Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [215]
There were many savage little naval actions in the narrow waters between the islands. On October 7, for instance, the submarine Unruly conducted an unsuccessful torpedo attack on a German troop convoy, then in frustration surfaced and engaged the enemy with its 4-inch deck gun until driven to submerge by the appearance of the Luftwaffe. Unruly later torpedoed a minelayer carrying 285 German troops. The cruisers Sirius and Penelope were caught by German bombers while attacking shipping, and Penelope was damaged. The destroyer Panther was sunk on October 8, and the cruiser Carlisle so badly damaged by bombers that after limping back to port she never put to sea again. The Luftwaffe sustained constant attacks on Leros’s port facilities, so that British warships had to dash in, dump supplies, and sail again inside half an hour. The RAF’s antishipping skills were still inferior to those of the Germans, and Beaufighter strikes cost the British attackers more heavily than their enemies. Even when raids were successful, such as one by Wellington bombers on the night of October 18, the results were equivocal: the Wellingtons dispatched to the bottom ships carrying 204 Germans, but also 2,389 Italian and 71 Greek prisoners. By October 22, a total of 6,000 Italian prisoners had drowned when their transports succumbed to British air strikes, while 29,454 Italian and British POWs had been successfully removed to the Greek mainland, and thence to Germany.
The cruisers Sirius and Aurora were badly damaged by Ju-88s, while German mines accounted for several British warships, including the submarine Trooper, which disappeared east of Leros. Almost every ship of the Royal Navy which ran the gauntlet to the Dodecanese, including launches, torpedo boats and caiques, had to face bombs, heavy seas in the worsening autumn weather, and natural hazards inshore. The destroyer Eclipse was sunk on October 23, while carrying two hundred troops and ten tons of stores. The navy reluctantly decided that it could no longer sail destroyers in the Aegean during daylight, in the face of complete German air dominance. The RAF continued to suffer heavily—in a single day’s operations on November 5, six Beaufighters were destroyed, and four crews lost.
On October 31, the senior British airman in the Mediterranean, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, wrote: “We are being pressed787 to throw good money after bad. The situation is fundamentally unsound.” John Kennedy urged Alan Brooke on October 28 that “the price we were paying [for Leros was] too great788 and the return too small to justify retention.” Brooke professed to agree, but told Kennedy that at that day’s Chiefs of Staff meeting the decision had been made to hang on. It had now become too difficult to withdraw the garrison in the face of German air superiority. In his own diary, Brooke called Leros “a very nasty problem, Middle East [Command]789 have not been either wise or cunning and have now got themselves into the difficult situation that they can neither hold nor evacuate Leros. Our only hope would be assistance from Turkey, the provision of airfields from which the required air cover could be provided.” Such aid was not forthcoming.
The final act of the Aegean drama began on November 12, when the Germans attacked Leros. The British garrison there, some 3,000 strong together with 5,500 Italians, had had several weeks to prepare for the inevitable. Nonetheless, when the moment came, everything that could go amiss did so. Before the landing the 234th Brigade was commanded by a short, red-faced and heavily moustached officer named Ben Brittorous, who embodied almost every deficiency of the wartime British Army. Brittorous was obsessed with military etiquette, and harassed