"We hoped that 25,000 to 90,000 good {roope—I am making it a little Yague—with artillery and a prop tion of tanks aided by Greek forces would be able to destroy parachute fand glider landings of the enemy 14 prevent him using the alrfelds fand harbours, Our army was to des troy the air borne attacks while the navy held off or destroyed seaborne attacks, But there was a time-limit, The action of the navy in maintain" ing a northern sea. guard without adequate alr defence was bound to be very costly. It is known how serious those losses were, "We could only stand a certain proportion of naval losses before the northern sea guard of the fleet would have to be withdrawn, If in. the meanwhile the army could succeed Beating off the head of the whole terrific apparatus of the air borne invvasion before the naval time-limit or Jos limit was reached, then the enemy would have to begin all over again and, having regard to the en-form ous and unprecedented scale of {the operation and'the losses he would have incurred, he might well for the time being at least have broken it foff—at any rate there would have been a long delay before he could ave mounted it again, "That was the basis on which the decision was. taken.
"What would our orities have said it we had given up Crete without firing a shot. We should have been {old that this pusillanimous fight had surrendered to the enemy the key of the eastern Mediterranean and that our communications with Malta and
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.