ABC at the Crete evacuation

A tradition is not a thing kept in a glass case. It is a working instrument, like a sextant or a chart, and like them it is useful only when carried into weather that might break it. Every generation of a fighting service inherits the tradition unspent, and every generation is presented, sooner or later, with the bill for keeping it. The bill is always paid in ships and in men, and it is always paid by someone who would rather not be the one to sign for it.

THE SERVICE AND THE MAN

Andrew Browne Cunningham was born at 6 Saxe-Coburg Place, Edinburgh, on the seventh of January 1883, the son of Daniel Cunningham, professor of anatomy at the University. He went into the Britannia at thirteen, was at sea by fifteen, and by the spring of 1941 he had been Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean for two and a half years. He had hunted the Italian fleet at Calabria, broken its battle line at Matapan, kept Malta supplied through a sea his enemies considered closed. The fleet called him ABC by his initials on the signal book, and the name had passed from the signal book to the wardrooms and from the wardrooms back to him. He was fifty-eight, short, sea-coloured, given to brief signals and shorter tempers. His instrument was a fleet. His domain was an inland sea whose air the enemy now owned.

THE ISLAND LOST

On the twentieth of May 1941 the Luftwaffe put the Seventh Flieger Division onto Crete from the sky. For ten days General Freyberg's New Zealanders and the British garrison held them on the northern ground, then fell back over the White Mountains to the fishing villages of the south coast. By the twenty-eighth there were sixteen thousand men on the beaches of Sphakia and Heraklion, waiting in the lee of the cliffs for the dark. The army had done what an army could do. The remainder was a sea problem. The sea problem belonged to Cunningham. To reach the beaches his cruisers and destroyers had to steam up through the Kaso and Kithera straits in daylight under a sky containing every Stuka the Germans could put into the Aegean, lift troops at night with no harbour and no jetty, and run south again before dawn. Three days of it cost him the Gloucester, the Fiji, the Greyhound, the Kashmir, the Kelly of Mountbatten, the Hereward, the Imperial, the Juno. His flagship Warspite was hit, the Barham hit, the carrier Formidable hit. By the third evening he had lost three cruisers and six destroyers and over two thousand men.

THE SIGNAL FROM LONDON

At about eight o'clock on the evening of the twenty-ninth of May the cypher office on the Orion, half a mile south of Sphakia in heavy darkness with the moon down, brought up a signal from the First Sea Lord. Dudley Pound had signed it himself, Pound, in the way one Edinburgh man writes to another when the matter is between them. The text noted that the rate of loss of major fleet units off Crete was, in the judgment of the Naval Staff, unsustainable. It recommended that the Commander-in-Chief Mediterranean consider discontinuing the evacuation and withdrawing the fleet behind the bomb-line at Mersa Matruh. It was, in form, advice. In plain reading it was an instruction to leave the army on the beaches.

A SECOND OF TIME ON THE BRIDGE

Cunningham took the flimsy out on to the wing of the bridge. The wind was off the land, smelling of thyme and burnt cordite, and the dark over Sphakia was complete. He read it once. He had been at sea forty-five years and he could feel the ledger in his head as plainly as the rail under his hand. The arithmetic of tonnage was Pound's arithmetic and it was correct: three cruisers and six destroyers in seventy-two hours could not be paid out of the Mediterranean Fleet a second week running. There was a sum on that side of the page and it balanced. There was another sum. The army on those beaches was sixteen thousand. It was the army the Navy had carried out of Greece in April and lost the Diamond and the Wryneck to bring off the last beaches there. It was, in the older bookkeeping of the service, the Navy's army. The thing that made it possible to ask a destroyer captain to take his ship into Suda Bay in daylight, and the thing that would make it possible to ask the next captain in the next war, was not in the arithmetic at all. It was the standing assumption, three centuries old, that when soldiers were on a beach the Navy came in. Pound was right about the ships. Pound was wrong about the service. The cost of the ships was three years of dockyard. The cost of the assumption, once spent, could not be made good by any yard in the kingdom. He folded the flimsy and went back inside. He had spent perhaps the time of two long breaths on the wing.

THE REPLY

He called his flag-lieutenant, Hugh Lee, and dictated. By Lee's account, published in 1973, the signal left the Orion at twenty-five minutes to ten on the night of the twenty-ninth of May 1941, addressed to all flags of the Mediterranean Fleet. 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. He signed it ABC, as he signed everything. Acknowledgements came back over the next twenty minutes from every senior officer in company. None argued. The captains on the screening destroyers had been waiting for the word and the word had come. The bows came round for Sphakia.

THE FOUR NIGHTS

The evacuation went on through the nights of the twenty-ninth, the thirtieth and the thirty-first of May and into the dawn of the first of June. The cruisers and the surviving destroyers ran up by dark, loaded soldiers over the side from caiques and ship's boats off open beach, and ran south at thirty knots to be clear of the Stuka radius by sunrise. They did not always clear it. The Calcutta went down on the thirty-first, bombed in open water on her way back to Alexandria. The Perth was hit, the Napier hit, the Kelvin hit. About sixteen thousand five hundred men were lifted off the south coast of Crete. About four thousand were left on the beaches and went into German captivity. About two thousand five hundred officers and men of the Royal Navy were killed in the four nights. When Cunningham came alongside in Alexandria on the morning of the first of June, the soldiers on the upper deck of the Phoebe stood in their torn battledress and cheered the ships in along the line of the boom. He went below without speaking.

THE RETURN

He commanded the landings at Sicily two years later, and on the eleventh of September 1943 received the surrender of the Italian battle fleet under the guns of Malta. He wrote in his memoirs that his father had told him at the age of ten that he would one day take the surrender of an enemy fleet, and that he had sometimes wondered, walking the quarter-deck at Valletta that morning, if the old anatomy professor had not been right. He was First Sea Lord from 1943 to 1946, the only Edinburgh-born holder of the office, and Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope. He died at Bishop's Waltham in 1963, eighty years old, and lies in the sea off the Nab Tower, by his own instruction.

THE TRADITION KEPT

The signal entered the signals tradition of the Royal Navy the night it was made, and it has not left it. It is printed in full, the only signal of the war so printed, in the 1955 Manual of Naval Customs and Traditions under signals of the Mediterranean Fleet, May 1941. The captains who acknowledged it that night went on to other wars and other ships, and they took it with them. The instrument had been carried into weather that might have broken it, and had not broken. In the Wardroom of HMS Excellent at Whale Island, Portsmouth, the signal is set in brass above the door between the dining-room and the bar, at the height of a serving officer's eye, so that every man who passes under it to take his dinner passes under the cost of his trade.