Operation Mercury (6 page)

Even when they reached their new positions the Allies were as exposed as ever. Wavell now flew to Athens to take stock of the unfolding disaster and to confer with both Wilson and the Greeks. The King was already preparing to evacuate his court and entourage to Crete and, after receiving their Commander-in-Chief's pessimistic report of 21 April, the War Cabinet confirmed the order to withdraw. It was none too soon for the Thermopylae line was now looking untenable; many units had lost much or all of their artillery and anti-tank weapons, and casualties, principally caused by air attacks, were mounting.

Evacuation, in the teeth of German hegemony in the skies was problematic, Piraeus was impractical because of this which meant the withdrawal would have to be accomplished through the necklace of small harbours further south in the Peloponnese. All heavy equipment would have to be rendered useless and abandoned, movement for the fighting formations was only permitted at night with the troops filtering down to their evacuation points, non combatant units had to take their chances during the lengthening spring days; easy meat for the prowling Stukas.

Sir Lawrence Pumphrey, and the Noodles, had bypassed Athens as they withdrew under the cover of darkness and at Marathon experienced the demoralising chore of disabling their surviving vehicles and guns. From Ruffina they were taken off by HMS
Fearless
. Though they had been through the whole campaign, they had not once sighted the enemy, other than the prowling Stukas and Me109s.

On 22 April the Greeks formally surrendered and by the 30th the evacuation by sea from the beaches was largely complete, despite a successful attempt by German paratroops to seize a vital crossing at Corinth by a coup de main. The Navy, not for the first, or last, time had delivered the rump of the army, some 80 per cent, from certain death or capture. Behind them the defeated army left all of their vehicles, heavy guns, armour and anti-tank weapons with great quantities of small arms, spares and supplies. Brigadier Brunskill recalled the moment of his deliverance:

Whilst the evacuation was a brilliant operation, superbly handled by the Navy, it remained a perilous operation; the departing ships, once the sun had risen, exposed to the fury of the Luftwaffe. The captain of HMS
Calcutta
graphically describes the intensity of the aerial harassment:

The news from the Western Desert where Rommel and his Afrika Korps were making their presence felt was also disheartening; a lightening strike, launched on 24 March, had retaken Benghazi and was rushing eastwards toward Egypt. Wavell's stock plummeted and it was inevitable he would be selected as the chosen scapegoat for the Greek disaster.

At 5.54 p.m. on 25 April some 5,000 men from the 19 Brigade were landed at Souda Bay; the first contingent of Wilson's battered evacuees, ‘… They had very little in the way of arms or personal equipment; they were dirty, ill organised, with no proper chain of command existing, “bomb-shy” and conscious of their recent defeat.'
²⁵
Crete; the backwater, ill manned, barely considered, was about to become the new front line.

General Kurt Student was a man with a mission. His objective was to ensure the capture of Crete, which now began to enter the strategic arena, was accomplished by the parachute troops under his command, the elite
Fallschirmjäger
in what would be the ultimate test of airborne operations; ‘vertical envelopment' from the skies.

Parachutists were a relatively new phenomenon in warfare, those who had slogged through the blood soaked horrors of the trenches had witnessed the birth of air power. It was a logical development of larger transport planes in the twenties that raised the possibility of these being used to outflank enemy positions from the air and drop infantry behind the lines to seize key objectives.

This delivery of men and matériel could be managed either by parachute or by glider or, latterly, by a judicious combination of both. The advantage of dropping from the skies was that the parachutists could land virtually anywhere and, as it would be hoped, muster swiftly on the ground to maximise the advantage of surprise.

The abiding weakness was that it was not possible to drop heavy weapons; these could only be accommodated by the gliders. The obvious role for airborne forces was to seize key objectives behind the enemy lines, interdict or sabotage his communications and be able to ‘hang on' until relieved by their advancing infantry.

An additional and more ambitious use was for the parachutists and glider borne troops to be dropped some way behind the enemy's line with a view to attaining a more ambitious strategic objective. For this, maximum support from friendly aircraft for tactical firepower and re-supply was essential. The descent upon Crete would be just such an operation, the most ambitious yet undertaken by an airborne spearhead.

Soviet Russia was the first of the great powers to experiment with paratroops; as early as 1930 airborne contingents were featuring in exercises but the doctrine went into decline when its champion, Marshal Tukhachevsky, fell victim to one of Stalin's relentless internecine purges.

Germany had, however, watched developments by the Red Army with interest; both cooperated in the 1920s and 1930s in accordance with the terms of the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo. The restriction on German military expansion, imposed under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and which had fettered the Weimar Republic, was repudiated by Hitler in 1935. This allowed the introduction of the Ju52/3
²
as a suitable workhorse for the Luftwaffe.

Major F.W. Immanns was the first commander of the nascent airborne arm in 1936, initially under the control of the army rather than the air force. The type of parachute adopted was the back pack version opened by a static line. In the course of the following year a formal training school was set up which also trained personnel from the Luftwaffe; not to be outdone the SS and even the SA sent odd detachments for training.

Immanns' successor, Colonel Bassenge, found that no coherent doctrine was emerging with men being trained in penny packets from rival services. Despite a limited showing in the 1937 manoeuvres, a viable parachute arm seemed unlikely until Student was appointed as operational commander.

A career soldier and consummate professional, Student had begun his career as a lieutenant in a Jäger battalion before the Great War. It was in the air rather than on the ground that he earned his reputation as a determined and fearless warrior, flying first against the Russians and latterly over the Western Front in the deadly circling dogfights fought out over the web of trenches. Shot down and badly wounded in 1917 he survived the war but saw the lustre of his profession dimmed by the savage repression of Versailles.

Student, the heroic flying ace, was not long unemployed, joining the fledgling and semi clandestine cadre of officers responsible for keeping alive the spirit of an air force despite the restrictions imposed by the Allies. With the emergence of Hitler and the triumph of National Socialism in 1933, the chains were cast off and the Luftwaffe was set up under Goering, another celebrated fighter pilot. Whilst he showed little inclination to politics and did not hunger for the laurels and spoils of patronage, Student was ambitious, extremely able and, in the pursuit of his goals, ruthless.

His aloof manner and intellectual arrogance won few friends amongst his conventionally minded colleagues though his care for the men who served under him, his fearlessness and dash, earned him the unstinting admiration of his subordinates. This was an officer who led from the front and showed an almost total disregard for danger:

Student was able to cultivate a special relationship with Hermann Goering - the idea that airborne operations should be entirely the preserve of the Luftwaffe appealed to his mania for self-aggrandisement. Having established a corridor to the seat of authority and resources Student, formally appointed on 4 June 1938, set to work with a will.

His first task was to weld the various fledgling detachments into a whole, the
7th Flieger
division of the Luftwaffe. The development of the type DFS 230 glider
⁴
provided just the type of aircraft necessary to facilitate the creation of a glider borne arm. Although the Sudeten crisis of 1938 was averted by frantic diplomacy, Student took the chance to mount a full-scale exercise deploying 250 Ju52s over open ground. A carefully staged performance which, whilst it impressed Goering, failed to make an equal impression on the General's more sceptical Wehrmacht colleagues, already tainted by jealousy at his easy access to the fat
Reichsmarschall
.

The army withdrew its personnel from the airborne division which was left bereft of men. Undaunted, Student continued to preach his tactical doctrine and when control of the rump of the airborne arm came under full Luftwaffe control at the end of the year, it seemed his moment had come. With a second
Fallschirmjäger
regiment being raised in 1939, Student perfected his blueprint for airborne operations. His elite would operate on the ground like a conventional brigade with integral signals, mortar and light artillery.
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From the beginning admission into the ranks of the parachutists conferred special status. These young recruits were subject to a gruelling training regime and frequently came through the Hitler Youth, the very ideal of the Aryan warrior, fit descendants of Teutonic Knights and torch bearers of the Nazi ideology.

These young lions were marked by their distinctive uniforms, originally a blue-grey coverall over which they wore a rush green smock with zip breast pockets. This reached to just below the knee but could be fastened up around the upper thighs so as to prevent the parachute harness from fouling. With their trousers tucked into black calf length jump boots and their equally unique round padded helmets, every facet of their appearance marked them as an elite.

Specialist troops required specialist weapons and whilst many
Fallschirmjäger
went into battle carrying the standard infantry rifle, the KAR-98K, 7.9 mm and with a five round box magazine, others carried the MP-40 machine pistol, a 9 mm weapon with a 32 round magazine. This, developed from the earlier MP-38, was primarily designed as a paratroopers' weapon; light and with a high rate of fire it was ideal for airborne operations.

Additional and heavier fire support was provided by the 7.92 mm MG 34. Defined as a light machine gun, but extremely well designed, robust and versatile, it could be used by one man as a section support or by a crew of three as a medium machine gun. It could fire 800 - 900 rounds per minute.

All small arms and machine guns were packed in containers for the jump and it was vital the troops accessed these as soon after landing as possible. When they left the plane the individual paratroops carried only a fighting knife and a 9 mm Walther P-38 semiautomatic pistol.

Their British adversaries, encountering these elite warriors for the first time on Crete, were impressed:

Student would have been gratified, his men were imbued with the ethos of Teutonic mastery, expected to adhere to a fierce ‘moral' code whose strident tone smacks of the days of chivalry when their mailed ancestors had stamped their presence on the East Prussian landscape:

The lightening victory over Poland in the autumn of 1939 moved with such dazzling rapidity that no opportunity for the
Flieger
division to demonstrate its mettle arose. It was only with the subsequent campaigns in the west, beginning with the invasions of Norway and Denmark, that Student finally found his chance.

Operation Weserubung was to involve the 1st Battalion, 1 Parachute Regiment under Captain Erich Walter. The
Fallschirmjäger
were tasked to support the seaborne invasions of both countries by the seizure of certain key objectives; in Norway, Oslo and Stavanger airfields, two further airstrips at Aalborg in Denmark and the capture of a vital bridge at Copenhagen.

Despite adverse weather over Oslo the paratroops, though dispersed, managed to win their objective; the other three were attained without serious opposition. As the campaign in Norway progressed a successful and daring landing on packed ice contributed greatly to operations around Narvik. This was vindication indeed.

It was, however, during the larger campaigns in the west that Student's paratroopers were to achieve their most stunning successes, victories that would put Student into personal contact with Hitler himself, a vast increase in prestige and the continuing spite of his less favoured contemporaries.

The operational tasks assigned to parachutists comprised the seizure by a
coup de main
of the apparently impregnable Belgian fortress of Eben-Emael, together with three vital bridges over the Albert Canal. Even more ambitiously, the 22nd Division was to air-land around the Hague in a dramatic bid to capture the Dutch Royal family and seize a number of airfields. The
7th Flieger
division was to take and hold the crossing points necessary for the relief by the advancing Wehrmacht of 22nd Division.

Captain Walter Koch was given the command of
Sturmabteilung Koch
, responsible for the extremely difficult job of assaulting the fortress and bridges. This was to be a glider borne operation and eleven aircraft under Lieutenant Witzig were to land directly on the roof of the fort.

The mission was a dazzling success, two out of the three bridges were taken intact and the fort's defences sabotaged by Witzig's group, even though his glider failed to make the drop, landing inside Germany after the tow parted too soon. The demoralised Belgians surrendered Eben-Emael when the ground forces arrived; the strongest garrison in the west had been reduced by a mere handful of paratroops.

The larger scale landings in Holland, however, were less convincing and revealed the weaknesses of Student's theories. Paramount amongst these was the fact that it was nigh on impossible for Student himself acting as divisional commander of the
7th Flieger
division also to successfully coordinate the actions of the 22nd (under Lieutenant General Hans Graf von Sponeck) which was landed some distance away.

Determined Dutch resistance foiled the paratroops' attempts to seize and hold the airfields which would facilitate the air landing of the remainder of the division. Sponeck's forces were thus scattered and, at the same time, contained. Kesselring, commanding
Luftflotte 2
, correctly assessed the situation and ordered Sponeck to simply consolidate his forces and then break out toward Rotterdam and Student. Though abortive, the landing did disrupt and tie down Dutch forces in considerable numbers.

The
7th Flieger
division was to take three bridges at Moerdijk, Dordrecht and Rotterdam. In the first and third instance the attacks were completely successful but, in the centre, the paratroops succeeded in gaining only a foothold and this was lost to spirited counter-attacks, the German commander being amongst the casualties. Despite substantial local counter-attacks Student's men clung to their gains until relieved on 12 May by 7th Panzer.

One of the German casualties was Student himself whose bravery in the field nearly proved his undoing. He suffered a very serious head wound which kept him out of the action for months. Although he seemed to recover there were those who felt his capacity to command had been impaired.
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