Crete: The Battle and the Resistance Read Online Free PDF Page A

Staff, watched Wavell's dispirited support for the project with dismay. He, like many other officers later, found it hard to forgive him for not speaking out. After the meeting, De Guingand noted how Eden 'preened himself in front of the fire while his subordinates congratulated him on a diplomatic triumph.
    This military view of events does not tally with that of the Foreign Office. Just before the main meeting, Sir Michael Palairet organized a private lunch to give Wavell a better idea of the issues involved, and to warn him that with the death of Metaxas, the King had the real power of decision. To the surprise of Harold Caccia, who was one of the four present, Wavell, 'normally rather a taciturn man, became quite loquacious'.

    He began by saying, 'Well, the situation in Greece is not that different from Egypt', and went on to compare the defensive properties of the Greek mountain ranges to the Qattara Depression. 'That means it's not really relevant to ask how many divisions are needed, since only a certain number can be deployed.' This, like many rushes of false optimism which influenced the principal characters —
    one suspects an almost desperate effort to conjure a virtue out of necessity — was based on the ill-founded assumption that either the Jugoslavs would stay neutral, or they would resist as fiercely and effectively as in the First World War.
    Once the decision to send an expeditionary force had been taken late in the afternoon, Eden, Dill and Wavell left Athens. They paid little attention to developments in Greece for the next ten days: Eden and Dill went to Ankara pursuing the quest for an alliance, and Wavell was fully preoccupied by the problem of stretching already over-stretched resources still further. A frequent remark of his at the time was Wolfe's aphorism: 'War is an option of difficulties.' Meanwhile, De Guingand, in the guise of a journalist, toured the proposed Aliakmon line wearing a borrowed suit in a rather loud check.
    On Saturday, 1 March, Bulgaria publicly joined the Tripartite Pact, and on Sunday morning the German Twelfth Army began to cross the Danube from Roumania over three pontoon bridges rapidly assembled by army engineers. Eden and Dill reached Athens a few hours later. General Heywood met them with even worse news. General Papagos had not given the orders for withdrawal to the Aliakmon line. He claimed that without transport there was not time, and that he had in any case been waiting for the response from the Jugoslavs about the security of the line's left flank.
    How much Heywood was responsible for this breakdown in communications is hard to tell, but he cannot have been entirely blameless. He was not the person to provide the objective advice which Wavell so badly needed on the exhausted state of the Greek army and, above all, on Papagos's ides fixes: his refusal to withdraw from the Bulgarian border, and his refusal to consider the transfer of divisions from Albania, however grave the threat from the north-east.
    Over the next two days, British exasperation and injured Greek pride grew in a series of fruitless meetings, which continually returned to the question of who had said what on 22 and 23 February.
    (General Heywood, in an astonishing oversight, had not kept minutes of the meeting for signature by both sides.) The Greek divisions in Eastern Macedonia were utterly exposed, yet Papagos still refused to move them back. His army possessed no transport and, he asserted, the British Military Mission knew that perfectly well. In any case he had been waiting for the British to inform him of the Jugoslav government's intentions, as he claimed had been agreed. Yet his obstinacy almost certainly owed more to a fear of abandoning Thrace to Bulgar cupidity; and without the port of Salonika, there was little hope of persuading the Jugoslavs to join the Greek army in his cherished project of a pincer attack on the Italians in Albania.
    Whatever Papagos's reasons and whatever the