The Second World War (26 page)

Seen against the deep blue of the early morning Cretan sky, through a frame of grey-green olive branches, they looked like little jerking dolls whose billowy frocks of green, yellow, red and white had somehow blown up and become entangled in the wires that controlled them. . . . I struggled to grasp the meaning behind this colourful fantasy, to realise that those beautiful kicking dolls meant the repetition of all the horrors we had known so recently in Greece.

Lieutenant Thomas’s sense of unreality was understandable. He was witnessing the first purposeful parachute operation in history. The Germans’ earlier jumps, in Norway and Holland, had been small-scale, lightly opposed and strongly supported by conventional ground forces. The
Sprung nach Kreta
was a true leap into the unknown, the pitting of pioneers in a military revolution against forces they could overcome only by their own unaided effort. Student’s men were in a sense primitives: the British and American equivalents, already training for future parachute operations of their own, would regard their equipment and technique with horrified incredulity. The Germans had no control over their descent; they jumped from their Junkers 52s, in groups of twelve, their parachutes opened by static line, but were then suspended by a single strap attached to the harness in the middle of the back. Slipstream and wind carried them indeed ‘like dolls’ to their landing, from the shock of which their padding, helmets and rubber boots were supposed to protect them. Those not injured by the impact – and jump injuries were numerous – then collected their weapons from parachuted containers, assembled in squads and moved to the assault. The glider infantry of the 1st Assault Regiment, crash-landed in groups of fifteen, reinforced them with heavier equipment.

Student’s theory of airborne assault took no account of Cretan terrain or New Zealand tenacity. The harsh and broken ground around Maleme injured many of his parachutists as they landed and pulverised a high proportion of the gliders; the New Zealanders dealt pitilessly with the survivors. They shot the enemy in the air: ‘You’d see one go limp and kind of straighten up with a jerk and then go limp again, and you knew he “was done for”.’ They shot them as they landed, so that next day a visiting staff officer to 23rd Battalion found ‘bodies everywhere, every ten-twelve yards. One stepped over them as one went through the olive groves.’ Sixty New Zealanders released from a field punishment centre in Maleme, where they were serving time for minor military offences, killed 110 Germans in the first hour of the assault.

The losses suffered by the German parachute battalions around Maleme in the first hours of 20 May were truly appalling. One company of III Battalion, 1st Assault Regiment, lost 112 killed out of 126; 400 of the battalion’s 600 men were dead before the day was out. Only a hundred men of the glider-borne I Battalion survived its landing unwounded; II Battalion also suffered heavily. IV Battalion, led by Captain Walter Gericke (who would survive to command the West German army’s parachute division as a NATO general), alone preserved the bulk of its strength. It and the survivors of the other three struggled throughout the day of 20 May to assemble their remaining strength, fight off the remorseless New Zealanders and move towards their objective, the Maleme airstrip. They made no progress; in the 21st New Zealand Battalion’s area the parachutists who fell in the streets of the village of Modhion were attacked ‘by the entire population of the district, including women and children, using any weapon, flintlock rifles captured from the Turks a hundred years ago, axes and even spades.’ They helped to add to the 1st Assault Regiment’s casualties, which by the end of the day included two battalion commanders killed and two wounded, together with the regimental commander. The 1st Assault Regiment, which regarded itself as the Wehrmacht’s elite, had by nightfall suffered much – perhaps 50 per cent losses – and achieved nothing.

Its sister regiments, 1st, 2nd and 3rd Parachute, directed against Heraklion, Retimo and Suda respectively, all on the north coast, also suffered heavily on 20 May. In one or two places, airborne assault achieved its intended suprise: near Suda, Crete’s main port, ten glider infantrymen who landed close to an artillery regiment killed 180 gunners who lacked small arms to defend themselves. Elsewhere, though, it was generally the Germans who were slaughtered. The 3rd Parachute Regiment, landing just east of the 1st Assault Regiment around Canea and Suda, arrived directionless; their commander, Süssmann (who also commanded the division), had died in a glider crash on take-off. Its I Battalion, led by Baron von der Heydte, an untypical parachutist by reason both of his undisguisedly aristocratic disdain for Nazism and of his marked intellectuality – he was to write a remarkable memoir of the Cretan campaign and end his career as a professor of economics – got down relatively unscathed. Its III Battalion, however, was almost wiped out during the day’s fighting, justifiably in the view of the New Zealanders, whose senior medical officer had been shot, with many of his patients, by members of this battalion during their initial assault. Its II Battalion attacked a feature defended by the New Zealand Division’s logistic troops; Company Sergeant-Major Neuhoff describes the results of his encounter with the petrol company of its Composite Battalion: ‘We advanced to attack the hill . . . we proceeded, without opposition, about half way up . . . suddenly we ran into heavy and very accurate rifle and machine-gun fire. The enemy had held their fire with great discipline and allowed us to approach well within effective range before opening up. Our casualties were extremely heavy, and we were forced to retire leaving many dead behind us.’ Yet their opponents, as the New Zealand official history records, were ‘for the most part drivers and technicians and so ill-trained for infantry fighting’.

Student, who had not yet left his rear headquarters in the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens, remained all day in ignorance of the fate his cherished division had suffered. Far into the night of 20/21 May he sat at his map table, as von der Heydte recalled, ‘waiting and waiting for the news which would bring him confirmation that he had been right in proposing the attack on the island to Goering a month previously. Everything had seemed so simple in prospect, so feasible and so certain. He had thought that he had taken every possibility into consideration – and then everything had turned out contrary to plans and expectations.’ The truth – as I. M. D. Stewart, the medical officer of the 1st Welch Regiment, a veteran and the most meticulous historian of the campaign, later recorded – was that he had ‘dissipated’ his airborne division ‘in scattered attacks about the island’:

Thousands of its young men now lay dead in the olive groves and among the buttercups and the barley. His glider troops and four of his parachute battalions . . . had been shattered, reduced within the space of fifteen minutes to a few dozen fugitive survivors. Other battalions had suffered little less severely. Yet he still had not captured an airfield. Now he had left only his tiny airlanding reserve. If these few hundred men should fail on the morrow [21 May] the only possible relief for the Division would have to come by sea.

On the evening of the first day of the first great parachute operation in history, therefore, the advantage appeared to have passed decisively to the opposition – an ill-organised force of under-equipped troops almost bereft of air cover and supporting arms. Yet, despite all the agony Student’s men had suffered and all the mistakes he had made, on 21 May he would succeed in recovering the initiative and turning the battle to his advantage. How so? The explanation, one of Freyberg’s staff officers was to reflect ruefully in the aftermath, was the absence of ‘a hundred extra wireless sets’; for the defenders had failed to recognise the extent of their own success and had failed to report it to Freyberg’s headquarters, which in turn had failed to radio the orders to recoup and regroup. Next morning Winston Churchill reported to the House of Commons that the ‘most stern and resolute resistance’ would be offered to the enemy. Meanwhile Freyberg lacked that clear picture of his battle which would allow him to react as commander. He communicated with the New Zealanders defending the Maleme airfield – Student’s
Schwerpunkt
– through the headquarters of 5 Brigade; the brigade in turn communicated indirectly with its battalion commanders; and Lieutenant-Colonel L. W. Andrews, the commander of the crucial battalion, 22nd, mistakenly believed that his brigade commander planned to support him. A brave man – he had won the Victoria Cross in the First World War – he decided on the evening of 20 May, after an initial counter-attack supported by two of the only six heavy tanks on Crete had failed, to regroup on high ground overlooking the airfield for a concerted push the next day, and this regrouping inadvertently conceded the vital spot to the Germans and so rescued them from the inevitability of disaster.

While Andrews took the wrong decision for good reasons, Student was arriving at the right decision for bad reasons: he had no ground for thinking that fresh troops would fare any better at Maleme than those already dead. Indeed, the universal military maxim, ‘never reinforce failure’, should have warned him against committing his reserve at that point. He nevertheless decided to do so. On the afternoon of 21 May his last two companies of parachutists fell among the New Zealand division’s Maori battalion and were slaughtered – ‘not cricket, I know,’ wrote one of their officers, ‘but there it is.’ At the same time Student’s airlanding reserve, the spearhead of 100th Mountain Rifle Regiment of the 5th Mountain Division, began to crash-land in Junkers 52s on the Maleme airstrip from which Andrews had withdrawn his defending 22nd Battalion the previous evening. ‘Machine-gun bullets tear through the right wing,’ wrote a war correspondent aboard. ‘The pilot grits his teeth. Cost what it may he has to get down. Suddenly there leaps up below us a vineyard. We strike the ground. Then one wing grinds into the sand and tears the back of the machine half round to the left. Men, packs, boxes, ammunition are flung forward . . . we lose the power over our own bodies. At last we come to a standstill, the machine standing half on its head.’

Nearly forty Junkers 52s succeeded in landing on the Maleme airstrip in this way, bringing 650 men of II Battalion, 100th Mountain Rifle Regiment. The mountain riflemen, like Student’s parachutists, also regarded themselves as an elite, and with justification. While the New Zealanders struggled to come to terms with the new threat, the mountaineers were moving to consolidate the German position at Maleme airfield, with the intention of extending their foothold next day.

Some of the mountaineers’ reinforcements were meanwhile approaching Crete by ship. They were to suffer an unhappy fate; but so too were the ships of the Royal Navy which intercepted them. The Alexandria squadron easily overcame the Italian escort to the fleet of caiques and barges carrying the remainder of 100th Mountain Rifle Regiment towards Crete, causing 300 of them to be drowned; but during 22 May the Luftwaffe inflicted a far more grievous penalty on the British ships and crews. The battleship
Warspite
was damaged, the cruisers
Gloucester
and
Fiji
sunk, together with the destroyers
Kashmir
and
Kelly
– the latter commanded by the future Earl Mountbatten of Burma. This was not the end of the navy’s losses; before 2 June it also lost the cruisers
Juno
and
Calcutta
and the destroyers
Imperial
and
Greyhound
, which were sunk, and suffered damage to the battleship
Valiant
, the aircraft carrier
Formidable
, the cruisers
Perth, Orion, Ajax
and
Naiad
and the destroyers
Kelvin, Napier
and
Hereward
. When the tally was taken, the Battle of Crete, though less shocking in its effect on British morale than the future loss of the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
was to prove, was reckoned the costliest of any British naval engagement of the Second World War.

Ashore, meanwhile, the battle had begun to run irreversibly the Germans’ way. The New Zealand counter-attack to recapture Maleme airfield failed in the early hours of 22 May; throughout the day Student, with brutal recklessness, directed a stream of Junkers 52s at the airfield. Those that crashed on impact, as many did, were pushed off the runway for the next arrival. Meanwhile the Luftwaffe operated overland in overwhelming strength, shooting and bombing anything that moved. ‘It is a most strange and grim battle that is being fought,’ Churchill told the Commons that afternoon. ‘Our side have no air . . . and the other side have very little or no tanks. Neither side has any means of retreat.’ The truth was that the British had no tanks that counted and no means of moving, while the Germans were accumulating growing numbers of fresh, first-class soldiers to manoeuvre against the defenders.

Freyberg now decided to withdraw eastward and regroup for a counter-attack. However, this regrouping was composed not of a single unit but of the bulk of his best troops, the New Zealanders and the regular British battalions. The withdrawal conceded yet more vital ground to the parachutists and mountain riflemen around Maleme, who were growing steadily in numbers. On 24 May they were repulsed from the village of Galatas, then took it, then lost it again to the New Zealand counter-attack Freyberg had planned as his decisive riposte; but it could not reach as far as Maleme, into which the Germans had now crowded almost the whole of the mountain division. When the Germans resumed their attack the British were driven relentlessly eastward, abandoning one position after another.

On 26 May, Freyberg told Wavell, commanding in the Middle East, that the loss of Crete could only be a matter of time. Next day Wavell decided on evacuation before the dominance of the Luftwaffe made that impossible. The garrison of Heraklion, against which the parachutists had made no impression, was taken off on the night of 28 May. The garrison of Retimo, which had also resisted all attacks, could not be reached by the navy and had to be abandoned. During 28-31 May the main force left its positions east of Maleme and began a long and agonising trek southwards across the mountains to the little port of Sphakia on the south coast. It was a shaming culmination to a benighted battle. The minority of troops which actually fought kept together as best they could; those who had left Greece disorganised now lost all semblance of unity. ‘Never shall I forget the disorganisation and almost complete lack of control of the masses on the move,’ wrote Freyberg, ‘as we made our way slowly through the endless stream of trudging men.’ When he and the rest of his broken army reached Sphakia they sheltered under the cliffs waiting for the navy to rescue them under cover of darkness. The navy suffered heavily in the attempt but by 1 June had succeeded in taking off 18,000 troops; 12,000 remained to fall prisoner to the Germans and nearly 2000 had been killed in the fighting.