Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (12 page)

then recommended that if the Italians invaded Greece they should be sure to take Crete to pre-empt a British occupation of the island. And on 28 October 1940, the day both of Italy's invasion of Greece and of the Axis leaders' meeting in Florence, Hitler told Mussolini that 'Germany could make available a division of airborne troops and a division of parachute troops' should he wish to invade Crete.

The strategy was so self-evident that Brigadier Tidbury, who was appointed commander of the British troops in Crete on 3 November, correctly identified every German objective and their four dropping zones on the island six and a half months before the attack came. The possibility that the British might work this out for themselves does not seem to have occurred to the Germans.

The proposal of a German airborne invasion of Crete was put to Goering by General Kurt Student, the architect of the paratroop division and commander of the XI Air Corps. Student came from a family of impoverished Brandenburg landowners, part of that Prussian class of 'ditch-barons' who formed the backbone of the Wilhelmine officer corps. From a light infantry regiment he transferred to flying duties, and when the First World War came, he flew a scout-plane over the Russians before the Battle of Tannenberg. One of the few German fighter pilots to survive the war, Student later became part of that secret cadre of officers in the Central Flying Office which laid the foundations for the Luftwaffe in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.

Student, known for his 'brusque good humour', irony and drawling voice, was a tireless worker, not a party man or corridor politician. Promotion came slowly. His assistant at Central Flying, Hans Jeschonnek, rapidly outstripped him to become Chief of Staff of the Luftwaffe. But this proved an advantage, for General Jeschonnek backed Student's appointment to form parachute regiments and helped him develop his more daring ideas, such as the use of gliders, later employed to spectacular effect in the capture of the Belgian fort of Eben Emael in May 1940.

Student believed passionately in his creation of a new strategic arm, rather than in the original idea of sabotage groups that would be dropped in the wake of a Luftwaffe bombing raid. Goering's feat of empire-building, which enabled a Luftwaffe division to be created, aroused great jealousy within the Wehrmacht. Military orthodoxy decried Student's ambitious schemes and the resources they required.

Yet such a revolutionary form of warfare clearly appealed to Hitler's sense of military surprise and symbolic imagery. Even before Student's men had a chance to prove themselves, he chose Colonel Bruno Bräuer's 1st Parachute Regiment to lead the march-past on his birthday parade in 1939.

Just over a year later, Wehrmacht critics had to fall silent after Captain Witzig's gliders landed within the defences of Eben Emael, and Student's paratroop drops paralysed the Dutch army. Yet the operation against Rotterdam nearly cost Student his life when a sniper's bullet penetrated one side of his brain. A Dutch surgeon saved him from death or paralysis.

Student, although he had grown flabby during the months of inactivity in hospital, was entirely recovered when Goering took him to see Hitler at the Mönichkirchen headquarters, south of Vienna.

They arrived on 21 April 1941, the day after the Fiihrer's fifty-second birthday and General Tsolacoglou's offer of surrender to General Sepp Dietrich in Greece. Hitler was openly sceptical of Student's visionary plan to use Crete and then Cyprus as stepping stones across the Mediterranean, with a paratroop assault on the Suez Canal just as Rommel reached the outskirts of Alexandria. This was the most dramatic expression yet of Jodl's peripheral strategy, which Hitler had abandoned in December to concentrate on the invasion of Russia. Hitler asked rather pertinently whether the paratroopers might not be more effectively deployed in the capture of Malta. Student repeated the same arguments with which he had convinced Keitel and Jodl: that Malta's size and shape meant that the garrison could deploy rapidly to counter-attack the dropping zones. Crete, on the other hand, was long and thin, with bad communications. Hitler, less easily persuaded than his generals, predicted heavy casualties. When not obsessed with a project, his military and psychological intuition was often very accurate.

Yet after a few days Hitler gave in to Goering's repeated requests for approval of what was to be called Operation Merkur, or Mercury. Martin Van Creveld defined the circumstances thus: 'Far from being part of any coherent strategy, therefore, Merkur was little more than a sop to Goering, whose air force was destined to play a subordinate role in the coming Russian campaign.' But Professor Van Creveld overstates his otherwise impeccable case about the Balkan campaign's lack of effect on Operation Barbarossa. Hitler, unlike those of his generals who still hankered after the peripheral strategy, was indeed uninterested in Crete as a stepping stone to the Middle East, but his lingering concern for the Roumanian oilfields and his atavistic Austrian fear of invasion from the south-east made him see the island as a useful offshore rampart.

Führer Directive No. 28 of 25 April began: 'The occupation of the island of Crete (Operation Merkur) is to be prepared in order to have a base for conducting the air war against England in the Eastern Mediterranean.' There was one qualification: 'The transport movements must not lead to any delay in the strategic concentration for Barbarossa.'

Student had already flown back to the airborne headquarters at Berlin-Tempelhof to set in motion the transfer to Greece of the 7th Parachute Division from eleven different camps in Prussia. For the divisional chief of staff, Major Count von Uxküll, the administrative complications allowed little time to think of the operation, whose objective they had been told in the strictest confidence. Secrecy only stimulated the rumours further when the warning order to move reached the barracks. Most of the bets were on Crete.

The Parachute Division, as part of the Luftwaffe and not the army, was very conscious of the Wehrmacht's suspicion. 'Our formation is young,' Captain Freiherr von der Heydte told his men in the 1st Battalion of the 3rd Parachute Regiment when presenting them with the divisional badge of a diving eagle with a swastika in its claws.* 'We must create tradition by our actions in the future. It depends upon us whether or not the sign of the plunging eagle — the badge which unites us — will go down in history as a symbol of military honour and valour.'

* Each regiment, with three battalions of 550 men, was equivalent to a weak infantry brigade. The Storm Regiment had four battalions, each 600 strong.

They were all volunteers, a number of them 17-year-olds who had seen magazine articles about the
Fallschirmjäger
regiments and longed tobelong to this new elite. Heydte said that his men had joined for 'idealism, ambition or adventure'. The idealists, former members of the Hitler Youth 'saturated with national slogans' were the most likely to crack up. According to Heydte, the adventurers made the best soldiers.

One volunteer called Martin Pöppel managed to be both a former member of the Hitler Youth and an adventurer. He was constantly in trouble throughout the 'unbelievably hard' training when Hauptfeldwebel Zierach 'reigned supreme with his fat punishment book, which he kept jammed between the first and second button on his chest.' The sentence was always physical exertion until the culprit dropped: 'running on the spot, marching and falling flat, marching and punishment routines to music'. But 'a bit of spirit, something out of the ordinary was what the paratroops wanted.' Success on passing-out and after the first jump was celebrated with sausages and beer and chatting up girls impressed by the paratroop uniform and their reputation as a
corps d'tlite.

The persistent notion that the Parachute Division represented only the flower of Nazi youth is misleading. A number of private soldiers and lance corporals came from old Prussian families: in the British Army, where NCOs instinctively distrusted 'gentleman rankers', this would have been unthinkable. The three brothers, Counts Wolfgang, Leberecht and Hans-Joachim von Blücher, provided the most striking example. Wolfgang, aged 24, was a lieutenant; the other two aged 19 and 17, sergeant and private. All three were to die fighting the Black Watch on the rust-coloured and rocky terrain around Heraklion airfield.

Parachute officers provided an equally marked contrast in backgrounds. Heydte described a fellow battalion commander as a man who had been 'a very good NCO; but even as an officer, he remained an NCO.' Amongst the hard-bitten fighters who had risen from the ranks, the most outstanding was Colonel Hermann Ramcke who had started as a ship's boy. During the First World War he fought in the trenches, and after the Armistice he joined one of the most brutal of the Freikorps — General von der Goltz's Iron Division which terrorized the Baltic states in 1919 on the fringe of the Russian Civil War. He finally became an officer in the Reichswehr during the inter-war years.

On the other hand Major General Wilhelm Süssmann, Major Count von Uxkiill (from a family of Baltic landowners) and Captain Baron von der Heydte all belonged to the anti-Nazi faction within the armed forces. Uxkiill, who recruited Heydte, was a second cousin of Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg. And Einer von der Heydte, who had been a friend of both Patrick Leigh Fermor and George Weidenfeld in Vienna in 1934, 'had become a regular cavalry officer,' wrote Leigh Fermor,

'rather like
ancien regime
Frenchmen, who followed the profession of arms in spite of their hatred for the government.' After the plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, Heydte, who had known a number of the conspirators, escaped only because his 'name was misspelled in the papers the Gestapo found.

Instead, a major called von der Heyde was arrested, and later freed by the Russians.'

In the eyes of the men, an officer's origins seem to have been more or less irrelevant: those with a well-earned reputation for bravery were idolized. Captain Gericke, a battalion commander, they regarded as 'a real god of war', after his exploits in Holland. And the eldest Blücher was admired more for his Knight's Cross, also won in Holland, than for his family name.

The 2nd Parachute Regiment and the divisional staff led by General Süssmann had left for Bulgaria on 26 March, before the invasion of Greece. And although no parachute units were called on to capture the island of Lemnos, as planned, they were used at short notice to seize the Corinth isthmus on 26 April.

On 2 May, the rest of the paratroopers followed by train, a thousand-mile, thirteen-day journey from their moorland training grounds in North Germany down through Austria, Hungary and Roumania to the Bulgarian border, then to Salonika and down the Aegean coast by lorry. They felt 'rather on holiday than on a journey into battle'. Only in Greece did they see signs of war: 'knocked-out tanks, gutted vehicles and the freshly-dug graves of soldiers'.

Their lorries took them to bivouac areas near airfields in Attica: Dadion, Eleusis, Megara, Tanagra, Topolia and Corinth where the 2nd Parachute Regiment had remained after their action. Heydte's battalion of the 3rd Parachute Regiment pitched their tents at Topolia. Early on 15 May, the morning after their arrival, an order arrived for regimental and battalion commanders to report to the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens by eleven o'clock. General Student had taken over the hotel as his headquarters within a week of its use as the GHQ for the Greek army and the British Military Mission.

As a Luftwaffe operation, Mercury came under the command of General Löhr's 4th Air Fleet, not Field Marshal List's XII Army headquarters. Senior German army officers were opposed to the operation. They were certain that the British would defend such a strategically important island to the end, and they feared the diversion of more troops just before Operation Barbarossa. The Parachute Division's privileged treatment, and Student's unprecedented plan to capture a major island from the air, with little hope of the usual ground support, promised some inter-service
schadenfreude
should the operation run into trouble.

The 22nd Division had been the air-portable formation allocated to the XI Air Corps, but Field Marshal List's headquarters decided that to move it down from Roumania, where it guarded the oilfields, was too complicated. In its place, List's staff suggested the 5th Mountain Division consisting of Bavarian and Austrian alpine regiments. This formation, which had suffered heavy casualties at the Rupel Pass, was resting at Chalkis. The 5th Mountain Division disliked the Prussians in the parachute division, and called them
Saupreussen
— or 'sour Prussians' as in sauerkraut.*

* For the full order of battle, see Appendix B.

Their commander, Major General Julius Ringel, an Austrian Nazi from before the
Anschluss,
was a jaunty Styrian squire with a dark moustache and imperial beard.

Student also encountered opposition within the Luftwaffe. He resented not having sole command of the operation, including control of the VIII Air Corps which was to provide close support to the paratroopers with about 570 aircraft — Stukas, Junkers 88s, Dorniers, Heinkels, Messerschmitt 109s and Messerschmitt 110s. The VIII Air Corps was commanded by Student's rival, General Freiherr Wolfram von Richthofen, a cousin of the 'Red Baron'. This Richthofen's fame was less romantic. He first attracted international attention when he directed the Condor Legion in Spain. His infamous battle honours — Guernica and, more recently, Belgrade — did not augur well for the ancient cities of Crete.

The concentration of transport planes, the largest ever seen, reached its peak on 14 May. Just over five hundred Junkers 52s, solid slow tri-motors of corrugated metal, were assembled on seven airfields in Attica and Boetia ready to ferry waves of paratroopers south for three hundred kilometres over the Aegean to drop on what were thought to be weakly defended objectives. But Student was then forced to delay Operation Mercury, originally scheduled for 17 May, to Tuesday, 20 May. Extra time was needed to bring the tanker
Rondine
with 5,000 tons of aviation fuel down the Adriatic.