Authors: Rick Stroud
Freyberg sat listening behind a wooden trestle table; in front of him was a hand grenade with which he planned to stall any sudden attack. What Cox read were not only the orders for the
3
rd Fallschirmjäger, but a summary of the whole invasion plan for Crete, detailing the attacks on four strongpoints: the port of Chania, the airfield at Maleme, and the towns of Rethymnon and Heraklion. It also revealed the Germans’ intelligence regarding the size of Allied forces on the island as being inaccurate, putting them at only 5,
0
00, when in fact there were more than 22,000.
When Cox had finished, Freyberg sent a signal to Wavell in Cairo. ‘Today has been a hard one. We have been hard pressed. So far, I believe, we hold aerodromes at Rethymnon, Heraklion and Maleme and the two harbours. The margin by which we hold them is a bare one, and it would be wrong of me to paint an optimistic picture. Fighting has been heavy and we have killed large numbers of Germans. Communications are most difficult . . . [I have seen] a German operation order with most ambitious objectives, most of which failed.’
The German invaders had not succeeded in taking any of their first-day objectives; huge numbers of dead and wounded paratroopers lay all over the drop zones – nearly
2
,
0
00 killed after less than twenty-four hours. The enemy seemed to be clinging on by their fingertips. Creforce and the Cretans had all but won the battle.
5
On the evening of 20 May 1941, in his headquarters on the second floor of the Hotel Grande Bretagne, Athens, Generalleutnant Kurt Student took stock. On one wall of the apartment was pinned a large map dotted with paper flags marking the positions of Axis and Allied units; in the centre of the room was a large, brilliantly lit table on which stood field telephones, a tangle of wires, stacks of paper, two black files and an ashtray full of cigarette stubs. Assessing the situation with Student were his ADC, Major Reinhardt, Generalmajor Julius ‘Papa’ Ringel of the 5th Mountain (
Gebirgsjäger
) Division and Generalleutnant Alexander Löhr. As commander of
Luftflotte
4, Löhr had been responsible for bombing operations on the Eastern front, including the fire-bombing of Belgrade, which killed thousands of civilians and turned the Yugoslav capital into a blazing marker for subsequent raids. It was to the highly decorated Löhr that Hitler had handed overall responsibility for the Luftwaffe element of Operation
Merkur
.
The atmosphere in the room was tense. A large number of senior commanders lay dead or dying on Crete. The elite assault regiment had been all but wiped out; aerial reconnaissance reported that the surviving invaders appeared to be scattered and disorganised. Ringel’s mountain troops were still on the Greek mainland and could not join the fighting until an airfield had been secured for them to land their transport planes.
In Germany, Hitler had forbidden his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to report on
Merkur
until the outcome was absolutely certain. Just before midnight the corrected casualty reports for 1st and 3rd Fallschirmjäger came in: they were catastrophic. General Löhr thought the invasion had been a fiasco and believed the operation should be aborted; Reinhardt asked his chief if he could start organising the withdrawal. In spite of the pressure to halt the battle, the highly ambitious Student wanted to continue. They should concentrate on securing the large coastal airfield at Maleme; he ordered Ringel to ready his mountain troops to be airlifted on to Crete at first light the next day.
Maleme was overlooked by the high ground known as Hill
10
7, which was the key to the airfield’s defences. Hill 107 was defended by the New Zealand 22nd Infantry Battalion. During the first day of the battle, the Wehrmacht had disrupted the battalion’s communications and cut off the western elements from their comrades to the east of the ridge. Thinking the men in the west had been overrun, the battalion commander withdrew in the night to regroup. At the same time soldiers on the airfield itself heard German voices and, thinking they were surrounded, they too withdrew. At dawn the soldiers on the west of Hill 107 also withdrew. Maleme was now undefended.
Very early in the morning of the
21
st, the second day of the battle, a Junkers 52, piloted by Hauptmann Kleye, flew onto the western edge of the airfield. The German troops on the newly captured Hill 1
0
7 watched as the aircraft’s wheels touched the ground. Shells exploded near the plane; it taxied to a halt, swung round, then the engines roared as Kleye revved them hard and lumbered back into the sky. Kleye had been sent by Student to discover the extent of the airfield’s defences. He radioed to his general that a landing and disembarkation was possible, but only if executed with maximum speed.
At about the same time Freyberg received the following Ultra decrypt:
Personal for General Freyberg Most Immediate
On continuation of attack Colorado [Crete] reliably reported that among operations planned for Twenty-first May is air landing two mountain battalions and attack Chania. Landing from echelon of small ships depending on situation at sea.
Freyberg seriously misinterpreted the signal, and then sent one of his own:
Reliable information. Early seaborne attack in area Chania likely. New Zealand Division remains responsible coast from West to Kladiso River. Welch Battalion forthwith to stiffen existing (sea) defences from Kladiso to Halepa.
Later that day hundreds of Junkers aircraft appeared over Maleme airfield, carrying 8,500 men of the 5th
Gebirgsjäger
(Mountain Division) and their commanding officer Colonel Ramcke. The pilots began the descent, braving the shells that were exploding on the runway. Nearly twenty aircraft were hit, crashing on to the airfield in flames. Soldiers scrambled from the ones that managed to land, hidden by the swirling red dust thrown up from the propellers. They were badly shaken by the battering their transports had taken, but they now had a foothold and used it to keep the runway open. More and more Junkers landed, weaving between the burning wreckage that littered the runway. An Allied artillery commander with a view of the airfield reported that the German troops ‘needed seventy seconds to land, clear the men and gear and take off’.
Cox reported the prevailing belief at headquarters that a seaborne invasion was imminent and that the airborne invasion was only a preliminary diversion. Freyberg had five battalions with which to counter-attack Maleme but he kept almost all of them watching the coast for a German armada. Throughout the rest of the morning the men of the Sherwood Rangers looked on in tortured frustration as, one after another, Junkers transport aircraft passed them, landed and unloaded men and materiel; they were forbidden to traverse their guns because coastal artillery was only to be used against the naval invasion.
In Heraklion, a group of German paratroopers penetrated the city’s West Gate, dividing into two attacking forces – one moving down Kalokerino Street towards Lion Square and the centre of the town, the other probing to the north, parallel to the sea, heading towards the harbour. There was prolonged opposition from armed civilians and retired soldiers; one, Colonel Tzoulakis, used his rifle to pin down a group of paratroopers near a burning mattress shop. He lost his life to machine-gun fire.
Near the harbour some civilians, including a boy scout, fired from the roof of the Ionian Bank at paratroopers in the building opposite, which caught fire. The soldiers surrendered and as they came forward, throwing down their weapons and manhandling a small air-portable field gun, a group of British soldiers from the Yorks and Lancasters appeared and started firing at the civilians on the roof, mistaking them for the enemy. The civilians shouted, pointing at the paratroopers who quickly gave themselves up to the soldiers and were marched off to a temporary POW compound near Liberty Square.
A fierce firefight in the tiny Barrel Makers Square saw another group of paratroopers overwhelmed and killed, their bodies left where they fell. Near Lion Square a popular policeman, well known in the city for his daily walks with his pet dog, was seen firing a Steyr sub-machine gun at fighter aircraft strafing the city at roof height. He too died, blown up in the bombing; only his leg, still with a boot on, was ever found.
Kapitan Satanas was in Heraklion with Pendlebury, desperate to get hold of his troop of one hundred armed guerrillas waiting ready at his home village of Krousonas. The two men thought that this small force might be able to launch flank attacks on the growing force of paratroopers collecting to the west of the city. They split up, Pendlebury and his driver taking the shorter, quicker route – a distance of about ten miles – on roads that went dangerously close to enemy positions; Satanas headed south through Knossos, a longer but safer route. After they parted company Pendlebury went back for a final time to his office near Lion Square to get a message to his Cretan fighters that they must somehow take and occupy the ridge overlooking Heraklion airfield to the east of the city. Then he set off, heading straight towards the Germans.
A few miles south of the city, the Villa Ariadne’s caretaker, Manolaki Akoumianakis, received Pendlebury’s message stressing the importance of holding the ridge. Manolaki’s son Micky was missing, thought to have been killed fighting on the mainland. The old man vowed vengeance on the boy’s life; hours later Manolaki himself was dead, killed in an attack trying to hold the ridge. His body, still clutching his straw hat, was found by his daughter Philia. He would not be buried for another month – the time it took for his son Micky to return safely to the island.
The battle lines in Heraklion continued to shift back and forth throughout the next day. The Germans took the port and city centre, but were then pushed out on the west side. There was more fierce fighting round the West Gate and at one point the townspeople saw a white flag and thought the Germans wanted to surrender. They were wrong; the white flag party was carrying an ultimatum: surrender or be carpet-bombed. The Cretans refused to give in. The Fallschirmjäger commanding officer, Major Schultz, who had led the first successful penetration of Heraklion’s city walls, ordered his soldiers to withdraw to clear the way for the Luftwaffe to carry out the bombardment. It was Friday
2
3 May. The bombers droned over Heraklion and the ground shook under the endless detonation of high explosive. Terrified civilians and defenders fled to the south of the city towards Knossos. Fire, flame and smoke engulfed everything; the day became known as Black Friday.
By the third day of the battle, the invading troops had established a strong foothold around Heraklion airfield. As they moved through the olive groves along the coast and south into the hills they passed the corpses of their comrades who had dropped and died on the first day, the bodies bloated and stinking in the sun. Many appeared to have died from a single bullet to the head, as if they had been executed after landing: the pockets of their jumpsuits had been ripped open, their equipment and clothing had been looted and their high-laced paratrooper jump boots were missing.
Along the coast, on 24 May, the Luftwaffe began to bomb the port of Chania. All day the bombers came, flattening the town. The bombing terrorised the civilian population and Allied soldiers alike. Refugees fleeing the city were machine-gunned by German fighter and bomber crews. From the surrounding villages survivors watched as their town was destroyed. The sun set on a beautiful Mediterranean evening, the sky still bright blue and the sea glittering. Geoffrey Cox stood with a brother officer looking down on the city over which hovered a tall cloud of smoke and dust; beneath it ‘tongues of red and yellow flame [were] writhing like giant boa constrictors’. The bombers left the harbour intact, knowing that after the battle they would need its services. Freyberg abandoned his headquarters near the town, leaving a muddle of telephones manned by an exhausted duty officer sitting at the foot of an olive tree. The British Army was falling apart.
On Tuesday 27 May, Freyberg received permission to withdraw. He drove by car to Sfakia, the tiny port on the south coast of the island. The same day Brigadier Chappel, commander of 14th Brigade and the Heraklion sector, was told that Royal Navy warships would arrive around midnight to take off 4,000 of his men. There was only enough room on board to evacuate the British and Commonwealth troops in the town; the Cretans and Greek regular troops who had fought for Heraklion were to be abandoned.
Before Chappel left he was visited by Kapitan Satanas. The imposing white-haired warrior, in a colourful waistcoat, jackboots, and a rifle slung across his back, stood in front of the khaki-clad brigadier. Satanas put his hands on Chappel’s shoulders and said: ‘My son, we know you are going away tonight. Never mind! You will come back when the right time comes. But leave us as many guns as you can to carry on the fight till then.’ Chappel agreed and ordered his men to hand over as many arms as they could collect.
After dark the troops trailed down to Heraklion harbour, where the cruisers HMS
Orion
,
Ajax
and
Dido
awaited them. The men were ordered not to smoke and not to carry objects such as mess tins that might clatter together. In shuffling silence they slunk past the airfield and haunts where they had enjoyed the hospitality of the locals. One soldier from the Black Watch remembers: ‘Nobody could get out of his mind the people who had welcomed their Scottish comrades so warmly, who had fought beside them so bravely and who were now being abandoned on tiptoe at midnight, and without warning, to the vengeful enemy.’