Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (37 page)

Whether or not winning the battle would necessarily have been a good thing in the long term has stimulated a lively hypothetical debate. Many people more militarily expert than Chips Channon have argued that it would have been impossible to maintain a garrison on the island and supply it. But no British troops would have been needed. Raising a second Cretan division combined with other Greek troops escaped from the mainland and arming them with captured German weaponry would have been sufficient.

An unexpected argument has, however, been advanced against this. It runs roughly as follows. If Crete had been held, the King of the Hellenes, George II, would have insisted on retaining command in this the last corner of his kingdom. But the combination of his intransigence, Cretan anti-monarchism and political unrest in the Greek armed forces which led to the mutinies in Egypt in 1944 would have brought on the Greek civil war even more rapidly, and reduced any British influence either on the mainland or on Crete. A victory for the Anglo-Greek forces in May 1941

would thus have led to Communist control of the whole country on the German withdrawal in 1944.

Leaving aside the unpredictability of Greek politics, if the Allies had won the Battle of Crete Hitler would not have switched his attention from Barbarossa for another attempt to invade the island. He had always been sceptical of Student's plan and had no personal stake in it. He would only have been provoked into a second invasion of Crete if long-range bomber bases had been established there in late 1942 or early 1943 to attack the Ploesti oilfields with Liberators. Then he would have been forced to divert badly needed resources from the Russian front. Britain had no idea that spring quite how important Crete could have become to the war effort, and many preferred to overlook it afterwards simply because the battle had been lost. American influence subsequently ensured that attention was concentrated on Italy, not the Balkans, so the whole weight of the war shifted away from the Eastern Mediterranean.

Yet for the Cretans themselves, and a handful of British, the battle for Crete was far from over.

21

Reprisal, Evasion and Resistance

In the short period of silence after the fighting wa? over, many Cretans felt a bewildered exasperation with British incompetence and the refusal to give them arms. This mood did not last long. Hatred of the invader, and thus affinity with their allies, was soon resuscitated by German reprisals.

German resentment was strong, especially among the rear echelon as is so often the case. The Wehrmacht had just suffered its heaviest losses so far during the war. Hurt pride was fuelled by anger that so many of their finest troops had been killed before they even touched the ground. They somehow felt that the British should have allowed them to land first. But that was nothing beside their anger at the resistance of armed Cretan civilians, whom they regarded with dread and loathing.

Every paratrooper on joining his regiment received a copy of General Student's 'Ten Commandments of the Parachute Division'. The ninth read: 'Against a regular enemy fight with chivalry, but give no quarter to guerrillas.' This dictum reflected a very Germanic attitude to the rules of war: no one but professional warriors should be allowed to fight. And in Crete paratroopers had encountered a popular resistance unprecedented in the Wehrmacht's experience.

The excessively high casualties of the Parachute Division were soon being explained away by outraged stories in which Cretan crones with kitchen knives cut the throats of paratroopers caught in trees, and roving bands of civilians tortured wounded German soldiers lying helpless on the field of battle. As soon as these accounts reached Berlin, Goering ordered Student to instigate an immediate judicial enquiry and carry out reprisals. In typical Nazi fashion, the reprisals took place before the twelve military judges had had time to report their findings.

The first affidavits were taken on 26 May and the whole process continued for three months. Judge Scholz, in a preliminary report on 4 June, wrote that: 'Many parachutists were subjected to inhuman treatment or mutilated', and that 'Greek civilians participated in the fight as
francs-tireurs.'
Later on, after a more careful study, Judge Rudel could only account for about twenty-five cases of mutilation on the entire island, and almost all of those had almost certainly been inflicted after death. But General Student had already issued the following order on 31 May: It is certain that the civilian population including women and boys have taken part in the fighting, committed sabotage, mutilated and killed wounded soldiers. It is therefore high time to combat all cases of this kind, to undertake reprisals and punitive expeditions which must be carried through with exemplary terror.

The harshest measures must indeed be taken and I order the following: shooting for all cases of proven cruelty, and I wish this to be done by the same units who have suffered such atrocities. The following reprisals will be taken:

1. Shooting

2. Fines

3. Total destruction of villages by burning

4. Extermination of the male population of the territory in question My authority will be necessary for measures under 3 and 4. All these measures must, however, be taken rapidly and omitting all formalities. In view of the circumstances the troops have a right to this and there is no need for military tribunals to judge beasts and assassins.

When this order was issued, a number of officers protested against the indiscriminate execution of civilians. Major Count von Uxkiill, the Parachute Division's chief of staff, was fearless in his denunciation of the plan and when it was announced, he is said to have stormed out of the conference followed by several other officers.* Colonel Bruno Bräuer, who later became the General commanding the garrison of Crete, derided the stories of torture as fabrications.

* There is some doubt, however, whether such a meeting took place, and Baron von der Heydte, who was a friend of Uxküll's, does not remember it.

Inevitably there were a few officers prepared to lead the execution squads. At Kondomari, where about sixty civilians were shot, the firing party was commanded by Lieutenant Horst Trebes who had taken part in Dr Neumann's occupation of Hill 107. Trebes, a former member of the Hitler Youth, was in a merciless mood: he was the only officer of his battalion to have come through unscathed. (Trebes met his death in Normandy three years later when commanding a paratroop battalion.) But Franz-Peter Weixler, the journalist who survived the glider crash, was court martialled and jailed for helping a Cretan to escape and for having taken photographs of the executions.

A German military doctor sent to investigate the charges of mutilation in Kastelli Kissamou, where Lieutenant Miirbe's detachment had been almost wiped out, reported that German troops had executed 200 male civilians because of the mutilation stories. (According to Judge Rudel there had been six to eight cases there, the highest number on the island.) The villages of Kakopetro, Floria and Prasses also suffered. The later, and more open, German Command under General Bräuer recorded the execution of a total of 698 alleged
francs-tireurs,
and 180 men who came under General Student's heading 'Extermination of the male population of the territory in question'.

On 3 June Kandanos paid the price for resisting the advance of the motor-cycle detachments to the south coast. 'This is the site of Kandanos', began the German proclamation displayed at the blackened site. 'It was destroyed as a reprisal for the killing of twenty-five German soldiers.' And on 1 August a punitive drive south of Canea — 'Special Action No. 1' — destroyed more villages, including Alikianou, Fournes and Skenes. A further 145 men and 2 women were shot, the majority of them from Fournes. But most of the executions had already been carried out before 10 June, when the State Department in Washington informed the British Embassy of Berlin's intention to try British and Cretan prisoners for atrocities committed against German paratroopers. The message said that 'certain punitive measures, at least with respect to the Cretans, appear to be necessary for the parachute troops'.

Agathängelos Xirouhakis, Bishop of Kydonia and Apokoronas, tried to persuade General Waldemar Andrae, the general who replaced Student as commander on the island, that his policy would only generate further bloodshed on both sides. Andrae 'was inclined to agree', recorded the report compiled under his successor General Bräuer, 'but wished that a demonstration of force should take place first so that the gesture might not be taken for a sign of weakness. This demonstration of force was termed

"League of Nations Undertaking".'

However, this bizarrely misnamed operation took the form of another punitive expedition rather than a display of strength. On 1 September 'a reinforced regiment [presumably about two thousand strong]

of German mountain troops surrounded the Omalos plain in the White Mountains having approached from several directions. Sporadic resistance was encountered, but no proper guerrilla organization.

German losses were one dead and two wounded. The population had to submit to the inquest of the Expedition Tribunals. The Tribunals found 110 men guilty, including 39 civilians and 6 British military personnel; all faced summary execution for attempted resistance.*

* Of the 1,135 Cretans executed from the start of the invasion until 9 September 1941, only 224 were sentenced by military tribunal.

The German Command considered the expedition a complete success, having given the population the impression that even in the most distant areas it was impossible to escape the discipline of the conquerors.'

General Ringel, the commander of the mountain troops, was in the White Mountains for other purposes. He was a keen chamois hunter at home in the Alps, and longed to bag one of the rare Cretan ibex. Manoussos Manoussakis, a young Cretan reserve officer who had gone to the Askifou plain to buy lentils because of the food shortage in Canea, found himself drafted as Ringel's guide, but he managed to avoid finding him an ibex.

The German propaganda machine soon changed direction. The English-language edition of
Signal
magazine showed photographs of paratroopers with local children entitled: 'Despite the tough battle no resentiments
[sic]
on Crete.'

For the Cretans, however, hatred of the enemy was so great that it sometimes went to irrational lengths. Even after the war, tractors and a steam-roller used on the Omalos plain to build an airfield were destroyed simply because they were German.

Occupied Crete was divided between the main German zone and a subsidiary Italian zone. The Italian forces, for the most part consisting of the Siena Division commanded by General Angelo Carta, were based in the two eastern provinces of Siteia and Lasithi. General Carta had his headquarters in Neapolis and ran his zone, admittedly a more pacific part of the island, with an easy-going attitude of which the Germans disapproved. Wanted men like the Communist leader Miltiades Porphyroyennis, on whom Harold Caccia had taken pity, were to hide in the Italian zone.

The three German-occupied provinces of Canea, Rethymno and Heraklion were controlled by garrisons in the major towns and a network of smaller outposts commanded by a sergeant or sergeant major. Along the southern coast, which became a prohibited area once British assistance to the Cretan resistance began in earnest, a line of linked guardposts was established in a vain attempt to prevent clandestine landings.

Predictably, the mountain villages with their warlike traditions and spirit of resistance represented the greatest threat to the Germans. Troops were most reluctant to venture out in highland areas. Often on approaching likely ambush points they would spray bushes with sub-machine gun fire as a precaution.

The large towns which were heavily garrisoned proved much easier to cow. But the Germans'

comparative lack of success in recruiting informers made it far harder to infiltrate nascent resistance networks, whether Nationalist or Communist, than in the rest of occupied Europe.

The German commander of the
Festung,
the Fortress of Crete, had his headquarters in Canea. His residence was the Venizelos family house in Halepa, built early in the century by a German architect.

The first
Festung
commander was General Andrae. He was succeeded by the more enlightened Bräuer in the autumn of 1942, and Bräuer was succeeded by the most hated of them all, General Müller, in the spring of 1944.

In addition, there was a divisional commander who had his headquarters south of Heraklion at Arkhanes and his residence at the Villa Ariadne. Müller made his reputation for brutality while holding this position before his promotion to commander of the
Festung.
His replacement, General Kreipe, abducted in a joint Anglo-Cretan operation in April 1944, was the last. The total of the Axis forces fluctuated greatly, according to the fortunes of the North African campaign, the situation on the Eastern Front, or the perceived threat of invasion: it ranged from around 75,000 in 1943 to just over 10,000 at the time of the surrender in 1945.

Conditions in Crete deteriorated drastically under the occupation. The threat of starvation ebbed and flowed, but fortunately famine never took hold as it did on the mainland where many thousands died.

For example, in Asi Gonia — an area where sheep-stealing was endemic and even the priest overlooked the provenance of his meat — only the high-principled schoolmaster died of hunger. But basic materials were very hard to find. Leather became virtually unobtainable, so soles were cut from old car tyres. A skilled cutter could get up to a dozen pairs from each tyre.

Life was most difficult in the big towns, especially for anyone without peasant relatives. But those with easy access to produce could do more than deal in the local black market. German officers and NCOs proved surprisingly easy to corrupt as the occupation continued. One family in Heraklion obtained the release of a relative by supplying the Cretan mistress of a German officer with food.