Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [213]
The island was twenty-eight miles long by six wide, with a local population of twenty thousand. Its rugged hills, impervious to entrenchment, rose to a height of 2,800 feet. In two days’ fighting, 2,000 Germans supported by plentiful Stuka dive-bombers secured Kos for a loss of just 15 killed and 70 wounded. Some 3,145 Italians and 1,388 British prisoners fell into their hands, along with a mass of weapons, stores and equipment. Neither the Italians nor RAF personnel on the island showed much appetite for participation in the ground battle. It was a foolish delusion in London to have supposed that Italian troops, who for three years had shown themselves reluctant to fight the Allies, could any more readily be motivated to take on the Germans. The men of the Durham Light Infantry were outnumbered, inexperienced and never perceived much prospect of success. Churchill described the defence of Kos as “an unsatisfactory resistance.” While this was true enough, responsibility rested overwhelmingly with those who placed the garrison there. The worst victims were the Italians, who paid heavily for their brief change of allegiance. On Kefalonia, in the Ionian Islands, the Germans had already conducted a wholesale massacre of four thousand “treacherous” Italian troops who surrendered to them. On Kos, the victors confined themselves to executing eighty-nine Italian officers. A few dozen determined British fugitives escaped by landing craft and small boat.
In the days and weeks following the loss of Kos, Churchill in vain pressed Eisenhower to divert resources from Italy to recapture it. A game of hide-and-seek persisted on other islands, between Hitler’s units and British special forces. The Germans staged a further airborne landing on Astipálaia. Luftwaffe aircrew, accustomed to the depressed spirits of their countrymen who knew that the war was being lost, were amazed to find exuberant paratroopers in Junkers transports en route to a drop zone singing “Kameraden, today there is no going back.” At this late stage of the war, the obliging British had provided the Fallschirmjäger with a field on which there were still victories to be won.
The Long Range Desert Group, whose men were not organised, trained or equipped to fight as infantry, suffered heavily in desultory battles. The main British force left in the Dodecanese was now based on Leros, an island much smaller than Kos and twenty miles farther north. When the British commander there heard that German prisoners on nearby Levitha had overpowered their captors and seized control, he packed fifty LRDG men onto two naval motor launches, and dispatched them to retake it. Once ashore, the LRDG fought a series of little actions with the Germans in which four raiders were killed and almost all the others captured. Just seven escaped at nightfall, by courtesy of the Royal Navy. Levitha remained firmly in German hands.
Churchill was dismayed by the unfolding misfortunes in the Aegean, as well he might be. Brooke wrote on October 6: “It is pretty clear in my mind780 that with the commitments we have in Italy we should not undertake serious operations in the Aegean … [but] PM by now determined to go for Rhodes without looking at the effects on Italy.” Churchill chafed to travel personally to North Africa to incite the Americans to address themselves to Aegean operations. Cadogan wrote: “He is excited about Kos781 and wants to lead an expedition to Rhodes.” The prime minister tried in vain to persuade Washington that Marshall should fly to meet him in Tunisia, there to be persuaded of the virtues of the Aegean commitment. On October 7, he wrote personally to Roosevelt: “I have never wished to send an army into the Balkans782, but only by agents and commandos to stimulate the intense guerilla activity there. This may yield results measureless in their consequence at very small cost to main operations. What I ask for is the capture of Rhodes and the other islands of the Dodecanese … Leros, which at the moment we hold so precariously, is an important naval