Authors: Rick Stroud
Spurr dashed off in search of his unit. He was soon surrounded by a crowd of running people. In the group were British, Greek and Cretan soldiers, civilian men, women and children. Most of them were armed with anything that could be used to inflict an injury, including hammers, saws and garden implements. Many of the women carried knives. The group ran to the West Gate out of Heraklion. Spurr found himself alongside a young Cretan couple: the woman brandished a large knife, and twisted to show him that she had a shotgun concealed in her skirts. The man motioned to the top of the massive arch that formed the gate shouting: ‘We are going up there where the German parachutes are.’ Spurr saw armed civilians and soldiers, all roaring at the paratroopers descending from the air. A Greek, Captain Kalaphotakis, appeared, trying to take charge. Spurr shouted to a British sergeant: ‘By the look of this lot they don’t need us do they?’
‘No,’ the NCO replied. ‘I think we had better get back to our own mobs.’
The crowd started jeering at a bedraggled unit of confused paratroopers, doubling up the road towards the gate. The civilians opened fire, though some of the weapons were so old they would not work. A hail of bullets hit the German troops, who tumbled dead to the ground. Once more Reg Spurr tried to leave and get back to his unit. The shouting crowd surged forward, charging another unit of invaders. Small-arms fire crackled, echoing off the buildings; bullets ricocheted everywhere. The people gave a loud cheer. Smoke and the smell of cordite drifted through the air. More soldiers lay dead and bleeding round the gate. The defenders reloaded their weapons.
That afternoon Spurr passed the site of a skirmish and found six or seven Germans lying dead in a dried-up creek. Close by were some houses where Spurr found two civilians, one, an old man slumped on his knees, his head forward and his hands clasped behind him. He had been shot in the back of the head and his corpse riddled with bullets. Next to him was a woman, still alive, writhing in agony. She was pregnant and had been bayoneted several times in the stomach. She died before Spurr could help her. He stumbled out of the house and vomited.
The casualties on both sides mounted very quickly. The
7
th British General Hospital, situated between the sea and the Maleme Road, was right in the path of shellfire and bombs. Staff tried to move the sick and wounded to the safety of caves on the beaches. They established three caves for the casualties and a fourth for the exhausted medical teams. Soon the caves were overflowing with injured Allied soldiers. As the hours wore on a new category of wounded man began to appear: German parachutists.
Later in the day the German
10
th Parachute Company landed in the vicinity of the hospital. Lieutenant Colonel Plimmer, a New Zealander and the commanding officer of a field ambulance company, was forced at gunpoint to surrender. As he climbed from his slit trench with his arms above his head he was shot dead. Twenty-six miles away to the west of Chania, at the small, almost derelict port of Kissamos Kasteli, lay an unfinished airstrip guarded by the 1st Greek Regiment under the command of Colonel Papadimitrakopoulos and a British major, T. G. Bedding, a former PT instructor. The regiment had been flung together using a thousand volunteers from the town and the surrounding villages. They were badly equipped and had only 600 rifles and two ancient machine guns, together with about 1,800 rounds of ammunition some of which was the wrong calibre. For three weeks they had been trained by a handful of New Zealand officers and NCOs who had managed to scrounge two Bren guns and a few more boxes of ammunition. Kissamos Kasteli was not very high on General Freyberg’s list of battle priorities.
The battalion fought on with anything it could lay its hands on: ancient shotguns, old flintlocks, axes, knives, even nail bombs improvised from plastic explosives. One of the villagers, Dr Stylianos Koundouros, found his father digging up an old Turkish rifle, hidden during an arms requisition years before; he made his father hand it over, and then ran off to join the regiment, heading for the noise of battle, the rifle in one hand, his medical kit in the other. ‘The Germans had never seen something like this in Europe,’ recalled George Bikoyiannakis, from the village of Galatas near Chania. ‘These people were fighting with farming tools. Even broomsticks. They would tie kitchen knives to them and use them as spears.’
The rag-tag force took on a formation of seventy-two Fallschirmjäger, mostly teenagers, under the command of Oberleutnant Peter Muerbe. Apart from Muerbe himself, and a couple of senior NCOs, none of the youths had seen combat. They were armed with rifles, Schmeisser sub-machine guns, long-barrelled Mausers (some equipped with telescopic sights), heavy machine guns, mortars and thousands of rounds of ammunition. It was planned to drop more supplies to them later in the morning and prearranged recognition signals had already been set up. The paratroopers had been told ‘only a token show of resistance is to be expected from irregulars among the inhabitants . . . they have no heavy equipment’.
At
0
8:14 hours, the first parachutists flung themselves out of the Junkers, arms outstretched in the starfish position. They dropped in two groups; many were hit and died before they reached the ground. The survivors were hunted through the vine and almond groves by Cretans who had grown up among the culverts, stone walls and gulleys that surrounded the town; every rock and bush was a familiar landmark. The hidden areas of dead ground quickly became killing zones. The defenders crawled on their stomachs, creeping behind the parachutists and slaughtering them. The villagers took the arms and ammunition from the dead soldiers. Bewildered young Germans heard the sound of their own weapons being fired against them and returned fire in panic, killing their own comrades.
Just over an hour later the surviving invaders of Kissamos Kasteli had been surrounded and trapped in a group of farm buildings. Major Bedding ordered his men to mount a siege. He knew that the Germans would soon run out of ammunition and water. The temperature was climbing towards fifty degrees. With nothing to fire and nothing to drink, the elite troops would have to surrender. Inside one of the stone buildings, in a hot, dark room, were four terrified civilians, members of the Vlahakis family: old Spiro the father, his elderly wife and their two grandchildren. Spiro’s son was outside fighting. By now the German commander, Muerbe, was dead and Gefreiter Walter Schuster had taken command.
Without warning, one of his men fired at the cowering civilians. The noise was deafening; ejected rounds sprayed onto the floor, and the Cretans were blown back, dead, their bodies slamming against the wall. Schuster asked the soldier what he thought he was doing: the paratrooper shrugged and said they would have died anyway in the crossfire.
Colonel Papadimitrakopoulos and his men mounted a reckless charge across open ground shouting ‘
Aera!
’ (‘Like the Wind’) – the battlecry of the Evzones, the elite troops who had fought for Greece since the middle of the nineteenth century. (When the Germans had marched into Athens in mid-April, it had been an Evzone who had been forced at gunpoint to take down the national flag flying over the Acropolis and replace it with the German swastika. The Evzone did what he was told took, but refused to hand over the Greek flag. Instead he calmly wrapped it round him, before throwing himself off the ancient building, dying a martyr’s death on the yellow stone a hundred feet below.)
Many Cretans now fell in Colonel Papadimitrakopoulos’s charge, cut down by automatic fire. The fighters who reached the building smashed their way in through the door and windows, struggling with the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. When it ended, only eighteen of the seventy-two who had jumped that day were still alive. The survivors stumbled into the blazing light, their hands above their heads. A Cretan with a badly wounded arm lunged at one of the soldiers with a bayonet, plunging it in and killing him. Bedding stopped any more revenge attacks and put the survivors in the town jail for their own safety.
At Maleme, the young Mihalis Doulakis watched his father beat to death with his walking stick a young Fallschirmjäger; the soldier had become hopelessly tangled in the lines of his parachute, unable to get at his emergency gravity knife in his breast pocket to cut the rigging. Similar scenes to those Colonel Bedding witnessed in the battle for Kissamos Kasteli were repeated all over the island. A song from the old days once again became popular:
Where is February’s starry sky
That I may take my gun, my beautiful rifle and bandolier,
Go down to Maleme’s airfield,
To capture and kill the Germans.
Cretans staked out wells, waiting for the soldiers, who they knew would be desperate for water; it was a trick their grandparents had learnt in the uprising against the Turks. It was a tactic that Pendlebury had urged the Creforce commanders to adopt, explaining the need for snipers to cover water sources and wells. A few days before the invasion, Pendlebury had used a captured German topographical map to identify a spring just outside the gates of Heraklion: ‘All the German soldiers who land to the west of Heraklion will need water and will be drawn by that spring,’ he told Satanas. ‘Therefore we must fortify that point. One can see it exactly opposite the Venetian walls so we can hit them from there.’
The 14th Infantry Brigade manning the garrison at Heraklion was commanded by Brigadier Brian Herbert Chappel, a regular army officer from Bedfordshire. Chappel had set up his headquarters in a cave among the West Wadi, an outcrop of rocks to the east, between the town and the airfield. One of the many visitors to the cave was John Pendlebury, come to badger him for arms. Patrick Leigh Fermor was working at Chappel’s brigade headquarters, employed, in his own words, as a ‘junior intelligence dogsbody’. He remembers John Pendlebury arriving at headquarters one day with Kapitan Satanas: ‘I was enormously impressed by that splendid great figure with his rifle,’ he recalled of Pendlebury. ‘He had a Cretan guerrilla with him festooned with bandoliers . . . the great thing was that [John’s] presence filled everyone with life and optimism and a feeling of fun’. The kapitans were chronically short of weapons, and it made Pendlebury ‘angry to think that the British garrison had 400 unissued Lee Enfield rifles lying in the ancient Venetian galley sheds alongside Heraklion harbour, which could be used to arm and defend’.
Chappel agreed to release some weapons to Satanas, who had been charged with distributing them. He took them to his home village of Krousonas and gave them to a sergeant of the gendarmerie, saying: ‘You will give one to each man and keep a note for me and a register.’ Each man received a rifle and about one hundred rounds of ammunition and Satanas and Pendlebury had a record of where the guns went.
At Rethymnon, a town about halfway between Heraklion and Chania, twenty-three-year-old Giorgios Tzitzikas had been sent by his commanding officer to carry a message to garrison headquarters that the Germans were descending on the villages of Pervolia, Misiria and Pigi, just to the east of the town. At headquarters he found chaos: frightened officers were trying to hide, terrified of being bombed. He delivered his message and, as he started back, realised that the headquarters was next door to a building where new gendarmerie recruits were billeted. The barracks was deserted; Tzitzikas went inside, hoping to find weapons. On the upper floor in the sleeping quarters he found two Mannlicher rifles, ammunition pouches and bayonets. Seizing them he ran outside into a disorganised crowd of gendarmes, soldiers, and civilians shouting, ‘To Pervolia, to Pervolia, save our town, lads’, and handed one of the Mannlichers to a comrade. On the way a gendarme captain tried to take the rifle away from him, saying he had stolen it. Tzitzikas pointed the gun at the captain, saying: ‘I’ll kill you if you take another step, because I took it from where the gendarmes had abandoned it, and now I’m going to use it.’
Very soon Tzitzikas was in action, fighting to stop the paratroopers entering Heraklion. Late in the day he charged a German machine-gun post which was dominating a gorge and which had inflicted terrible losses on the Cretan fighters. As he ran, Tzitzikas tripped on a wire and crashed to the ground, breaking the stock of his weapon. He recovered and crept to the machine-gun post where he shot the gunner in the back. The soldier toppled onto the gun and his comrades fled. Tzitzikas, now alone, heard people shouting: ‘Greeks, Greeks’ as a rallying cry; then a woman’s voice: ‘Greeks, Greeks! I’ve got a gun, come and get it.’ Tzitzikas moved off in the direction of the noise to rejoin the fighting: civilian men and women, of all ages, killing the enemy with anything they could lay their hands on.
Late on that first afternoon came the second wave of Fallschirmjäger, including Martin Pöppel and his comrades. Pöppel himself landed in an olive grove and, apart from getting caught in a tree, arrived almost unopposed. The temperature on the ground was soaring; many of the men took off their jump smocks and hid them in the undergrowth, disobeying the regulations that said the men should take off their smocks, unbuckle their equipment, put the smocks back on and put the equipment on over their uniforms. They formed up and set off for the airfield. The savage fighting continued into the evening. When the Allied forces began to run out of ammunition the local militia came to their aid, flushing out pockets of the enemy all over Heraklion.
Thousands of documents were retrieved from dead paratroopers and taken to the Allied intelligence officers. Geoffrey Cox, an intelligence officer and former war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, ended the day with two sackfuls of captured papers in his dugout. Before going to sleep he decided to see what they contained: among the paybooks, codebooks, aerial photographs and other military papers, he found a bloodstained carbon copy of a typescript. Cox read the document by torchlight and, with the help of a German dictionary, concluded that it was the operation order for 3rd Fallschirmjäger. At the bottom of the order was an instruction that it should be burnt once read and was not to be carried into action. Cox took it immediately to General Freyberg, who asked him to read the report out loud.