covered with dust. ‘The bastards,’ he said, then began coughing violently.
‘Is Company HQ all right, sir?’ asked Tanner.
‘Yes. A bit of bomb blast, but that’s about it,’ he replied, when he’d recovered. ‘Thankfully there was no glass in the windows.’ He leaned on his knees and cleared his throat. ‘They certainly weren’t going for the harbour that time,’ he said at last. ‘They were going for the whole damn town.’
Tanner offered him his water bottle. ‘I pity the poor bastards in the centre. That was some bombardment.’
Peploe took a long gulp of water, then wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘This is not good, Jack. Not good at all.’
Captain Alex Vaughan had stayed put in his house when the siren rang out and the first bombs began to fall, but as explosions started crashing around him and buildings crumbled, he hastily closed the window shutters and took to the cellar. He prayed that the stash of armaments was safe. That morning he had paved the way for the arrival of the caique that night. The thought of it all being destroyed was doubly alarming, because of the loss to the guerrillas and because if it exploded it would tear a giant hole in the heart of the old town.
Even from his hideout in the cellar, he had heard the whistle of bombs and felt the ground shudder. Several landed uncomfortably close. He wondered whether the entire building above him might topple. Certainly plenty of dust and debris fell from the cellar’s roof.
But somehow the building survived, and when at last the bombers had left, he tentatively made his way up the stairs into the main part of the house once more. Outside, Heraklion was shrouded by a dense fog of dust and smoke, so thick it was like the worst pea-souper in London. He waited inside, drank some water, then a large brandy, and at last ventured out. Slowly but surely, the dust was dispersing, like a veil being slowly lifted. Vaughan gasped at the level of destruction. Rubble and debris littered almost every street. Although much of the town miraculously still stood, many buildings had been utterly destroyed and now lay crumbled in heaps as much as ten foot high. Many more had been damaged.
But one thing was perfectly obvious: there was absolutely no way they would be able to shift the whole lot that night – not quickly and discreetly.
Alopex would have to wait for his stash of arms.
From the 3rd Battalion command post away to the west of the town, Oberleutnant Balthasar had also watched the bombing of Heraklion. From the first floor of the house, he and Major Schulz peered through his binoculars as the town walls slowly emerged from the haze of dust and smoke.
‘Richthofen’s lot did their job well,’ said Schulz, a wry smile on his face.
‘It’s about time we gave them a show of force,’ said Balthasar, still looking through his binoculars. ‘They’ve not been playing by the rules. They needed a lesson like this.’
He had already been feeling in better spirits before the bombardment, not least because his bout of dysentery seemed to have passed. Earlier that morning he had eaten a tin of meat spread and hard bread, some chocolate and a fruit bar, then washed it down with a mug of hot coffee and a Pervitin tablet. Two hours on, and his stomach was still at peace, no longer stabbing him with pains from bile or nauseous hunger. In fact, he felt fresh and full of energy for the first time in days.
But there was another reason for his improved humour. At just before eight that morning, they had at last made direct radio contact. For days they had heard only occasional snatches of traffic, but now at long last they had spoken directly with Athens. Ironically, there was still no link to Oberst Brauer, only a few kilometres away, but it seemed Brauer’s headquarters was also in contact with XI Fliegerkorps HQ in Athens, so finally the separated parties could communicate with each other.
And not only had Athens warned them of General von Richthofen’s plans to pulverize Heraklion, they had also relayed Brauer’s orders that all troops of the 1st Fallschirmjager were to join together to the east of the airfield – that meant not only the 3rd Battalion but also those men who had landed the day before to the south of the town. They were to move that night, under the cover of darkness.
The prospect of leaving their river hiding place, with its stench of baking corpses, faeces and sweat, had given all the men a lift. No longer would they be isolated and rudderless. Rather, they would be massed together, no doubt in preparation for an assault on the airfield. The port, Balthasar now realized, was of secondary importance. Once the airfield was captured, troops and supplies could be flown in, rather than haphazardly dropped from the sky. The stranglehold could be tightened until the British had to flee or surrender.
It was true enough that capturing the airfield would be no easy task, but for the first time since their disastrous landing, Balthasar could see a way through. Against all the odds, they might yet win the day. And with victory would come revenge.
Balthasar lowered his binoculars and lit a cigar from his ration pack, the smoke curling around him in a thick sweet cloud that kept the insects and the cloying stench at bay. He thought of all the men he had lost since landing. Too many had been brutally butchered at the hands of the Cretans. Balthasar had seen some terrible things in his life, but deliberately hacking off the head of a man or ripping out his guts was something that belonged to a different, more bestial age. Good God, what kind of people were they? They would have to pay for what they had done. He glanced back at the still-smoking town, imagining the piles of rubble and corpses that now littered the streets.
Sunday, 25 May, 8 p.m. Another sweltering day was drawing to a close – a day of back-breaking labour as platoons had been detailed in turns to help the Greek garrison and civilians start the massive task of clearing the town. There had been barely a street in the whole of Heraklion to have gone unscathed. All day, the air had been thick with the smell of dust; it rasped the back of the throat, clung to sweat-moistened skin, and the folds of clothes. The amount of stone and debris littering the myriad streets and alleyways was incredible, and with no mechanical machinery and mostly bare hands little had been achieved, despite the best efforts of soldiers and civilians alike. The priority had been to rescue any of the living still trapped.
Tanner had helped pull a middle-aged woman and her teenage daughter from underneath one collapsed house. It had been painstaking work, one block of stone at a time, with the constant fear that any movement might make the situation worse, rather than better, and with the trapped women’s plaintive cries for help ringing in their ears. Eventually, however, they had pulled them clear, their hair, clothes and skin as white as if a sack of flour had been thrown over them. A few cuts and badly bruised, but otherwise, miraculously, they had been in one piece. Others had not been so lucky. Tanner saw one woman clutching her dead child, rocking and wailing with grief. He had wished then that they would be sent back to North Africa, with its wide, open desert – a place where armies could hammer away at each other with civilians well out of harm’s way.
But now, back at B Company’s lines, Tanner had other things on his mind. He had once more put his battle blouse over his shirt as the heat of the day was replaced by cooler night air. From the outcrop he had been watching the ground ahead once more. Still there was no sign of life and no further explosions. The enemy were keeping out of sight and it had begun to bother him that the remaining three booby traps might be left for some locals to discover.
He was about to head to Company HQ to speak with Peploe, when he saw the captain walking towards him through the olive grove to their forward positions. Tanner clambered down to meet him. ‘Just the man, sir,’ he said.
‘Oh, yes?’ Peploe looked around him. The men had dug a series of small two-and three-man trenches either side of the road and between the olives and other trees. Discarded ammunition boxes, bullet casings and pieces of kit littered the ground. ‘Looks a bit of a mess, doesn’t it?’
‘I shouldn’t worry too much, sir.’
Peploe took off his tin hat and ran a hand through his hair. ‘Maybe not. Anyway, did you want me?’
‘Yes, sir. I’d like to go forward and have a dekko.’
‘It’s certainly been pretty quiet.’
