Cruiser (33 page)

The Allied force on Crete was commanded by a New Zealander, Major-General Bernard Freyberg.
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A muscular bull, invariably described by his contemporaries as ‘larger than life', he had fought with bravery at Gallipoli, had famously swum the Hellespont as Lord Byron had done a century before, and had been one of the mourning party that buried the poet Rupert Brooke on the Greek island of Skyros in that ‘corner of a foreign field That is forever England'. Freyberg had won a Victoria Cross on the Somme in 1916 and had been wounded nine times – a fact that fascinated Churchill, who once made him strip naked to display his scars. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was offered command of the New Zealand Army's 2nd Division. Churchill, always attracted to men of valour, treated him as a favourite.

On the face of it, the defence of Crete was simple enough. The island is long and narrow, some 250 kilometres from west to east, and shaped like a sausage, as the Germans said. Much of it is mountainous, with a long backbone of ragged ranges that fall steeply to the sea on the southern coast. To the north, the land is flatter, with farms and olive groves. In 1941, there were three main towns. The capital, Canea, of about 36,000 people, was on the coast near Suda Bay, with an airfield nearby at Maleme, further to the west. Retimno and its airfield were
some 48 kilometres to the east of Suda and inland. Heraklion, which had both a port and an airfield, was further east again. Any invasion would obviously come in the north. But it was there, too, that the island would have to be supplied by the British, for there was no suitable port on the steep southern shores.

Freyberg was ready for the battle; the troops he commanded, designated Creforce, patently were not. There was one fresh British infantry brigade of around 15,000 men that had been sent from Egypt but which, apart from a battalion of the Black Watch, was barely trained. There were 7750 New Zealanders and 6500 Australians, all of them refugees from the Greek disaster, exhausted men who had left most of their equipment behind in the rout. Even the most basic necessities were missing. With few tents, they slept in the open beneath the olive trees, huddling under greatcoats or sharing a blanket, itching with lice. Army rations seemed to consist entirely of cold tinned herrings in tomato sauce, which were christened ‘goldfish in blood'. Cooking was done in petrol tins, and some of the diggers had to eat with their hands until they could carve forks and spoons from wood. Cretan villagers provided eggs and a few lambs every so often, and there was some consolation in the local rough red wine.

The rest of Creforce consisted of around 10,000 Greeks. Many of them were local peasants armed with ancient hunting rifles. And the Commonwealth troops were little better provided with arms and ammunition. There were rifles and some machine guns and a few dilapidated Matilda tanks. Cairo had promised to send 100 artillery pieces, but only 49 French and captured Italian field guns ever arrived, some of them without sights. Communications between various army units were primitive at best, relying on kilometres of telephone cable wound out along the ground. For air cover, the RAF could offer only six modern Hurricane fighters and another dozen or so antiquated Gladiator fighters and Blenheim bombers. As it turned out, these aircraft were withdrawn to Egypt the
day before the German invasion for fear they and their pilots would be destroyed within hours. Their ground crews were left behind. By day, the men of Creforce crouched in the olive groves as the Luftwaffe began to soften them up with air raids. Freyberg signalled Wavell:

In London, however, Winston Churchill remained as blindly optimistic as ever, his mind locked in the tactics of the First World War. He cabled the New Zealand Government that:

Churchill was at least correct about the air attack. Reading the Luftwaffe signals, British code-breakers had assembled a formidable file of ULTRA intelligence on Operation MERKUR. They knew the strength of the forces that would be hurled against Crete from the air, and that there would be three major landings to take the airfields at Maleme, Retimno and Heraklion. They knew dates and times. They knew that
General Student had postponed his attack from 17 May to 20 May. Freyberg, who was privy to the existence of ULTRA, was told all that and more. Churchill personally despatched a British intelligence officer, a brigadier, to Crete, to ensure that his favourite had every known detail at his fingertips.

But to no avail. For all his courage, Freyberg was no strategist. He was a fighter, not a thinker. Despite the ULTRA information handed to him on a plate, he had convinced himself that the Luftwaffe's airborne assault would be only a diversion. The main invasion would have to come from the sea. He disposed his forces to repel a landing on the coast near the capital, Canea. Appalled, Churchill's emissary noted that he had found Freyberg to be ‘a Bear of Little Brain'. Unknowing or unheeding, on 18 May Churchill sent another of his stirring cables to his Creforce Commander:

In Athens, the Hotel Grand Bretagne hummed with activity. In the vast ballroom, beneath its art-deco chandeliers and heavily curtained windows, desks of Luftwaffe staff officers beavered away at the invasion plans. Telephones rang incessantly, typewriters clattered, teleprinters chattered, despatch riders came and went. A huge wall map of Crete displayed the principal landing zones for the parachutists and the gliders. The invasion would begin with a massive bombing attack, to soften up the defences, just after dawn. Then there would be landings in three stages: in the early morning at Maleme, in the west; at midday at Retimno, more or less in the central sector; and finally in the late afternoon at Heraklion, in the east. When the Fallschirmjäger had taken the island, there would be follow-up
landings from the sea by infantry troops and equipment. Every small detail was attended to with Teutonic thoroughness.

But German intelligence was wildly off the mark. Where Freyberg had been given accurate information of his opponent's intentions, General Student was operating on little more than optimistic guesswork. The Germans believed there were only about 5000 British troops in the garrison on Crete. They thought all the Australians and New Zealanders from Greece had been evacuated to Egypt, and they took little account of the Greek forces on the island. More ludicrous still, they had deluded themselves that a large pro-Nazi element in the local population would rise up to give them an enthusiastic welcome.

Tuesday 20 May began with a morning of brilliant blue Mediterranean skies. At 6.45 am, not long after breakfast, Freyberg emerged from his headquarters in a small villa overlooking Suda Bay to see swarms of Stukas diving, sirens screaming, in a thunderous attack on his anti-aircraft defences. Bombs were bursting in billowing orange flames, leaving choking clouds of smoke and dust. Freyberg recorded the scene in his memoirs:

The battle for Crete had begun, exactly as ULTRA had
warned. The fight would be fast and deadly. Over the western Maleme sector, the lumbering JU52s – oddly boxy aircraft with corrugated steel bodies that looked like flying cattle trucks – droned in from the sea at around 300 feet, to disgorge their human cargoes like clouds of insects.

The Fallschirmjäger jumped in a spreadeagled posture they called the ‘crucifix'. It was an apt description. As these black specks came closer to the ground, dangling helplessly beneath their parachutes, they were met with a murderous fire that killed scores of them. Many more sprawled wounded where they landed, trapped in their harnesses and heavy jumpsuits designed for colder northern climates, to be picked off individually as the morning wore on. Several hundred dropped directly on top of a concealed New Zealand battalion and were massacred almost to a man as they struggled to free themselves from their webbing. One Luftwaffe assault battalion had 400 of its 600 men killed. Other paratroops – far from being welcomed by the local population – were slaughtered by hunting groups of Cretan peasants who ambushed them in the olive groves and shot them with hunting rifles or slit their throats with knives.

The gliders fared a little better. One, carrying a general and his staff, had already crashed onto a small Aegean island after its tow rope had snapped. Others were shot down as they approached the Cretan coast, or broke up as they crunched into a dry river bed to the west of Maleme. But some 40 of them did make it. Their men, shocked but not beaten, regrouped to take the airfield there.

The result for the Germans at Retimno and Heraklion later that day was much the same – a slaughter of men floating in the air or struggling on the ground. If anything, it was worse at Heraklion than at Maleme. The Australians of the 2/4th Battalion, well concealed on high ground near the Heraklion airfield, were almost at eye level with the JU52s as they rumbled past. They shot the tumbling paratroopers at point-blank range.

As night began to fall, the Luftwaffe was facing a
catastrophe. Nearly 2000 men had been killed in the three sectors. At the Grand Bretagne, Student confronted the grim reality that some of his units had been virtually wiped out and that none of Operation MERKUR's first-day objectives – the capture of the three airfields – had been achieved. When this news began to filter back to the High Command in Berlin, Student found himself under great pressure to cut his losses and call off the next day's assault. Only a miracle could save the situation.

General Freyberg offered up that miracle. Creforce had taken casualties, but nothing on the scale of the German losses. Now was the time he should have mustered his forces for a counter-attack under the cover of darkness. Tragically, he did not. His mind was still fixated on the illusion of a massive seaborne invasion, and for that he waited. It was a fatal mistake, and on it turned the Battle of Crete.

As a small leak can become a flood, so one error in the night at Maleme allowed the Germans to wrest a victory from the jaws of defeat. From a high point known as Hill 107, a New Zealand infantry battalion, supported by a handful of artillery pieces, had commanded the Maleme airfield. Fighting like tigers, they had withstood several assaults by paratroops during the day. But that evening, through a muddle in their orders and a breakdown in the chain of command, they withdrew to another ridge further east. The Germans swarmed onto Hill 107 in their wake, and, by dawn, control of the landing strip was theirs. At the eleventh hour, Student's great gamble had paid off.