Battle of Crete

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Crete began at 08:00 on the 20th of May 1941, when dozens of Junkers Ju 52 aircraft disgorged German paratroopers into the skies above Maleme Airfield. Within hours, the invaders were being cut down before they could reach the weapons canisters dropped alongside them. A company of 126 men lost 112 killed in a single morning. By nightfall, the German attack had stalled across every objective, and Allied defenders were confident they had broken the invasion. Then, overnight, a breakdown in communication between two New Zealand officers changed everything.

  Operation Mercury, codenamed after the swift Roman god, was the first large-scale airborne invasion in military history. It would produce firsts on both sides: the first major Allied use of intelligence from decrypted Enigma messages, and a civilian resistance so fierce that elderly men clubbed paratroopers to death with walking canes. Yet the battle ended in Allied evacuation, a savaged Royal Navy, and a lesson that traveled in opposite directions on either side of the front line. The questions that follow are why the defenders, who knew the attack was coming and who held it off on the first day, ultimately lost the island, and what the battle cost everyone who fought it.

• 2. A Island Worth Dying For

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  British forces first garrisoned Crete on the 28th of October 1940, the day Italy attacked Greece. The arrangement reflected cold strategic arithmetic: Crete's harbours gave the Royal Navy a base in the eastern Mediterranean from which it could threaten the Axis southern flank, and British bombers stationed on the island would have the Ploiesti oil fields of Romania within their range.

  When Germany overran mainland Greece in April 1941, roughly 57,000 Allied troops were evacuated by the Royal Navy. Some were redirected to Crete, but most had lost their heavy equipment during the retreat. Winston Churchill cabled his Chief of the Imperial General Staff: "To lose Crete because we had not sufficient bulk of forces there would be a crime." His anxiety was justified. The island garrison had seven different commanders in seven months, and when the navy attempted to deliver supplies in the weeks before the German attack, Luftwaffe raids forced most ships to turn back. Of the roughly 27,000 long tons of supplies dispatched between the 1st and the 20th of May, only about 2,700 long tons arrived.

  German interest in Crete was itself contested. The Army High Command was focused on finalizing Operation Barbarossa and opposed a diversion to Crete. Hitler remained wary of threats to his Romanian fuel supply, however, and Luftwaffe commanders were eager for a dramatic airborne operation. The desire to recover prestige after the Battle of Britain may also have sharpened Luftwaffe enthusiasm. Hitler was eventually won over. In Directive 31 he described Crete as the future operational base from which to prosecute the air war in the eastern Mediterranean, and in Directive 28 he authorized the invasion. The operation had to be finished before the end of May and must not delay Barbarossa.

• 3. Intelligence Known, Intelligence Wasted

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  By early April 1941, British decrypts of Luftwaffe Enigma traffic had revealed that Fliegerkorps XI was assembling Ju 52 transport aircraft for glider-towing in the Balkans. On the 26th of April a Luftwaffe message naming Crete was decrypted for the first time. By the 5th of May it was clear the attack was not imminent, and by the 6th of May the British knew that the 17th of May was the expected completion date for German preparations.

  Francis Hinsley, the official British intelligence historian, later wrote that the Germans had more casualties conquering Crete than in the entire rest of the Greek campaign; he also noted how difficult it was to measure intelligence value, because it was never clear how swiftly Enigma information reached the commander on the ground, or how he acted on it. That commander was Major-General Bernard Freyberg, a New Zealand officer and Churchill's personal choice, appointed on the 30th of April 1941. Freyberg had studied earlier German airborne operations and understood that the paratroopers would try to seize airfields for reinforcement. He wanted to make the airfields unusable. Middle East Command in Alexandria overruled him; the staff apparently believed the invasion would fail and wanted the airfields intact for the RAF afterward.

  Ultra intelligence was detailed but misread in one critical respect. The Enigma decrypts described both an airborne assault and seaborne operations. Freyberg, fixated on the amphibious threat, kept large numbers of men along the coast rather than concentrating them at Maleme Airfield, the principal German objective. The after-action report of Fliegerkorps XI later noted that the defensive area had been so thoroughly prepared that it seemed the garrison had known the invasion was coming. They had known. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, had originally reported only 5,000 British troops on Crete and no Greek forces whatsoever. Whether Canaris was misinformed or deliberately sabotaging Hitler's plans was never fully resolved; he was executed later in the war for alleged involvement in the 20th of July Plot.

• 4. The Day the Airfield Was Lost

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  On the afternoon of the 20th of May, as the invasion appeared to be failing, the New Zealanders holding Hill 107, which overlooked Maleme Airfield, began to bend under German pressure. That night, Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Andrew VC, commanding the 22nd New Zealand Infantry Battalion, lost communication with his two westernmost companies. He concluded, incorrectly, that they had been overrun.

  Andrew requested reinforcement from the 23rd Battalion. Brigadier James Hargest denied the request, believing the 23rd was already engaged with parachutists in its own sector. Andrew then withdrew his eastern elements under cover of darkness, with Hargest's consent. The westernmost company commander, Captain Campbell, learned of the withdrawal only in the early morning and pulled his men out as well. By first light on the 21st of May, Maleme Airfield stood undefended. In Athens, General Kurt Student had already decided to concentrate everything on Maleme, the one place where any progress had been made. An early morning reconnaissance flight over the airfield went unopposed. Ju 52s began landing reinforcements from the 5th Mountain Division that night, some pilots crash-landing on beaches or in open fields rather than waiting for a runway.

  Freyberg ordered a counter-attack on the night of the 21st of May to retake the airfield. The battalion detailed to relieve the assault unit had no transport; vehicles were delayed by German aircraft. By the time the unit moved into position it was 23:30, and the 20th Battalion took three more hours to reach its staging area. The counter-attack went in at 03:30 instead of under darkness, ran straight into German daylight air support, and failed. A second counter-attack on the 22nd, by two New Zealand battalions including the 28th Maori Battalion, came in daylight against Stuka dive-bombers and dug-in paratroops and also failed. The airfield was gone, and with it the battle.

• 5. The Navy's Terrible Price

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  The Royal Navy's role in the Battle of Crete was to stop the German seaborne reinforcements and eventually to evacuate the garrison, and it accomplished both at an enormous cost. On the night of the 21st of May, Force D under Rear Admiral Irvine Glennie intercepted an Axis convoy of around 20 small boats trying to land reinforcements near Maleme. The convoy turned back after losing more than half its boats; only one small vessel reached Crete, landing three officers and 110 German soldiers near Cape Spatha.

  The following day was catastrophic. Force C, under Rear Admiral Edward Leigh Stuart King, hunted a second convoy through the Aegean but ran low on anti-aircraft ammunition under relentless Luftwaffe attack. King elected not to press his overwhelming advantage against the convoy escort, partly because he had not yet confirmed a major enemy force was ahead of him. He turned away. During the withdrawal, the cruiser Gloucester was hit by several bombs between 15:30 and 15:50 and had to be left behind. She sank with the loss of 22 officers and 700 ratings. Later that afternoon, a Junkers Ju 88 flown by Lieutenant Gerhard Brenner dropped three bombs on the cruiser Fiji, disabling her, and sank her at 20:15. Five hundred survivors were rescued that night by destroyers Kandahar and Kingston.

  On the night of the 22nd of May, Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten's 5th Destroyer Flotilla was diverted to attack a German convoy off Cape Spatha. When rounding western Crete the following morning, his three ships, Kelly, Kashmir and Kipling, were attacked by 24 Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers. Kashmir sank in two minutes. Kelly capsized and sank. Kipling survived 83 bombs and rescued 279 survivors. The film In Which We Serve, made by Noel Coward, was based on this action. By the 23rd of May, Admiral Andrew Cunningham signalled his superiors that daylight naval operations could no longer continue. By the end of the campaign the Royal Navy's eastern Mediterranean strength had been reduced to two battleships and three cruisers.

• 6. Cretan Civilians at War

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  Cretan civilians did not watch the battle from a distance. When German paratroopers landed, residents picked up whatever was in reach, from kitchen knives to agricultural tools. At Kastelli, the 1st Greek Regiment combined with armed civilians to route a detachment of paratroopers dropped on the town. At Paleochora, civilians joined in counter-attacks that hampered an entire German reconnaissance battalion. British and New Zealand advisers at these locations were hard pressed to prevent outright massacres of captured Germans.

  In one recorded incident an elderly Cretan man clubbed a parachutist to death with his walking cane before the German could disentangle himself from his parachute cords. In another, a local priest and his teenage son broke into a village museum, retrieved two rifles dating from the Balkan Wars, and sniped at German paratroopers at landing zones. The Abwehr had predicted Cretan civilians would welcome the Germans as liberators, pointing to the island's strong republican and anti-monarchist tradition and the legacy of the late prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos, himself a Cretan. The prediction failed completely.

  The German reprisals were swift and savage. Even before the island fell, civilians were being executed. On the 2nd of June, male citizens of Kondomari were shot by a firing squad, an event captured on film by a German army war correspondent. On the 3rd of June, the village of Kandanos was razed and roughly 180 of its inhabitants killed. Between the 2nd of June and the 1st of August, 195 people from Alikianos and its vicinity were killed in mass shootings. General Student, who ordered the shootings, avoided prosecution after the war despite Greek efforts to extradite him. The officer who ordered later reprisals, Generalleutnant Friedrich-Wilhelm Muller, nicknamed "The Butcher of Crete", was tried by a Greek military court and executed. The first Cretan resistance movement was established just two weeks after the island fell.

• 7. Aftermath and Legacy

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  Student, reflecting after the war on what the battle had cost, concluded that Crete was the death of the airborne force. The 7th Fliegerdivision, the only large parachute unit of its kind in the German military, was decimated and never rebuilt. Hitler, convinced that airborne troops had lost the element of surprise, directed that paratroopers be used as ground infantry in subsequent operations. German estimates of Allied casualties and garrison strength had been badly wrong from the start; Canaris had reported 5,000 British troops when the real figure was many times higher.

  The Allies drew the opposite lesson. Impressed by what the Germans had nearly achieved, British and American planners began forming their own airborne assault and airfield-defence units. The RAF Regiment, created specifically because the Army had failed to protect airfields at Maleme, was formally established on the 1st of February 1942, only six days before the initial assault a senior RAF officer had written presciently that the Army "must take steps to protect our aerodromes with something more than men in their first or second childhood."

  The human cost of the eleven-day battle was enormous on every side. German casualties were estimated by various sources at between 6,000 and 7,000 men; the British lost 1,742 killed, 1,737 wounded, and 11,835 taken prisoner from a garrison of slightly more than 32,000. Royal Navy dead numbered 1,828, and 5,255 Greek troops were captured. Of the roughly 800 commandos of Layforce who were sent to Crete to cover the evacuation, about 600 were listed as killed, wounded or missing; only 179 got off the island. One Cretan source puts civilian deaths at 6,593 men, 1,113 women, and 869 children killed by German forces during and after the battle, with German records documenting at least 3,474 civilians executed by firing squad. Max Schmeling, former world heavyweight boxing champion, had jumped with the first wave on the 20th of May as a Gefreiter in the German paratroopers. He survived both the battle and the war.