Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (28 page)

Parachutists who landed unharmed—and most of Battalions I and II of 3rd Parachute Regiment did so, together with the Parachute Engineer Battalion, between Maleme and Canea—had only to find their weapon canisters to be ready for action. Those groups quickly consolidated and started fighting as formed units. Around Maleme itself, even after they recovered from the chaos of their opposed descent, the survivors of Battalion III and from the glider parties remained desperately hard pressed. The New Zealanders, including those of 23rd and 21st Battalions who held the ground to the east of Maleme, were dug in and full of fight. As for the Germans, “even those who landed unwounded and unseen in a vineyard or field of barley could not fight effectively until they found their weapons. And if a container had fallen in the open, retrieving it was like a murderous game of grandmother’s footsteps.”
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Quite quickly the battalion was almost destroyed. The commander, his adjutant, three of his four company commanders and 400 of his 500-odd soldiers were killed outright or died of untended wounds among the olive trees and scrub of Hill 107.

General Freyberg, eating breakfast in his headquarters in the quarry near Canea, had greeted the arrival of the Germans at eight o’clock with the comment “They’re dead on time!,” his only known public acknowledgement of his access to Ultra intelligence.
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“His attitude,” wrote the future Lord Woodhouse, later to be a leader of the Special Operations Executive in Greece, “was that he had clearly made all the necessary dispositions on the basis of his information, and that there was now nothing more for him to do except leave his subordinates to fight the battle.”
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Freyberg’s dispositions, despite his continuing misapprehension of the danger from the sea, did indeed prove effective in the central sector around Rethymno and at Heraklion in the east. Two Australian battalions, 2/11th and 2/1st, defended Rethymno airfield, supported by two Greek regiments. The Australians were well dug in and had good fields of fire, there being little vegetation in the area. They also enjoyed the advantage of ample warning because of delays in Athens, the German parachutists did not arrive until the afternoon, several hours after the descents at Maleme and Canea. The two battalions, I and III of 2nd Parachute Regiment, were also flown in along the coastline, the planes and jumpers presenting excellent targets in the last moment of their approach; some of the aircraft actually flew below the positions of the Australians hidden on the coastal hills. When the Australians opened fire they caused carnage. Several aircraft were brought down, others dropped their parachutists into the sea, where they were instantly taken to the bottom by the weight of their equipment. Those who survived found little cover from either fire or view. They were shot in large numbers, many falling to bands of Cretan irregulars.

The key to the success of the defence was the quality of the two battalion commanders, Campbell and Sandover, who kept their men in hand, organised effective fire and led counterattacks to mop up any remaining resistance. The 2nd Parachute Regiment was decisively defeated at Rethymno. It suffered very heavy casualties and its commanding officer, Colonel Sturm, was taken prisoner by Sandover on the morning of 21 May.

The 1st Parachute Regiment, dropping at Heraklion, suffered even worse ill-fortune. Its Battalions I and III fell among the best-trained defending units on the island, the 2nd Leicesters, 2nd Black Watch and 2nd York and Lancaster. Their soldiers were pre-war regulars, who knew their business. They were also supported by more than a dozen light antiaircraft guns which held their fire during the preparatory German air raids and whose positions were therefore not detected. When the troop-carrying Junkers 52s appeared, even later than at Rethymno, some as late as seven o’clock in the evening, fifteen were shot down in the two hours the parachute runs lasted. The parachutists who got clear were shot in large numbers by the British, as they hung in their harness, as they touched down or as they scrambled to seek cover and their weapon containers on the ground. Whole companies were destroyed—one had only five survivors; Battalion III of 1st Parachute regiment lost 300 killed, and 100 wounded out of a strength of 550. Among the casualties at Heraklion were three brothers, members of the illustrious family of Blücher, Wellington’s fellow commander at Waterloo, serving as a lieutenant, corporal and private.
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By the second day of the battle, 21 May, the advantage had swung decisively Freyberg’s way at Heraklion and Rethymno. Both airfields remained in British hands and, though there were parties of Germans still fighting in the countryside and within the Venetian walls of Heraklion, they were simply hanging on. It was only a matter of time before they would be overrun or forced to surrender—unless, that is, the battle went against the British elsewhere on the island. And it had already begun to do so.

Creforce lacked wireless sets, so that intercommunication between Freyberg’s sectors was at best intermittent, often nonexistent. Signalling to Wavell in Cairo on the night of 20 May, he reported: “We have been hard pressed. I believe that so far we hold the aerodrome at Maleme, Heraklion and Retimo and the two harbours. The margin by which we hold them is a bare one and it would be wrong for me to paint an optimistic picture. The fighting has been heavy and large numbers of Germans have been killed . . . The scale of air attack upon us has been severe. Everybody here realises the vital issue and we will fight it out.” Freyberg actually believed that the tide had turned. What he did not know was that the second sentence of his signal was crucially incorrect. Maleme airfield was about to be abandoned by the defenders under cover of darkness. The Germans would use it to fly in the infantry of 5th Mountain Division, thus turning the balance decisively their way. The Battle of Crete was about to be lost.

Not for want of courage. Both Andrew, the Victoria Cross winner commanding 22nd New Zealand Battalion, and Hargest, his superior commanding 5 New Zealand Brigade, were brave men and experienced veterans of the Great War; their soldiers were brave and experienced also. The unexpected nature of airborne warfare had unnerved them, however, while their means of intercommunication was erratic at best and Hargest in particular shared Freyberg’s anxiety about a landing from the sea. Andrew made one concerted effort to drive the Germans away from the airfield in late afternoon, when he sent the two Matilda tanks he had under command forward. Neither was in proper working order and one soon turned back. The other, which might have swept the airfield clear, so frightened were the parachutists of tanks, inexplicably drove past and descended into the Tavronitis River bed, where it soon grounded.

Soon after dark fell on 20 May Andrew came to the disastrous conclusion that his forward companies had been overrun and that his best procedure was to draw his other two companies back on to Hargest’s other battalions to the east, perhaps to launch a counterattack in daylight the following morning. In one of their few wireless contacts, Hargest appeared to agree with him, or at least to accept the decision of the man on the spot. Both were quite wrong. The two companies Andrew thought cut off were, though battered, holding their ground and still dominated the enemy, who were now exhausted, often to the point of falling asleep where they lay. Hargest had plentiful reserves, including a whole uncommitted battalion, but declined to organise a full-scale reinforcement of the airfield or Hill 107. During the night, as the New Zealanders in the forward positions learnt haphazard that they had been abandoned, they left their positions, and made their way eastward. The vital ground was falling by default.

In Athens the German senior commanders were concluding, on the night of 20–21 May, that the battle was lost. Student realised he faced the destruction not only of his division but of his reputation and career. He hastily convened a conference to make a new plan. Surplus parachutists would be formed into a battle group under Colonel Ramcke to land directly around the airfield, while Captain Kleye, a particularly daring pilot, was to attempt to land on the airfield at first light, to bring badly needed ammunition but also to test the defences.
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Kleye made a successful touch-down and take-off on the morning of 21 May. On his return to Athens, every available soldier was set to preparing the Junkers 52 fleet for the renewed assault. The effort took all day, during which the New Zealanders, partially reorganised by Brigadier Hargest, pushed forward to retake the ground abandoned the night before. They advanced under heavy air attack and against the fire of the surviving Germans, hidden in vineyards and olive groves. The 28th Battalion, composed of Maoris, New Zealand’s native warrior race, actually got back onto the airfield but, finding themselves unsupported, turned about. There were other successes as the New Zealanders probed forward. Then, in the late afternoon, the Ramcke parachute group fell in 5 Brigade’s area and the New Zealanders were forced to renew the business, as on the day before, of shooting parachutists as they fell out of the sky and mopping up parties that managed to land unscathed.

Ramcke’s descent would probably have merely added to the parachute catastrophe had not, simultaneously, the 5th Mountain Division begun to arrive in strength on Maleme airfield. It was not a tidy arrival. The New Zealanders within range opened a devastating fire, thickened by shells from captured Italian field guns fired by British gunners. Twenty-two Junkers 52s were hit on or before reaching the ground, a heavy loss to a transport fleet already severely depleted on the preceding day of action. The Germans, however, were ruthless, using captured British Bren gun-carriers to push wrecks off the runway and turning aircraft round in seventy seconds. On 21 May a battalion of 100th Mountain Regiment was flown in; by the 24th the whole division had landed, bringing the numbers transported by the troop-carrier fleet to nearly 14,000. During the arrival of the mountain division, the New Zealanders, reinforced by the 2/7th Australian Battalion and the 1st Welch Regiment, continued to battle on against the airheads around Maleme and Canea, often with success. It was during this phase of the fighting that Lieutenant Charles Upham, of the 20th New Zealand Battalion, won the Victoria Cross; he was to win another again later in the war, the only infantry soldier, and one of only three men, ever to be awarded two VCs.

Despite the bravery of the defenders of western Crete, and their willingness to return to the fray in an increasingly confused battle, by 22 May the decision was already out of their hands. Although appalling losses had been inflicted on the parachute and glider troops on the day of landing and in the immediate aftermath, the loss of Maleme airfield by 21 May was a decisive setback. Thereafter the Germans, who enjoyed complete air superiority, could reinforce the island at will, while Creforce, unsupported by air and scarcely by sea, began to wither away. Eventually about 20,000 survivors of the fighting, some escaping in formed groups, others straggling, were taken off by the navy from the southern port of Sphakia, having made a hard escape across the White Mountains; others were embarked in units from the north coast. Many remained, to take up resistance with the Cretans, who refused to submit to the occupation; in the end they had to be restrained from attacks on the Germans by the British liaison officers sent to their guerrilla bands, to avert the appalling reprisals inflicted on the inland villages.

British, Australian and New Zealand losses during the fighting totalled nearly 3,500 killed; about 12,000 were taken prisoner. There were also nearly 2,000 losses among sailors of the Royal Navy, fighting to destroy or turn back the seaborne invasion, the prospect of which had so alarmed General Freyberg. The toll among the Germans, though no more than equal, was felt more heavily. Casualty figures rarely agree; estimates of the number of Germans killed in the Battle of Crete, from 20 May to 1 June, vary between 3,352, the number commemorated in the cemetery on Hill 107, and 3,994, Anthony Beevor’s calculation, which included aircrew. The gruesome point about the German casualties is that a huge proportion were from the 7th Parachute Division and fell on a single day, 20 May. As many as 2,000 were killed out of a total strength—currently that of the three parachute regiments and the Assault Regiment—of about 8,000; the number may have been higher, there being no one to count.
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Crete was therefore a German disaster. It effectively destroyed one of the finest fighting formations in Hitler’s army; he resolved never to risk an airborne operation again and largely stuck to his decision. Yet Crete was also a battle that the British lost. Many of those killed, wounded or captured were also soldiers of the highest quality; it is invidious to discriminate but Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who was to meet them frequently in the Western Desert at the head of the Africa Corps, reckoned New Zealanders the best soldiers he ever knew, including in that judgement his own Germans. The Australians, less well disciplined but equally self-reliant, were also soldiers of high quality. So were those of the five British regular battalions, York and Lancaster, Welch, Leicesters, Black Watch and Argylls. Some men were taken off by the navy in formed groups, others were evacuated haphazardly. Creforce did not make an organised escape, and the shame of rout, worse than that of defeat, hung about the survivors who eventually found their way back to Egypt.

The navy suffered as badly as the army. In the effort to oppose the seaborne invasion in which Freyberg’s fears were so disastrously invested—in reality nothing more than a few flotillas of Greek fishing boats, unprotected and crammed to the gunwales with defenceless German infantry—Admiral Cunningham sacrificed to the attack of German airpower three cruisers,
Gloucester, Fiji
and
Calcutta,
and six destroyers,
Juno, Greyhound, Kelly, Kashmir, Imperial
and
Hereward.
Four battleships were damaged, six cruisers and seven destroyers. Many of the warships had escaping soldiers embarked, and casualties aboard were heavy. The naval battle of Crete, like the land battle, was a defeat for British power, and the loss of life among the naval crews and the embarked soldiers and RAF ground crew was grievous.