Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (18 page)

While the Storm Regiment troops landing to the west of Hill 107 could shelter from the worst of the fire in the river-bed, Major Scherber's III Battalion, dropping two kilometres or so along on the Canea side of the airfield, faced a massacre from the moment they jumped.

Most of Scherber's men landed on the well-concealed positions of the New Zealand Division's Engineer Detachment and 23rd Battalion. One group dropped on battalion headquarters. Colonel Leckie killed five and his adjutant, seated at a packing case which served as his desk, shot two without standing up.

Exultant cries of 'Got the bastard!' could be heard on all sides. Nowhere was it heard with greater glee than amongst the former inmates of the Field Punishment Centre at Modhion, just inland from the Engineer Detachment. The soldiers under sentence there were given rifles and the promise of a pardon if they fought well, then let off the leash to hunt down paratroopers scattered in their area.

Sixty prisoners killed a hundred and ten in less than an hour.

Those Germans who survived the descent through crossfire arrived doubly disorientated by the unexpected resistance. Some crashed on to roofs, others through the branches of olive trees. There they were shot before they had time to wriggle out of their harnesses. Suspended bodies twisted gently as if from the macabre gibbets of a previous century.

Even those who landed unwounded and unseen in a vineyard or field of barley could not fight back 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. Scherber, his adjutant, and three out of four company commanders were killed, along with nearly four hundred men. Lieutenant Horst Trebes was the only key officer to survive unwounded.

The other main German objective in the Maleme and Suda sectors was the Ayia valley south-west of Canea, known during the battle as Prison Valley because of the low, white buildings of Ayia jail. The prison was overlooked by the heights of Galatas a kilometre to the north, which formed part of a range of round dry hills separating the cultivated valley from the sea.

Galatas was the central position of the New Zealand Division's scratch 10th Brigade, which only possessed a single truck. Colonel Kippenberger, its commander, did not even have a wireless set in his headquarters. The largest unit in this very mixed formation was the Composite Battalion comprising the remnants of two New Zealand regiments of field artillery, the Divisional Petrol Company, and a transport company, all reassigned as infantrymen: the gunners were known as the

'infantillery'.

Kippenberger also had two Greek regiments, both ill-armed and ill-led. The 6th Greek Regiment, with only three rounds of ammunition per man due to a mix-up, straddled the valley leading towards Canea, while the 8th Greek Regiment, armed with Steyers captured from the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, were placed in a dangerously isolated position south of Lake Ayia. When Kippenberger visited the liaison officer he had sent to advise the Greek colonel, he did not 'tell him that I had argued elsewhere that 8 Greek was only a circle on the map and that it was murder to leave such troops in such a position.' (This Greek regiment proved their pessimism wrong by its astonishing resistance.)

Also up the valley, but on the north side, was the Divisional Cavalry nearly two hundred strong acting as infantry. Kippenberger's battalion in Greece, the 20th, comprised part of yet another reserve against a seaborne invasion, 'where', he later lamented, 'they did nothing all the vital first day'.

Kippenberger, although one of the ablest New Zealand officers, made a crucial mistake. He put no defending force in the prison itself: 'a solid rectangle of buildings impervious to our little guns. Its Governor was suspected of being pro-German, and so he proved. I have no recollection that we ever considered garrisoning it.'

After the bombing and strafing attacks of the early morning, Kippenberger shaved, then began to eat a very unsatisfactory plate of porridge under the trees outside the little house which acted as his headquarters in Galatas. Suddenly, he heard oaths and exclamations, and lifted his head to see four gliders: 'in their silence inexpressibly menacing'. He shouted 'Stand to your arms!' and dashed back upstairs for his own rifle.

These gliders, bearing the now leaderless headquarters of General Süssmann, landed between the prison and Lake Ayia. They were followed almost immediately by the waves of troop-carriers dropping the three battalions of the 3rd Parachute Regiment and the Engineer Battalion.

Rather like Brigadier Meindl, the division's chief of staff, Major Count von Uxkiill refused to come by glider and insisted on parachuting instead. With great style, he fixed his monocle firmly in place before launching himself from the aeroplane, and later claimed that it stayed in place, even on landing.

But for many in the 3rd Parachute Regiment, the drop was far from jolly. A large part of its HI Battalion came down on the well-camouflaged positions of the 18th and 19th New Zealand Battalions and suffered a similar fate to Scherber's men east of Maleme. The trenches of the 19th Battalion were so well-concealed that Corporal Fletcher and his section watched in mounting excitement as one of the first paratroopers to land leopard-crawled towards them across a small field, thinking he was concealed by the furrows. They held their fire until he popped his head up three yards away. The first shot only wounded him. 'He yelled and squealed like a pig with its throat cut and pleaded for mercy

— we gave him mercy all right — one clean through the nut.' Most accounts of this action, like those of the fighting elsewhere, boast about tallies and compare the slaughter to duck-shooting and potting rabbits. Kippenberger records: '19 Battalion told us that they had killed 155 parachutists and, rather apologetically, that they had taken nine prisoners.'

The 6th Greek Regiment, whose position ran from Galatas across the valley, found the enemy dropping all round. But since their colonel had not issued the ammunition received the day before, the ill-trained soldiers not surprisingly scattered.

Kippenberger's brigade major, Captain Bassett, tried to rally as many as he could. The next morning, two hundred of those who remained were handed over to 'a blond hero' — Captain Michael Forrester of the Queen's and the British Military Mission. The New Zealand official history and most other works incorrectly describe Forrester as taking over that morning and leading a charge. In fact he had returned from Heraklion the evening before to Prince Peter's house overlooking the bay north of Daratsos. Here he found only Marcos, the cook.

During his pre-breakfast shave, he had seen the paratroopers begin to drop, and grabbing a rifle, first took part in the battle against a group of paratroopers who attacked the 7th General Field Hospital just across the bay, then joined the coastal flank of the Composite Battalion manned mainly by drivers.

Only a light troop of Royal Artillery remained in the valley below Daratsos, utterly exposed. A group of Captain von der Heydte's men raided them from the flank and, having no personal weapons, they were beaten back losing several men and one of their field guns, which the paratroopers gleefully turned on a nearby farmhouse held by British soldiers.

Nearly five kilometres up the valley, Major Liebach's Engineer Battalion dropped to the west of Lake Ayia, some of its detachments falling on the 8th Greek Regiment, most of whose men held their ground with a bravery and effectiveness that Kippenberger had never expected. The rest of Heydte's I Battalion and Major Derpa's II Battalion landed virtually unopposed between Lake Ayia and the prison which they promptly occupied. Unable to believe their good fortune, they had a secure base, a medical station and a source of water.

From 'Pink Hill', just in front of Galatas, it looked as if 'the whole valley was covered with discarded parachutes, like huge mushrooms'. Kippenberger and the men of the Divisional Petrol Company could see paratroopers running about collecting themselves and their weapons from the containers.

They were out of effective range. Only scattered paratroopers had landed near enough to engage. In the first moments of the battle, Kippenberger had stalked a sniper on the edge of the village and shot him at point-blank range.

Less than two kilometres to the north-east of Galatas, was leaguered part of a squadron of the 3rd Hussars. These recently arrived cavalrymen were not yet fully accustomed to the morning air raids known as 'the daily hate'.

Every spare moment had been spent on badly needed maintenance and repairs to their light Whippet tanks. The vehicles — described by one of their officers as 'armoured perambulators' — were already in a deplorable state when shipped from Alexandria: they represented a hasty selection from those sent back from the desert to be refitted in base workshops round Cairo. To make matters worse, the ship carrying them had been bombed on arrival in Suda Bay, and the tanks had to be winched from the hold of the half-sunken vessel.

Squadron headquarters and two troops (each of three or four tanks) had concealed themselves in an olive grove. The officers and NCOs were sitting round a table under a tree having breakfast when the second wave of bombers and fighters attacked the coastal strip. The Messerschmitts came low overhead strafing at random, the bullets ripping through the canopy of leaves. Everyone scrambled for cover behind tree-trunks.

A few minutes later, with bodies packed uncomfortably on top of one another, somebody shouted The bastards are landing!' They looked up through the branches and saw the parachutes. The squadron leader screamed, 'Tank crews!' Another mad scramble followed, and the crews became mixed up in their haste.

Lieutenant Roy Farran led his troop charging up the road to Galatas. They passed a group of Greek soldiers who begged for ammunition. Farran threw them a belt from his Vickers, but later realized that it was the wrong calibre for their rifles. The cavalrymen experienced a surge of exhilaration as New Zealanders yelled encouragement and gave them the thumbs-up sign.

Beyond Galatas, the lead tank came under fire from a Schmeisser. Traversing the turret, Farran spotted a grey figure charging towards them up the road. He yelled the order to fire and the gunner let off a burst, but their target proved to be a peasant woman in a long dress. One bullet hit her in the shoulder, another in the head, but she ran on past the tank screaming. Farran was frozen in horror until the German parachutists began firing again.

Back through the village the tank halted when a Cretan hidden in a ditch waved to them with a handkerchief. He put his fingers to his lips and pointed to the opposite ditch. Straining out of the top of the turret, Farran saw a German parachutist in full gear lying face-down. He called on him to surrender, but the man did not move, so he fired his heavy service revolver at him. The shot missed, but the German could not stop himself from tensing visibly. Farran traversed the turret and turned the Vickers on him. A few yards further down the road they shot two more Germans, then five suddenly appeared out of the trees from another direction, their hands up. Fearing a trick, Farran gave the order to fire and three were cut down. The other two, although hit, managed to escape back into the trees. 'I do not think that I would make a practice of shooting prisoners', he wrote in his memoirs, 'but Crete was different, and in the heat of the moment I had not time to think.'

Crete was indeed different. In the speed, uncertainty and fear of battle, neither side showed much regard for the Geneva Convention. There were numerous incidents when soldiers and officers on both sides killed prisoners. Yet when paratroopers from the 3rd Parachute Regiment's III Battalion attacked the field hospital on the coastal promontory two kilometres north of Daratsos and allegedly forced patients taken prisoner to walk in front of them as a screen, Farran was surprised at 'German callousness towards the Red Cross at this period of the war, for generally speaking they were most meticulous in their observance of the rules.'

Crete's greatest difference, to the horror of the Germans, was the part played by 'unrecruited civilians'.

The Cretan resistance, unlike those underground movements in the rest of Europe which did not start to develop until a year or so after the German occupation, began literally in the first hour of the invasion.

Boys, old men and also women displayed a breath-taking bravery in defence of their island. German soldiers were doubly scandalized at the idea of women fighting them. They would rip the dress from the shoulder of a suspect. If she had a bruise from the recoil of a rifle, or was caught knife in hand, she would be shot along with the men.

Scattered paratroopers landing near Perivolia were, in the words of the New Zealand official history,

'despatched by civilians with axes and spades'. One of the first examples of spontaneous mobilization was an attack on the rear of the Parachute Engineer Battalion which had landed round Lake Ayia by Cretan irregulars advancing from the large village of Alikianou.

Within a short space of time, according to a German report, the 16th Company of the Storm Regiment

'which had been ordered to protect the south of the aerodrome of Malemes
[sic]
continually had to fight against
francs-tireurs'.

Although the Cretans had their own proud traditions of resistance to the Turk, their ferocity and reckless bravery in 1941 were more reminiscent of the Second of May Rising against Napoleon's forces in Madrid, of a
guerra al cuchillo:
war to the knife.

Some priests led their parishioners into battle. Father Stylianos Frantzeskakis, hearing of the airborne invasion, rushed to the church to sound the bell. Taking a rifle, he marched his volunteers north from Paleokhora and later fought German motor-cycle detachments when they reached Kandanos.

An intelligence officer from the 14th Infantry Brigade's headquarters remembered several priests, keen duck-shooters and therefore 'pretty good shots', who almost certainly took part in the fighting.

At the time of the battle, one went around with a rifle down his trousers waiting for the chance of a pot-shot at German paratroopers. And at Rethymno, Ray Sandover, one of the Australian battalion commanders, saw a monk on the second day of the battle armed with a rifle and an axe in his belt. On the third day the monk appeared accompanied by a little boy acting as gun-bearer with a Schmeisser sub-machine gun and other trophies he had won in the battle against the paratroopers.