Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [73]
Churchill believed, surely rightly, that Crete could have been held. Yet Freyberg had been his personal choice to lead its defence. The New Zealander, like Gort awarded a World War I Victoria Cross, was the sort of hero he loved. Freyberg was a fine and brave man, but on Crete he showed himself unfit for command responsibility. Many of his troops were fugitives from Greece. The British Army never had the skill, which the Germans later displayed, for welding “odds and sods” into effective impromptu battle groups. In April 1940, for instance, the survivors of German navy destroyers sunk at Narvik were immediately conscripted to join Wehrmacht troops contesting possession of the port with the British. Compare and contrast the attitude of RAF ground personnel in Greece in 1941 and later on other battlefields: they flatly rejected suggestions that they should take up rifles and join the struggle, saying that this was not their job. Almost all chose to accept captivity rather than undertake unfamiliar duties as warriors.
A shortage of wireless sets crippled British communications, and Freyberg’s understanding of the battle. There was little transport to move troops, and the Luftwaffe wrought havoc on such roads as existed. All these factors contributed to defeat, but the ultimate verdict remained inescapable: once again, a British army had been outfought, in a battle conducted on terms which should have favoured it. The New Zealanders’ contribution was outstanding, but other units performed poorly. During the evacuation, much of Freyberg’s force degenerated into a rabble.
Churchill, a few months later248, claimed to regret the Greek commitment, which he described to Colville as the only error of judgement his government had made. Wavell should have garrisoned Crete, he said, and advised the Athens government to make the best terms with Germany that it could. But this was a view expressed while Britain was still struggling for survival. In the longer run of history, the nobility of his purpose in Greece commands respect. As Robert Menzies and others perceived, British passivity in the face of the destruction of Greek freedom would have created a sorry impression upon the world, and especially the United States. Nonetheless, events in the Mediterranean dismayed every enemy of Nazism. A Bucharest Jew, Mikhail Sebastian, wrote: “Once more Germany gives the impression249 of an invincible, demonic, overwhelming force. The general feeling is one of bewilderment and impotence.”
A German war correspondent, Kurt Pauli, approached some British prisoners near Corinth and struck a posture of chivalrous condescension. “You’ve lost the game,”250 he said. Not so, the POWs replied defiantly: “We’ve still got Winston Churchill.” Was this enough, however? Alan Brooke wrote later of “the utter darkness251 of those early days of calamities when no single ray of hope could pierce the depth of gloom.” It was astonishing that the prime minister maintained his exuberance. Robert Menzies wrote: “The PM in conversation will steep himself252 (and you) in gloom on some grim aspect of the war … only to proceed to fight his way out while he is pacing the floor with the light of battle in his eyes. In every conversation he inevitably reaches a point where he positively enjoys the war: ‘Bliss in that age was it to be alive.’ (He says) ‘Why do people regard a period like this as years lost out of our lives when beyond question it is the most interesting period of them? Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?’”
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