Reckoning on Crete

As one George to another, Britain's King cabled Greece's last week a message of heartfelt condolence: "Britain shares the grief of the Greeks at the loss of Crete." Britain's grief was indeed deepseated, but it was not entirely sentimental. Not until last week had the full significance of the loss of Crete, in terms of British war effort, come home to the British people.

The strategic loss was severe, and last week the British felt the full force of that loss. British war vessels, trying to cooperate in the Syrian adventure (see p. 28) as they had along the Libyan littoral, took a pasting from the air. So did Matruh, the British base of operations in Egypt's Western Desert. So did Alexandria and To bruch and Haifa. The blow to home morale was heavy; the first airborne invasion of an island was not easy for islanders to for get. But the biggest shock was the expense of losing Crete.

The naval loss was staggering. The Admiralty admitted that altogether four cruisers and six destroyers had been sunk by enemy aviation. This was more than the Italians lost at the much-hailed Battle of Matapan (three cruisers, three destroyers). One of the lost cruisers was an anti-aircraft ship, one of the "bristling porcupines" which have so far treated hostile airplanes roughly and come off relatively well. Ironically 'this one was sunk not by bombs but by an infernal machine. The anti-aircraft cruiser and two of the other ships were sunk by steered torpedoes (TIME, Nov. 11, weird one-man vessels of destruction which anonymous Italian heroes sneaked into the harbor of Suda Bay under cover of darkness.

The only compensation for the naval loss was destruction of an estimated 300 German fighting and transport planes; but there were no warehouses full of British cruisers, as there were of Nazi planes.

The loss in Empire personnel was also grim--proportionately far greater than at Dunkirk or Greece. Here the "known loss" was 15,000 men, against 17,000 evacuated, nearly 50% (at Dunkirk losses were 12%, in Greece 25%). Winston Churchill, as a palliative to rising British anger over Crete (see p. 24), estimated that the Germans had lost 17,000 men. But the German High Command, whose claims if not admissions have usually proved unfailingly accurate, last week admitted losing only 5,893 men (1,353 killed, 2,621 missing, 1,919 wounded). Of these admitted casualties, 4,761 or 80% were Air Force and parachutists. The Germans said that 200 men, not 5,000 men as the British claimed, were drowned on the way to Crete when the British sank German transports.

The only premise on which a war of successive brilliant withdrawals can be fought with any hope of eventual victory is that the withdrawers should inflict great casualties on the enemy and suffer small ones. In Crete that premise did not obtain.

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