Operation Mercury Read online

  To ensure that this superiority in the air was maintained, Von List was the beneficiary of a new aerial command, Luftflotte 4. A mix of fighters, bombers, dive bombers and observers with a full complement of aircrew and base personnel, created specifically to support the Balkans offensive, some 1,200 aircraft flying from bases in Romania and Bulgaria. Against this formidable armada, backed by a further 300 Italian planes, the RAF could, as mentioned, muster a paper strength of perhaps a couple of hundred, less than half of which were airworthy. It was an inauspicious beginning.

  The primitive state of the Greek national infrastructure further hamstrung the Allies, whilst the Germans had been able to create functioning airstrips in the occupied countries. To signal the type of interference the British might expect, the Luftwaffe carried out a serious raid on the docks at Piraeus on the night of 7 April. One of their targets was the supply ship Clan Fraser – loaded with munitions. Brunskill, arriving by car to do what he could, found total chaos:

  To my dismay I saw the port was in flames. The fire on the Clan Fraser had taken such a hold there was no possibility of putting it out. There was not a Greek in sight nor any member of the crew. Red hot fragments from the ship had started fires wherever they dropped on buildings and more important on every ship, lighter and boat. No one seemed to be doing anything to save the ships. I found a small party of New Zealanders and we put out a few small fires with buckets of water.20

  There was little that could be done. Presently a further ammunition supply vessel also blew up to add to the confusion and to reinforce the message that the Luftwaffe ruled the skies over Greece.

  Despite all these difficulties the Allied soldiers found themselves being greeted rapturously by the citizens, welcomed as friends and liberators, an affection that never waned even when the same troops, battered, bloodied and in the exhaustion of retreat, came stumbling back through the same streets.

  By the middle of March the battalions were digging in along the Aliakmon line but the plan was already crumbling. General Papagos was unwilling and largely unable to extricate his divisions from Albania, the newly raised formations were hopelessly inadequate and under-equipped. Wavell’s expressed concerns over the vulnerability of the Allied defences proved entirely well founded. The line was also very thinly held and a vital corridor, through which the Germans could penetrate and thus turn the whole position, was virtually unmanned. Hitler was not blind to the strategic opportunities his sudden and violent occupation of Yugosalvia now presented.

  There was no alternative but to withdraw and Wilson extricated his forces from the trap which the Aliakmon line had become to establish a new position which, in the east, would stretch from the anchor of Mount Olympus to the Serbian border. In the course of the withdrawal the Greek Macedonian divisions began to disintegrate; a whiff of treachery was also in the air.21

  This proved to be the beginning of a series of extended rearguard actions into which the campaign deteriorated, faced with the continuous advance of an enemy with an overwhelming superiority of men, guns and armoured vehicles, his advance closely supported at every stage by the siren wail of the Stukas and the murderous strafing runs of Me109s.

  Sir Lawrence Pumphrey had been commissioned into the Northumberland Hussars; Yeomanry, who were being re-equipped with anti-tank guns and obliged to part with their beloved mounts (officers had been allowed to retain their horses, however, until the close of the current hunting season). He arrived in Egypt on New Year’s Day 1941. The regiment was encamped near Tel-el-Kebir, site of Sir Garnet Wolseley’s victory over dissident local forces in 1882. Here they practised the techniques of desert warfare before moving closer to Alexandria, on the fringes of the Nile Delta.

  Rumours abounded, and soon the ‘Noodles’ were aboard HMS Gloucester bound for Piraeus. Young men, schooled in the classical tradition and reared on Homer, strained for a first glimpse of the magical Greek mainland. Initially they were based at Glyfada, amidst delightful hill country cooled by thyme scented spring air.

  Squadron Leader David Barnett, who would be killed on Crete on the morning of 20 May, gave a series of lectures before the unit moved into position on the line of the River Axios in late March. The Noodles were temporarily attached as gunnery support to the Greek 6th Division under General Karasos. Sir Lawrence found the General spoke no English, and they communicated with a little oral French and by written exchanges in classical Greek.

  On 6 April, Easter Sunday, Sir Lawrence returned from communion to find the entire Greek force had decamped without notice. His detached four gun battery was obliged to limber hurriedly and follow the rest of the regiment in their retreat through Thessaly. German tanks were catching up on the far side of the intervening river and the guns made ready to stand and fight. Before the enemy was sighted, fresh orders to withdraw were received and the rearguard once again struggled after, losing one of the guns during the course of a difficult river crossing.

  Sir Lawrence’s battery was supported by a platoon from the Rangers and, even though they were bringing up the rear, never actually sighted the Germans. They did not rejoin the main body until they had reached Thermopylae; ground sanctified by the sacrifice of much earlier wars.

  The line was always in imminent risk of being outflanked and the panzers probed around the extremities, avoiding strongly held defensive positions which could be encircled and mopped up later; the pressure from the air was nerve-racking, relentless and virtually unopposed:

  The Germans dive bombed the village and put the wind up us. Do not like the dive bombers or the machine gunning from the air. It seems like years since I took my clothes off, had a wash and some sleep … We saw some great aerial displays by the Hun. He doesn’t move unless his airforce is going flat out and he has the planes and he keeps our heads down. Some more of his infantry crossed the flat yesterday and we gave them a hot time. I only dropped one but it was a long shot. Am just about asleep on my feet and everything on me is wet through. Bottom of the trench a sea of mud.22

  M. Koryzis, the Greek Prime Minister, on hearing from Papagos (as did Wilson) that the Greek armies had reached the limit of their endurance, chose the moment to end his political career by blowing his brains out. His commander-in-chief, now becoming anxious to spare his country further suffering in the face of inevitable capitulation, suggested to Wilson that it was time for the Allies to withdraw, sauve qui peut.

  This was the news that Wavell must have dreaded; all his worst fears were confirmed and the War Cabinet accepted the inevitable, endorsing the order for an evacuation; it was now just a question of how many could be saved from the gathering debacle.

  On the ground Wilson faced the unenviable task of attempting a fighting withdrawal from the ruptured position around Mount Olympus to a shorter line of no more than fifty miles and running from the heroic outpost at Thermopylae to the Gulf of Corinth.

  A nightmare retreat for the troops, dodging from one bomb-racked village to another, constantly exposed to the chattering machine guns, the trucks bumping and toiling over unmade cart tracks, exhausted, disorientated. All movement was confined to the hours of darkness, the drivers straining to maintain contact with the taillights of the truck in front, the only illumination permitted, the stark mountain landscape lit by the bursting of enemy shells and the crump of abandoned supply dumps going up.

  Even when they reached their new positions the Allies were as exposed as ever. Wavell now flew to Athens to take stock of the unfolding disaster and to confer with both Wilson and the Greeks. The King was already preparing to evacuate his court and entourage to Crete and, after receiving their Commander-in-Chief’s pessimistic report of 21 April, the War Cabinet confirmed the order to withdraw. It was none too soon for the Thermopylae line was now looking untenable; many units had lost much or all of their artillery and anti-tank weapons, and casualties, principally caused by air attacks, were mounting.

  Evacuation, in the teeth of German hegemony in the skies was problematic, Piraeus was impractic
al because of this which meant the withdrawal would have to be accomplished through the necklace of small harbours further south in the Peloponnese. All heavy equipment would have to be rendered useless and abandoned, movement for the fighting formations was only permitted at night with the troops filtering down to their evacuation points, non combatant units had to take their chances during the lengthening spring days; easy meat for the prowling Stukas.

  Sir Lawrence Pumphrey, and the Noodles, had bypassed Athens as they withdrew under the cover of darkness and at Marathon experienced the demoralising chore of disabling their surviving vehicles and guns. From Ruffina they were taken off by HMS Fearless. Though they had been through the whole campaign, they had not once sighted the enemy, other than the prowling Stukas and Me109s.

  On 22 April the Greeks formally surrendered and by the 30th the evacuation by sea from the beaches was largely complete, despite a successful attempt by German paratroops to seize a vital crossing at Corinth by a coup de main. The Navy, not for the first, or last, time had delivered the rump of the army, some 80 per cent, from certain death or capture. Behind them the defeated army left all of their vehicles, heavy guns, armour and anti-tank weapons with great quantities of small arms, spares and supplies. Brigadier Brunskill recalled the moment of his deliverance:

  Towards sunset [on 24 April] we were told to be ready to march. Relief showed on all our faces and no one asked the distance. The six miles were covered in excellent time and we arrived at the water’s edge in good order without incident. As the harbour was too shallow for huge ships to put alongside invasion barges were brought in by the Navy and everyone looked on in silent admiration of real efficiency. The last on board arrived about midnight making seventy sleepless hours in all, and lay down everywhere, anyhow to sleep the sleep of exhaustion.23

  Whilst the evacuation was a brilliant operation, superbly handled by the Navy, it remained a perilous operation; the departing ships, once the sun had risen, exposed to the fury of the Luftwaffe. The captain of HMS Calcutta graphically describes the intensity of the aerial harassment:

  At seven o’clock in the morning, April 27th, bombers came over and did not leave us until 10 a.m. We were shooting so accurately that again and again we put them off. About 7.15 one transport was hit and began sinking. I ordered the Diamond alongside to take off troops, and about 9 a.m. three more destroyers, the Wryneck, Vampire and Voyager, joined us in the battle with the dive bombers. In that three hours the Calcutta fired about 1200 rounds of four-inch shells and many thousands of rounds of pom pom and machine gun ammunition. The Coventry came out to relieve me, enabling me to disembark them and return to the convoy in the afternoon. One more transport was sunk but we got all the survivors safely ashore.24

  The news from the Western Desert where Rommel and his Afrika Korps were making their presence felt was also disheartening; a lightening strike, launched on 24 March, had retaken Benghazi and was rushing eastwards toward Egypt. Wavell’s stock plummeted and it was inevitable he would be selected as the chosen scapegoat for the Greek disaster.

  At 5.54 p.m. on 25 April some 5,000 men from the 19 Brigade were landed at Souda Bay; the first contingent of Wilson’s battered evacuees, ‘… They had very little in the way of arms or personal equipment; they were dirty, ill organised, with no proper chain of command existing, “bomb-shy” and conscious of their recent defeat.’25 Crete; the backwater, ill manned, barely considered, was about to become the new front line.

  Chapter 3

  Operation Mercury

  We are few yet our blood is wild,

  Dread neither foe nor death

  One thing we know – for Germany in need – we care

  We fight, we win, we die,

  To arms! To arms!

  There’s no way back, no way back.1

  General Kurt Student was a man with a mission. His objective was to ensure the capture of Crete, which now began to enter the strategic arena, was accomplished by the parachute troops under his command, the elite Fallschirmjäger in what would be the ultimate test of airborne operations; ‘vertical envelopment’ from the skies.

  Parachutists were a relatively new phenomenon in warfare, those who had slogged through the blood soaked horrors of the trenches had witnessed the birth of air power. It was a logical development of larger transport planes in the twenties that raised the possibility of these being used to outflank enemy positions from the air and drop infantry behind the lines to seize key objectives.

  This delivery of men and matériel could be managed either by parachute or by glider or, latterly, by a judicious combination of both. The advantage of dropping from the skies was that the parachutists could land virtually anywhere and, as it would be hoped, muster swiftly on the ground to maximise the advantage of surprise.

  The abiding weakness was that it was not possible to drop heavy weapons; these could only be accommodated by the gliders. The obvious role for airborne forces was to seize key objectives behind the enemy lines, interdict or sabotage his communications and be able to ‘hang on’ until relieved by their advancing infantry.

  An additional and more ambitious use was for the parachutists and glider borne troops to be dropped some way behind the enemy’s line with a view to attaining a more ambitious strategic objective. For this, maximum support from friendly aircraft for tactical firepower and re-supply was essential. The descent upon Crete would be just such an operation, the most ambitious yet undertaken by an airborne spearhead.

  Soviet Russia was the first of the great powers to experiment with paratroops; as early as 1930 airborne contingents were featuring in exercises but the doctrine went into decline when its champion, Marshal Tukhachevsky, fell victim to one of Stalin’s relentless internecine purges.

  Germany had, however, watched developments by the Red Army with interest; both cooperated in the 1920s and 1930s in accordance with the terms of the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo. The restriction on German military expansion, imposed under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and which had fettered the Weimar Republic, was repudiated by Hitler in 1935. This allowed the introduction of the Ju52/32 as a suitable workhorse for the Luftwaffe.

  Major F.W. Immanns was the first commander of the nascent airborne arm in 1936, initially under the control of the army rather than the air force. The type of parachute adopted was the back pack version opened by a static line. In the course of the following year a formal training school was set up which also trained personnel from the Luftwaffe; not to be outdone the SS and even the SA sent odd detachments for training.

  Immanns’ successor, Colonel Bassenge, found that no coherent doctrine was emerging with men being trained in penny packets from rival services. Despite a limited showing in the 1937 manoeuvres, a viable parachute arm seemed unlikely until Student was appointed as operational commander.

  A career soldier and consummate professional, Student had begun his career as a lieutenant in a Jäger battalion before the Great War. It was in the air rather than on the ground that he earned his reputation as a determined and fearless warrior, flying first against the Russians and latterly over the Western Front in the deadly circling dogfights fought out over the web of trenches. Shot down and badly wounded in 1917 he survived the war but saw the lustre of his profession dimmed by the savage repression of Versailles.

  Student, the heroic flying ace, was not long unemployed, joining the fledgling and semi clandestine cadre of officers responsible for keeping alive the spirit of an air force despite the restrictions imposed by the Allies. With the emergence of Hitler and the triumph of National Socialism in 1933, the chains were cast off and the Luftwaffe was set up under Goering, another celebrated fighter pilot. Whilst he showed little inclination to politics and did not hunger for the laurels and spoils of patronage, Student was ambitious, extremely able and, in the pursuit of his goals, ruthless.

  His aloof manner and intellectual arrogance won few friends amongst his conventionally minded colleagues though his care for the men who served under him, his
fearlessness and dash, earned him the unstinting admiration of his subordinates. This was an officer who led from the front and showed an almost total disregard for danger:

  [He] had absolutely no fear of danger … driving with a very noticeable vehicle in areas held by partisans, in cities occupied by the enemy or in terrain dominated by enemy bombing – never with any security precautions. He paid no attention to random shots that flew around and seemed to be surprised when those who were with him threw themselves under cover. He wanted to give a visible example. This naturally made an impression on [his] parachutists.3

  Student was able to cultivate a special relationship with Hermann Goering - the idea that airborne operations should be entirely the preserve of the Luftwaffe appealed to his mania for self-aggrandisement. Having established a corridor to the seat of authority and resources Student, formally appointed on 4 June 1938, set to work with a will.

  His first task was to weld the various fledgling detachments into a whole, the 7th Flieger division of the Luftwaffe. The development of the type DFS 230 glider4 provided just the type of aircraft necessary to facilitate the creation of a glider borne arm. Although the Sudeten crisis of 1938 was averted by frantic diplomacy, Student took the chance to mount a full-scale exercise deploying 250 Ju52s over open ground. A carefully staged performance which, whilst it impressed Goering, failed to make an equal impression on the General’s more sceptical Wehrmacht colleagues, already tainted by jealousy at his easy access to the fat Reichsmarschall.

  The army withdrew its personnel from the airborne division which was left bereft of men. Undaunted, Student continued to preach his tactical doctrine and when control of the rump of the airborne arm came under full Luftwaffe control at the end of the year, it seemed his moment had come. With a second Fallschirmjäger regiment being raised in 1939, Student perfected his blueprint for airborne operations. His elite would operate on the ground like a conventional brigade with integral signals, mortar and light artillery.5