Sfakia: The Royal Navy and Crete,
Part 2

Nick Hewitt, Interpretation Officer, IWM

Part 2 Evacuation

At 2330 on 28th May Rear Admiral Rawlings arrived off Heraklion with the cruisers Dido and Orion and six destroyers. The evacuation at Heraklion was almost flawless, thanks in large part to the discipline of the soldiers of the 14th Infantry Brigade. By 3:30am 3,486 men, nearly all of the British and Australian troops in the town, had been embarked and Rawling's force had put to sea, with two and a half hours of darkness in which to reach safe waters.

Disaster struck an hour and half later when the steering gear of the destroyer HMS Imperial, damaged in an earlier air attack, failed completely. Rawlings decided to transfer her crew and embarked soldiers and sink her, but the delay whilst this took place cost the force an hour. Consequently when day broke Rawlings' ships were still inside the Aegean. The first air raid came in at dawn and bombing continued for six hours. The destroyer Hereward was badly damaged and had to turn back to Crete to be beached. Both the cruisers were hit. Orion, the most over-crowded ship in the force, was hit three times in two hours. One bomb exploded on the mess decks, killing 260 soldiers and wounding another 280. A bomb penetrated one of Dido's turrets and exploded in her canteen, killing 103 soldiers from the Black Watch. Enemy attacks continued until the ships were only a hundred miles from Alexandria - by the time the force reached port over one fifth of the Heraklion garrison had been killed.

At Rethymno there was no evacuation. Lt-Colonel I R Campbell and his two Australian battalions, despite having fought their immediate enemy to a standstill, were forced to surrender on the 29th.

However, the bulk of Creforce had retreated over the White Mountains from Suda and was awaiting evacuation on the south coast at Sfakia. On the night of Wednesday 28th the 5th Destroyer Flotilla arrived and embarked the first 744 men. The ships returned safely to Alexandria and the following night, a larger force arrived, including the assault ship HMS Glengyle and the cruisers HMS Phoebe, HMS Coventry HMS Calcutta and HMAS Perth. Ships' boats and landing craft from the Glengyle ferried troops from the narrow shingle beach to the waiting ships. By 0320 on the 30th the force had embarked over 6,000 men and was setting off back to Alexandria. Fighter cover from the RAF, lamentably lacking throughout the campaign, helped to minimise the damage from air attacks although the Perth was damaged by a bomb which exploded in her boiler room, killing thirteen men.

Four more destroyers set out for Sfakia at 0915 on Friday the 30th. Two were forced to turn back, leaving two Australian destroyers, HMAS Napier and HMAS Nizam, which managed to embark around 1,500 men on their own, before returning unscathed to Alexandria despite a series of air attacks.

Freyberg had requested one last lift for the night of Saturday 31st. Cunningham decided to risk it, and a large force of ships was once again despatched, under Admiral King in the cruiser HMS Phoebe, which arrived at Sfakia at 2320. The intention was to take off all of the approximately 6,500 men remaining at the anchorage. However, the circumstances were not ideal. The troops had to pass through the narrow streets of the town and then descend a steep escarpment (known to the Australians as the 'top storey') to a tiny beach. The whole area was crowded with hungry and panicky base area troops, blocking the progress of the fighting men. Consequently the flow of men down the escarpment to the beach was slow. The beach itself was empty for a while and the operation fell badly behind schedule. At 0300 the ships weighed for the last time, with just under 4,000 men embarked.

The Luftwaffe was to strike one last blow. 100 miles west of Alexandria, the returning force met the anti-aircraft cruisers HMS Coventry and HMS Calcutta which had been sent out to provide additional cover. Calcutta was hit by bombs dropped by two Ju88s and sank within a few minutes, the last ship lost during the battle for Crete.

Many men had been left behind on the island, approximately 5,000 each at Sfakia and Rethymno alone. But Cunningham had decided it was finally time to cut his losses. On 1st June he signalled the Admiralty that the only remaining ships which were not sunk, damaged or too slow were two battleships and five destroyers, and as a consequence he was calling an end to the evacuation. He was not to know that the Royal Navy's nemesis, the Luftwaffe's Eighth Air Corps, was in the process of being recalled to prepare for the invasion of Russia.

Tactically the battle of Crete was a disaster for the Royal Navy. Three cruisers and six destroyers were sunk, and another seventeen ships were damaged. Of the hard-worked cruisers, only HMS Phoebe escaped unscathed. 2,261 men were killed. The battle compared to a major fleet action, yet the only enemy warships sighted were the Italian destroyers which had escorted the invasion convoys.

However, it has already been stated that Crete was a battle between a fleet and an air force, and as such in 1941 it was a battle which a fleet could not win. (During the battle Cunningham, when one of his staff remarked that fighting the Luftwaffe was like butting your head against a brick wall, replied "What you have forgotten, you miserable undertaker is that you may be loosening a brick"!) The fact that the Mediterranean Fleet continued to operate in these conditions and never relinquished its control of the sea was a victory of sorts, particularly when coupled with the prevention of a seaborne landing and the successful evacuation of around 15,000 men.

And there was another arguably more important aspect. When asked to continue the evacuation on the night of the 31st, Cunningham famously declared: "It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue." The Navy could come out of the battle with its head held high, secure in the knowledge that it had not let the Army down, as reflected by a favourite toast in the wardrooms of the Mediterranean Fleet after Crete: "To the three services, the Royal Navy, the Royal Advertising Federation, and the Evacuees". The Army could continue to rely on the fact that, when the chips were down, the Navy would be there. That continued faith was hard to put a price on.