The Daring Dozen

by Gavin Mortimer

  Von der Heydte and his men travelled through Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria until they reached the Mediterranean Sea at Salonika. They established a camp to the east of an airfield near the village of Topolia, and the next day, on 16 May 1941, von der Heydte attended a meeting hosted by Student at the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Athens. The first thing von der Heydte saw when he entered the room was a large map of Crete on the wall. Then, ‘in a quiet but clear and slightly vibrant voice General Student explained the plan of attack. It was his own, personal plan. He had devised it, had struggled against heavy opposition for its acceptance and had worked out all the details.’4

  Crete had been in Allied hands since the previous autumn, when they had garrisoned the island (which measures 160 miles from east to west) following Italy’s attack on Greece. Situated in the Mediterranean, equidistant between Athens and the Egyptian coast, the island’s airstrip allowed British bombers to attack the Romanian oil fields that were vital to the German war effort, while its harbours were a haven for the Royal Navy from where they could attack German supply ships.

  Student had indeed argued vociferously for the plan to be accepted at a time when the German High Command was focused on the impending invasion of Russia (which would begin on 22 June 1941). Eventually he won his case and was authorized to go ahead and plan Operation Mercury, the first airborne invasion in military history.

  Von der Heydte and his fellow officers listened intently as Student unveiled his plan for the seizure of Crete. Simultaneously, the island would be attacked at four different locations with the Assault Regiment, commanded by Brigadier General Eugen Meindl dropping to the west and securing the airfield at Maleme. The 2nd Regiment, led by Captain Hans Wiedemann, was tasked with occupying the town of Rethymnon and its adjoining airfield, and the 1st Regiment under Major Erich Walther would jump into Gournes in the north and capture Heraklion.

  Von der Heydte’s 3rd Regiment, under the command of Colonel Richard Heidrich and reinforced by a parachute-engineer battalion, had the town of Chania on the north-west coast of Crete as its objective. Commanding the 1st Battalion, von der Heydte’s mission was to jump into the Agya Penitentiary, a flat and exposed plain, and secure the road that led from Chania to Suda, further east along the coast. Meanwhile the 2nd Battalion under Major Helmut Derpa was to land east of the Agya Penitentiary and oust the British from the high ground at Galatas, south-west of Chania. The mission of the 3rd Battalion under Major Ludwig Heilmann was to go in first and capture the Alikianou to Chania road, around which were fruit plantations that sloped down from the coastal heights to the Agya Penitentiary.

  Once Student had explained the plan, he handed over to his intelligence officer, who confidently asserted that the island was defended by two or three weak Greek divisions, and a ‘British force of divisional strength consisting mainly of Dominion troops (New Zealanders) under command of the well-known General Freyberg’. The intelligence officer added that the local population was believed to be ‘sympathetic’ to a German invasion, and in fact there already existed an underground network of pro-German resistance fighters who would identity themselves during the landing by uttering the codeword ‘Major Bock’.

  On the evening of 16 May, von der Heydte treated his orderly, 18-year-old Willi Riese, to a meal in a small Athens taverna and the teenager listened rapt as his commanding officer ‘told him the history of Athens, of the battles against the Persians, of the war with Sparta, and of the heroic fight against Philip of Macedonia’.

  When they returned to battalion headquarters, von der Heydte found his men enjoying bottles of beer and cognac that had been issued on his orders. The paratroopers were in high spirits, talking of girls and escapades, and it occurred to von der Heydte that he alone felt oppressed as he recalled another tale from the past. ‘Somehow,’ he wrote later, ‘I could not help recalling the youths who had been sent to Crete every nine years to die in sacrifice to the Minotaur.’5

  On the evening of 19 May, the 120 men of von der Heydte’s 1st Battalion began preparing for their historic airborne operation. One of them was the former heavyweight boxing champion of the world, Max Schmeling, who at 35 was one of the oldest members of the battalion. Schmeling had held the world heavyweight title between 1930 and 1932 but as a paratrooper he was unremarkable, although von der Heydte employed his physical strength to good effect as leader of his mortar section.

  Now, on the eve of battle, Schmeling was sent to see von der Heydte by the battalion medical officer because he was suffering from severe diarrhoea. ‘He was in a quandary,’ remembered von der Heydte, ‘because if he reported sick it might be assumed that he was trying to shirk, and this he did not wish to do under any circumstances. So I advised him, as I think any battalion commander would have done in a similar situation, to tie his waterproof jumping suit especially tightly from behind and to fly and jump with the rest of us.’6

  At 0400hrs on 20 May, the battalion began taking off from Tanagra in Greece. Von der Heydte was one of the few men on board his transport who had seen action and knew what awaited them in Crete. The rest, the idealists, adventurers and ambitious young men that comprised the 1st Battalion were blithely indifferent and anticipated an easy occupation to go with those of the Norway, Denmark and the Low Countries. Before long the men were all singing the ‘Song of the Paratroops’:

  Fly on this day against the enemy!

  Into the ’planes, into the ’planes!

  Comrade, there is no going back!

  Von der Heydte and his men of the 1st Battalion dropped into Crete unopposed on the morning of 20 May. As he floated down to earth, von der Heydte had identified the village of Alikianou, and landed, only narrowly avoiding a large reservoir and a fig tree. He looked at his watch – 0715hrs – and then dug out a guide book to Crete that he had bought from a stall in Athens to see if the buildings he could see in the distance were those of a prison. Satisfied that they were, von der Heydte began advancing down the dusty white road that led from Alikianou to Chania. ‘Psychologists may ponder whence that sense of power and courage is derived once a parachutist has gained terra firma after a successful jump,’ wrote von der Heydte later. ‘It is a sensation almost of intoxication. He feels himself a match for any man and ready to take on anything that comes along.’7

  Von der Heydte quickly assembled his battalion and began to attack the enemy positions on the high ground overlooking Chania. The 2nd and 3rd companies advanced up the lower slopes of Great Castle Hill, supported by a machine-gun platoon, but were met by heavy British resistance. Going to ground in an olive-tree orchard, the paratroopers worked their way upwards and into the Cladiso Valley.

  Von der Heydte set up a command post in a deep gully at 1030hrs and began receiving conflicting reports from his company commanders that indicated the British had established a strong line of defence. Two British artillery pieces situated in an olive grove had been neutralized after fierce hand-to-hand fighting, but the news from 1st Company was less encouraging. Placing his adjutant in temporary charge of the battalion, von der Heydte and his orderly, Riese, went forward to locate 1st Company. He found them pinned down in a shallow ditch and, crawling forward on his own, von der Heydte spotted through his binoculars two British heavy machine guns, well-concealed in some shrubs beside a solitary cottage.

  Back in the shallow ditch, von der Heydte sent a message instructing Schmeling and his mortar section to shell the cottage, and within minutes the British machine guns had been silenced. But the British resistance was still strong and the commanders of both 2nd and 4th companies were badly wounded as they tried to lead their men towards Chania. Then news reached von der Heydte that the battalion command post had received a direct hit, killing two and destroying a wireless set. Von der Heydte’s adjutant was ‘grave and remarkably pale’, an indication of the ferocity of the fighting all around.

  By noon, however, von der Heydte’s battalion had taken most of their objectives, albeit at a heavy cost. A dressing station, established in
the shade of some trees to deal with the wounded, was overflowing and von der Heydte did his best to rally the spirits of those awaiting attention from the battalion doctor. Then he saw a wounded Englishman. ‘I knelt beside him and brushed his blond hair back from his forehead,’ he recalled. ‘One of the orderlies then saw fit to explain to him that I was the commanding officer of the battalion. With large astonished blue eyes the Englishman looked at me. “The war is over for me, sir,” he said. “I hope it will be for you, too, in the not-so-distant future.”’8

  The wounded British soldier’s comrades were similarly defiant as the day wore on, digging a defensive line to prevent the Germans attaining their goal of Chania. Then the defenders’ artillery was augmented by the guns of the Royal Navy warships anchored in Suda Bay, and finally the British counter-attacked in late afternoon. Von der Heydte described the close-quarter fighting that ensued as ‘bitter’ with the British making good use of the cover. But with von der Heydte directing his men, the German paratroopers repelled the attack and the rest of 20 May passed without further serious incident.

  The following day, 21 May, was relatively quiet with both sides content to snipe at one another without launching a full-scale assault. Von der Heydte had sited his battalion well, with a commanding view of the villages of Perivolia and Pyrgos to the front and the blue waters of Suda Bay to the rear. During the day, a resupply by parachute of arms and ammunition boosted the morale of von der Heydte’s men, though the heavy firing they could hear coming from the direction of Maleme made them wonder how their comrades were faring.

  In fact Maleme airfield fell to the Germans on 21 May and soon it was being used to reinforce the Airborne Corps with Alpine troops from the 5th Mountain Division. Together the paratroopers and the mountain troops repulsed a New Zealand counter-attack the following day, an action that proved to be a turning point in the battle for Crete. With the airstrip bringing in further German forces and supplies, and fearful of a major seaborne landing, the British began withdrawing to the eastern tip of the island to prepare for an evacuation.

  On Sunday 25 May, von der Heydte’s battalion was dug in on the heights south-west of Perivolia and Pyrgos, waiting to link up with the assault troops from Maleme before launching an attack against Chania. On the same day General Student argued successfully for a fresh wave of attacks on the British positions by Stuka dive-bombers (something the army opposed because they wished the aircraft to be preserved for the invasion of Russia), and on 26 May the Stukas began attacking.

  So, too, did 1st Battalion, advancing on 26 May to secure Perivolia and Pyrgos, and the next day they pressed on to Chania with von der Heydte at the head of his men. They found the town deserted, the British having already evacuated and the civilians fearful of the Germans. The mayor of Chania, however, was waiting and he asked one of the battalion soldiers to be taken to his commander. Presented to von der Heydte, the mayor refused to believe that this unkempt figure before him was the paratroopers’ leader. ‘Well could I understand it,’ reflected von der Heydte. ‘Since the morning of May 19th I had not had a shave, and my clothing, which I had not changed during the past eight days, was torn to ribbons.’9

  Von der Heydte accepted the town’s surrender and, once Chania was well defended, he organized the burying of the battalion’s dead, one of whom was his young orderly Willi Riese. Exact casualty figures suffered by the German airborne corps during the invasion of Crete vary but it is accepted that between 6,500 and 7,000 men were killed or wounded. The Allies lost approximately 3,500 men in the fighting. Despite the successful outcome of Operation Mercury, the scale of the losses so horrified Hitler that he vowed never to permit such a massed airborne assault again. ‘Our losses had been caused through multiple reasons,’ stated von der Heydte, who was promoted to major and decorated with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for his leadership and courage during the invasion (the highest such award in the German military). ‘The troops had been inexperienced in parachute warfare. For many of them the battle of Crete had been their first taste of action, and for most of them it had been their first drop against an enemy. The training of the officers had been none too thorough, and their personal bravery had not proved sufficient compensation for their lack of knowledge.’

  The three years that followed the invasion of Crete were frustrating ones for von der Heydte. Having led his battalion into Russia in the autumn of 1941, he was wounded in the shoulder during the heavy fighting of the siege of Leningrad. Von der Heydte was carried to a dressing station on the banks of the river Neva, where he was examined by Dr Petritsch, the battalion medical officer, who had performed sterling work in Crete. Suddenly the dressing station took a direct hit from a Russian shell, a piece of shrapnel severing the doctor’s carotid artery as he tended von der Heydte. He himself was left unscathed by the explosion.

  In May 1942 von der Heydte – by now fully recovered from his shoulder wound – received word that his battalion would spearhead Operation Hercules – an invasion of Malta, the island that served as a vital British base for their operations in the Mediterranean. The plan was that von der Heydte and his men would jump six hours in advance of the main invasion fleet and destroy the British anti-aircraft defences. As von der Heydte began to train his men for the joint German-Italian invasion, in which they would land in gliders, General Student was summoned to see Hitler to discuss Operation Hercules. Student gave the Führer a comprehensive overview of his plan. In his book Jump Into Hell, Franz Kurowski (who served as a war correspondent in the German Army during World War II) described how Hitler listened to what Student had to say and then decided to cancel the operation because he doubted the Italian Navy had the courage to accomplish their tasks, ‘and then you’ll be sitting alone with your paratroopers on the island’.

  Instead of dropping into Malta, von der Heydte’s battalion was attached to the combat brigade commanded by Major General Hermann Ramcke and sent to North Africa. Just a few months after having fought on the Eastern Front, von der Heydte was now operating in temperatures exceeding 55 degrees Celsius.

  On 30 August the battle of Alam el Halfa began, which turned out to be General Erwin Rommel’s last major offensive against the British Eighth Army in the Desert War. Von der Heydte’s battalion was tasked with attacking the enemy positions along the Ruweisat Ridge, but after six days of heavy fighting the Axis forces withdrew with losses of nearly 3,000 men. Von der Heydte survived the battle, winning the Italian Silver Medal for bravery, but a short while later fell ill with dysentery and therefore was absent when the British offensive began at El Alamein. Though he rejoined his battalion at the end of the year, von der Heydte continued to suffer the effects of dysentery until he was finally evacuated to the Berlin-Dahlem hospital for tropical diseases in Germany.

  In February 1943 von der Heydte was transferred to the 2nd Parachute Regiment and in September of that year he was ordered to Rome to disarm the Italian forces following their armistice with the Allies. In a suburb of the Italian capital, tanks belonging to a pro-Allies Sardinian Division opened fire on von der Heydte’s men, so the commanding officer sat on top of an armoured car and advanced into Rome at the head of a small convoy to draw the Italians out into an ambush. One of his men, Captain Milch, recalled what followed:

  Major Von der Heydte stopped at a marketplace and bought grapes, which we immediately ate. As we continued, we kept on seeing motorcycle messengers in Italian uniforms. Then we got to a tank obstacle … I went ahead, followed by the staff car and the armoured car. When we were not too far from the famous obelisks along the Via Ostiense, not far from the Coliseum, I saw tanks in a side street that were following our movements with their main guns. We were in a trap. In order to warn the vehicles following us, I fired at the closest tank with my rifle. A salvo from the tank’s main guns was the answer. The tanks rolled out, pursued the armoured car, which was able to escape, and ran into my battery. The battery turned back all of the Italian attacks into the afternoon.10

 
; By such fearless behaviour did von der Heydte successfully disarm the Italian forces in Rome and its environs by 11 September. A short while later, while on a reconnaissance flight over the city in a Fieseler Storch, von der Heydte’s aircraft crashed and he was badly injured. When he returned to active service four months later, von der Heydte was appointed commander of the newly formed 6th Parachute Regiment, a unit comprised predominantly of young, raw recruits; as he had done three years earlier prior to the invasion of Crete, von der Heydte was obliged to prepare a mix of idealists, adventurers and ambitious young soldiers for the reality of war.

  The regiment was based just outside Paris and throughout the spring of 1944 von der Heydte trained them thoroughly for the invasion that he knew to be imminent. At the start of June von der Heydte’s regiment moved north-west into Normandy and he established his command post in Carentan, a small town of 4,000 inhabitants, situated three miles from the coast on the main road (the Route National 13) between Cherbourg in the north and Caen in the east. One battalion he stationed in Carentan, another he sent seven miles north-west to Sainte-Mère-Église, and a third was dug in around Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, four miles to the north.

  Though most of the German High Command were convinced the invasion, when it came, would occur further east at Calais, von der Heydte was not convinced and conducted regular aerial reconnaissance patrols, his love of flying undiminished despite his accident of the previous year. On the evening of 5 June von der Heydte was engaged in one such reconnoitre when his headquarters received a visit from General Kurt Student, Commander-in-Chief of the German airborne field army. Student dined with von der Heydte’s liaison officer and then departed for his headquarters in the city of Nancy in the east of France. ‘Be alert!’ he jokingly told the liaison officer as he left Carentan.