The Battle of Souda
The Battle of Souda is often used as a turning point in global history, often finding itself on a list of top ten influential global battles, although the impact may have been heavily overstated simply because much like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the battle may have just been the spark to accelerate several historical trends long in the making. The battle was the culmination of British political aims - the British, finally sick of the military junta in Royalist Greece, had decided on a plan of regime change, as they were well-aware that the regime was unpopular.
Alexandros Papagos took command of the Greek Army in the summer of 1948, just as the Royalist Army began collapsing. As Communist forces closed in on Southern Greece, the Royalists were rocked by a devastating defection, that of his top subordinate, Lt. General
Thrasyvoulos Tsakalotos. The result was devastating for Papagos, whose every maneuver become double-checked and triple-checked by skeptical anti-Communists. In reality, Papago's retreat from Northern and Central Greece saved the Royalist Greeks, allowing them to hold a smaller, less bloody-front until the cease-fire in 1954. However, as a result, his moderating influence on politics was utterly shredded, especially after the death of the moderate politician, Themistoklis Sofoulis, in 1949 and the assassination of Konstantinos Tsaldaris in the same year. In the 1950 Greek elections, the winner was Nikolaos Plastiras of the National Progressive Center Union, which favored peace with the Greek Communists. However, the Greek Communists turned down the peace offering, viewing it as a sign of weakness and then intensifying their offensive. The King of Greece, Paul I, deeply distrusted Plastiras, who was an ardent Republican who had previously launched two coups with the aim of ending the Greek monarchy. The final straw was when Plastiras was found meeting with agents of the NKVD (ironically, he had successfully negotiated more covert Soviet arms shipments to Royalist Greece to fight Tito-aligned Communist Greece). Paul I sacked Plastiras, and when Plastiras refused to leave, the King turned to a fringe far-right politician, Giorgios Grivas, who immediately took a young group of radical officers who overthrew Plastiras. Grivas then had himself appointed as Prime Minister, dissolving Parliament and holding new (more or less rigged) elections.
Having pushed back the Communist offensive until they finally came to the peace table in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia in 1954, Grivas's position in Greece seemed strong and he turned instead towards his lifelong goal of uniting Greece and Cyprus (he was a Greek Cypriot). In late 1962, King Paul died of cancer, removing another moderating influence on Grivas. The new King, the 21-year old Constantine II, had nowhere the same political base of his father. Relations between Grivas and Constantine II quickly deteriorated to the point where the young King was essentially put under house arrest by Prime Minister Grivas. This outraged many South Greek right-wing royalists, a crucial part of Grivas's support, but also allowed Grivas to strike his now infamous deal with the Syrians. MI6 was aware that the young King disliked Grivas, so the British cabinet figured the best way to put the Mediterranean back in order was to remove the relatively unpopular and radical South Greek dictatorship and put a moderate democratic government supported by both the King, centrists, and others. The South Greek King was under house arrest in Crete, so the British plans were to simply occupy Crete, declare a rival government with the King at its head, and then watch the South Greek government collapse in Athens from internal revolt. Regardless, this would crush the Syrian threat to British shipping, as they were primarily using the surprisingly large Souda Naval Base in Crete as their goal, the largest naval base in the Mediterranean, which stands out for being simultaneously constructed by covert American
and Soviet aid.
First of course however, was to liberate Crete. The British Mediterranean Fleet was located in Cyprus itself, which was to cause several delays. Unlike in Singapore, Cyprus was an outright warzone, with EOKA militants launching bombings and sabotages. In particular, EOKA militants sabotaged everything British they could get their hands on, which meant that on the departure date, some ships of the British Navy were not exactly battle-ready. First Sea Lord Mountbatten had essentially been fired by the new Labour government for 1) disagreeing with Labour's plan to enact regime change in Greece and 2) being a Tory, who was famously close friends with many hated political enemies of Labour, leaving policy somewhat confused. Regardless, the Mediterranean Fleet was quickly able to assemble two aircraft carriers, the HMS Ark Royal, HMS Hermes, and HMS Eagle, which had been recently rebuilt at Devonport Dockyard as a key (and expensive!) Conservative policy goal.[1] This comprised roughly three of the United Kingdom's six carriers, an acceptable committment because the Mediterranean Fleet was viewed as the most important British fleet at this time.
The new British Buccaneer aircraft was a few days away from being ready for deployment, but it was viewed as too risky to change aircraft days before a major operation. As a result, the British aircraft at hand were primarily de Havilland Sea Vixens and Supermarine Scimitars. The plan was for the Royal Navy to park well outside of Souda, pound the Naval Base alongside any South Greek naval assets caught inside, before moving up many of the screener ships to support an amphibious assault. Once the Souda Naval Base was offline, the Royal Navy would enjoy total naval superiority over the Mediterranean and would then would be able to launch multiple amphibious assaults all across Crete, totally disorientating the South Greek Army which would be presumably collapse under assault from all sides. British officers carefully studied the German invasion of Crete, eager to avoid its bloody outcome, as Prime Minister George Brown explicitly told British commanders that he wanted minimal casualties on
both sides, which meant pushing the South Greek Army into a surrender was preferable to any bloody offensives. For similar reasons, air strikes in heavily civilian areas was ruled off, something that irked many British officers because of the South Greek government's tendency of placing air bases close to major population centers.
The British strike on Souda was a clear success - pretty much every large ship of the Greek Navy, including both of their flag ships, the Cruiser Illi, the Cruiser Giorgios Averof, as well as over 60% of Greece's destroyers, was destroyed in the initial British attack despite much-formidable-than-expected anti-aircraft defenses at the Souda Naval Base. British pilots were surprised at the number of surface-to-air missiles, especially because they seemed very similar to Soviet SAMs - namely the stationary S-25 Berkut and the mobile S-75 Dvina. Although British aircraft took heavy casualties, they dutifully completed their mission, essentially knocking down most of the defensive fortifications of the Souda Naval Base. Royal Marines, supported by the Royal Navy, landed in Souda Bay. Although most of the South Greek artillery emplacements had been disabled, South Greek soldiers were able to resist on the cliffs and base itself. However, Royal Marines slowly but surely advanced to slowly surround the Greek garrison in the base itself.
In the peak of fighting, British AWACS quickly picked up that the remnants of the Greek Air Force was entering the fray. However, this was caught very late for the simple reason that the British were primarily prepared for South Greek aircraft to attack them from Crete - British planes systematically shredded South Greek fighter planes who attempted to enter the fray. In the dogfights over Souda, the British had managed to down 102 South Greek airplanes at a loss of only 21 British aircraft. Although the South Greeks had the advance of fighting on their home turf, their planes were typically outdated, some of them even being outdated British aircraft! However, much to their surprise, Greek aircraft were approaching from the other side - from Mainland Greece itself (Souda was in the north of Crete). This was seen as immediately strange because the South Greeks were not known to have any long-range fighters with sufficient range to reach Crete from the Peloponnese. Much to the shock of the whole world, including almost all Greeks, the Grivas government had somehow acquired four Tu-22 Blinder bombers from
somewhere (it was not widely known that the Royalist Greeks had been receiving Soviet aid since 1948). Worst of all for the British, the South Greeks came prepared - as the Blinders were modified to replace their bomb space with more missile racks, allowing each bomber to hold three Kh-22 missiles. As the missiles were coming from the opposite side of the British carrier group that AWACS was focused on, they remained undetected until it was far too late to evade.
At this time in history, anti-ship missiles had never been used in combat before - and the Royal Navy in particular had relatively weak anti-missile defenses. The Western allies were aware of the new SS-5 Styx anti-ship missile put on missile boats, but they weren't even aware of the new Kh-22 missile. At 3:15 PM, twelve Kh-22 missiles smashed into the British fleet. Only two missiles missed. The combined countermeasures of the fleet, primitive as they were (mostly just WW2-era chaff) with barely any advanced notice, were only able to deflect one missile (aimed the Hermes). The other missed the Ark Royal, simply because a remarkably brave Royal Navy officer, seeing no other choice, set off his own ship's ammunition in front of the Ark Royal, causing the missile to mistake the heat of the destroyer for the carrier. Although almost the entire crew of the destroyer died (over two hundred sailors), the move likely saved hundreds of more British lives. Five missiles hit the HMS Eagle, causing the entire carrier to crumble and sink almost immediately with almost all hands lost, almost three thousand sailors, often drowned to death or asphyxiated by fire within a giant steel coffin. The Hermes was hit with three, which also caused the ship to start sinking, but so the largely majority of sailors were able to escape, with even the majority of stored aircraft being able to be transferred. The Ark Royal in contrast, was the luckiest, as only two missiles hit it, enough to cripple it and kill almost a hundred sailors, but not enough to immediately sink it. Most importantly, this gave the surviving aircraft of the HMS Eagle somewhere to land, which meant that there could still be aerial cover over the Mediterranean Fleet. Had the missiles also disabled the Ark Royal, then the Mediterranean Fleet would have been left totally defenseless against South Greece's Blinder bombers, at least until reinforcements could arrive (they were immediately ordered from Singapore).
Off the coast of Souda, the remnants of the South Greek Navy took this as their signal to attack. Most of the smaller missile boats of the Hellenic Navy had been concealed in various small caves on the shores of Crete - with British air support basically destroyed, the missile boats launched what were essentially suicide charges into the still larger British Navy. As most of the boats were able to fire off their entire complement of Styx anti-ship missiles before being unceremoniously sunk by the Royal Navy, the rest of the South Greek Navy was able to sink or disable almost two-thirds of the Royal Navy parked off the coasts of Souda (which in practice meant around 1/3rds of the Mediterranean Fleet, carriers excluded, though most of the disabled destroyers were repairable, so the long-term impact on the Royal Navy of this assault was low). The commander of the Ark Royal grimly realized that the damage to the carrier was simply too severe to actually limp back to Cyprus without sinking along the way - so there was only direction he could sail towards. The HMS Ark Royal immediately sailed towards Souda - for the Royal Navy, the Crete campaign would literally now be a matter of victory and death.
Regardless of the outcome of the Crete campaign, the news headline that the entire world first saw was blazoned across a picture of the sinking HMS Eagle. As it was immediately obvious that the HMS Ark Royal was probably damaged past repair, world leaders immediately interpreted this to mean that South Greece, which was quite likely the poorest nation in all of Europe (after so many years of civil war) never hit by a hydrogen bomb, a nation which literally had a hostile enemy directly to the North, had managed to sink three British carriers. One major newspaper simply broadcasted that "half the Royal Navy" was sunk, even though the lost ships were far far less than half (they were about half of then-active carriers, however). By any standard, the British still enjoyed one of the strongest navies on Earth, enough to typically best basically any major power not named the United States of America. However, that was no longer the impression, not in the world and especially not in Great Britain itself, where pretty much every British newspaper responded with some of the most literary, well-written displays of horror ever penned. The Conservatives more or less immediately terminated their supply-and-confidence agreement with the Labour government, very rationally concluding they would take back power easily. This only further added to the national humiliation when Prime Minister George Brown was forced to give a speech to the press calling for new elections while quite clearly visibly drunk. Although Prime Minister Brown did have a drinking problem, there was no evidence that was ever simultaneously drinking while making policy (the PR was scheduled at the last minute, once the election date was already decided at a suitably clever date). However, that didn't particularly matter to the British press, who found their villain.
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[1] OTL, both were meant to go to Suez, though only one got there. The HMS Eagle refit is also more extensive ITL.