Operation Albumen: The Great Cretan Airfield Barbecue of 1942
June 1942. Malta is on its last legs, starving under a Luftwaffe stranglehold. The only hope is a fast convoy from Alexandria, and the only way to distract the Germans is to set half of Crete on fire. Enter David Stirling’s travelling circus of chaos merchants.
Stirling, being Stirling, had already hogged every decent target in Libya for the SAS. The Special Boat Section (SBS) got handed the leftovers: four airfields on Crete. Mike Kealy thought that was the deal—until he discovered Stirling had quietly nicked the crown jewel, Heraklion, for a scratch team of one Greek guide, four French SAS lunatics, and the aristocratic Captain Lord Jellicoe as tour guide.
The SBS were not amused. One officer summed it up perfectly: arguing with David Stirling was like trying to stop a steamroller with a banana. Guess who the banana was.
Submarines slipped out of Alexandria on 6 June. Four nights later, rubber boats hissed onto Cretan beaches. Waiting in the darkness was the legendary Captain Tom Dunbabin—part scholar, part pirate—who’d been hiding in the mountains since the 1941 invasion, living on goat milk and pure spite.
Then the fun began.
- At Tymbaki, David Sutherland crept up excitedly… only to find the airfield empty. Not a single plane. He probably kicked a rock and swore in fluent Glaswegian.
- At Maleme, Mike Kealy and Tramp Allott discovered the Germans had turned the place into Fort Knox’s angry older brother—electrified wire, searchlights, machine-gun nests, and enough snarling Alsatians to make Crufts look understaffed. They took one look, muttered “sod this,” and tiptoed away.
- But at Kastelli, George Duncan hit the jackpot. The defences were a joke. In under two hours he and his lads slapped bombs on eight aircraft, six trucks, four bomb dumps, seven petrol dumps and two oil dumps. Every timer ticked perfectly. They were halfway up the nearest mountain when the whole lot went up like the world’s angriest bonfire. Flames lit the sky, secondary explosions rattled windows ten miles away, and at least seventy German soldiers suddenly discovered the downside of sloppy sentry duty.
Cairo later heard that once the Germans figured out how the raiders had arrived and left, they were so embarrassed they lined up every sentry on duty that night and shot them for carelessness. Harsh, but fair.
One airfield properly roasted, two written off as impossible, one mysteriously aircraft-free. Not a bad night’s work for a bunch of madmen who’d paddled ashore with nothing but explosives and bad intentions.
The convoy got through. Malta lived to fight another day. And somewhere in the Cretan hills, Tom Dunbabin poured himself a well-earned raki and toasted the beautiful insanity of it all.
