Clan Cunningham

From the night of the twenty-eighth of May 1941 to the dawn of the first of June, in the worst air-sea action of the Mediterranean campaign, the British Mediterranean Fleet under Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham (Edinburgh-born, fifty-eight years old, in his third year as Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean) evacuated about sixteen and a half thousand British and Commonwealth troops from the southern beaches of Crete after the loss of the island to the Luftwaffe and the German airborne division. The fleet operated by night against continuous Stuka attack by day, lost three cruisers and six destroyers sunk, two battleships, an aircraft carrier and three further cruisers seriously damaged, and over two thousand naval personnel killed. The Royal Naval Staff in London advised on the third evening that the operation should be discontinued because the loss of ships was unsustainable. Cunningham, by the signal he sent on the night of the twenty-ninth of May to all flags of the Mediterranean Fleet, replied: it takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It would take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue. The signal is among the most-quoted in twentieth-century Royal Naval signals literature. The evacuation continued. The remaining troops on Crete were taken off, fewer than four thousand were lost.

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