> The Battle of Crete was a big-time screw-up. Evelyn Waugh describes it in his “Sword of Honour” trilogy.
Have you read “The Mark of the Lion”, biography of Charles Upham VC with Bar, by Kenneth L Sanford? Highly recommended. Covers the Crete fiasco brilliantly (Upham was awarded his first VC for Valor there, his second in North Africa).
Soon to be a movie. Rumored to star Russell Crowe (hope not!) as Upham. Filming starts in NZ soon.
*DieHard*
Oh, for the good old days of war movies, and the old-time stars.
No, I haven't read "The Mark of the Lion." But Waugh does a brilliant job portraying what it would have been like to have arrived in Crete with the last British troops sent in--just in time for the retreat and abandonment.
In his trilogy, Waugh pretty much shows all the warts involved in the conduct of the war by the British bureaucrats, not as an anti-war writer, but as a writer who thought some very basic mistakes were made--most of all, the mistake of admiring and allying with Stalin and letting him take over Yugoslavia and the rest of Eastern Europe. From his point of view, the problem with the war was that it wasn't heroic enough.