by Iain Gale
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Very well, Corporal. Thank you.’
The man ran off back to Brigade.
Lamb turned to Eadie. ‘You heard him, Charles. Move out with your platoon and clean them up.’ Eadie raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, sir. Of course. Right away. The whole, er, battalion of them?’
‘No, man. Just whatever you can see. The brigadier’s right. We have to stop them regrouping. It’s our only chance. You take the left flank down into the valley. I’ll send Hugh to the right. I’ll hold the centre with the Greeks.’
Eadie yelled across to Valentine. ‘We’re moving off, Sarnt. Twenty-yard gaps. We’ve got to stop them from regrouping. Got it?’
Valentine drawled, ‘I think so, sir. Come on, you lot.’ And then they were off, through the vines in the direction that Lamb had indicated, down towards the round hill which housed the village cemetery and beyond it to the valley and the low, white buildings of Ayia jail which lay at its base, and which had given it its new name: Prison Valley.
He called across to Wentworth. ‘Hugh. You’re on my right, all right? We must stop them from re-forming.’
‘Sir.’
‘Right, Sarnt-Major, we’re moving up with the others. Sarnt Hook, Beaumont, Simmonds, you’re with me. We’re in the centre. Where are the bloody Greeks, Sarnt-Major?’
‘Been off looking for Jerries to kill, sir. Their blood’s up right enough.’
‘That’s good. They’ll need it. Valentine, you speak the lingo. Go and round them up, get them back with their platoons. Right, let’s go.’
They moved forward steadily and soon found themselves descending terraces of vines, past the slit-trenches of the forward troops, New Zealanders who offered their own verbal encouragement. ‘Go on, mate. We’re right behind you. We’ve got twenty-three of the buggers already. Beat that if you can.’
The slopes of the hillsides made a curious buffer to the noise of the battle, and the further down they went into the little valley the less frenetic it became. Lamb felt suddenly alive, as he always did when heading into battle. He still had the knot of fear that went with it, but his head was filled with certainties and perhaps just a little of the euphoria of the previous night, the dinner with the Prince and Hathaway and then the party, and then Anna. And then he remembered. Christ, how could he have forgotten? The King. He looked around and realised it was now too late. His men were committed to the attack. As soon as they had retaken the hill he would consolidate and they could make their way to Perivolia. He prayed he would not be too late, that the paratroops would not have found the King before he did.
They were almost at the bottom of the little valley now and Lamb could see the slopes of Cemetery Hill and, closer, the chutes hanging from trees across its floor, some of them with their owners still dangling in grotesque attitudes of death.
His eye was caught by a black shape in the sky as another glider floated in from the right and grazed the base of the valley before crashing into two pine trees. Lamb watched as the pilot and co-pilot, ripped from their harnesses, were catapulted through the windscreen and the fuselage broke in two midway along its length, the wings snapping off like a balsa-wood model. Two of its occupants staggered out, bleeding, but the others who followed were alert and had weapons in their hands. They looked around nervously and found cover in the gorse bushes.
Lamb yelled, ‘Jerries, 2 o’clock.’
The men opened up with rifle fire and he thought he saw one of the men go down, but he could not be sure. ‘Follow up, you men. And watch out.’
Beaumont called to him, ‘Blimey, sir. Look at this.’
He hurried over and found the corporal staring at the body of a dead paratrooper. Beaumont was holding a canteen in his hands. He offered it to Lamb. ‘It’s coffee, sir. Bloody strong too.’
Lamb took a swig. It was. ‘And look, sir, he’s got rations. A bloody great sausage, bread, fruit and chocolate. Two bars, sir. Lucky bugger.’
‘He’s a dead lucky bugger now, isn’t he, Corporal? Gather it up, we’ll need it. Now all of you, keep your heads down. We don’t know where they might be.’
He had hardly spoken when there was a crack and Corporal Beaumont fell, shot clean through the forehead, the chocolate and fruit tumbling from his hands. They dropped as one.
‘Where the hell did that come from?’
‘Front and left, sir, 10 degrees.’ Bennett pointed and Lamb followed his finger towards a group of olive trees about fifty yards away beyond a field of vines. He could see white chutes among the vines and another couple on the trees.
Lamb brought his Thompson gun up slowly and aimed it at the target. He turned and nodded to the others. Then he breathed out, and gently squeezed on the trigger. There was a burst of staccato fire and then eight of the men opened up in the same direction. There were yells and screams and then the crack of rifles as the Germans returned fire.
‘Sarnt-Major, where’s the Lewis gun?’
‘With Corporal Simmonds right behind us, sir.’
‘Get it up here and give them some.’
Seconds later Simmonds had come up to them. He dropped to the ground, put the Lewis on its rest and opened up. There were more screams, but this time no return of fire. Only silence.
Simmonds spoke, his cheek still against the gun. ‘Could be bluffing, sir.’
‘Yes, perhaps they are. But we’ve no choice. Come on.’
Lamb moved forward at a crouch and slipped a grenade from his pocket. Then at twenty yards he pulled the pin and, holding the trigger, counted before throwing it. They all hit the ground. The explosion that followed ripped into the trees. Lamb shouted. ‘Come on,’ and together they charged towards where the Germans had been, through the smoke and stench of cordite.
There was no one left alive. Of the three paratroops who had fired on them, one had been killed by gunfire. It was hard to tell how the others had died but the grenade had certainly done its work. Lamb looked at the first man, as fine an example of blond-haired Aryan youth as you could encounter.
‘Sarnt-Major, get their weapons and their rations and …’ Lamb stopped. Ahead of them there was a commotion in the trees, and raised voices. ‘Quiet, all of you. Get down.’
They dropped to one knee and waited, all of them raising their weapons, expecting at any moment to see a German helmet. Instead they saw khaki and moustaches. Greeks. Not his men but the battalion that had been beside them in the line. But what were they doing walking to meet him? He called out, ‘Hold your fire. They’re Greek.’
Lamb stood up and the men followed. ‘Hey there. Captain. Yasou.’
The Greeks stopped and then, recognising a British officer, walked on. One of their officers approached Lamb.
‘Yasou, Kapitan. Good to see you and not more of those German cuckolds.’ He spat on the body of the blond Fallschirmjäger. Lamb breathed sigh of relief. They were not his Greeks but part of the 8th Greek Regiment whom General Freyberg in his wisdom had left down in Prison Valley at the foot of the hill.
‘Can I ask what you’re doing, Captain? Are you withdrawing?’
The man nodded and shrugged. ‘We have to. We have no alternative. We have only three rounds each at the start. Now perhaps we have only one. And no bayonets. What can we do? How can we fight?’
‘But I was led to believe that ammunition had been sent to your CO.’
‘If it has then it hasn’t been given out to us. Look.’
He held out his revolver, a Smith & Wesson, to Lamb and dropped open the chamber to reveal a single round.
‘No, I agree. You can’t fight without ammunition. You’d best get back to Galatas and see if you can scrounge any there.’
‘Yes, Kapitan, I think so too. Good luck.’
The Greeks passed through them with thumbs-up signs, yasou-ing and hello-ing as if they were old friends. And then they were gone. Christ, thought Lamb, who was holding Cemetery Hill now?
He turned to Bennett. ‘Sarnt-Major, better send a runner back to
Colonel Kippenburger. Tell him the 6th Greeks have pulled off Cemetery Hill for lack of ammo. Tell him we’re going to try and get to it before the Jerries do. And you’d better send out someone to find Valentine and his bloody Greeks, wherever they are. We’re going to need them now.’
Bandouvas had been sitting on a chair outside the door of his house in the little mountain village of Fournes when the second air-raid came and he knew that something was up. This was what Kapitan Pendlebury had told him would happen. Two air-raids would signal the attack. Almost as soon as he had come out of the cellar he had seen them, the white mushrooms, falling gracefully from the sky. He knew what they were. Pendlebury had shown him illustrations. Paratroops. The sky was full of them now, canopies of silk with their heavy cargo hanging beneath, a grey-black lump. He rushed into the house, where his wife was sitting in a chair in the kitchen recovering from the bombing and shaking her head.
‘Quick, woman. Get the guns.’
Bandouvas’ wife just stared at him.
‘The guns. The guns. The ones in the barn. Quick, woman. The Germans are here.’
She got up with a start and ran to the kitchen drawer. Reaching in, she searched for a moment and took out a knife which might have passed for a kitchen knife but which looked in truth more like the cut-down Turkish scimitar that it was, a weapon used 100 years ago to attack another invader and oppressor. Bandouvas smiled at her. ‘Good. Now get the guns while I find the bullets.’
She rushed out of the door and a few minutes later, as Bandouvas slung on a bandolier of bullets, came hurrying back in bearing in her arms three ancient rifles. Bandouvas looked at them.
‘They’ll still work. They’re good enough. Now go and get Melina. Get bandages ready too. We’ll need plenty of them. I’m off to find Giorgio and Andreas. We’ve no time to waste.’
He found his sons up on the hill. They came running towards him, the older, Andreas, followed by fourteen-year-old Giorgio.
Bandouvas pointed. ‘Look, do you see them?’
‘Yes, father, of course we see them.’
‘Here, take a gun, and you, Giorgio.’
The younger one spoke. ‘I have a knife.’
Then Andreas. ‘And I have the axe, father. Grandfather’s axe. I dug it up.’
He held it out. Bandouvas took it from him and looked at the axe that had belonged to his father. It was not a chopping axe for wood, but a Cretan fighting axe, a tomahawk of the type used by red Indians seen in the cowboy films they showed in the picture house in Heraklion. He turned the weapon over in his hands for a moment, feeling its perfect balance, noticing how sharp it still was.
‘Good. Let’s find the bastards. The British need our help. It’s a good day for killing.’
High in the skies above Crete, Sussmann continued to fall, floating safely now on the air current. Christ, he thought, I am a lucky sod. If I can just pull on this thing, somehow will it to carry me over there, I might be able to make land. He was falling faster now, it seemed, and was carried on the wind. A favourable wind, a Greek wind of fate that was blowing him ever closer to the island. It rose to meet him and he knew now that he could do it.
He had seen his subordinates before they left the airfield in the other gliders and transports and knew they would be down there now. Brigadier Meindl in his own glider, and Major Count von Uxkull, his monocled Chief of Staff, who had insisted on dropping by parachute. Somewhere. And the division was out there too now. He could imagine them, his boys: some of them caught in the trees, poor bastards, some of them would not have made it, but those who had, he knew, would be quickly stripping off their harnesses hunting for their weapons containers and supplies, getting ready to face the enemy and to take the island in the name of the Führer. Oh, Sussmann was no fanatical Nazi. He was a career soldier from a family of soldiers. But he was loyal to Germany, and at present that meant loyal to Hitler. And there was something else, something that even some of his commanders did not yet know – certainly not that strutting Austrian Julius Ringel and his mountain men. Sussmann had been given another mission. It was to be his personal honour to capture the King of Greece. He looked down and got ready. He felt like a trussed turkey. His lifejacket was cumbersome and he half wished he hadn’t worn it, but Scheiber had insisted. His MP40 machine-pistol was slung around his shoulder to hang loosely at his left leg, and he hoped he would not encounter it on landing. Better that, though, than to land with just a Sauer pistol, good as it was, as was standard practice. At least with his Schmeisser to hand he had a better chance of survival against an instant enemy. And of course he had his knife, strapped to his leg. He tried to flex the muscles in his legs to prepare for the impact of landing.
Even at the age of forty-five, Sussmann knew in his heart that he was as able as the fittest young lieutenant, and now he would prove it to them. The poor buggers who had gone down in the glider would not have died in vain. He was here to take command.
He had passed out of the paratroop school with flying colours and had made a number of jumps, but that fear never left you. He was sure that your mental state counted just as much as your fitness and your technique.
The ground rushed up to meet him and he braced himself to take the impact, bending his knees to take the shock. Christ, he thought. Perhaps that was a mistake after all. Then, hitting the button which secured his harness, he slipped it off and grabbed his pack. He looked around and realised that he was now quite alone and in enemy territory. Where he was he had no idea, but he was close to the sea and in north-west Crete. He removed the Luger from his shoulder strap and checked it before placing it in the holster at his side. He felt around his uniform for the extra magazines for the Schmeisser and found they were all in place. Lastly he drew out the map of Crete from his breast pocket. Then, aware that every step might be his last, Generalleutnant Wilhelm Sussmann set out to find his men.
10
Sitting in his new command post, behind a low dry-stone wall, on the edge of an olive grove in the valley on the forward slopes of Pink Hill, Peter Lamb considered the situation. The entire floor of the valley was covered with parachutes. They filled it, like so many huge mushrooms, mostly white but with other colours too. He could see the enemy paratroops running between them, zig-zagging to avoid incoming fire, collecting weapons from the containers that had split open like pea pods. Occasionally one of the men would fall, crumbling like a paper doll as he was hit by gunfire. But as far as Lamb was concerned there was absolutely nothing he could do. The enemy were out of range. Behind him, dug in, was the Petrol Company, the New Zealand hotch-potch of Service Corps men, drivers, mechanics and the like under Captain Macdonagh. Lamb had his men around him, Eadie on the left, Wentworth on the right, with a total of about thirty. Valentine was somewhere to his rear with the Greeks, and he hoped that his training of them had been enough. He knew too that Michael Hathaway and his band of partisans were in Galatas. It was clear to him now, though, that the Jerries had taken Cemetery Hill. A few minutes ago his position had been raked by machine-gun fire from the heights. They had taken no casualties, but it had put the wind up the men and been enough to tell him of their presence. Since then there had been nothing. The enemy were clearly weighing up their chances.
Lamb reasoned that, if the Jerries were up on Cemetery Hill, in all probability they must have taken the prison and made that their base. Any fool would have done that – any fool but whichever Allied commander had taken the decision not to defend it. Time and again Lamb had thought over the past week that the prison would have made an ideal strongpoint, with its large, windowless buildings and high walls. A company of infantry could have held out there indefinitely. But whoever had had the option had not installed even a token garrison, and now it must be in German hands. The paratroops would have gained their first foothold on the island. However, now was not the time to apportion blame. That would surely come later, as it always did.
Anyone could see that Pink Hill was the gateway to the Galatas heights and that whoeve
r controlled the heights controlled the entire area. Pink Hill also denied the village of Galatas itself to the enemy, and from it fire could be brought down on the surrounding area, in particular the vital artery of the road from the south. He had no idea whether the northern flanks down to the sea were still intact. Closest to the coast were the Royal Marines and on their left flank the 4th Field Regiment, artillerymen fighting as infantry or ‘infantillery’ as one wag had put it. It was anyone’s guess how they would do when attacked by German paratroops. On Ruin Hill were the divisional supply troops, and next to them on Wheat Hill the 5th Field Regiment, more gunners with rifles. Then came Pink Hill and his men, and then the perimeter stretched back round up to the sea. It was a good position and Lamb knew that his men were as vital to it as any of the components that made it up. And that worried him. For if he were to pull back now, to try to reach Perivolia and find the King, the line might collapse. Perhaps, he thought, if I leave half the men with Eadie …
He turned to Bennett.
‘You know, Sarnt-Major, we’ve made a pretty good fist of it so far if you think about it. I mean, what have we got here? Apart from us, that is? Under-equipped, non-infantry soldiers. Gunners without artillery and drivers without trucks who left their kit on the beaches of southern Greece. Down in Galatas there are 400 Greeks with precious little ammo or bayonets, and we’ve got our own company of Greeks who two weeks ago couldn’t hit a barn door. But I can tell you I’m willing to bet that where we are, right here, is going to decide this whole bloody battle. It’s going to be up to us. Any suggestions?’
‘If you put it like that, sir, it looks a bit thick, doesn’t it? D’you think those Greeks will fight, sir? The ones with no ammo?’
‘The Greeks want the Jerries out more than we do, Sarnt-Major. If they can find some bullets they’ll be back. Someone’s just got to work out what to do with them.’
Valentine appeared, breathless.
