by John Keegan
Student, who had not yet left his rear headquarters in the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens, remained all day in ignorance of the fate his cherished division had suffered. Far into the night of 20/21 May he sat at his map table, as von der Heydte recalled, ‘waiting and waiting for the news which would bring him confirmation that he had been right in proposing the attack on the island to Goering a month previously. Everything had seemed so simple in prospect, so feasible and so certain. He had thought that he had taken every possibility into consideration – and then everything had turned out contrary to plans and expectations.’ The truth – as I. M. D. Stewart, the medical officer of the 1st Welch Regiment, a veteran and the most meticulous historian of the campaign, later recorded – was that he had ‘dissipated’ his airborne division ‘in scattered attacks about the island’:
Thousands of its young men now lay dead in the olive groves and among the buttercups and the barley. His glider troops and four of his parachute battalions . . . had been shattered, reduced within the space of fifteen minutes to a few dozen fugitive survivors. Other battalions had suffered little less severely. Yet he still had not captured an airfield. Now he had left only his tiny airlanding reserve. If these few hundred men should fail on the morrow [21 May] the only possible relief for the Division would have to come by sea.
On the evening of the first day of the first great parachute operation in history, therefore, the advantage appeared to have passed decisively to the opposition – an ill-organised force of under-equipped troops almost bereft of air cover and supporting arms. Yet, despite all the agony Student’s men had suffered and all the mistakes he had made, on 21 May he would succeed in recovering the initiative and turning the battle to his advantage. How so? The explanation, one of Freyberg’s staff officers was to reflect ruefully in the aftermath, was the absence of ‘a hundred extra wireless sets’; for the defenders had failed to recognise the extent of their own success and had failed to report it to Freyberg’s headquarters, which in turn had failed to radio the orders to recoup and regroup. Next morning Winston Churchill reported to the House of Commons that the ‘most stern and resolute resistance’ would be offered to the enemy. Meanwhile Freyberg lacked that clear picture of his battle which would allow him to react as commander. He communicated with the New Zealanders defending the Maleme airfield – Student’s Schwerpunkt – through the headquarters of 5 Brigade; the brigade in turn communicated indirectly with its battalion commanders; and Lieutenant-Colonel L. W. Andrews, the commander of the crucial battalion, 22nd, mistakenly believed that his brigade commander planned to support him. A brave man – he had won the Victoria Cross in the First World War – he decided on the evening of 20 May, after an initial counter-attack supported by two of the only six heavy tanks on Crete had failed, to regroup on high ground overlooking the airfield for a concerted push the next day, and this regrouping inadvertently conceded the vital spot to the Germans and so rescued them from the inevitability of disaster.
While Andrews took the wrong decision for good reasons, Student was arriving at the right decision for bad reasons: he had no ground for thinking that fresh troops would fare any better at Maleme than those already dead. Indeed, the universal military maxim, ‘never reinforce failure’, should have warned him against committing his reserve at that point. He nevertheless decided to do so. On the afternoon of 21 May his last two companies of parachutists fell among the New Zealand division’s Maori battalion and were slaughtered – ‘not cricket, I know,’ wrote one of their officers, ‘but there it is.’ At the same time Student’s airlanding reserve, the spearhead of 100th Mountain Rifle Regiment of the 5th Mountain Division, began to crash-land in Junkers 52s on the Maleme airstrip from which Andrews had withdrawn his defending 22nd Battalion the previous evening. ‘Machine-gun bullets tear through the right wing,’ wrote a war correspondent aboard. ‘The pilot grits his teeth. Cost what it may he has to get down. Suddenly there leaps up below us a vineyard. We strike the ground. Then one wing grinds into the sand and tears the back of the machine half round to the left. Men, packs, boxes, ammunition are flung forward . . . we lose the power over our own bodies. At last we come to a standstill, the machine standing half on its head.’
Nearly forty Junkers 52s succeeded in landing on the Maleme airstrip in this way, bringing 650 men of II Battalion, 100th Mountain Rifle Regiment. The mountain riflemen, like Student’s parachutists, also regarded themselves as an elite, and with justification. While the New Zealanders struggled to come to terms with the new threat, the mountaineers were moving to consolidate the German position at Maleme airfield, with the intention of extending their foothold next day.
Some of the mountaineers’ reinforcements were meanwhile approaching Crete by ship. They were to suffer an unhappy fate; but so too were the ships of the Royal Navy which intercepted them. The Alexandria squadron easily overcame the Italian escort to the fleet of caiques and barges carrying the remainder of 100th Mountain Rifle Regiment towards Crete, causing 300 of them to be drowned; but during 22 May the Luftwaffe inflicted a far more grievous penalty on the British ships and crews. The battleship Warspite was damaged, the cruisers Gloucester and Fiji sunk, together with the destroyers Kashmir and Kelly – the latter commanded by the future Earl Mountbatten of Burma. This was not the end of the navy’s losses; before 2 June it also lost the cruisers Juno and Calcutta and the destroyers Imperial and Greyhound, which were sunk, and suffered damage to the battleship Valiant, the aircraft carrier Formidable, the cruisers Perth, Orion, Ajax and Naiad and the destroyers Kelvin, Napier and Hereward. When the tally was taken, the Battle of Crete, though less shocking in its effect on British morale than the future loss of the Prince of Wales and Repulse was to prove, was reckoned the costliest of any British naval engagement of the Second World War.
Student gains the upper hand
Ashore, meanwhile, the battle had begun to run irreversibly the Germans’ way. The New Zealand counter-attack to recapture Maleme airfield failed in the early hours of 22 May; throughout the day Student, with brutal recklessness, directed a stream of Junkers 52s at the airfield. Those that crashed on impact, as many did, were pushed off the runway for the next arrival. Meanwhile the Luftwaffe operated overland in overwhelming strength, shooting and bombing anything that moved. ‘It is a most strange and grim battle that is being fought,’ Churchill told the Commons that afternoon. ‘Our side have no air . . . and the other side have very little or no tanks. Neither side has any means of retreat.’ The truth was that the British had no tanks that counted and no means of moving, while the Germans were accumulating growing numbers of fresh, first-class soldiers to manoeuvre against the defenders.
Freyberg now decided to withdraw eastward and regroup for a counter-attack. However, this regrouping was composed not of a single unit but of the bulk of his best troops, the New Zealanders and the regular British battalions. The withdrawal conceded yet more vital ground to the parachutists and mountain riflemen around Maleme, who were growing steadily in numbers. On 24 May they were repulsed from the village of Galatas, then took it, then lost it again to the New Zealand counter-attack Freyberg had planned as his decisive riposte; but it could not reach as far as Maleme, into which the Germans had now crowded almost the whole of the mountain division. When the Germans resumed their attack the British were driven relentlessly eastward, abandoning one position after another.
On 26 May, Freyberg told Wavell, commanding in the Middle East, that the loss of Crete could only be a matter of time. Next day Wavell decided on evacuation before the dominance of the Luftwaffe made that impossible. The garrison of Heraklion, against which the parachutists had made no impression, was taken off on the night of 28 May. The garrison of Retimo, which had also resisted all attacks, could not be reached by the navy and had to be abandoned. During 28-31 May the main force left its positions east of Maleme and began a long and agonising trek southwards across the mountains to the little port of Sphakia on the south coast. It was a shaming culmination to a benight
ed battle. The minority of troops which actually fought kept together as best they could; those who had left Greece disorganised now lost all semblance of unity. ‘Never shall I forget the disorganisation and almost complete lack of control of the masses on the move,’ wrote Freyberg, ‘as we made our way slowly through the endless stream of trudging men.’ When he and the rest of his broken army reached Sphakia they sheltered under the cliffs waiting for the navy to rescue them under cover of darkness. The navy suffered heavily in the attempt but by 1 June had succeeded in taking off 18,000 troops; 12,000 remained to fall prisoner to the Germans and nearly 2000 had been killed in the fighting.
These figures confirmed, if the evidence were needed, that Crete had been a catastrophe. It had entailed the loss of two formed divisions of troops, New Zealand, Australian and British, urgently needed to fight the burgeoning war in the desert against Rommel’s expeditionary force. It had also added unnecessarily to the roll of humiliation which Hitler had inflicted on the British Empire, most of all because both he and his enemies knew by what a narrow margin his parachutists had been rescued from defeat. Had Maleme not been abandoned on the second day, had Freyberg’s counter-attack been launched two days earlier, the parachutists would have been destroyed in their foothold, the island saved and the first definitive check to Hitler’s campaign of conquest imposed in a blaze of spectacular publicity. As it was, the German war machine had been seen once again to triumph, in a new and revolutionary form, in the very centre of Britain’s traditional strategic zone, and against a principal instrument of its overseas power, the Mediterranean Fleet.
Yet, not only with hindsight, Crete could also be seen as a highly ambiguous victory. ‘Hitler’, Student recorded, was ‘most displeased with the whole affair.’ On 20 July he told his parachute general, ‘Crete proves that the days of the paratroopers are over. The paratroop weapon depends upon surprise – the surprise factor has now gone.’ He had refused to allow the German propaganda machine to publicise the operation while it was in progress and he now set his face against mounting operations of the same type in the future. Crete had killed 4000 German soldiers, most from the 7th Parachute Division; nearly half the 1st Assault Regiment had died in action. Gericke, who had come across the dropping zone of its III Battalion on 23 May, was appalled by the evidence of what had befallen it. ‘Frightful was the sight that met our eyes. . . . Dead parachutists, still in their full equipment, hung suspended from the branches [of the olive trees] swinging gently in the light breeze – everywhere were the dead. Those who had succeeded in getting free from their harness had been shot down within a few strides and slain by the Cretan volunteers. From these corpses could be seen all too clearly what had happened within the first few minutes of the battle of Crete.’ Not only the men but the whole structure of the airborne force had suffered disastrously; 220 out of 600 transport aircraft had been destroyed, a material loss quite disproportionate to the material advantage gained. The seizure of Crete had not been and would not prove essential to German strategy; a successful attempt on Malta, desired by OKW, would by contrast have justified any loss suffered by its mounting. The occupation of Crete, moreover, would involve the Germans in a bitter anti-partisan campaign, their conduct of which would blacken their name and lay the foundations of a bitter hatred of them not erased in the island to this day.
The British and Americans, both energetically raising parachute divisions, drew from Crete a conclusion different from Hitler’s: that it was that particular form rather than the underlying principle of airborne operations which had proved unsound. In their great descents on Sicily, Normandy and Holland, they would eschew Student’s practice of launching parachutists directly on to an enemy position in favour of landing at a distance from the objective and then concentrating against it. In Sicily and Normandy they would also risk large-scale airborne offensives only in co-ordination with a major amphibious assault from the sea, thus distracting the enemy from a concerted response against the fragile military instruments of parachute and glider. In Sicily and Normandy this careful reinsurance was to justify itself. In Holland, in September 1944, when they abandoned caution and essayed a Crete-style assault of their own, the disaster which overtook Montgomery’s parachutists was to prove even more complete than that suffered by Student’s. In the broad if not the narrow sense, therefore, Hitler’s appreciation of Operation Merkur was correct: parachuting to war is essentially a dicing with death, in which the odds are loaded against the soldier who entrusts his life to silk and static line. There is a possibility that a combination of luck and judgement will deposit him and his comrades beyond the jaws of danger, enable them to assemble and allow formed airborne units to go forward to battle; but the probability is otherwise. Of the four great parachute endeavours of the Second World War, two – Sicily and Normandy – managed to evade the probabilities, two – Crete and Arnhem – did not. The demise of independent parachute forces since 1945 is the inevitable outcome of that unfavourable reckoning.
NINE
Barbarossa
Even while the news of his flawed victory in Crete was reaching him, Hitler’s thoughts were engaged with events far away. Indeed, at the height of the battle he had been preoccupied with two quite unrelated matters: the abortive sortie of his ‘wonder’ battleship Bismarck into the North Atlantic and the flight on 10 May of his deputy, Rudolf Hess, bearing an unauthorised offer of peace to the British. Bismarck’s destruction on 27 May could be represented by his propaganda machine as a sort of epic; Hess’s crazed initiative – which puzzled the British quite as much as it mystified his fellow Nazis – continued to enrage Hitler for weeks and months afterwards. He had Goebbels describe it as the result of ‘hallucination’; but the defection struck him a personal blow. Hess was not only an ‘old fighter’ but his amanuensis, who had taken down Mein Kampf from dictation during their incarceration at Landsberg after the Munich Putsch of 1923; he was also a comrade-in-arms from the List Regiment, a society of ‘young Germans’ whose brotherhood during the First World War had brought Hitler the one truly fulfilling experience of his lonely and confused youth.
Memories of the sacrifice offered by the List Regiment in the Kindermord bei Ypern, perhaps aroused by Hess’s flight, must have put the devastation of 7th Parachute Division and the destruction of the 1st Assault Regiment into perspective. Hitler was himself the survivor of a massacre in 1914 even more extensive than the parachutists had suffered in May 1941. No other division of the Wehrmacht, in Poland, Norway, the Low Countries, France and the Balkans, had suffered losses approaching those of Student’s elite. However, not only were such losses commonplace by First World War standards; they also counted for little beside the strength which had accrued to the Wehrmacht since the war had begun. The Wehrmacht’s losses thus far in twenty-one months of war had, by the standards of twentieth-century bloodletting, been inconsiderable: in Poland 17,000 dead and missing; in Scandinavia 3600; in France and the Low Countries 45,000; in Yugoslavia 151; in Greece and Crete less than 5000. On the other hand, the strength of the German army had risen since September 1939 from 3,750,000 men to 5,000,000; the Luftwaffe numbered 1,700,000, including anti-aircraft (flak) and parachute troops; and the navy 400,000. The Nazi Party’s army, the Waffen-SS, had increased from 50,000 to 150,000 men. The most striking assertion of strength was in the army. On mobilisation for war in September 1939, the Feldheer (field army) had included 106 divisions, of which ten were armoured and six motorised; by June 1941, on the eve of Barbarossa, the roll had increased to 180 infantry, 12 motorised and 20 Panzer divisions. The multiplication of armoured formations had been achieved by halving the number of tanks each contained. For all that, the German army, with the airfleets which supported it, was not only larger but disproportionately stronger in every way – in weapons, in reserves, above all in operational skill – than in 1939. Hitler’s rearmament programme of 1935-9 had merely lent military weight to his adventures in foreign policy; his war-making had permeated the whole of German society.
One German male in four was now in uniform; most had directly experienced victory, had trodden the soil of occupied territory and had seen soldiers of the victor nations of 1918 taken into captivity. The red-white-black and swastika flag had been raised ‘from the Meuse to the Memel, from the Belt to the Adige’, as the national anthem proclaimed it should fly, and German soldiers now stood ready to carry it even deeper into the zone of conquest Hitler had worked out as his own: into Stalin’s Russia.
The Balkan campaign, often depicted by historians as an unwelcome diversion from Hitler’s long-laid plan to attack the Soviet Union and as a disabling interruption of the timetable he had marked out for its inception, had been in fact no such thing. It had been successfully concluded even more rapidly than his professional military advisers could have anticipated; while the choice of D-Day for Barbarossa had always depended not on the sequence of contingent events but on the weather and objective military factors. The German army found it more difficult than expected to position the units allocated for Barbarossa in Poland; while the lateness of the spring thaw, which left the eastern European rivers in spate beyond the predicted date, meant that Barbarossa could not have been begun very much earlier than the third week of June, whatever Hitler’s intentions.
The outlook for Barbarossa nevertheless rested on German over-optimism. ‘Massive frontier battles to be expected; duration up to four weeks,’ Brauchitsch had written at the end of April 1941, ‘but in further development only minor resistance is then still to be reckoned with.’ Hitler was more emphatic. ‘You have only to kick in the door,’ he told Rundstedt, commanding Army Group South, on the eve of Barbarossa, ‘and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.’ Hitler’s prognosis was in part ideologically determined; he was committed to a view of Soviet Russia which represented its citizens as the crushed and brutish creatures of a Bolshevik tyrant, 200 million Calibans quailing under the eye of a Prospero corrupted by absolute power. There was irony in this mirror image. But Hitler’s belief that Soviet communism had a hollow centre was supported not only by prejudice but also by realities: in 1939 the giant Red Army had performed lamentably against minuscule Finland; and that humiliation was explained in turn by the massacre of its senior officers – far more complete than any war could have inflicted – instituted by Stalin in 1937-8.
