Clan Cunningham · 1941
ABC at the Crete evacuation
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.
It is twenty past nine on the night of the twenty-ninth of May 1941, on the bridge of the cruiser HMS Orion, half a mile south of Sphakia on the south coast of Crete, in heavy darkness with the moon down. He is fifty-eight years old. He is Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, born at 6 Saxe-Coburg Place, Edinburgh, on the seventh of January 1883, the son of an Edinburgh anatomy professor, in his third year as Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean Fleet, and in the fourth night of the operation to lift the army of Crete off the beaches at Sphakia and Heraklion before the Luftwaffe makes the southern coast untenable.
The signal pad in his hand is the signal from the First Sea Lord at the Admiralty in London received an hour ago. The signal advises that the rate of loss of major fleet units off Crete (three cruisers, six destroyers in seventy-two hours) is, in the judgment of the Naval Staff, unsustainable. The signal recommends that Cunningham consider abandoning the further evacuation and withdraw the fleet behind the bomb-line at Mersa Matruh. It is not, in form, an order. The First Sea Lord has signed it Pound. It is, in plain reading, an instruction to leave the army on the beaches.
He thinks: the army on the beaches is sixteen thousand. The army on the beaches is the army the navy went to Greece to bring out in April. The army on the beaches is the army the navy lost the Diamond and the Wryneck to bring out of Greece on the twenty-seventh of April. The army on the beaches is the navy's army.
He thinks: the loss of three cruisers and six destroyers in three days is unsustainable on the tonnage of the Mediterranean Fleet. The First Sea Lord is right.
He thinks: the loss of sixteen thousand men of the army on the southern Crete beaches to a German airborne unit that the army has been holding off for ten days, because the navy declined to come into bombing range and lift them off, is the kind of thing the navy does not do. The First Sea Lord is, on this question, wrong.
He thinks: the tradition of this service is the tradition of going in. The going-in is what the captains' commissions are for. The tradition is what makes it possible to ask captains to go in. The tradition has cost three centuries of dead. The tradition cannot be replaced by a vote of the Naval Staff in London.
He gives the dictation to his flag-lieutenant Hugh Lee at twenty past nine, by Lee's deposition published in 1973. The signal goes out to all flags of the Mediterranean Fleet at twenty-five to ten. To all ships in company. The evacuation will continue. It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It would take three hundred years to build a new tradition. ABC.
The signal was acknowledged in turn by every senior officer of the fleet over the next twenty minutes. The evacuation continued through the night of the twenty-ninth, the night of the thirtieth, and the night of the thirty-first of May. Approximately sixteen thousand five hundred men were taken off the south coast of Crete. The Mediterranean Fleet lost, in the four nights, the cruisers HMS Gloucester, HMS Fiji, HMS Calcutta; the destroyers HMS Greyhound, HMS Kashmir, HMS Kelly, HMS Hereward, HMS Imperial, HMS Juno; the battleships Warspite (Cunningham's flagship) and Barham badly damaged; the aircraft carrier HMS Formidable badly damaged; with the loss of about two thousand five hundred officers and men of the Royal Navy. The army losses on Crete itself were about four thousand killed, captured or missing, against an evacuation total of about sixteen and a half thousand.
The signal entered the Royal Naval signals tradition immediately. It is in the Manual of Naval Customs and Traditions of 1955 (the first post-war edition) under the heading signals of the Mediterranean Fleet, May 1941, and is the only signal of the war that the Manual prints in full. Cunningham went on to command the operations off Sicily, the Italian armistice (he received the surrender of the Italian fleet at Malta on the eleventh of September 1943, an event of which he said in his memoirs that he had been told by his father at the age of ten that he would do, and that he had sometimes wondered if his father had not been right), and the planning for D-Day. He was First Sea Lord from 1943 to 1946, the only Edinburgh-born holder of the office. He died at Bishop's Waltham in 1963, eighty years old. The signal is on a brass plaque in the Wardroom of HMS Excellent, Whale Island, Portsmouth. The plaque is in the place of the Wardroom: above the door, between the entrance to the dining-room and the bar.