History of the Second World War (24 page)

Similar conditions prevailed farther north. General von Manstein, who was then commanding a spearhead panzer corps in East Prussia, said that heavy rain fell there during late May and early June. It is evident that if the invasion had been launched earlier the prospect would have been poor, and as Halder said, it is very doubtful whether an earlier date would have been practicable, quite apart from the Balkan hindrance. The weather of 1940 had been all too favourable to the invasion of the West, but the weather of 1941 operated against the invasion of the East.

When the Germans invaded Greece in April 1941, following the landing of a small British army of reinforcement at Salonika, the Greek Army was mainly aligned to cover the passages through the mountains from Bulgaria, where the German forces had assembled. But the expected advance down the Struma Valley masked a less direct move. German mechanised columns swerved westward from the Struma up the Strumitza Valley parallel with the frontier, and over the mountain passes into the Yugo-Slav end of the Vardar Valley. Thereby they pierced the joint between the Greek and Yugo-Slav armies, and exploited the penetration by a rapid thrust down the Vardar to Salonika. This cut off a large part of the Greek Army, anchored in Thrace.

The Germans followed up this stroke, not by a direct advance southward from Salonika past Mount Olympus, where the British army had taken up its position, but by another swerving thrust down through the Monastir Gap, farther west. The exploitation of this advance towards the west coast of Greece cut off the Greek divisions in Albania, turned the flank of the British and, by its threatened swerve back onto the line of retreat of the surviving Allied forces, produced the speedy collapse of all resistance in Greece. The bulk of the British and Allied forces were evacuated by sea to Crete.

The capture of Crete by an invasion delivered purely by air was one of the most astonishing and audacious feats of the war. It was, also, the most striking airborne operation of the war. It was performed at Britain’s expense — and should remain a warning not to discount the risk of similar surprise strokes ‘out of the blue’ in the future.

At eight o’clock on the morning of May 20, 1941, some 3,000 German parachute troops dropped out of the sky upon Crete. The island was held by 28,600 British, Australian, and New Zealand troops, along with two Greek divisions amounting in numbers to almost as many.

The attack had been expected, as a follow-up to the German conquest of the Balkans, and good information about the preparations had been provided by British agents in Greece. But the airborne threat was not regarded as seriously as it should have been. Churchill has revealed that General Freyberg, V.C., who had been appointed to command in Crete on his suggestion, reported on May 5: ‘Cannot understand nervousness; am not in the least anxious about airborne attack.’* He showed more concern about seaborne invasion — a danger which was, in the event, dispelled by the Royal Navy.

* Churchill:
The Second World War
, vol. III, 246.

Churchill felt anxious about the threat, ‘especially from the air’. He urged that ‘at least another dozen “I” [Infantry] tanks’ should be sent to reinforce the mere half dozen that were there.† An even more fundamental weakness was the complete lack of air support — to combat the German dive-bombers and intercept the airborne troops. Even the provision of anti-aircraft guns was scanty.

† ibid, p. 249.

By the first evening, the number of Germans on the island had been more than doubled, and was progressively reinforced — by parachute drop, by glider, and from the second evening onwards by troop-carriers. These began landing on the captured Maleme airfield while it was still swept by the defenders’ artillery and mortar-fire. The final total of German troops brought by air was about 22,000. Many were killed and injured by crashes on landing, but those that survived were the toughest of fighters, whereas their numerically superior opponents were not so highly trained and some were still suffering from the shock of being driven out of Greece. More important were their deficiencies in equipment, and especially the lack of short-range wireless equipment. Nevertheless, many of these troops fought hard, and their stiff resistance had important effects that only became known later.

Optimism continued to prevail for a time in British high quarters. In the light of reports received, Churchill told the House of Commons on the second day that ‘the greater part’ of the airborne invaders had been wiped out. Middle East Headquarters went on for two more days talking about the Germans being ‘mopped up’.

But on the seventh day, the 26th, the British commander in Crete reported: ‘In my opinion the limit of endurance has been reached by the troops under my command . . . our position here is hopeless.’ Coming from such a stout-hearted soldier as Freyberg, this verdict was not questioned. Evacuation began on the night of the 28th, and ended on the night of the 31st — the Royal Navy suffering heavy losses from the enemy’s dominant air force in its persistent efforts to bring away as many troops as possible. A total of 16,500 were rescued, including about 2,000 Greeks, but the rest were left dead or prisoner in German hands. The Navy had well over 2,000 dead. Three cruisers and six destroyers were sunk. Thirteen other ships were badly damaged, including two battleships and the only aircraft-carrier then in the Mediterranean Fleet.

The Germans had some 4,000 men killed, and about half as many wounded. Thus their permanent loss was less than a third of what the British had suffered, apart from the Greeks and local Cretan levies. But as the loss fell mostly on the picked troops of Germany’s one existing parachute division, it had an unforeseen effect on Hitler that turned out to Britain’s benefit.

At the moment, however, the collapse in Crete looked disastrous. It hit the British peoples all the harder because it followed hard on the heels of two other disasters. For in April the British forces had been swept out of Cyrenaica in ten days, by Rommel, and out of Greece within three weeks from the start of the German invasion. Wavell’s winter success in capturing Cyrenaica from the Italians came to appear no more than a delusory break in the clouds. With this fresh run of defeats at German hands, and the spring renewal of the air ‘Blitz’ on England, the prospect was darker even than in 1940.

But Hitler did not follow up his third Mediterranean victory in any of the ways expected on the British side — a pounce upon Cyprus, Syria, Suez, or Malta. A month later he launched the invasion of Russia, and from that time on neglected the opportunities that lay open for driving the British out of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. If his forfeit was mainly due to his absorption in the Russian venture, it was also due to his reaction after the victory in Crete. The cost depressed him more than the conquest exhilarated him. It was such a contrast to the cheapness of his previous successes and far larger captures.

In Yugo-Slavia and Greece his new armoured forces had been as irresistible as in the plains of Poland and France, despite the mountain obstacles they met. They had swept through both countries like a whirlwind and knocked over the opposing armies like ninepins.

Field-Marshal List’s army captured 90,000 Yugo-Slavs, 270,000 Greeks, and 13,000 British — at a cost to itself of barely 5,000 men killed and wounded, as later records showed. At the time British newspapers estimated the German loss as over a quarter of a million, and even a British official statement put them as ‘probably 75,000’.

The blemish on Hitler’s Cretan victory was not only the higher loss but the fact that it temporarily weakened the one new kind of land-fighting force he had which could reach out and seize places over the sea without risking interception by the British Navy — which still dominated the seascape, despite its heavy losses. In effect, Hitler had sprained his wrist in Crete.

After the war General Student, the Commander-in-Chief of the German Airborne Forces, revealed, surprisingly, that Hitler was a reluctant convert to the scheme of attacking Crete:

He wanted to break off the Balkan campaign after reaching the south of Greece. When I heard this, I flew to see Goring and proposed the plan of capturing Crete by airborne forces alone. Goring — who was always easy to enthuse — was quick to see the possibilities of the idea, and sent me on to Hitler. I saw him on April 21. When I first explained the project Hitler said: ‘It sounds all right, but I don’t think it’s practicable.’ But I managed to convince him in the end.

In the operation we used our one Parachute Division, our one Glider Regiment and the 5th Mountain Division, which had no previous experience of being transported by air.*

* This and the extracts on pages 138 and 139, from Student in Liddell Hart:
The Other Side of the Hill
, p. 228-43.

The air support was provided by the dive-bombers and fighters of Richtofen’s 8th Air Corps, which had been a decisive instrument in forcing the gate into Belgium and France successively in 1940.

No troops came by sea. Such a reinforcement had been intended originally, but the only sea transport available was a number of Greek caiques. It was then arranged that a convoy of these small vessels was to carry the heavier arms for the expedition — anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, the artillery and some tanks — together with two battalions of the 5th Mountain Division . . . they were told that the British Fleet was still at Alexandria — whereas it was actually on the way to Crete. The convoy sailed for Crete, ran into the fleet, and was scattered. The Luftwaffe avenged this setback by ‘pulling a lot of hair’ out of the British Navy’s scalp. But our operations on land, in Crete, were much handicapped by the absence of the heavier weapons on which we had reckoned. . . .

At no point on May 20 did we succeed completely in occupying an airfield. The greatest degree of progress was achieved on Maleme airfield, where the valuable Assault Regiment fought against picked New Zealand troops. The night of May 20-21 was critical for the German Command. I had to make a momentous decision. I decided to use the mass of the parachute-reserves, still at my disposal, for the final capture of Maleme airfield.

If the enemy had made an organised counterattack during this night or the morning of May 21, he would probably have succeeded in routing the much battered and exhausted remnants of the Assault Regiment — especially as these were badly handicapped by shortage of ammunition.

But the New Zealanders made only isolated counterattacks. I heard later that the British Command expected, besides the airborne venture, the arrival of the main German forces by sea on the coast between Maleme and Canea, and consequently maintained their forces in occupation of the coast. At this decisive period the British Command did not take the risk of sending these forces to Maleme. On the 21st the German reserves succeeded in capturing the airfield and village of Maleme. In the evening the 1st Mountain Battalion could be landed, as the first air-transported troops — and so the battle for Crete was won by Germany.

But the price of victory was much heavier than had been reckoned by the advocates of the plan — partly because the British forces on the island were three times as large as had been assumed, but also from other causes.

Much of the loss was due to bad landings — there were very few suitable spots in Crete, and the prevailing wind blew from the interior towards the sea. For fear of dropping the troops in the sea, the pilots tended to drop them too far inland — some of them actually in the British lines. The weapon-containers often fell wide of the troops, which was another handicap that contributed to our excessive casualties. The few British tanks that were there shook us badly at the start — it was lucky there were not more than two dozen. The infantry, mostly New Zealanders, put up a stiff fight, though taken by surprise.

The Fuhrer was very upset by the heavy losses suffered by the parachute units, and came to the conclusion that their surprise value had passed. After that he often said to me: ‘The day of parachute troops is over.’ . . .

When I got Hitler to accept the Crete plan, I also proposed that we should follow it up by capturing Cyprus from the air, and then a further jump from Cyprus to capture the Suez Canal. Hitler did not seem averse to the idea, but would not commit himself definitely to the project — his mind was so occupied with the coming invasion of Russia. After the shock of the heavy losses in Crete, he refused to attempt another big airborne effort. I pressed the idea on him repeatedly, but without avail.

So the British, Australian, and New Zealand losses in Crete were not without compensating profit. Student’s project of capturing the Suez Canal may have been beyond attainment, unless Rommel’s panzer forces in Africa had also been strongly reinforced, but the capture of Malta would have been an easier task. Hitler was persuaded to undertake it a year later, but then changed his mind and cancelled it. Student said: ‘He felt that if the British Fleet appeared on the scene, all the Italian ships would bolt for their home ports and leave the German airborne forces stranded.’

CHAPTER 12 - HITLER TURNS AGAINST RUSSIA