Island Full of Voices ..i`
Battle for Crete. By John Hall Spencer. (Heine- mann, 30s.) Tuts book includes a great deal more than its title suggests. Mr. Hall Spencer is an ex-regular marine officer, and, though one gathers from the text that he did not chance to be on the island during the operations in which his fellow marines played so distinguished a part, he is eminently qualified to plot and record the pro- gress of that peculiar battle. Rightly and use- fully, more than a third of the book is a recapitulation of the events which led to the battle, beginning with Mussolini's abortive in- vasion of Greece from Albania and ending with the ominous spring evening in Crete seven months later when all that remained of the British and Imperial expeditionary force, chased horn Greece by the Germans with heavy losses in_ prisoners and arms, waited, with a handful of their Greek allies, for the attack which, almost certainly, the morrow would bring. There was an odd kind of exhilaration in the air.
All who witnessed the next day's doings keep their own indelible impressions. I was junior 10 at Brigadier Chappel's HQ in a small canyon between Knossos and the great walled town of Herakleion. News had reached us early of a large-scale parachute attack in the west of the island, especially round Maleme aerodrome. Our turn could not be long; and soon a shattering bombing attack, far worse than any that had gone before, left no room for doubt. Fires blazed ithe town under a huge parasol of dust, but Otherwise all was suddenly quiet; a foreground °t hot sunshine, spring flowers and olive groves With the huge outline of Mount Ida a few miles away,
After the glare, it took some moments to get used to the dimmer light of the cave where our stretch of coast was mapped out on a huge table. An RAF corporal, telephone in hand, was an- nouncing map references and numbers from the nearby radar station; another was placing little model planes, each representing an enemy for- mation, over the empty squares of sea: 'Fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred.
• The steadily thickening lines of plane- shaped chips were pushed forward under the stalactites with croupier-like skill, until the officer in charge said: 'They ought to be in sight by now.'
We clithbed into the sunlight again, and peered north; and there, low on the horizon, hovered an unending blur like a locust-sWarm, darkening and hardening and soon accompanied
Y a steadily growing hum. The blur resolved itself into row on row of planes, the hum be- came a roar, and, as the author aptly quotes front Milton:
See how in warlike muster they appear In rhombs and wedges and half moons and wings, and the air overhead was benighted by the huge black-and-white-crossed aircraft sliding and wheeling low over their shadows and shedding their long showers of multi-coloured confetti into a sudden ear-fracturing pandemonium of gunfire. At one moment one could count seven JU-52s falling in flames simultaneously and setting fire to the trees; and everywhere Ger- mans were struggling in the branches, caught in telegraph wires, even marooned on roofs, some of them so near that even staff officers grasped rifles and sallied into the groves. So it went on all day, wave following wave, and by dusk our small aerodrome—their target—was still clear of the enemy and hundreds had been killed and captured. (And so it went on until the end.) The aircraft blazed fitfully in the olive woods all through the short, hot night. . . .
It is one of the oddities of battles (a phe- nomenon well brought out in Tolstoy's account of Borodino and even better in Stendhal's Water- loo in La Chartreuse de Parme) that few of the participants know what is going on outside the range of their own eyes. This was especially true here, and it is one of the many merits of Battle for Crete that it mops up this obscurity—at least for me—in a way that scores of subsequent Alexandrian and Cairene conversations with friends who had been engaged in other parts of the island—a mass of uncoordinated anec- dotes, in fact—have always failed' to do. Why was Maleme allowed to fall? The key aero- drome, which, once in German hands, meant unlimited enemy landings and the inevitable capture of Crete? This universal question is satisfactorily answered and the ordeal of the defenders convincingly related. A thing that nobody realised at the time was the smallness of the margin between defeat and victory, and how close was the German high command, after the terrible losses of their onslaught, to aban- doning the, operation as a failure.
It is an exciting story. The escape over the mountains of King George of Greece is a saga on its own, also the total destruction of the German invasion fleet by the navy. The Maori bayonet charges are spiritedly told, and I am glad the author touches on Michael Forrester's private and successful counter-attack at the head of a swarm of half-armed Greek civilians. Due credit is given to the participation of Cretan guerrillas and the brutal reprisals they incurred: events which set the tone for the entire course of the occupation which followed. I wish he had said something about John Pendlebury's guer- rillas round Herakleion, and his death. Wavell's and Freyburg's roles in the campaign are thoughtfully appraised, and Laycock's fine rear- guard action. The final retreat to Sphakia in the west is a harrowing tale, and will send many readers back to the later parts of Officers and Gentlemen.
Mr. Hall Spencer has studied all the relevant documents on both sides. He has also corre- sponded with most of the leading figures, in- cluding General Student, the German comman- der, and many humbler figures chosen at ran- dom, and this multiplicity of sources gives his story life and variety. But he does not sum up. Were we right to risk temporary reverses in the desert and disaster in Greece by dividing our scanty manpower and resources? It is a difficult question. I think the answer is `yes'; but we deserve a further chapter here. Apart from this lack, it is a fine book.
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR
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