to the hills. In the event he, with a gallant band of thirteen officers and thirty-nine other ranks, did just that and, after many adventures, they were rescued from the south coast by submarine.
At 8.30 a.m. on 29 May Campbell and the rest surrendered, plodding through the ravaged landscape and marching into captivity with the added humiliation of being made to pull the trailers containing enemy equipment:
The fields on each side were sprinkled with dead and no-mans-land near the town itself was even more thickly spread with corpses … We saw a paratrooper, still attached to his parachute hanging from the telephone wires. Half his head had been blown off.19
Having mopped up resistance at Rethymnon, Wittman forged westwards to Herak
lion where Brauer’s survivors had emerged to take control of the ruins. The charge was spent, he sent a fast flying column of motorcyclists toward Aghios Nikolaos. Their mission was to link up with the Italians. Determined to play his part in the tragedy of Crete, Il Duce had sent amphibious forces to occupy the eastern extremity of the island around Sitia on 28 May. These fresh invaders, landing from the Dodecanese, were not engaged after the battle was safely won. Italian gunboats had launched some half hearted spoiling attacks on Royal Navy vessels and the port of Ierapetra had been bombed on the 25th.
Lawrence Pumphrey, having managed to reach the beach, was amongst those taken prisoner. His brother John, who’d acted as a movement officer in the final stages of the evacuation, found himself a passenger in a Sunderland flying boat, but his brother officers and troopers were left behind.
With his lacerated feet too painful even to hobble, Lawrence was driven into captivity on the back of a German truck. Like so many Allied prisoners he found he had little personal animosity toward his captors. They, for their part, behaved well. Food was scarce but, after a few days on the north side of the island, he was flown back to Athens, a very different journey from the first. He was amongst a group of British prisoners, temporarily held in an old Greek barrack pile at Salonika. The buildings were so infested it was deemed wisest to sleep out on the parade ground. Some weeks later the prisoners were herded into cattle trucks for the long journey north. At Belgrade they received welcome succour from the Red Cross. At Lübeck they were put into a newly constructed camp. Lawrence was suffering from jaundice and shivering in his battered tropical kit. Later that year he was moved to a vast compound at Warburg, situated on the cold, bare expanse of the Westphalian Plain. He remained a year in Warburg where, with others, he planned to escape by means of a tunnel. By this time officers and men had been segregated, though he still had the company of a handful of fellow Noodles who’d all been captured on Crete. In June 1943, he was part of a mass escape from the camp at Eistedt in Bavaria. Sixty-five prisoners tunnelled clear of the camp but were subsequently all re-captured. Lawrence Pumphrey finished the war in Colditz.