DODECANESE CAMPAIGN (SEPTEMBER 9–NOVEMBER 22, 1943)

General Henry Maitland “Jumbo” Wilson was appointed commander in chief of the Middle East and, under orders from Winston Churchill, mounted an expedition to occupy the small Greek islands of Kos, Leros, and Samos in September 1943 with the object of creating a diversion during the Italian Campaign. The expedition was a bad idea, and Wilson’s forces sustained heavy casualties, for which Wilson was widely blamed.

A Bristol Beaufighter releases its bombs toward the further of two German flak vessels attacked by aircraft of No. 201 Group, south of the island of Kalymnos in the Dodecanese. Inadequate air support helped doom the British campaign in the Dodecanese. Imperial War Museum photo.

Maj. Gen. Wagner, commander of German forces in the Dodecanese, and two of his staff officers come alongside the destroyer HMS Kimberley on a motor launch which the Germans had captured from the British a few months previously. The Kimberley took Wagner to the island of Symi in the Aegean, where the unconditional surrender of German forces in the region was signed, May 18, 1945. The failure of the British Dodecanese campaign resulted in German control of the islands until the end of World War II. Imperial War Museum photo.

 
The islands of the southern Aegean Sea off the southwest coast of Anatolia were known through much of their history as the eastern or southern Sporades (“scattered”). The islands include Rhodes, Karpathos, Kassos, Haliki, Kastellorizo (Castlerosso), Alimia, Tilos, Symi (Simi), Nissyros, Kos (Cos), Pserimos, Astypalea, Kalymnos, Telendhos, Leros, Lipsi, Patmos, Arki, and Agnthonissi. Early in the twentieth century, the Young Turks revoked the historic privileges enjoyed by the islanders, who were part of the Ottoman Empire. Twelve islands (dhodkeka nisia) joined in a failed protest against the loss of these privileges, and the name of Dodecanese stuck as a term for all these islands, even though they exceeded 12 in number.

In 1912, as a consequence of the Italo-Turkish War, the Dodecanese Islands passed to Italian control. In 1941, the Germans joined their Italian allies in garrisoning the islands, which were inhabited chiefly by Greeks. The Italians had naval and air bases on Rhodes, the strategic key to the area. There was also an airfield on Kos, a seaplane base and naval batteries at Leros, and an air base on Scarpanto.

When Italy surrendered on 8 September 1943, the Dodecanese were occupied by two poorly equipped Italian divisions totaling 37,000 men; Italian morale was very low. The Germans had one division of 7,000 men, which was well equipped with tanks and artillery. The local Greek population was excited at the prospect of liberation by the Allied powers.

British Prime Minister Winston L. S. Churchill ordered that operations be conducted against the Dodecanese Islands. He believed that success there would open the way to the Dardanelles and the Balkans. He also sought to induce Turkey to join the war and to remove the stain of Britain’s defeat in World War I at Gallipoli. The original plan for an invasion of the Dodecanese, prepared by the Middle East Command, was known as Operation MANDIBLES, but it was subsequently renamed Operation ACCOLADE. Churchill appealed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and to General Dwight D. Eisenhower for aid to liberate the Dodecanese. The Americans, who were preparing a landing on the Italian peninsula at Salerno, rebuffed him. Roosevelt also suspected that the British hoped to open a new front in the Balkans. Coincidentally, the Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting in Quebec ordered most of the landing ships in the Middle East to the Indian Ocean, which starved the operation of needed assets.

When Italy surrendered on 8 September 1943, three British operatives led by Major Lord George Jellicoe parachuted onto Rhodes. They contacted Italian authorities there and urged them to take the Germans prisoner. However, Admiral Inigo Campioni, commander of Italian forces in the Aegean, hesitated. The Germans, meanwhile, acted swiftly and soon subdued the Italians.

The British nonetheless proceeded with some landings, and by October 1943—with a force of 5,000 men and a small flotilla—they secured several islands, among them Kos, Samos, Patmos, and Leros. They were not able, however, either to gain air superiority or take Rhodes, and as long as the Germans were secure at Rhodes, the British could not hold the Dodecanese.

German Response
When Italy surrendered to the Western Allies on September 9, 1943, 7,500 Germans of the “Sturm-Division Rhodos” overwhelmed and disarmed the Italian Dodecanese garrison of 30,000 men. Winston Churchill, fixated as always on military activity in the Mediterranean, ordered in British and Greek commandos with an eye to forcing the Germans from the Dodecanese and from Crete. By mid-October some 4,000 British commandos were spread over eight small islands, though none landed on Rhodes. Elements of the German 22nd Infantry Division from Crete crossed to Kos (Operation IRON BAR) on October 3 to eliminate the only British airfield in the Dodecanese. They forced the isolated British garrison of under 1,400 men to surrender, took an additional 4,000 Italian prisoners, and summarily executed over 100 Italian officers.

Churchill’s advisers recommended withdrawal from the Dodecanese, but the Prime Minister pressed ahead with the campaign, essentially reinforcing failure. In his defense, he hoped to provoke Turkey into the war against Germany. He also saw the island campaign as a preliminary to a larger and long-cherished Balkan campaign, a proposal repeatedly rejected by American military and political leaders. The Germans assaulted Leros (Operation LEOPARD) on November 12, overrunning the British garrison of 3,000 men and taking prisoner another 8,500 Italian soldiers and sailors. The campaign was over by November 22. Elements of the British and Greek navies took serious losses, mostly from Luftwaffe bombing but also strikes by new radio-controlled missiles used by the Germans for the first time.

Operations and Units
On 3 October 1943, the Germans went on the offensive, attacking Kos. Heavy bombing of the island by Stuka aircraft reduced the British defenses, and soon the British force there surrendered. Churchill refused to consider a withdrawal, instead ordering that Leros and Samos be held at all costs. Indeed, the British reinforced Leros. On 12 November, the Germans attacked Leros with overwhelming force, taking it four days later. The British troops remaining in the Dodecanese then withdrew.

Among British units involved were the Long Range Desert Group, the Special Boat Squadron, the Raiding Forces’ Levant Schooner Flotilla, the King’s Own, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, and the Durham Light Infantry. The Greek navy provided 7 destroyers to assist the more numerous British vessels. In the offensive, the British lost 4 cruisers damaged and 2 submarines, 6 destroyers, and 10 small coastal vessels and minesweepers sunk. The Royal Air Force flew 3,746 sorties and lost 113 aircraft out of 288 involved. The British army lost in all about 4,800 men, while the Italians lost 5,350. German casualties totalled some 1,184 men, 35,000 tons of shipping (between late September and late November 1943), and 15 small landing craft and ferries. The operation failed as a consequence of Campioni’s hesitation, German aggressiveness, non-cooperation by the Americans, and the inadequacy of British resources. Holding the islands, however, stretched German resources, ultimately tying down some 60,000 Germans who might have been better employed elsewhere.
After the war, the British governed the Dodecanese until 1947. The islands were then turned over to Greece.

Suggested Reading: Jeffrey Holland, The Aegean Mission (1988).

German airborne invasion of Crete

The battle off Cape Matapan was over, and with it any will on the part of the Italian navy to contest Britain’s rule of the Mediterranean. What the Axis could not achieve at sea, they would soon achieve from the air. German forces crushed the exhausted Greek army and swept the British from the Peloponnese with disheartening rapidity and ease. More than 12,000 men were lost together with 8,000 vehicles and 209 planes. But Cunningham’s fleet managed to stage a little Dunkirk and snatched more than 50,000 men (figures vary slightly) from Nazi clutches. Since the Luftwaffe now completely controlled Grecian skies, Cunningham did not even consider bringing in the fleet’s heavier ships to cover the evacuation; Formidable, with its scant complement of overworked planes, would have been particularly vulnerable. This meant that evacuation could take place only at night. The operation turned out to be much like the successful withdrawals under enemy noses from Gallipoli twenty-six years before. The merchantmen and destroyers came in only after dark and were to leave no later than three in the morning. Those ships that somehow were unable to maintain this timetable were inevitably caught at sea at dawn and bombed. So disciplined were the British that they lost only six ships, most of them merchantmen, and Pridham-Wippell’s destroyers and light cruisers worked magnificently. Just 14,000 troops were rescued directly from jetties or wharves, the remainder being snatched off open beaches by landing craft, small boats, “and any other craft that could be collected.” Cunningham later paid tribute “to the inertness of the Italian fleet. Had they chosen to interfere, Operation ‘Demon’ would have been greatly slowed up” and possibly interrupted altogether.

Crete, however, would be another matter. For the Luftwaffe and particularly General Karl Student, head of the German paratroop invasion force, Crete was simply a natural progression of the Grecian campaign that would culminate with German boys standing on the banks of the Suez Canal and walking the streets of Cairo. For Hitler, the conquest of Crete would complete an essential but unwelcome Balkan diversion. Crete would not be a springboard for an amphibious invasion of Egypt but rather the shield that would protect the comparatively weak Balkan flank of the imminent German invasion of Russia from any future Allied counterstroke. However mixed and varied their motives, the Germans wanted Crete, and the British knew it. This island fortress with its “second Scapa” at Suda Bay could not be allowed to fall.

Once again, however, enemy airpower proved irresistible, and this time it was employed on such a lavish and dramatic scale that Cunningham’s navy was pulled into the fray and badly mauled. Formidable, Cunningham’s only carrier, had been reduced to but four serviceable aircraft due to the continued wear and tear of recent operations, and Cunningham’s only eight-inch-gun cruiser, York, had been completely disabled as the result of a daring attack by six fast Italian “explosive motor boats” on Suda Bay. Mussolini’s fleet sailors may have displayed little stomach for fighting, but his small-boat men and underwater demolition teams were always feisty, daring, and resourceful.

The German airborne invasion of Crete began shortly after dawn on May 20, 1941, with reinforcements to come in by sea the following night. As the battle raged ashore during the next several days, British light forces north and east of the island found the enemy convoy with 2,300 German troops embarked and shot it to pieces; another small convoy with ammunition and food was also wiped out. For a time, the Australian–New Zealand defenders held the enemy at bay, inflicting terrible casualties. But the Germans proved up to the challenge. A last desperate gamble to land troop-laden JU-52s directly on the runway at Máleme paid off, despite heavy artillery and mortar fire. Now capable of being resupplied and reinforced by airlift, Student’s determined paratroopers began a steady, grinding, irresistible offensive. Crete was doomed. Offshore, Stukas and Heinkels staging from fields in eastern Libya, Greece, and the Italianheld Dodecanese bombed the Royal Navy unmercifully, disrupting but not completely stifling British efforts to interdict enemy supply routes into Crete and maintain the flow of supplies to their own forces. The seas between Alexandria and Suda Bay came to be known to weary, desperate Jack Tar as “Bomb Alley.” For a time, Cunningham’s destroyers and cruisers beat back the Luftwaffe formations, but at a terrible cost in ammunition. As the enemy air raids continued (some ships were under continuous attack for up to three and a half hours), the toll began to mount. Hard-fighting cruisers and destroyers were wracked with bombs, then often heavily strafed as they broke up and went to the bottom. As early as the twenty-third, Cunningham replied to a rather hectoring cable from the Chiefs of Staff (read Churchill) in London with the observation that “the experience of three days in which two cruisers [including the gallant Gloucester] and four destroyers have been sunk and one battleship, two cruisers and four destroyers severely damaged shows what losses are likely to be” should the fleet be ordered to maintain control of the seas around Crete without the benefit of sufficient air cover. “Sea control in the Eastern Mediterranean,” Cunningham concluded, “could not be retained after another such experience.”

Formidable’s greatly reduced air group mounted one last successful night raid against the German air base at Kárpathos in the Dodecanese, but as the carrier and its escorts withdrew on May 27, both it and the battleship Barham were badly bombed by the vengeful Germans, and Cunningham promptly ordered all his big ships back to Alexandria. It was left to the antiaircraft cruisers and destroyers to undertake the last act of the campaign, yet another evacuation of friendly forces in the face of an aroused and determined enemy.

There are no more melancholy pages in Cunningham’s splendid memoirs than those devoted to the evacuation of Crete on the nights of May 27–28 and 28–29, 1941. The “small boys” dedicated to the task were bombed repeatedly as they approached and withdrew from the island. Ammunition lockers were emptied and gun crews stupefied with fatigue as wave after wave of German and Italian aircraft roared down out of the skies. As ships heaved and rocked under the impact of bomb blasts aboard or near misses, several thousand sailors were pitched into the warm, salty waters, some to be rescued, many to perish along with their mates who went down with their ships. The final toll off Crete in the ten days after May 20 was three cruisers and six destroyers gone. Moreover, Formidable, the battleships Warspite and Barham, and four more cruisers were damaged beyond any hope of repair at Alexandria and had to be sent home (or to American yards) for months of rebuilding, while another nine cruisers and destroyers required several weeks or more of dockyard work at Alexandria.

Cunningham was aware of the peculiar strain of the operation. The ship’s companies were not inspired to do battle with the enemy as they would have been had the Italian fleet or a German battleship appeared in their sights. “Instead they had the unceasing anxiety of the task of trying to bring away in safety, thousands of their own countrymen, many of whom were in an exhausted and dispirited condition in ships necessarily so overcrowded that even when there was opportunity to relax conditions made this impossible.” And Cunningham concluded almost in despair, “There is rightly little credit or glory to be expected in these operations of retreat.”