June 12th – June 28th 1943 – Rhodes - Operation Jasper - Part III – The Liberation of Rhodes
Any hopes the Italians might have had about reinforcements to replace their losses were swiftly dashed. It took the High Command in Rome until the 14th to even order the gathering of a relief force for dispatch to Rhodes and it didn’t set out until the 19th. When word of the force being dispatched to their aid reached Admiral Campioni [1], he was far from pleased. What was on its way was less than five hundred men packed onto commandeered fishing boats and a single small formerly Greek freighter, now renamed
Cavalluccio Marino carrying ammunition, supplies and fuel for the troops defending Rhodes, though by this point the Italian forces on Rhodes had no mechanized transportation and the last operational Regia Aeronautica aircraft had been evacuated. The escort provided for this convoy was also completely inadequate, consisting of a pair of MAS boats, numbers
43 and
77, that had been patrolling the area and had the misfortune to be available when the orders went out. Admiral Campioni not unreasonably concluded that there was little point in waiting on this convoy and began falling back to what he hoped was a more defensible line, a decision that was clearly vindicated as things went badly for the convoy from the start. The submarine
HMS Usk along with several others had been assigned to watch the waters around Rhodes and early on the 20th she spotted the convoy [2]. The
Cavalluccio Marino was in an exposed spot on the outside of the cluster of fishing vessels rather being in the centre of the convoy and the two MAS boats were positioned at the front and rear of the convoy. They were watching for aircraft and surface ships, since they were poorly equipped for anti-submarine warfare.
Usk fired a spread of torpedoes, and one struck the
Cavalluccio Marino, which was more than enough to inflict fatal damage and she sank in under ten minutes.
MAS 43 tried to chase
Usk, essentially trying to bluff her into diving and fleeing, while
MAS 77 picked up survivors from the freighter. Unfortunately for the Italians, the captain of
Usk called
MAS 43’s bluff and continued to shadow the convoy, only briefly breaking off to send a report on its speed and course. There being no other targets worth expending torpedoes on the
Usk was merely a spectator as the remains of the convoy chose to carry on to Rhodes, though the commander had to veto the over eager suggestion from his first officer that they surface and engage with their deck gun! Around 1300 hours the convoy was intercepted by a trio of Bristol Beaufighters who conducted an attack with rockets and cannon that sank one fishing boat and badly damaged
MAS 77, which had to be abandoned as its engine was beyond repair. Despite being expected to sink
MAS 77 somehow stayed afloat and was found battered and broken on the coast of Rhodes on the 23rd of June, by which time the surviving fishing boats of the convoy were also in Greek hands [3].
The convoy was supposed to rendezvous with the Italian forces and offload at a small cove which they reached on the 22nd of June, having waited for morning to make their approach. Even if the
Cavalluccio Marino had survived offloading it would have been a panful task, assuming any of the troops waiting there had been willing or able to assist in the landing. Instead as the survivors of the relief force began to offload in the absence of any communication with their comrades on the Island the convoy came under artillery fire from the Greek troops had been dispatched to the cove in response to reports of the convoy’s movements, and the nearest Italian troops were now more than twelve kilometres further south and incapable of offering any support. The shelling created panic among the soldiers already making for shore in small boats, though none of the boats were actually hit by the shells but several capsized, either owing to near misses from the shells or the efforts of the men aboard them to turn back. Several hits did land on the fishing boats and one on
MAS 43. This hit did little damage but did persuade the crew of the MAS boat to withdraw, leaving the fishing boats to their own devices. One of them boats was set on fire by a shell from the light artillery pieces and the boats which chose to make for shore came under mortar and machine gun fire. The fire from the hidden defenders stopped almost as swiftly as it had started, and a voice called out in halting Italian for the soldiers on the beach to surrender. Given that artillery shells were still falling on the fishing boats, where both the troops and the crews were trying to abandon ship or flee, the Italians had little choice and the white flag was soon raised, with the inevitable jokes from the Greek troops afterwards about how it was probably the first thing the Italians had packed when preparing for the landing. The truth was that having been sent into ambush with no support there was little else the Italian troops could have done except die in a futile effort to break out, and the jokes aside the Greeks were deeply relieved that Italians has shown common sense [4].
The Italian garrison forces had no idea about the fate of their reinforcements until the Greeks started broadcasting radio messages stating that they had destroyed the relief force at sea, a gross exaggeration intended to undermine Italian morale and reinforced by having Italian prisoners calling on their comrades to lay down their arms. Trying to destroy the morale of the Italian garrison forces was a futile effort as it was already at rock bottom by the 22nd. Efforts to establish a new defensive line had been thwarted by the presence of the Stuarts and Crusaders of 4th Independent Armoured. The Stuarts were a constant nuisance, outflanking and harassing the Italian infantry as they tried to redeploy and where they did manage to dig in the Crusaders rolled up and blasted their improvised defences with 6pdr HE rounds. The Crusaders had received applique armour to upgrade their protection, though this had reduced the tank’s top speed, which was not really a consideration on Rhodes. The Italians were limited to the speed of marching feet, and the occasional animal drawn cart, while lacking any weapon that posed a serious threat to the Greek armour. Some tank traps were prepared to try and disable and destroy the advancing tanks, but all the Greek losses can be attributed to accidents or wear and tear rather than enemy action. The major impediment to the operation of their armour was the difficulties involved in getting fuel and ammunition forward to keep them running [5].
Admiral Campioni found himself caught between two increasingly irreconcilable objectives. One was to keep in contact with the coast, in the hope that some further relief force, or evacuation effort might arrive. By this point he was out of communication with his superiors and unaware that the situation on Rhodes had been written off after a report from
MAS 43 was relayed to Rome. Campioni’s other objective was to avoid his forces being outflanked to the west and south, which allow would Greek troops to attack the rear of his position. By the 26th the eastern most elements of the Italian force had been pushed back all the way to the coast, leaving the entire force trapped in a roughly semi-circular perimeter close to Fatou. At this point the Italians were down to about nineteen hundred effectives, still possessing a moderate supply of ammunition for their rifles, but out of almost everything else. A small squadron of Greek flagged fighter bombers had been deployed to a forward airfield on Crete and these now went in action and began a series of attacks against the Italian positions throughout the 26th and 27th, accompanied by a softening up effort by light artillery and tank guns. On the afternoon of the 27th the inevitable happened and a group of Italian officers were allowed through the lines to offer the surrender of the Italian troops, Campioni having being injured during a bombing raid, which had forced to accept the necessity of surrender. The formalities were swiftly completed, and the Italians laid down their arms at 2000 hours, with Rhodes officially liberated on the 28th of June 1943 [6].
For the Greek government the liberation of Rhodes achieved all their goals. It showed their troops were willing and able to take the battle to the Axis and it bolstered their credibility with the population on mainland Greece as radio broadcasts made great play of Operation Jasper. In a somewhat darker turn of events Rhodes also offered a base of operations from which the Greek government could carry out operations on the mainland with less scrutiny from the British and the Americans, and some of these operations were directed against the Communist partisans, which created an enmity that only grew as the war drew to a close [7].
For the Italian High Command, the reaction was one of anger, not at the defending troops but because they had been advocating pulling back from the Peloponnese for months, recognizing that the islands were far too difficult to defend with the resources currently available and they had suffered a humiliating and unnecessary defeat because of the insistence on defending every corner of Mussolini’s imperial ambitions. That there had been no withdrawals came back to the desire of Count Ciano and his ministers to appease the Germans, and they wished to be seen to falling in line with Hitler’s policy of holding every inch of ground, regardless of strategic reality. The loss of Rhodes only served to fuel further discontent in Rome, and in cities such as Turin where it was threatening to reach boiling point and the long suppressed Communist movement was coming to the fore in taking advantage of the rising tide of anger. Hitler was certainly concerned by events on Rhodes, fearing that it might indeed be a prelude to a full-scale assault on Greece and the rest of the Balkans. To the dismay of the General Staff he ordered that Greece be reinforced with more Heer troops, events in Rhodes having once again demonstrated how unreliable that in fact the Italians were, indeed he was beginning to voice the opinion that he had been deceived previously, that the Italians were just another breed of mongrel sub humans, not the inheritors of Imperial Rome, and should be treated accordingly. The General Staff shrugged off this ominous development and prevaricated over carrying out Hitler’s orders to redeploy troops, delaying long enough that the orders were rescinded when Operation Millennium was launched, not that this brought much cheer to von Kleist and his staff given the massive setbacks Germany was to suffer in Operation Citadel and on D-Day [8].
[1] OTL Admiral Campioni was in command on Crete during the battle with the Wehrmacht when Italy surrendered in 1943 and was executed by the Italian puppet government in 1944. Suffice to say he will live a rather longer life as an Allied POW than as German one.
[2] Like Campioni
HMS Usk has a rather better fate here as IOTL she was sunk in April 1941.
[3] The convoy is a classic example of needing to be seen to do something, regardless of whether it makes sense.
[4] So the relief effort ends as a bit of a farce rather than a tragedy.
[5] Neither tank is really a first line machine at this point, but more than good enough to cope with conditions on Rhodes. By the next time the Greeks mount a significant operation they will have upgraded somewhat.
[6] So yes Campioni was wounded and will walk with a limp for the rest of his life, which will last for several more decades ITTL.
[7] Shifting political balances in the ranks of the Allies are going to make restraining communist expansion a political/strategic goal as we enter the final phase of the war in Europe.
[8] Both coming very soon.
