Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (13 page)

Any doubt in German officers' minds as to the identity of their objective vanished the moment they entered the ballroom of the Hotel Grande Bretagne. A huge map of Crete had been fastened to the far wall. They took their seats and looked around. Daylight was excluded. The shutters and windows along the outer wall had been fastened, and the lights of the chandeliers were reflected in the mirrored doors along the opposite side.

'In a quiet but clear and slightly vibrant voice', wrote Heydte later, 'General Student explained the plan of attack. It was his own, personal plan. He had devised it, had struggled against heavy opposition for its acceptance, and had worked out all the details. One could perceive that this plan had become a part of him, a part of his life.' Student had rejected advice to concentrate his forces on one objective: instead he preferred to spread his bets and attack all three airfields on the north coast, each of which had a nearby port for resupply if the attack was successful. But this dispersal of effort left him with insufficient paratroop reserves to reinforce a particular sector rapidly.

The Storm Regiment, his largest formation, would drop on and around the airfield of Maleme in the west of the island. Not far from there, the 3rd Regiment and the engineer battalion would drop in the valley running north-east towards Canea to attack Suda and tie down any Allied reserve forces. Fifty kilometres to the east, most of the 2nd Regiment would drop on the airfield next to Rethymno, and a further sixty-five kilometres to the east, the 1st Regiment would take Heraklion and its airfield.

Glider-borne troops would land first near Maleme and Canea to attack key anti-aircraft batteries. As soon as the airfields were secured by paratroop forces on Day 1 or Day 2, the transport planes would fly in the 5th Mountain Division. Motorcycle troops, mountain artillery and engineer units would follow.

On the second day, two
Leichten Schiffsstaffeln,
or groups of light ships — altogether 7 small freighters and 63 motor-assisted caiques — would bring reinforcements, supplies and pack-animals for the mountain regiments. The reinforcements consisted of two battalions of mountain troops and anti-aircraft batteries. The first flotilla would sajl with one battalion to Maleme, or Suda Bay if it was captured on the first day, and the second flotilla to Heraklion with the other. Some light tanks and motor transport would come later as part of 'the follow-up' once 'shipping communications between the mainland and Crete' had been established. The seaborne part of the plan had only been added as an insurance policy at Hitler's insistence.

General Student's intelligence staff, led by Major Reinhardt, then produced one of the most inaccurate briefings of the whole war. Their photo-reconnaissance 'line-overlaps' along the coast, which recreated an aerial picture of each objective and dropping zone, had failed to pick out the vast majority of the well-camouflaged positions. General Student after the war claimed that the Dornier pilots had reported that 'the island appeared lifeless.'

The Germans, during their period of seemingly unstoppable conquest, paid relatively little attention to the art of intelligence. Such over-confidence was revealed in the language of their summaries which phrased mere suppositions with the cast-iron confidence of undeniable truths. That of 19 May, on the eve of battle, categorically stated that the British garrison on Crete was no more than 5,000

strong, with only 400 men at Heraklion, and none at Rethymno. All the New Zealanders and Australians from Greece had been evacuated directly to Egypt and there were no Greek troops on the island.

Most astonishing of all, Reinhardt's summary predicted an enthusiastic welcome from the civilian population, even that a pro-German fifth column would emerge uttering the password 'Major Bock'.

He and his staff had either dismissed out of hand or failed to read the general briefing document completed on 31 March for the invasion of Greece. There the relevant passage read: 'The Cretans are considered intelligent, hot-blooded, valorous, excitable as well as 8

'Most Secret Sources'

Major General Bernard Freyberg VC, the commander of the New Zealand Division, only reached Crete on 29 April. With characteristic determination, he had refused to leave Greece until the last moment to ensure that as many of his men were evacuated as possible. He looked forward to reassembling the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in Egypt as a single formation. His 6th Brigade had gone on to Alexandria, and he assumed that the other New Zealand units evacuated to Crete would follow in the next few days. The possibility that he might be asked to stay to command the island's defence never occurred to him. But for Churchill, Freyberg was the obvious choice. And Wavell was urged to appoint him — tantamount to an order in the circumstances.

Freyberg's career was endowed with the muscular morality of the Edwardian hero. At school in New Zealand, he proved himself a champion swimmer, but his academic performance did not indicate a reflective or enquiring mind. He studied to be a dentist but, on the prospect of war in 1914, made his way to London to volunteer. He had no military experience other than as a territorial subaltern in New Zealand. The story that Freyberg, on his way to Europe, had joined Pancho Villa's army in Mexico and 'reached the rank of General' was a preposterous invention which Churchill helped circulate. This canard, which gave him 'a certain amount of notoriety', lasted until after the Second World War. 'The truth is', Freyberg said in 1948 when Governor-General of New Zealand, 'I have never bothered to contradict it.'

Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, secured Freyberg a commission in the Royal Naval Division, and took pride in his deeds of cold courage — swimming by night to a hostile shore near Gallipoli with flares to confuse the Turks, and winning a Victoria Cross after leading the Royal Naval Division's Hood Battalion to capture Beaucourt in Flanders.

Freyberg, who had been a slightly incongruous comrade of such aesthetes of the lost generation as Rupert Brooke, Patrick Shaw-Stewart and Charles Lister, was lionized by hostesses after the Armistice. Fascinated by his lack of fear, Churchill describes in a curious paragraph how, during a country house weekend, he had asked Freyberg to strip to allow him to count his twenty-seven wounds. Freyberg modestly explained before taking off his clothes .that 'You nearly always get two wounds for every bullet or splinter, because mostly they have to go out as well as in.'

During the inter-war years Freyberg settled down. He married a remarkable woman, both well-connected and greatly liked, and left behind the ostentatious bravery of his youth when his ambition to win medals had been ingenuously proclaimed. He retired from the Army in 1934. Five years later, on the outbreak of war, Churchill lobbied on his behalf when the future command of New Zealand's expeditionary force was discussed. But Churchill's intervention made little difference to the deliberations: the New Zealand forces at that time had no other obvious candidate.

In the early days, Freyberg was not popular, especially with his staff officers. He had acquired the formalism of the British Army of that time and lost touch with the New Zealand of his youth. To the irritation of his officers, he busied himself with details which he should have left to them. But as the war progressed, they grew to admire his strengths: on top of his bravery he had a genuine interest in the welfare of his men and he was a first-class trainer of troops. And they developed a humorous, although occasionally exasperated, affection for his weaknesses.

These failings — chiefly obstinacy, muddled thinking and an extreme reluctance to criticize subordinates — became especially important in the circumstances of Crete. Freyberg was famous for his inability to sack a useless officer, even after promising his staff that he would go through with it.

'He could not bear to be unkind,' one of them wrote later. On numerous occasions he went to great lengths to avoid such a distressing duty. This was perhaps part of that curious form of moral cowardice often found in large men of prodigious physical courage.

Bernard Freyberg was indeed large, and the description barrel-chested for once fitted perfectly.

Churchill called him 'the great St Bernard', which suggests also his rather endearing schoolboyish enthusiasms. When he wore his 'lemon-squeezer' hat, he really did look like 'a huge scoutmaster', as another of his staff officers remarked.

Freyberg provides yet another example of how storybook heroes seldom make good generals. A member of the War Cabinet staff felt that Churchill was too impressed by men of action. 'Winston was a bad judge of character. He didn't seem able to relate the task to the man needed to do it. He automatically went for men who had been tremendous fire-eaters in their youth, almost thinking

"Who is most like I was then?" '

On 30 April, the day after he reached Crete on board HMS
Ajax,
Freyberg was summoned to a conference with his two immediate superiors, General Wilson and General Wavell. This meeting took place at Ay Marina in a large seashore villa with a rooftop balcony sheltered by an awning which flapped in the breeze.

The Commander-in-Chief arrived by car from Maleme airfield where he had landed after an uncomfortable flight from Egypt in a Blenheim. Churchill had sent the following signal two days before: 'It seems clear from our information that a heavy airborne attack by German troops and bombers will soon be made on Crete. Let me know what forces you have in the island and what your plans are. It ought to be a fine opportunity for killing the parachute troops. The island must be stubbornly defended.'

Having accorded Crete the lowest priority possible for the last six months, despite Churchill's instructions, Wavell was depressed by his renewed pugnacity. 'Winston is always expecting rabbits to come out of empty hats,' he said to Chips Channon. Disastrous aircraft losses during the fall of Greece meant that there were not enough Hurricanes left to provide adequate fighter cover. As a result, both the Royal Navy and the RAF had rather lost interest in the island as a forward base. The opportunity to develop aerodromes for long-range bombing of the Ploesti oilfields seems to have slipped from strategic thinking at this stage. Meanwhile the Army needed every battalion and tank available to cope with Rommel's advance in North Africa, and Wavell now had to put together a force to relieve British bases in Iraq besieged in an uprising which the Germans had promised to support.

First of all Wavell took Jumbo Wilson on one side and told him, 'I want you to go to Jerusalem and relieve Baghdad.' Then he called Freyberg over and, having complimented him on the performance of the New Zealand Division in Greece, said that he wanted him to command Creforce.

Freyberg did not conceal his dismay. 'I told him', he wrote later in a report to the New Zealand government, 'that I wanted to get back to Egypt to concentrate the Division and train and re-equip it and I added that my Government would never agree to the Division being split permanently. He then said that he considered it my duty to remain and take on the job. I could do nothing but accept . . .

There was not very much to discuss. We were told that Crete would be held. The scale of attack envisaged was five to six thousand airborne troops, plus a possible seaborne attack. The primary objectives of this attack were considered to be Heraklion and Maleme aerodromes.'

Freyberg was the seventh commander of British forces on the island since their arrival the previous November. He was appointed over Major General Weston of the Royal Marines, who had recently arrived to command the various elements of the Mobile Naval Base Defence Organisation. Weston, who had displayed considerable energy during his four days in office, believed that the appointment of General Officer Commanding had been offered to him, so he felt aggrieved by the abrupt change.

This senior Marine officer was a curious mixture. He possessed an analytical mind and a much clearer view of enemy strategy than his successor, yet was self-important and liable to behave unreasonably over small incidents.

That afternoon Creforce Headquarters was established in a quarry above Canea on the west side of the neck of the peninsula that formed the shelter of Suda Bay. The site was perfect. It looked down the coast towards Maleme and, swinging a few degrees left, over the valley leading to Canea which Brigadier Tidbury had correctly identified six months before as the second enemy dropping zone in the area of Canea.

Weston jealously held on to his personnel so Freyberg found himself without a headquarters staff.

'There weren't even clerks and signallers,' he later recorded, 'only an officers' mess.' Freyberg, even though he was no prima donna, may well have been privately upset by Weston's behaviour, but friction between them seems to have had little influence on events, perhaps because Freyberg backed away from any unpleasantness.

Freyberg clearly wondered what he had been landed with. In spite of Churchill's command of November 1940 and repeated demands, basic measures for the defence of the island had not been taken. The subsequent excuse of GHQ Middle East that there were not enough resources to go round, although true, was also disingenuous. No effort was made to think things through: that fatal British vice of compromise, spreading the jam so thinly that it did no good anywhere, was all too evident.

The will and energy for hard decisions were in even shorter supply than materials.

Peter Wilkinson, the SOE officer who had come to Crete to observe the parachute invasion, wrote in his report to Colonel Colin Gubbins at SOE's headquarters in London: 'Our staff appeared to suffer from complete inertia. Not even the most elementary preparations had been made. Although we have now been over six months in Crete, there is not a single road from Canea to the south coast that can be used for military transport — though there were only four miles to complete when they arrived here.'

Crete, with its mountain ranges like battlements facing Africa, could only be resupplied through ports on the north coast. With German airfields in Greece, this was a grave weakness, as the constant pall of black smoke over Suda Bay demonstrated: ten merchant ships totalling fifty thousand tons were sunk by air attack in under a month.