Blood tears and folly, p.34
Blood, Tears and Folly, page 34
With their radio out of action, the New Zealanders withdrew to their reserve position, a piece of high ground where the colonel believed he would be reinforced the next day, and so be able to mount an attack that would regain the lost ground. When daylight came the handful of Germans were still on Hill 107. Kurt Student had chosen the airfield at Máleme as his Schwerpunkt, main point of attack, and with that determination for which Germans are noted, he now stubbornly continued to land more planes there into what soon became a meatgrinder. It was one of the most reckless battlefield decisions of the entire war. Riddled with shell fragments and bullets of the defenders as they came into their approach run, 40 or so Ju 52s were crash-landed on to the airfield. The Germans scrambled over slumped dead and wounded comrades to get out of the planes and fight. These men were not even trained airborne troops; they were Gebirgsjäger of the 100th Mountain Rifle Regiment. By 5 o’clock that afternoon the town of Máleme and the airport were in German hands. One account says that:
It is not too much to say that this tiny movement [by the New Zealand colonel] lost the Allies the Battle of Crete. By noon on May 21 so many more German paratroops had dropped safely, so many gliders come in, so many Ju-52s had crash-landed on the slowly expanded space, that overwhelming strength had been packed into it. In the afternoon it burst out, and the Fallschirmjäger could follow Student’s orders to ‘Roll up Crete from the west’.25
Crete was not easily conquered. For a week bitter fighting continued. Food, supplies and even ammunition were left behind so that the Junkers could bring more and more combat troops. But by the end of that week the battle was decided. Freyberg was granted permission to start the British evacuation. The Royal Navy played its part to the end. Not only did it cover the withdrawal, taking severe losses in the process, but it prevented the Germans bringing in supplies and reinforcements by sea. Until the end of June all German supplies were brought in by air.
Almost fifty years afterwards, two books took up the issue of the Crete fighting all over again.26 One said that Freyberg misread the Enigma intercept he was given, and believed that the main German attack would be from the sea. With this in his mind, the writer said, Freyberg saw no reason to squander men in a bitter fight for the airfields.
The other, by Freyberg’s son, said that Freyberg was given the complete German battle plan nine days before the attack. It was passed on to every senior commander and staff officer in Crete in an intelligence appreciation dated 12 May 1941. But, added Paul Freyberg, commanders in the field were never allowed to act on information derived solely from Enigma. Wavell was not empowered to vary this order and stopped Freyberg from changing his dispositions at Máleme.
Perhaps it would have made a difference. But the failure to hold Máleme airfield, and indeed the loss of Crete, was largely due to the determination of the elite German paratroops and their willingness to take devastating casualties and go on fighting:
In flexibility of mind, and speed of decision and action, the German battalion and brigade commanders had outdone the officers who had opposed them. The fact is not surprising, nor anything to the dishonour of men leaving their peace-time occupations to make war against opponents whose every thought and ambition for many years had been devoted to nothing else.’27
However, there were other factors. Little had been done since the army arrived to prepare the island against invasion. Six successive commanders of varying competence and energy had come and gone while Wavell’s headquarters had failed to impose any defence plan. Enigma intelligence was not used to the full because so few British commanders knew that it was a flawless glimpse into the enemy’s mind. The defenders failed to appreciate that possession of the airfields was the sole decisive factor. Had they understood that, the Germans would probably have been fought to a point where their losses were too severe for the drops to continue.
German commanders were less impressed with the performance of their soldiers. The paratroops suffered very heavy casualties. Of 8,500 men dropped on the first day, 3,764 were killed and 2,494 wounded. Freiherr von der Heydte, commander of the paratroops at Máleme airfield, attributed the high losses to insufficient training and tactical experience, especially among the junior officers. The casualties, and the losses of transport aircraft, helped to ensure that Germany never again used a parachute army for an airborne attack. A plan to follow success in Crete with an immediate airborne invasion of Cyprus – and thoughts of a similar invasion of Malta – were abandoned. Most of the veterans of the Crete battle died fighting as infantry on the Italian or the Russian fronts.
At sea, the Royal Navy had attacked convoys bringing seaborne reinforcements, and covered the evacuation too. It was a battle between German bombers and RN warships. The total losses were three cruisers and six destroyers sunk; three battleships, an aircraft-carrier, six cruisers and seven destroyers damaged. Once again it was demonstrated that warships could not operate without effective air cover. Admiral Andrew Cunningham, C-in-C of the Mediterranean fleet, said that three squadrons of fighter planes would have been enough to save Crete (and his warships too, no doubt). But there were no fighters available. The Air Ministry continued to devote the greater part of its energies to strategic bombers. There was no indication that any lessons were learned by the men in London who decided these matters. Little wonder that after the war an official history sardonically quoted Cicero’s maxim: ‘An army is of little value in the field unless there are wise counsels at home.’
There was a bitter after-taste to the battle. Motivated by a rumour that German prisoners had been mistreated, the victorious paratroops formed firing parties and executed Cretan hostages (200 in one town square alone). The German inquiry that followed said the rumour was groundless. Kurt Student was condemned to five years imprisonment at a postwar war crimes trial for killing British POWs at Máleme but the sentence was not confirmed.
No matter what disillusion with paratroops the Crete battle brought to the German high command, the British and the Americans were thrilled by the idea of parachute armies and began to form and train their own units. Some were used in close support on D-Day. At Arnhem in Holland in 1944 a parachute army was dropped behind the enemy lines. It was not a success.
In strategic terms perhaps the German sacrifice was worthwhile. Crete was a fine prize, as one glance at a map will show. It provided a base from which the Germans could attack the whole eastern Mediterranean – such a good base that some critics of Wavell said that a commander with a better grasp of strategy would have abandoned Greece and used all the available resources to fortify Crete.
The fighting on Crete had revealed the limitations of Enigma and other high-grade decrypts. The Luftwaffe had always been the most vulnerable user of Enigma, largely due to careless mistakes and lack of signals discipline. But a prize-fighter out of training can be told that his opponent weighed in at 250 pounds, and is a great exponent of straight rights, and still get hurt when the punches land. The Enigma interception was passive, just as radar and asdic were passive. These facilities could report the presence of an enemy or reveal his intentions; you still had to find a way to hit him. After Crete, the British were able to reflect upon the German methods while they were full-length on the canvas.
15
Two Side-Shows
Diverse paths lead diverse folk
the right way to Rome.
Chaucer, A Treatise on the Astrolabe
The East African campaign has been called a ‘side-show’ by men who were not there. Perhaps it was. Every confrontation seemed like a side-show to someone, and yet what at the time was called ‘The Abyssinian Campaign’ has all the ingredients of a great battle, and a unique place in the strategy of the Second World War.
The story begins a few weeks after Italy declared war. On 3 August 1940 three battalions of the Italian army and fourteen battalions of colonial infantry, together with pack-artillery, medium tanks and armoured cars, moved across the border into British Somaliland, in the ‘horn of Africa’ It was a small country compared with neighbouring Abyssinia, which the Italians had conquered in 1936, and its defence force consisted of a battalion of the Black Watch, two Indian and two East African battalions and the Somaliland Camel Corps. After two days of heavy fighting the British force was evacuated on 15 August 1940 under a strong rearguard action by the Black Watch.
Churchill was angry. He felt that defeat at the hands of the Italians – for the one and only time on record – would boost the morale of the Italian army in Libya just when ‘so much depended on our prestige’. Italy’s propaganda service made the most of the British expulsion from its African holding. It was a black mark for General Wavell, and Churchill’s black marks were accumulated like trading stamps: when you had a certain number of them, you were traded in for someone else.
To make matters worse for Wavell, he had Abyssinia’s Emperor Haile Selassie sitting in Khartoum, waiting for the British to restore his country to him. He had arrived in Egypt by flying boat as long ago as 25 June. The Foreign Office in London had packed him off on one of the last cross-Europe flights before France collapsed, without warning anyone that he was on his way back to Africa. With the British defeat in Somaliland, he had become an even more embarrassing encumbrance with whom all communication was difficult, since the emperor insisted upon speaking Amharic. The only available interpreter of Amharic spoke only Arabic and, on at least one occasion, the Arabic interpreter spoke only French, thus requiring a third interpreter.
The struggle for East Africa
In January 1941, after General O’Connor’s victories at Sidi Barrani in the Western Desert, the 4th Indian Division was taken from the fighting and brought 2,000 miles south to East Africa. The 5th Indian Division was brought to Khartoum. West African troops and some South African brigades were moved to Kenya. There were several reasons why Churchill bullied Wavell into a three-pronged assault upon this million-square-mile rectangle of land. Beside his obvious chagrin at having been ejected from British Somaliland by the Italians, and the wish to remove, once and for all, the Italian dream of joining East African possessions to Libya by conquering Egypt, there was a broader strategy behind the move.
Churchill wanted to bring South Africa into a fighting war, and by taking South African army and air force units northwards into areas of greater strategic importance (instead of using them as garrisons, which is all the South African government had promised) there was a chance of blooding them and granting them a victory not too far away from their homeland. Removing the Italians would be a popular action at home in South Africa. The South Africans were not entirely sure about the wisdom of engaging in war against Germany, but Jan Christiaan Smuts – their premier and C-in-C – had won the vote in Parliament by a narrow margin. A victory for the South African fighting men would reinforce pro-British Smuts in his present shaky political position.
Wavell was not privy to Churchill’s thinking on the matter. He was no politician and not, in the global sense, a strategist. Wavell did not want to attack Abyssinia; he preferred to wait until the rifles he had supplied to the natives brought about a popular revolt against Italian rule – or at least to wait until the rainy season had ended. Wavell sent a specialist in guerrilla warfare, Captain Orde Wingate, to get a revolt started, but Churchill was not prepared to let large bodies of fighting troops stand idly by, waiting for a revolt to start. He wanted this battle won and the troops – South Africans included – moved north into Egypt to face whatever proved to be the next crisis.
Few campaigns can match this Abyssinian one, either for the fierceness of its fighting or the colourful nature of its combatants. The 5th Indian Division, arriving at Keren, included such units as the 5th Mahratta Light Infantry Regiment, 3/2 Punjab, Skinner’s Horse, the Worcesters, motor machine-gun companies of the Sudan Defence Force and the 1st Transvaal Scottish with its own pipe band. On the Italian side there were Blackshirt Legions, the Savoia Grenadiers and Alpini units.
The landscape was equally exotic. In this land of precipitous mountains, high plateaux, gorges and ravines as well as tropical lowlands, Keren was a road and rail junction and the key to the north. Standing at 4,000 feet above sea-level, the country surrounding Keren was like a lunar landscape. To seal the mighty gorge the Italian engineers exploded charges under 200 feet of cliff and blocked the road. ‘Keren,’ said one account, describing that moment when the defenders sealed themselves inside, ‘was like a great medieval castle whose portcullis has fallen.’
The 4th Indian Division had been chosen because of their experience of mountain warfare.1 Facing them were crack troops of the Bersaglieri battalion of the Savoia Grenadiers, commanded by a young and energetic colonel. Five days of fighting cost the Italians nearly 5,000 casualties, including 1,135 dead. The Allied casualties were no fewer. The siege of Keren lasted 53 days and the British commander had to pause and bring in another division before finally taking the town.
None of the Allied troops who fought at Keren would dismiss Italian troops as lacking the ability to fight. Some of the most bitter fighting of the whole war was seen in East Africa. The RAF, the South African Air Force and Rhodesian squadrons were using antiquated planes such as Gloster Gladiators, Westland Lysanders, Vickers Wellesleys and Vickers Vincents. Without the air superiority they gained with these machines the Allied forces would never have been able to take Keren. The Italian commander was the Duke of Aosta, who was married to a French princess. He was described by Churchill as ‘a chivalrous and cultivated man, partly educated in England’.2 Churchill may have intended to say ‘educated partly in England’, but with Churchill you can never be sure.
Other Allied components included a battalion of the French Foreign Legion and the Highland Light Infantry. Exotic names abounded: a mobile force was called ‘Flit’ (after a well-known brand of insect repellent) and the commanding general’s aircraft was called ‘Mrs Clutterbuck’. The official war artist Edward Bawden depicted the campaign in several superb watercolour paintings now to be seen at the Imperial War Museum in London.
One column, ‘Gideon Force’, was commanded by ‘Gideon’ Orde Wingate, who said he was given nothing but ‘sick camels and the scum of the Cavalry Division’. With them he brought the ‘Lion of Judah’, otherwise known as Haile Selassie, back to his capital over some of the worst going in the world. The Force included 700 camels, 200 mules and some horses, the emperor and his guard, together with a propaganda unit which had its own printing press, Amharic type-faces and many coloured inks. The emperor’s party was said to be able to follow the trail without a compass, using just the smell of the dead camels. Fifty-seven were counted on one day alone. One officer of the Cavalry Division wrote:
Slowly, at the rate of about two miles an hour, we passed on over desolate ridges where the scrub had been burnt away by the fires of earlier hamlias [camel caravans]. The sun rose hot over a blackened landscape. Dead camels lay stinking in the heat at the foot and top of every khor where the broken ground had proved too much for them. The blood of crippled camels, newly slaughtered, was drying on the rocks. Frightened living camels shied away from the corpses; their drivers sometimes vomited. Hundreds of vultures, gorged with flesh, lurched heavily around.3
On 5 May 1941 Haile Selassie was back in his capital at Addis Ababa. It had been a campaign of remarkable chivalry which recorded no rape, murder, plundering or bombing of civilians. In defence of Keren the Italians fought fiercely and their final withdrawal from there was deft and skilful. The final skirmishes of the campaign in East Africa went on for seven months after the fall of Addis Ababa. It would provide time enough to reflect upon the strangely mixed quality of the Italian army. Some units proved brave and efficient while others were either unwilling to fight, or too disorganized to be formidable adversaries. Some said the Italians suffered from a shortage of the sort of officers that a large educated professional middle class could supply.4 German liaison officers remarked on the low standards of training and the lack of initiative of junior officers. In part it was a matter of weapons. Italy lacked a strong industrial base and had failed to improve weapons which, although good enough in the early 1930s, were outmoded by the 1940s. There was a prevailing feeling among all Italian soldiers, except perhaps those in the elite Fascist regiments, that they were fighting on the wrong side; that the English, French and Americans were traditional friends, and the Germans and Austrians Italy’s implacable foes.
As the mopping-up continued Churchill’s reasoning proved sound. Italian East Africa was Italian no more. It was the first Allied strategic victory of the war, and came at a time when the Allies desperately needed victory of any sort. Here was a clear demonstration of what air superiority over a battlefield could achieve and how unity among disparate forces could win the day. South African, East African, West African, British, Indian, Sudanese and Cypriot troops had taken part and South African soldiers, once committed to serving in only southern Africa, were now a part of the main Allied battle forces. But the campaign had done nothing to ease Churchill’s doubts about Wavell. When the two men met for the first time in August 1940 it had been clear to everyone that they were totally incompatible in temperament and outlook. The record suggests that Wavell, taciturn, wary and professional, probably thought Churchill an interfering politician who knew nothing about generalship. Churchill, exuberant, bellicose or laudatory as the mood caught him, certainly found Wavell uncooperative and narrow-minded. The subsequent exchanges between them had done nothing to change these first impressions.
The victory brought a vital change, enabling President Roosevelt to declare the Red Sea to be no longer a ‘war zone’. This meant that United States shipping was once more permitted, by government and insurance conditions, to sail to Suez. American tanks, guns and planes could now be shipped around the Cape of Good Hope to Egypt.
