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A squadron of South African–manned Spitfires was deployed on Kos, which alone had an airfield. A British officer set up his headquarters there alongside that of the Italian garrison, their conspicuously hesitant new allies. An SOE officer landed on Samos, followed by several hundred troops. A general serving as military attaché in Ankara crossed from the Turkish coast. There were soon five thousand British personnel scattered through the archipelago. Command arrangements were chaotic, with almost absolute lack of coordination between army, navy and air force. But in those naïve early days, many of the newcomers relished the sensation of adventuring upon azure seas and islands steeped in classical legend. Amid barren hills, olive groves and little white-painted village houses, British buccaneers draped with submachine guns and grenades mingled with the local Greeks, breathed deep the Byronic air, pitched camps and waited to discover how the Germans would respond.

They were not long left in doubt. Hitler had no intention of relinquishing control of the Aegean. The Germans began to meet tentative British incursions by sea and air with their usual energy and effectiveness. Almost daily skirmishes developed, with RAF Beaufighters strafing German shipping, Luftwaffe planes attacking Kos, and LRDG patrols and elements of the SBS fighting detachments of Germans wherever they met them. An officer of yet another British intelligence group, MI9, was suddenly hijacked—and shot in the thigh—by pro-Fascist sailors on an Italian launch ferrying him between local ports. These men changed sides when they heard on the radio of Mussolini’s rescue from mountain captivity by Otto Skorzeny’s Nazi commandos. On several islands Germans, Italians and British roamed in confusion, ignorant of one another’s locations or loyalties. Two British officers being held prisoner found their Austrian guard offering to let them escape if he might come too. Captors and captives often exchanged roles, as the tides of the little campaign ebbed and flowed.

The prevailing theme was soon plain, however. The Germans were winning. In Greece and the Aegean they deployed 362 aircraft, many of which were available to operate in the Dodecanese. The South African Spitfire squadron on Kos was hacked to pieces in the air and on the ground by Bf-109s. RAF Beaufighters lost heavily in antishipping strikes which inflicted little damage upon the enemy. German bombing demoralised the British—and still more, their new Italian allies—as well as destroying Dakotas shuttling to Kos. The Royal Navy was dismayed by the difficulties of sustaining supply runs to tenuously held islands while under German air attack. British troops in the area were a hotchpotch of special forces, intelligence personnel, gunners, infantry and “odds and sods” lacking mass, coherence and conviction. The main force, the 234th Brigade, had spent the previous three years garrisoning Malta, where its soldiers gained much experience of bombing, hunger and boredom, and none of battle. In the fifth year of the war, when in almost every other theatre the Allies were winning, in the eastern Mediterranean Churchill contrived to create a predicament in which British forces were locally vulnerable on land, at sea and in the air.

On the morning of October 3, the 680 soldiers, 500 RAF air and ground crews and 3,500 Italians on Kos awoke to discover that German ships offshore were unloading a brigade-strong invasion force whose arrival had been unheralded, and whose activities were unimpeded. It was a tribute to German improvisation that such an operation could be staged with little of the training or specialist paraphernalia which the Allies deemed essential for amphibious landings. The Germans mounted the Kos invasion with a scratch force, supplemented by a paratroop landing, against which the RAF launched ineffectual air strikes. The British defenders lacked both mobility and the will to leave its positions