Mercury Falling
THROUGHOUT THE SPRING and into May 1941, the Luftwaffe had continued to pound Britain, focusing particularly on ports. Liverpool was severely and repeatedly hit in the first week of May, with nearly 700 bombers flying over. Sixty-nine out of 144 cargo berths were put out of action, the cathedral was hit and some 6,500 homes were completely destroyed. In all, there were 2,895 casualties. Clydebank near Glasgow was also heavily bombed, as too were Belfast, Hull, Cardiff and Plymouth. The centre of Portsmouth was devastated by five nights of bombing. None the less, all these ports, and also Southampton, which had been badly hit earlier in the Blitz, continued to function.
On the night of 10–11 May, London was also heavily hit once more, by 571 bombers dropping 800 tons of bombs. Some 1,436 people were killed and a further 1,800 seriously injured. The next night, the bombers returned and hit Westminster Abbey, the Law Courts and even the Chamber of the House of Commons. Much of London’s traffic, both on the roads and on the railways, was paralysed.
For those still concerned with defending Britain, the continued attacks were doubly sinister because, with the arrival of longer days and better weather, the conditions for a German invasion were improving. There was no real intelligence to suggest that this was likely to happen in the immediate future, but preparations to repel the invader were at once stepped up. In north London, Gwladys Cox received a pamphlet through her letterbox on 24 May called ‘Beating the Invader’. ‘It tells us what to do in the event of an invasion by answering fourteen questions such as, “What do I do if fighting breaks out in my neighbourhood?” and “What does it mean when the church bells are rung?”’ she noted in her diary, then added, ‘More and more unreal!’
It did no harm to be prepared for the worst, although in fact the worst was over. The attacks on London in the second week of May were the last major ones for the time being. By the third week in May, Luftflotte 2 had been largely withdrawn in preparation for BARBAROSSA, leaving a depleted Luftflotte 3 to continue the raids against Britain – attacks that would be carried out with far less vigour than before. The Blitz was over – for the time being, at any rate.
The Luftwaffe’s bombing of Britain had failed in its objective. The morale of the British had not collapsed, nor had its infrastructure been fatally damaged. In all, just 0.1 per cent of the population had been killed and a further 0.15 per cent had suffered serious injury. Forty thousand deaths were a lot, but the number fell way short of the picture of Armageddon many had predicted before the war. Many of the damaged houses had been repaired within a matter of weeks; by March 1941, for example, of the 719,000 houses that had suffered bomb damage in London, only 5,100 were still awaiting repair. Food supplies had also been maintained throughout. It had been calculated by the Ministry of Home Security that of the 6,699 economic ‘key points’ – that is, industry, food stocks, oil depots, armaments and so on – only 884 had been hit, and just eight out of 558 factories had been destroyed beyond repair. Weekly outputs of steel continued to rise throughout the Blitz. Aircraft production took a small dip in the last quarter of 1940, but by May 1941 was higher than at any point in the war so far. British society had been a very long way from disintegrating.
On the other hand, the Blitz had been disruptive enough, had been very expensive for the Government, and had tied up more than 600,000 men on military and civil defence who could otherwise have been employed elsewhere; managing Britain’s war effort had been made just that bit more difficult. On the other side of the fence, it had cost the Luftwaffe around 600 bombers, which most certainly could have been used elsewhere. It had also taught the British much about aerial bombing – what worked and what was less effective. Most of all, it taught Britain’s air chiefs that to cause really substantial damage to the enemy, a significantly bigger air force was needed than the one the Luftwaffe had been sending over. Britain had every intention of creating one.
After taking the unusual decision to fly on operations for the Regia Aeronautica, Count Galeazzo Ciano was back in Rome and once more resuming his duties as Foreign Minister and right-hand man to the Duce. Generally speaking, the Italians were rather ungrateful to Hitler for baling them out of a tight spot in both the Balkans and North Africa. Both humiliated and chastised, they were grumbling and back to their bitchiest best regarding their Axis partner, while at the same time resentful that Hitler was not involving them more now that the fighting in mainland Greece and Yugoslavia was over.
High on Ciano’s list of priorities was annexing some part of Yugoslavia and ensuring they, the Italians, not the Greeks, governed Greece. The Germans had made vague noises about the Italians being given a free hand in Croatia and along the Dalmatian coast. ‘But,’ noted Ciano, ‘up to what point are they sincere?’
There was also mounting consternation at the way German commanders were treating the Italians in the field. Ciano had heard reports that Rommel was threatening Italian divisional commanders with military tribunals if they didn’t show more gumption, while in Albania the bad feeling between the two forces was equally palpable.
When Hitler made a Reichstag speech on 4 May, in which he ranted about Churchill and the Jewish conspiracy, Mussolini dismissed it as ‘useless’ and told Ciano it would have been better if he’d not bothered. A couple of days later, en route to Monfalcone to talk to Ante Pavelic´, the new Fascist leader of Croatia in Yugoslavia, Ciano noticed Mussolini was rapt in thought. ‘We speak at length of the future prospects of the war,’ noted Ciano. ‘I cannot say that now he has cast aside his optimistic view of a rapid end, he has any clear idea of the future.’ It was not surprising. Mussolini’s pride had taken a huge beating over the past months.
Far better news for both men was the stunning revelation that Rudolf Hess, one of the leading Nazis and Hitler’s appointed Deputy Führer, had flown to Scotland for what he claimed were clandestine peace talks with the Duke of Hamilton. The Duke, although an aristocrat and RAF Wing Commander, had little if any political influence and was certainly not an anti-war appeaser as Hess appeared to believe. At any rate, after being chased by various British night fighters, Hess’s Me110 finally ran out of fuel, so he bailed out and was promptly caught and arrested. For several days, the British kept the news of his capture secret as they tried to make head or tail of what on earth Hess had been trying to achieve. In the meantime, Hitler sent von Ribbentrop to Rome to announce the news to Mussolini. He was clearly stunned by what had happened, and Ciano, for one, enjoyed his discomfiture enormously. ‘The tone of the Germans is one of depression,’ wrote Ciano. ‘Von Ribbentrop repeats his slogans against England with that monotony that made Göring dub him “Germany’s No. 1 parrot”.’ Later, after von Ribbentrop had taken off for the flight home, von Bismarck, the German councillor at the embassy, said, ‘Let’s hope that they will all crash and break their necks.’ Ciano was amused. ‘That’s German national solidarity for you!’
It was against the backdrop of battles at sea, preparations for BARBAROSSA, negotiations with the Greeks and strange peace missions by a deranged Nazi Deputy Führer that Operation MERCURY was finally launched.
On the long, narrow and mountainous ancient island of King Minos, the morning of 20 May dawned calm and cloudless; the rains and bad weather that had been a feature of the Greek spring had made way for summer. From his billet in the village of Galatas, just to the west of Canea and between the town and the airfield at Maleme, Colonel Howard Kippenberger was shaving when first a reconnaissance plane appeared followed soon after by a fighter, which roared over the main street in the village strafing with its guns. Kippenberger, forty-four years old and commander of the New Zealand 10th Brigade, thought this was unusual and, hurriedly finishing his shave, cautiously looked out of his first-floor window. He now saw there were other fighter aircraft thundering overhead and towards Canea but, having decided there was little he could do about it, went down to have some breakfast.
While there were mainly fighters over Galatas, elsewhere Dornier 17s and Ju88s were giving the defenders yet another demonstration of air power. So long as those on the receiving end were in slit trenches, these attacks killed comparatively few, but they were frightening, the blast of bombs was deafening and disorientating, and psychologically they were also a reminder of the lack of support in the air from the RAF.
Kippenberger had been largely unperturbed by their latest visit, but he worried it was affecting the cooks, who had produced an especially bad bowl of watery porridge that morning. But he had barely begun to eat, however, when someone gave a loud exclamation. From the open courtyard where they sat, they could see four menacing gliders, the first they had ever seen, while from the north was a growing thunderous roar.
‘Stand to your arms!’ shouted Kippenberger, then ran upstairs for his binoculars and rifle. By the time he had run back down to the courtyard, the roar overhead was deafening and scores of troop carriers were flying low overhead. Running down to brigade HQ in what was known as Prison Valley, hundreds of enemy paratroopers were dropping out of the sky directly over the 10th Brigade positions. Gunfire was crackling loudly. Kippenberger sprinted to the command post, a small pink house on a knoll, and had just dashed through a gap in the cacti when a burst of gunfire spattered the cactus either side of him. Jumping sideways, he rolled down a slope, twisted his ankle, then, hobbling, crawled up the track and into the back of the house, where he saw the German. Fortunately, he had not been seen in turn, so he stalked around the house and then shot him cleanly through the head from ten yards. ‘The silly fellow was still watching the gap in the hedge,’ wrote Kippenberger, ‘and evidently had not noticed me crawl into the house.’
With the CP back in his possession he quickly caught up with his Brigade Major, Captain Brian Bassett, and his signallers, and made a quick assessment of the situation. Discarded parachutes covered the landscape; Kippenberger could also see that Germans had fallen among the two Greek battalions attached to his brigade and men were running about all over the place. As more bullets tore through the surrounding cactus, it was clear they needed to move their HQ a little way north. Taking a sub-machine gun and a pistol from the dead German, Kippenberger and the others set off to their new CP, which was to be in a hollow just to the north of Galatas, where a field telephone had already been set up. By the time he got there, the fighting had quietened down. A number of Germans had been shot and a lot more rounded up. The rest had gone to ground, presumably trying to group themselves back into some kind of organized formation. One of Kippenberger’s New Zealand battalions reported killing more than 150 paratroopers. For Kippenberger, it was now time to take stock. He had two Greek regiments under his command, one of which, the 6th, had not been issued with any ammunition, so it wasn’t until they began capturing the weapons of dead Germans and their ammunition arrived that they could start fighting back. Enemy fighters were still about; snipers were taking potshots in and around Galatas; more transports were dropping supplies. But otherwise, their area, at least, was calm. By midday, at any rate, there was no sign that he could see to suggest the airborne invasion had been even remotely successful.
It had been agreed with the Greek Government that the moment the Italians showed any sign of aggression towards them, British and French forces would occupy Crete as a means of denying it to the enemy. With the French out of the war by the time Italy invaded Greece, that task was left to the British only. As far as Admiral Cunningham was concerned, Suda Bay, just to the east of Canea, would make a useful refuelling post for his smaller vessels and so a small base was established there, some anti-aircraft guns were brought in, and a landing ground was created at Maleme for Fleet Air Arm fighters which could then defend the harbour. At Heraklion, roughly in the middle of the 160-mile-long northern coastline, a further RAF airfield and staging post was established.
As a base, Crete had been little used – not, at least, until the fall of Greece, when it had become the first port of call for many of the evacuating forces. Thanks to Ultra decrypts of German Enigma traffic at Bletchley Park, the British knew about the German invasion plans for the island, and Wavell appears to have had no question marks at all over his determination to defend the island. There was certainly some sense in trying to keep this base in the Aegean, and in any case, on paper, it looked like a hard nut for the Germans to crack. It was true that its defences were poor: almost no air forces, poor communications and road links, and few anti-aircraft guns, all of which its small force had repeatedly flagged up since they had arrived there the previous autumn. However, arming Crete to the teeth had not been a high priority – or even a necessity – and had only become a higher one with the threat of the German invasion of Greece. Even now, its strategic importance remained limited.
None the less, on balance, it was worth defending, especially since Cunningham’s fleet remained the dominant naval presence in the Mediterranean and because there were now some 32,000 British, New Zealand and Australian troops on the island, as well as a further 10,000 Greek troops; once again, German intelligence had been woeful, misjudging the real size of the garrison by a margin of four to one. True, this force of over 40,000 was not well-equipped in terms of tanks or motor transport – most of which had been left in Greece – but the very nature of airborne operations meant that the Germans would be even more lightly equipped. The rule of thumb in battle is that attackers need at least a 3:1 advantage in manpower. Making an initial assault with 1:4 disadvantage made dubious military sense.
In fact, there were so many troops now on Crete that there was barely time to evacuate them in any case. Furthermore, the Greek King, George II, had evacuated Athens to Crete; there were thus important political reasons for keeping the island out of Axis clutches.
The man given the job of defending the island was Major-General Bernard Freyberg, commander of the New Zealand Division. Brought up in New Zealand, he had come to Britain in 1914 and volunteered to fight. Serving in the Royal Naval Division, he had fought with immense bravery both at Gallipoli and in Flanders, was wounded numerous times and won a Victoria Cross. After the war, he remained in England, married well and was a good friend of Churchill, who was fascinated by Freyberg’s deeds of arms and self-effacing nature. At one country-house weekend, Churchill urged Freyberg to strip off his shirt to allow him to count all his wounds and totted up no fewer than twenty-seven. Freyberg pointed out that it wasn’t really that number as one bullet usually created an exit as well as an entrance mark. In fact, Freyberg retired from the army in 1934, largely because of a heart condition, and by the outbreak of war was gearing up to stand as a British Member of Parliament; he had put his military days behind him. However, with the start of hostilities, Churchill urged the New Zealand Government to recall him to lead the country’s expeditionary force. In truth, there was no other candidate. Freyberg, despite having little ambition for such a post, accepted it as his duty.
He accepted this new task too, even though he had been hoping to get his division back to Egypt and properly reorganized and trained. The shortcomings on Crete, and especially the poor communications and almost total lack of air cover, worried him considerably, which he voiced to Wavell, but he was not a man to flinch from duty. In fact, he was in every way a noble, fearless and quite extraordinary bear of a man, and as an inspirational figure he was well suited to commanding the dogged New Zealanders. This, however, could not disguise the lack of intellect or deep military understanding missing at higher levels of command; good staff officers could protect him from these shortcomings, but unfortunately, when he arrived to take command of ‘Creforce’ on 29 April, he barely had a staff at all.
Freyberg responded to the Ultra details of the German plan by concentrating his forces along the very narrow northern strip between the mountains and the coast. The New Zealand Division – of which Kippenberger’s 10th Brigade was part – were between Suda Bay, Canea and Maleme, while the Australians were at Rethymnon and the British at Heraklion. This was all in keeping with the revelations of German plans. Nevertheless, Freyberg also felt hidebound by Ultra. He wanted, for example, to further reinforce Maleme but felt that to do so would risk exposing their intelligence. He was also unduly worried by details of a seaborne landing. This was clearly only part of the subsequent reinforcements and in any case was taken note of by ABC and his naval forces, yet Freyberg interpreted it differently as a major threat concurrent with the airborne forces. The general had witnessed the power of the Luftwaffe first hand over Greece, but otherwise his experience and understanding of air power were extremely limited; those years out of the army, at a time when air power was developing, had left him behind the times.
Yet despite the shortage of communications, the lack of heavy weapons and air power, and Freyberg’s own somewhat muddled interpretation of German intentions, there was much reason for the defenders to feel confident as those first Fallschirmjäger began falling among the scrub, cactus and rocks of northern Crete that May morning. After all, one of the key ingredients for a successful coup de main operation was surprise, yet it was not an advantage Operation MERCURY could claim.
While Colonel Kippenberger had been shaving that morning, just a few miles away Freyberg was having his breakfast at his villa overlooking Creforce HQ on the edge of Canea. A young officer from the British Military Mission to the Greek Army arrived with a message, and Freyberg invited him to stay. They were sitting on the veranda when the invasion began. Suddenly, the sky was full of gliders and Ju52s spewing thousands of paratroopers.
‘Well,’ muttered Freyberg, ‘they’re on time.’
Around midday, as the German paratroopers around Maleme and Canea were struggling to recover from catastrophic losses that morning, Martin Pöppel and the rest of 2. Fallschirmjägerregiment were being driven over to their transports, now returned, refuelled and in many cases repaired after their first trip to the island. The result was an inevitable delay in launching the second wave. For the men, it was dusty and hot, and especially so since they had all their jump equipment. Pöppel noticed his Ju52 already had a number of bullet holes over the wings and fuselage. Around 1 p.m., with the men all loaded, they were off at last, climbing high initially and then dropping low over the wine-dark sea. It was over two hours to Rethymnon, so Pöppel decided to use the time to get some sleep. ‘It’s a blessed ability,’ he noted, ‘one that I can use at any time of day or night.’
As they approached Crete, he awoke and checked his equipment one more time. As they crossed the coast, the order ‘Prepare to jump!’ was given. Moments later, they were out; it was now 3.40 p.m. Pöppel looked around as he floated down – the drop zone, he reckoned, had been judged perfectly: about seven miles to the east of Rethymnon and with nothing to meet them other than a few threatening shots. Landing in an olive tree, he managed to quickly free himself and was soon clear and on firm ground once more. The heat was intense, and after gathering the weapons containers and grabbing their kit, they collected themselves together and tried to acclimatize for a moment before heading towards the airfield, their day’s objective.
The area had been bombed just before their drop but not very effectively, and while Pöppel saw little gunfire as they floated down, elsewhere the defenders responded more bullishly; seven transports were brought down on land and a number disappeared in flames into the sea. Nor was the drop as accurate as Pöppel had thought. A number of Fallschirmjäger fell straight into the sea and drowned, while about a dozen had the misfortune to land among bamboo and become impaled on the stalks. Others suffered injuries on the rocky ground. In fact, only Pöppel’s company and one other were dropped in the right place.
The drop at Rethymnon had involved some 1,500 troops. One group headed towards Rethymnon itself, with the town and port their objective, but soon came up against the 800-strong Cretan gendarmerie there and were beaten back. A second force of some 200 Fallschirmjäger landed mostly right in front of one of two Australian battalions and were beaten off by nightfall with eighty-eight Germans captured and a number of weapon canisters captured.
Meanwhile, Martin Pöppel and his overheating comrades, under the command of Major Kroh, headed either side of the coast road towards the airfield only to be stopped in their tracks by Australians protecting the landing ground from the rocky hills to the east, known by the defenders as Hill A. Forced to take cover in the vineyards next to the coast road, they pushed forward tentatively as dusk began to fall, calling out the password ‘Reichsmarschall’ in loud whispers as more Fallschirmjäger managed to join them.
The third drop took place around the ancient town of Heraklion and fared little better. It was also even later, not arriving until after 5.30 p.m. Once again, the drop was badly dispersed, many paratroopers were killed as they fell, and here the Bofors light anti-aircraft guns had more success against the lumbering Ju52s. Transports were still coming over after 7 p.m., at which point no fewer than eight were reported as falling in flames at the same time. And as at Rethymnon, counter-attacks by the defenders around the airfield were swift, determined and largely successful.
A further group of Fallschirmjäger had been dropped to the west of the town, and as darkness fell these now attempted to storm the massive Heraklion city walls around the Canea Gate. Once again, the town itself had been left in the hands of local Cretans and Greek troops. In what became a battle of furious close-quarter fighting, the Germans broke through into the city but were eventually forced to pull back for lack of ammunition and through mounting casualties; bullets quickly ran dry when a magazine had just three seconds of fire-time.
As night descended over Crete like a shroud, it seemed clear to most that the airborne assault had been a costly failure, yet one of the most striking characteristic features of the fighting was its confused nature, and it was confusion, or, rather, the fog of war, that had the final say.
Indeed, that Colonel Howard Kippenberger, a brigade commander, had been both actively involved in the fighting and had shot a man in the head from a matter of yards said much about the nature of the battle that day. Even when undertaken in daylight, airborne drops were rarely as accurate as those conducting the airlift would have liked. As a result, the normal practice of infantry warfare was swept aside as paratroopers landed largely willy-nilly, sometimes several miles away and in other places literally on top of the defenders. It was disorientating for all concerned: the defenders never really knew whether there might be a Fallschirmjäger lurking behind any cactus or olive tree, while the attackers had to work out where they were, then more often than not found themselves fighting alongside unfamiliar comrades.
Nowhere had the confusion been more marked than in the New Zealanders’ sector around Canea, Galatas and Maleme. It was 22nd Brigade that was defending Maleme and the key low Hill 107 that overlooked the airfield. The Fallschirmjäger of the Storm Regiment that had landed there had been badly mauled: the New Zealanders had been told to aim at the paratroopers’ feet because of their deceptively swift descent and many had been killed before they even hit the ground. A number of commanders were either killed or wounded, which led to further confusion; in one Storm Regiment battalion, no fewer than sixteen officers died and seven were wounded. The attackers were also shocked to find themselves confronted by groups of Cretans, including women and boys; near the little port of Kastelli Kissamou, to the west of Maleme, fifty-three out of seventy-two Fallschirmjäger were killed by locals and the rest taken prisoner. A number of the corpses were hacked at by these locals, many of whom had been armed only with axes and spades.
Around Galatas and Prison Valley, the confused nature of the fighting had continued all day. Unfortunately, the Germans had managed to capture the prison itself – Kippenberger’s men had been positioned around and overlooking the valley rather than defending the prison building – which gave the paratroopers there a firm base as well as water. None the less, the defenders largely had the area under control, and the German occupation of the prison would have counted for nothing had the Fallschirmjäger there remained unable to be reinforced.
None of the German objectives had been taken: not Canea, not Maleme, not even the tiny port of Kastelli Kissamou. In all, 1,856 Fallschirmjäger had been killed on the first day – a huge number of the attacking force. Many others had been wounded, so that total casualties for the day were around 4,000 out of the roughly 14,000 paratroopers available for the entire operation. Back in Athens, as piecemeal reports reached them, it seemed clear to General Löhr that Operation MERCURY had failed and would have to be aborted.
That it was not was largely due to the inability of the defenders to properly communicate with one another. As in France in May 1940, field telephone lines were cut, runners were unable to get through, and Colonel Leslie Andrew, the commander at Maleme, was left with an increasingly unclear picture of what on earth was going on. His request for support from the neighbouring battalion was refused by Colonel James Hargest, 5th Brigade’s commander, and with darkness falling Andrew felt he had no choice but to withdraw.
The beleaguered, battered Fallschirmjäger around Maleme and Hill 107 had been bracing themselves for a major British counter-attack, but it never came. Colonel Andrew never received the reinforcements he so urgently needed. Just one battalion, maybe even one company, to help Colonel Andrew might have made all the difference.
Near the landing ground to the east of Rethymnon, Major Kroh’s force of paratroopers attacked uphill through the vineyards in the grey light of early dawn. The men were all exhausted, hungry and thirsty, and, unbeknown to them, the Australian commander, Colonel Campbell, recognizing the hill was the key objective for the Germans, had thrown all his reserves into reinforcing the position, including two Greek regiments, one on either flank. Martin Pöppel and his comrades were soon pinned down by heavy Allied fire. He spotted one Oberjäger holding his torn guts with both hands and hurried over to help, but the man told him to press on and come back and help him later. ‘It’s no good,’ noted Pöppel. ‘People are getting hit all around us, and the air is full of their groans and cries of pain. We’re forced to withdraw from this hill of blood and so fail to achieve our objective.’ Pulling back, they found some cover on a reverse slope and then occupied a lone house, where the wounded were tended by the medical orderlies. The rest scrambled over a road and into a shallow hollow. There were only thirty or so men. A heated debate followed. Should they surrender? ‘Quite out of the question,’ grunted one Feldwebel. Moments later, they heard vehicles and British voices. Crouching low, they waited for them to pass then scurried away, back down the coast road and discarding everything but their weapons, ammo and other essentials.
Eventually, they stopped in a hollow. Of Major Kroh, there was no sign. Another officer, Oberleutnant Anton von Roon, began to organize another battlegroup from the remnants of their shattered unit. A friend handed Pöppel a much-needed cigarette. ‘Tired and dispirited,’ he recorded, ‘we sit with bowed heads.’ Short on ammunition, with many of their comrades dead or wounded, and with almost no communications, their chances of reversing this dire situation looked bleak indeed.
Yet while it was hard for the besieged Fallschirmjäger around Heraklion and Rethymnon to envisage a way out, the news was better at the western end of the island. Back on mainland Greece, General Kurt Student was still under pressure to abort and was keenly aware that unless he was able to start landing 5. Gebirgsdivision by the end of play that second day, it was all over. Throwing caution to the wind, he ordered one of his staff, a pilot, to fly to Crete and then touch down and take off at the western side of Maleme. This he did, and although he was able to report some light firing, none of it had been direct. This told Student what he needed to know: the western side of Maleme, at any rate, was no longer being defended. Immediately ordering his reserve troops under the command of Colonel Gerhard Ramcke to take off and drop to the west of Maleme, and two further companies to be dropped east of the airfield, he also told the Gebirgsjäger to be on standby to fly to Crete at a moment’s notice.
Although the 28th Maori Battalion massacred the paratroopers dropped to the east of Maleme, by 5 p.m. the first Gebirgsjäger units were landing at Maleme. As many as twenty Ju52s were hit or crashed, but they kept going: disgorging troops, taking off again, and then more landing among the wreckage. At one point, they were landing and the men jumping out in around seventy seconds. By the time a counter-attack was finally launched, it was early in the morning of 22 May, and they were up against fresh and now well-armed mountain troops and revitalized paratroopers. Consequently, it failed.
Still occupying the ground around Galatas, Colonel Kippenberger and his men were holding up rather better, and a concentrated attack by the Fallschirmjäger around the Prison Valley was forcibly beaten back not by the New Zealanders, but by a horde of Cretans led by a British officer of the Military Mission. Later, Kippenberger’s ‘Composite’ Battalion, made up of troops hurriedly brought together before the invasion began, found another forty-odd German paratroopers in the village of Agio Goannino, where they were ‘nearly all disposed of’. Kippenberger noticed that most of the Germans they came across were armed only with sub-machine guns, the MP40, or ‘Schmeisser’, as it was known to the British. These had an effective range of little more than 75 yards and were best at distances of 30 yards or less. And while the Germans had some light mortars and machine guns too, really there was absolutely no reason at all why any soldiers armed with rifles and Bren guns that were lethal at 400 yards should lose.
Nor would they have done, so long as Creforce had only the Fallschirmjäger units to deal with. Martin Pöppel and his comrades at Rethymnon would have soon been overrun for good, and so too would those German paratrooper units at Heraklion. Unfortunately for the defenders, however, now that more and more fresh troops were being landed at Maleme, this was no longer the case. The Gebirgsjäger were equipped with mainly rifles, machine guns, mortars and even small artillery pieces. After the Germans had been a whisker away from defeat, Freyberg and his senior commanders had allowed the enemy a lifeline, one that their training and determination had allowed them to rapidly exploit. Suddenly, the Allied defence of Crete was unravelling. Of all the setbacks Britain had faced so far in the war, this was surely the most unnecessary and inexcusable.
On the 23rd, Freyberg ordered his forces to fall back to a new line around Galatas, while more German reinforcements were landing at Maleme and further paratroopers were being dropped around Heraklion. When the RAF arrived and bombed Maleme, they destroyed twenty-four all-important Ju52s, but as far as saving Crete was concerned it was too little, too late. On the 26th, the Canea–Galatas line was broken, the defenders pushed back yet further. ‘The news from many quarters,’ noted Kippenberger, ‘made it plain that the end was near and I was unashamedly pleased in the evening when orders came to set off on the march over mountains to Sphakia and there embark.’
In fact, the order for the evacuation was not given until the following day, the 27th, and while the defenders might have been relieved to get away from the place, Admiral Cunningham, whose Mediterranean Fleet would have to perform this latest miracle, was far from happy. Many of his ships were already in the vicinity, however. In fact, the attempted German effort to reinforce the invasion by sea had been swiftly intercepted by ABC’s forces and largely sunk. One battalion of German mountain troops, travelling in traditional Greek sailing boats, was almost entirely wiped out.
The Luftwaffe, however, had struck back, and on 22 May two cruisers, the Gloucester and Fiji, were sunk, along with four destroyers, while two battleships and two further cruisers were damaged. Among those carrying out attacks were Helmut Mahlke and his Stuka Geschwader, who had been posted to Greece from Sicily that same day and had added to Admiral Cunningham’s woes by sinking a merchant vessel in Suda Bay.
The naval losses, especially, were severe blows to the British. In his office in Alexandria, near the war room where all the movements of his ships were carefully plotted, Cunningham followed the events with a heavy heart. ‘I came to dread every ring on the telephone, every knock on the door,’ he noted, ‘and the arrival of each fresh signal.’ That night, 22 May, he had signalled to all his ships at sea, ‘Stick it out. Navy must not let Army down. No enemy forces must reach Crete by sea.’
Nor did they, but, sadly for ABC and all his men, their valiant efforts had been for nothing. Now, less than a week later, they had to attempt to rescue Creforce with the Luftwaffe still ruling the skies. Sphakia was little more than a small fishing village on the south side of the mountainous island, and an evacuation from there was unquestionably going to be difficult and made worse by the near-exhaustion of many of the men being picked up and the crews who had to carry out the lift. ‘We were not really in favourable condition to evacuate some twenty-two thousand soldiers,’ wrote Cunningham with some understatement, ‘most of them from an open beach, in the face of the Luftwaffe. But there was no alternative.’ A plan was hastily formed. Troops from Canea and around Suda Bay would make their way south, through the mountains, while a blocking force held off the enemy. They would be evacuated from Sphakia. Those from Rethymnon would, it was hoped, be picked up from Plaka Bay, near the town, while a further lift would be carried out in one night from Heraklion. In the event, they were unable to reach Rethymnon, and the Australians there either took their chances and went into the mountains or surrendered. More than 700 did the latter. At Heraklion, the evacuation was altogether more successful, and on the night of 28–29 May some 4,000 were taken off the island in one lift, and without lights and without disturbing the enemy. It was no small feat.
In all, some 16,500 men were safely evacuated, including Colonel Kippenberger. For all involved, it was a devastating blow, not least because a number had to stay behind as a rear-party to cover their departure. One of his fellow brigade commanders, Jim Burrows, had volunteered to remain and command the New Zealanders. ‘I spoke as reassuringly as I could to the rear-party,’ wrote Kippenberger, ‘shook hands with Jim, and went off very sadly.’ After tramping several miles to the beach, they later boarded the Australian destroyer Napier, safely reaching Alexandria the next day.
Crete was surrendered at 9 a.m. on 1 June. Although some 5,000 British and Commonwealth troops were left behind, and some 3,500 were casualties, once again, the bulk of British forces had escaped. The naval losses had been hard for the British, and ABC especially, to bear. Three cruisers and six destroyers were sunk and sixteen further vessels damaged, some badly so. With it had come the loss of more than 2,000 lives. ‘Once again,’ wrote Cunningham, ‘it had been borne in upon us that the Navy and the Army could not make up for the lack of air forces.’ He had a point and reckoned, not unreasonably, that three squadrons of long-range fighters might have saved Crete. And a few radios would have helped too.
But the losses to the Germans had been worse. In Rethymnon, Martin Pöppel spent the day of victory helping to bury the dead. ‘We put up crosses with names and dates,’ he wrote, ‘but what good are crosses to our comrades? Young lads, like ourselves, cheerful and happy in Tanagra such a short time ago. Now they lie here, far from home.’ The Fallschirmjäger, among the best troops in the Wehrmacht, had lost around 6,000 men, more than half those dropped. These were catastrophic casualties for one of Hitler’s most prized spearheads, and a cautionary tale for any military thinking that airborne operations were some kind of panacea. Perhaps even more critically, the losses of transport aircraft had been terrible too: 143 had been destroyed and eight were missing, while a further 120 were severely damaged and 85 more had suffered lesser damage. More than 50 bombers and fighters had also been lost.
With BARBAROSSA now just three weeks away, it was the loss of transport aircraft, however, that would hurt Germany most. Greece and Crete had been won, but whether the prize had been worth it was another matter.