Last Lift from Crete: The Nicholas Everard World War II Saga Book 2 by Fullerton Alexander

Author:Fullerton, Alexander [Fullerton, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: McBooks Press
Published: 2005-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Sixteen-thirty: with four and a half hours of daylight left, the ships were alone again. Two Hurricanes had stayed with them for about an hour after that air battle, then another had arrived and that pair had departed. The single aircraft had been relieved by yet another, after another hour, and he’d been the last. End of luxury, of the sensation of being pampered.

Three times during the afternoon enemy reconnaissance machines had come to look at them. Twice Hurricanes had chased the snooper away, and once it had been shot down. But the Germans would know that when the force got to a certain distance from the desert airfields the fighter escort would be withdrawn; once a recce flight came and found them unescorted, it wouldn’t be long before the dive-bombers returned.

There was quite a lot of movement on the ships now. The wind was Force 4 and the sea was up to match it. But it seemed to have got no worse during the past hour; if it stayed like this and there was some degree of shelter inshore, it ought to be possible to get the troops in.

On his high stool, Nick drank tea and munched biscuits. Pratt came up from the chart, bringing a tea-mug with him. He murmured, looking round at the sea’s frothy, jumpy surface, “Might be a bit tough for the landing-craft, sir?”

“They’ll have to cope with it. It’s important to get this lot ashore.”

The appearance of the Hurricanes might have been an indication of the importance attached to it. For the sake of the cut-off Retimo garrison, presumably. A garrison—Wishart had said—that included women, for God’s sake: an Aussie field hospital with twenty or thirty nurses in it, evacuated from Greece. Well, they’d be worth their weight in gold, no doubt, but there’d be all hell to pay if they couldn’t be got out when the crunch came … There’d been a heated exchange of signals, Wishart had told him privately, between Whitehall and ABC during the last day or two; the C-in-C had had to point out that the Navy wasn’t afraid of incurring losses, only of losing so many ships that there’d be too few left operationally fit for the Eastern Mediterranean to be held. Then Malta would fall, and Suez would be lost, and the Levant, and the whole Middle East and its oil … London still seemed blind to the facts of life in terms of air power and the lack of it. One trouble was that “Tiger,” the big Malta convoy operation, had succeeded; it had only got through by a fluke of weather, but as a result of it London—or Churchill, anyway—did believe in miracles and the performing of the impossible.

Wishart had mentioned the hunt for Bismarck, too. The entire Home Fleet was at sea, and so was Force H from Gibraltar. Hood had to be avenged. Britain and the Empire were fighting the war alone: the German propaganda machine under Dr Goebbels was going full blast—Bismarck

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