Crete
Sir: It is odd, surely — or rum, as many of your contributors might perhaps admit — for a general to sit down to breakfast (Patrick Leigh Fermor's review concerning the Battle for Crete, 23 September) and decide to lose a. battle because of the hypothetically difficult and perhaps in- soluble consequences the winning might result in? Wasn't it rather that the general in question was timorous and indecisive, and influenced by a raw-mouthed fellow- countryman and colonel or brigadier who withdrew his men from the perimeter of Maleme, where they had fought well and effectively, and by so doing relieved the badly-shaken enemy of having to arrange its own evacuation or surrender?
An effective general could have won
LETTERS
Crete. By winning, the surviving members of the German Parachute Brigade would. have been safely in the bag and unable to contribute to Operation Barbarossa, to participate in which, in whatever capacity, they were withdrawn from the island. By winning, the thousands of British and Commonwealth soldiers who were taken prisoner could then have been shipped to Egypt to add their weight to the battle against Rommel, which General Wavell was fighting in depleted strength because of his having had to commit troops to the Greece debacle; and, incidentally, the personnel of those many army service units who, on the evacuation of mainland Greece, had been disembarked on Crete as a stage in their transportation to Egypt could have been sent on and replaced by a combat unit, or the island's defence could have been taken over by those Greek or Cretan forces, and civilians, whom Patrick Leigh Fermor rightly claims put up so fierce a fight in defence of their heritage. In the event of our winning, could the Germans have mounted a second invasion by sea or air after a first had failed so disastrously, involved as they had become in Africa and as they were to be in their new assault on Russia? By winning, the cruiser York might well have become salvaged from its half-sunken bed in Suda Bay and put to use again. By winning, troops in North Africa and elsewhere might have been emboldened by the boost to morale the victory would have provided.
No retreat has the makings of an heroic affair — perhaps with the exception of Dunkirk — and the evacuation of Crete was a disorganised shambles. Layforce became caught up in the debacle before its Commando units, brought from Egypt piecemeal, were able to muster and be- come a single fighting force, but its smaller units could have been employed in the kind of clandestine action for which its mem- bers, however haphazardly at that time, had been trained.
As one of the lowest in rank of Layforce personnel, I have been pondering on and off for 48 years (including four as a prisoner-of-war resulting from the gener- al's breakfast insouciance) the enigma of our defeat, and also why Layforce was not employed, even in its fragmented form, or why in fact it had even been committed, considering that the decision to send it to Crete must have been taken at a time when evacuation was uppermost as a factor in the general's mind or that of his brigadier, to ponder as well my own lost Napoleonic chance of stepping from the ranks to take over control and become the island's cool victor!
It is hard to find anything to recommend in the opinion concerning the out-of-the ordinary heroism implied in many accounts of the battle, excepting only that of the Cretan villagers subsequent to the surren- der. And incidentally, what did happen to the Layforce commander and his senior officers, none of whom appeared to be present on the beach at Sfakia on that morning of 1 June when German Stukas bombed and strafed the unarmed and beleaguered, who an hour or two before had been told that the very last liberty boat had gone, and that they were to lay down arms and wait for the victorious enemy to come and collect them?
Gilbert Horobin
108 Iliados, 116 32 Athens
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