CRETE 1941
The Germans launched the first ever mass airborne invasion in history to seize the island from Greek, British and Commonwealth forces
One-hundred kilometres from the mainland, Crete is the secondlargest of the Greek islands, a strip of land measuring 258km from east to west and just 12km at its narrowest. Dominated by the White Mountains that form its spine, it has a rich history of invasion and occupation, with the Romans, Arabs and Venetians among others all having left their mark, especially on the likes of Khania, Rhethymnon and Heraklion on its more populated northern coast. Historically fought over, it had been a relative backwater for years until World War II erupted and thrust it centre stage in the spring of 1941.
The Mediterranean war
Fascist Italy took the lead for the Axis in the Mediterranean, its military weakness cruelly exposed by the December 1940 British offensive in the western desert that almost wiped out Mussolini’s forces in North Africa and saw more than 130,000 dispirited Italians shuffle into captivity. However, with total victory within its grasp, British Middle Eastern Command was ordered by London to send its best troops to Greece, where an earlier failed Italian invasion had forced Hitler’s hand. There, on the morning of Sunday 6 April 1941, Generalfedlmarschall Wilhelm List’s 12th Army crossed the Greek frontier and proceeded to drive the British into a hasty retreat that ended just over three weeks later with the evacuation of the British force back to Egypt.
Not all, however, arrived in Alexandria – some were dropped off in Crete instead. There, they joined the existing garrison and provided a muchneeded reinforcement in numbers, but not much else, the defeat in Greece having cost the already miserly equipped British and Commonwealth forces 8,000 vehicles, 233 guns, 104 tanks and most of the rest of their heavy equipment. Most disastrous of all, the Royal Air Force had lost 209 irreplaceable aircraft in the skies above Greece, meaning it had barely a handful of modern fighters and bombers to support the ground troops and Royal Navy.
Imperial Lion vs Nazi Eagle
Nevertheless, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill thought he had an answer – General Sir Bernard Freyberg VC. Freyberg was a living legend. A New Zealander nicknamed the ‘Salamander’ by Churchill for his determination to be in the heat of the action, he had won a Victoria Cross in World War I and commanded the 2nd New Zealand Division in the Greek campaign. Courageous,
honourable and tough, he was also prone to mood swings and trapped in a World War I mentality that led him to believe the threat to Crete would be from a seaborne invasion. After taking over command he cabled HQ Middle East: “…have just returned from final tour of defences. I feel greatly encouraged… I do not wish to be over-confident but I feel we will at least give excellent account of ourselves… Crete will be held.”
His opponents would be Kurt Student and Julius Ringel. The latter a bearded Austrian and fervent Nazi, whose 5th Gebirgsjäger (mountain) Division was a late addition to a plan wholly of the making of his ambitious fellow general, Student. Operation Mercury – as the invasion of Crete was coined – was Student’s dream, the zenith of his belief in the ability of airborne forces to achieve victory through mass air and glider drops. Having only been formed in the late 1930s, Nazi Germany’s fallschirmjägers (paratroopers) had achieved glory by carrying out a series of daring attacks during 1940-41, including the capture of Europe’s strongest fort – Belgium’s Eben-emael – by a handful of glider-borne troops. Now, a year later, he was determined to show the world what his paras could do.
Briefed to his commanders in a second-floor suite of Athens’ Hotel Grande Bretagne in “a quiet, clear and slightly vibrant voice”, as one of them later remembered, Student’s Mercury was a colossus. Split into three groups, the nearly 11,000 men of 7th Flieger Division would land and seize, Khania, the nearby airfield at Maleme, and then Rhethymnon and Heraklion further along the coast. They would be reinforced by Ringel’s mountain troopers, who would both fly in to captured air strips and be ferried in by sea. Student’s intelligence head, Major Reinhardt, assured the assembled group that there were only around 5,000 defenders and the Cretans themselves would welcome the invaders – it would be a walkover. He would be wrong on all counts.
20 May: D-day
Well before dawn thousands of paratroopers heard the command: “To the aircraft, march!” Each man held the metal clip end of the long static cord in his mouth, leaving his hands free to pull himself up into the belly of the aircraft. Then, he fastened the clip onto the jump-wire running at head height inside the plane. Each then took their seat, armed only with a pistol, all their other weapons and equipment packed into the four containers already loaded into the bomb bay. The containers would be dropped with them, but until they reached them the paras would be virtually defenceless.
The Luftwaffe had concentrated the bulk of its transport fleet of Ju 52s – Auntie Jus as they were nicknamed – and as the 500 aircraft headed south the sky brightened, promising a hot sunny day. Just after 0800hrs, as the Allied garrison stirred, Major Humphrey Dyer of the New Zealand Maori Battalion heard “a continuous, low roar. Above the horizon there appeared a long black line as if a flock of migrating birds… We looked, spellbound”. On board the armada the bulkhead lights were red – two minutes to go – then they changed to green. Adolf Strauch, of the 2nd Battalion, Oberst Alfred Sturm’s 2nd Parachute Regiment, recalled: “…we moved to the exit door on the port side of the aircraft… we could feel the air blowing in… he [our sergeant] flung himself forward and out of the machine to be followed by the rest of us in quick succession. When each man jumped the Ju bounced upwards a little as the load was lightened”. On the ground, Peter Butler recalled: “There was perhaps a minute’s awestruck inactivity while people realised what was going on, then firing started from all over the area.” Another defender said it was “like the opening of the duck shooting season… it was a concentration of some of the best small-arms fire I’ve ever seen”.
What followed was a slaughter. The slow transports made perfect targets, with aircraft riddled by fire, dozens of paratroopers dying before even jumping. Those that did manage to jump were shot at as they floated down, unable to steer themselves due to the design of their parachutes. Many that did reach the ground were killed before they could arm themselves. Bill Ritchie had just completed his morning ablutions when “a parachutist dropped near me and all I had with me was a spade; fortunately, I got him before he got out of his chute”. The 750 Germans in gliders were supposedly better off than their aircraft-borne comrades as they were fully armed and so could fight from the moment they touched down, but their wood and fabric gliders drew horrendous fire. “They came in so low you couldn’t miss," said Butler. "I saw one man firing a Bren [light machine-gun] from his shoulder literally tearing a glider to pieces – bits were flying off it. It landed about 20 yards away and only one man got out. He made about two steps before he was cut down.”
Large as the air armada was, it still wasn’t enough to take in all the paratroopers in one wave, so that afternoon a second assault went in, to the east. They met the same fate. By now alerted to what was coming, the defenders mauled the slow-flying transports, with one gunner seeing “planes burst into flames, then the crew inside feverishly leaping out like plums spilled from a burst bag. Some were burning as they jumped to earth. I saw one aircraft flying out to sea with six men trailing from it in the cord of their chutes”.
In the balance
Miraculously, some fallschirmjägers survived the carnage and began to fight back. In isolated groups they took cover wherever they could and fought it out with Freyberg’s men and Cretan civilians, who, far from welcoming them, were determined to wipe them out, as one group under a Leutnant Paul Muerbe discovered to their cost: “The platoon… became involved with strong guerrilla bands… of 73 men, Leutnant Muerbe and 52 men were killed.”
Heartened by reports from across the island, Freyberg signalled Middle East Command that, although a hard day, his men had seen off the German threat. But a lack of effective communications and an inability to understand the type of battle he was actually fighting blinded him to the reality that it was far from over, and in fact was being decided at the far west of his line at Maleme. Maleme’s airstrip was the Germans' main objective that first day. Take it and they would be able to fly in the reinforcements and matériel that would win them the battle. Student knew this implicitly and threw everything he had at it.
The key to Maleme was Hill 107, a feature rising up to the west that dominated the area. Held by a single battalion, the 22nd
New Zealand, it came under sustained attack from the start. Eugen Meindl – the senior German officer in the landings – gathered
“LIKE THE OPENING OF THE DUCK SHOOTING SEASON… IT WAS A CONCENTRATION OF SOME OF THE BEST SMALLARMS FIRE I’VE EVER SEEN”
up every paratrooper, gun and mortar he could find and desperately tried to take it. Under immense pressure, and in a welter of poor communication and misunderstanding, the New Zealanders' commanding officer – the Vc-holder Leslie Andrew – withdrew off the hill that night, and with it the battle was lost. Counterattacks to retake it were later launched but not followed through
– one supported by two Matilda tanks failed when one of the tanks broke down and the other’s turret mechanism jammed at the same time as the crew realised they had the wrong calibre of ammunition. Freyberg, still obsessing over a seaborne attack, failed to see that with Maleme the Germans already had a beachhead.
Battle at sea
The seaborne armada Freyberg so feared was a paper tiger. With the Kriegsmarine having no real presence in the eastern Mediterranean, Ringel had been forced to cobble together a makeshift force of some 63 vessels – mostly requisitioned Greek fishing caiques powered by a sail and a small auxiliary engine – escorted by a single Italian torpedo boat, the Lupo. Putting to sea, they crawled towards Crete at a sluggish seven knots, until on the night of 20/21 May they were found by Rear Admiral Irvine Glennie’s three cruisers and four destroyers. Most of the terrified gebirgsjägers had never been on a ship before and now “the sky was filled with brilliant white parachute flares that lit up whole areas of the sea... shells began to explode on the caique… we could see our boys jumping into the sea… the leutnant told us to put on our life jackets and remove our heavy nailed boots”. Another remembered: “Our caique suddenly turned over… and we were all flung into the sea… some of our casualties were caused when jägers were run down by the [British] ships.”
The German fleet was effectively destroyed and hundreds of men were drowned.
However, while the Royal Navy ruled the waves during darkness, it was a different story when the sun came up. With no air cover the Luftwaffe hunted Glennie and the rest of Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s force across the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean.
HMS Greyhound was the first to be sunk, followed by two cruisers: the Gloucester and Fiji. Darkness brought respite, but not for long as five destroyers under the command of Lord Louis Mountbatten found themselves pounded by Stukas the following dawn. The Kelly and the Kashmir were sent to the bottom in quick succession, and with their loss Cunningham felt the Navy’s defence of Crete was untenable.
21 May D-day + 1
Hauptmann Kleye – an officer on Student’s staff – was sent by his boss to find out what was going on and landed at Maleme at around 0700hrs on the morning of the 21 May. Although he came under fire, he reported the airfield as useable and from then on a steady stream of aircraft began to arrive, ferrying in desperately needed ammunition and supplies, but more importantly reinforcements and heavy weapons. Most of those fresh troops were Ringel’s gebirgsjägers and, supported by masses of Luftwaffe firepower, they began to roll up the British and Commonwealth positions from west to east.
Having come within an ace of losing the battle and the Third Reich’s only parachute division, Student was left kicking his heels
as the cautious and methodical Ringel took over the campaign. Freyberg’s command was effectively split into three, with the troops in Rhethymnon and Heraklion caught in their own struggles as the courageous New Zealanders fought on in Khania. Helmut Mahlke was a Stuka pilot flying overhead: “At 1000hrs on 26 May we attacked an enemy tented encampment on Crete… we flew at low level up and down the roads, bombing any worthwhile targets and machine-gunning individual vehicles of every description… there was very little flak to speak of.”
The efforts of Mahlke and his comrades were decisive. Constant air attack caused terrible losses and robbed the remaining defenders of any ability to coordinate their efforts and counterattack, and even if they had it begged the question: with what? They had hardly any heavy weapons, with most of their artillery being captured Italian and French models, many without sights or more than a few rounds. Almost all their armour had already been destroyed or rendered unusable, they had no air cover, and even rifle ammunition was becoming scarce.
Crete abandoned
The same morning that Mahlke made his ground attack the exhausted Freyberg cabled Cairo: “In my opinion the limit of endurance has been reached by the troops under my command… our position here is hopeless.” Shocked at what they regarded as a sudden turnaround in fortune, permission was reluctantly given to evacuate the island. The surviving troops from Khania headed south on the single road to the small port town of Sphakia. Mercilessly bombed and strafed by the Luftwaffe, a Scottish officer – Freddie Graham – described the retreat: “The road was jammed with troops in no formed bodies shambling along in desperate haste. Dirty, weary and hungry, they were a conglomeration of Australians, a few New Zealanders and British, and Greek refugees… a rabble one could call them, nothing else.”
As thousands of dispirited British and Commonwealth troops streamed south, those at Rhethymnon and Heraklion bravely fought on. Lieutenant-colonel Ian Campbell of the Australian 2/1st was leading his men against a German position in Perivolia: “Nine men were ordered to move to a low stone wall
about 25 yards from the German front line… they raced along the low hedge to a well. The leader, Corporal Tom Willoughby, was nearly there before he fell. The man carrying the
Bren went down. Someone following picked it up and went on until he was killed, and so the gun was relayed until it almost reached the well in the hands of the last man, and he was killed too as he went down with it. Eight brave men died there… the ninth man, Private Proud, was hit on the helmet as he jumped up and fell back stunned.”
Even as Graham’s "rabble" reached
Sphakia, the Royal Navy was steeling itself to run the gauntlet and save as much of the garrison as it could. In an heroic effort worthy of the finest traditions of the senior service, starting on the night of 28 May, Cunningham’s warships evacuated almost 11,000 men from the southern port, and another 4,000 from Heraklion on the northern coast.
By the morning of 1 June it was over. British and Commonwealth losses included just under 2,000 dead and the same number wounded, with another 5,000 left behind to trudge into captivity, one of whom was Campbell, whose mighty defence of Rhethymnon counted for nought as the Navy was unable to reach him and his gallant men, forcing them to surrender.
Terrible though these figures were, they were overshadowed by the German tally.
“IN MY OPINION THE LIMIT OF ENDURANCE HAS BEEN REACHED BY THE TROOPS UNDER MY COMMAND… OUR POSITION HERE IS HOPELESS”
Some 6,580 men were killed, wounded or missing, half of this number being paratroopers killed on the first day of the operation. The Germans also lost some 150 transport aircraft, which would be sorely missed in the upcoming invasion of the Soviet Union. But it was the heavy losses among the ranks of the elite fallschirmjäger that were the most damaging. One of the best-trained, best-equipped and most highly motivated spearhead formations in the entire Wehrmacht had been gutted in less than a fortnight.
One of their number who survived, Adolf Strauch, reflected on an operation in which “every third man had been killed, every second man wounded. Our victory was no victory”.
His commander, Student, agreed: “The battle of Crete… resulted in the loss of so many valuable parachutists that it meant the end of the German airborne landing forces which I had created.”