by John Keegan
Despite the bravery of the defenders of western Crete, and their willingness to return to the fray in an increasingly confused battle, by 22 May the decision was already out of their hands. Although appalling losses had been inflicted on the parachute and glider troops on the day of landing and in the immediate aftermath, the loss of Maleme airfield by 21 May was a decisive setback. Thereafter the Germans, who enjoyed complete air superiority, could reinforce the island at will, while Creforce, unsupported by air and scarcely by sea, began to wither away. Eventually about 20,000 survivors of the fighting, some escaping in formed groups, others straggling, were taken off by the navy from the southern port of Sphakia, having made a hard escape across the White Mountains; others were embarked in units from the north coast. Many remained, to take up resistance with the Cretans, who refused to submit to the occupation; in the end they had to be restrained from attacks on the Germans by the British liaison officers sent to their guerrilla bands, to avert the appalling reprisals inflicted on the inland villages.
British, Australian and New Zealand losses during the fighting totalled nearly 3,500 killed; about 12,000 were taken prisoner. There were also nearly 2,000 losses among sailors of the Royal Navy, fighting to destroy or turn back the seaborne invasion, the prospect of which had so alarmed General Freyberg. The toll among the Germans, though no more than equal, was felt more heavily. Casualty figures rarely agree; estimates of the number of Germans killed in the Battle of Crete, from 20 May to 1 June, vary between 3,352, the number commemorated in the cemetery on Hill 107, and 3,994, Anthony Beevor’s calculation, which included aircrew. The gruesome point about the German casualties is that a huge proportion were from the 7th Parachute Division and fell on a single day, 20 May. As many as 2,000 were killed out of a total strength—currently that of the three parachute regiments and the Assault Regiment—of about 8,000; the number may have been higher, there being no one to count.46
Crete was therefore a German disaster. It effectively destroyed one of the finest fighting formations in Hitler’s army; he resolved never to risk an airborne operation again and largely stuck to his decision. Yet Crete was also a battle that the British lost. Many of those killed, wounded or captured were also soldiers of the highest quality; it is invidious to discriminate but Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who was to meet them frequently in the Western Desert at the head of the Africa Corps, reckoned New Zealanders the best soldiers he ever knew, including in that judgement his own Germans. The Australians, less well disciplined but equally self-reliant, were also soldiers of high quality. So were those of the five British regular battalions, York and Lancaster, Welch, Leicesters, Black Watch and Argylls. Some men were taken off by the navy in formed groups, others were evacuated haphazardly. Creforce did not make an organised escape, and the shame of rout, worse than that of defeat, hung about the survivors who eventually found their way back to Egypt.
The navy suffered as badly as the army. In the effort to oppose the seaborne invasion in which Freyberg’s fears were so disastrously invested—in reality nothing more than a few flotillas of Greek fishing boats, unprotected and crammed to the gunwales with defenceless German infantry—Admiral Cunningham sacrificed to the attack of German airpower three cruisers, Gloucester, Fiji and Calcutta, and six destroyers, Juno, Greyhound, Kelly, Kashmir, Imperial and Hereward. Four battleships were damaged, six cruisers and seven destroyers. Many of the warships had escaping soldiers embarked, and casualties aboard were heavy. The naval battle of Crete, like the land battle, was a defeat for British power, and the loss of life among the naval crews and the embarked soldiers and RAF ground crew was grievous.
How did the defeat come about? Ralph Bennett, the best qualified chronicler of Bletchley and its work, being both an initiate and a professional historian, wrote that “Crete [exemplifies] the truth that both force as well as foreknowledge is needed to win battles.” His judgement may be restated. The British possessed ample force to win the Battle of Crete, had it been correctly deployed and committed during the course of the action. They enjoyed almost complete foreknowledge: more information about the objectives of each element of the attacking force, revealing the central importance the Germans attached to Maleme, might have altered Freyberg’s assessment of priorities. Given his obsession about the danger of a seaborne landing, however, even that is doubtful.
What the events of 20–21 May on Crete reveal is that a defending force, uncertain of how to respond exactly to impending danger, however well informed it may be of the general risk, is at a disadvantage against an enemy who has his aim clearly in mind. Freyberg knew when the Germans would appear; he knew their objectives, the three airfields; and he knew their strength, a whole airborne division, reinforced by mountain troops. He was unclear, however, about the balance between the attacking elements, having confused the airborne with that of the far less menacing seaborne invasion. The Germans, by contrast, knew exactly what they intended to do: seize the three airfields by an advanced guard of parachutists and glider infantry and then reinforce success. At two of their objectives, Heraklion and Rethymno, they suffered costly defeats. At Maleme they achieved initially partial success, which they completed by taking an operational risk that Freyberg and his subordinates were not prepared to match.
There were a succession of turning points. Had Andrew not withdrawn his two less engaged companies from Hill 107 during the night of 20–21 May, they would have been able to support next day the two companies still engaged around Maleme airfield, which were holding their own. The decision, taken by Andrew alone, though without protest by his superior, was the first and most important mistake. It was not fatal. Well into the next day the struggle for Maleme continued and had not been lost by the British. It was only at 7:15 on the morning of 21 May that German headquarters in Athens got the news that “Group West [the Assault Regiment and 3rd Parachute Regiment] has taken the south-east corner of the airfield and the height 1 km to the south [Hill 107].”47 Until then, the airborne commanders thought that the battle was lost; it was only on news of the capture of Hill 107, and of Kleye’s successful touch-down at Maleme, that they decided to risk the mass descent on the airfield by the air-landed 5th Mountain Division. The mountaineers did not begin to arrive until late afternoon. In the meantime the New Zealanders had mounted several counterattacks and almost regained the ground lost; they had also slaughtered the second wave of parachutists dropped east of Maleme.
The counterattacks of 21 May, which could have saved the situation, failed for a variety of reasons. German close air-support, strafing by Messerschmitt 109 fighters, dive-bombing by Stukas, was both terrifying and deadly; Freyberg did not commit enough troops; he failed to do so because of his continuing concern about a sea landing, an anxiety heightened by an Ultra message received at about four o’clock on the afternoon of 21 May, “among operations planned for Twenty-first May is air landing two mountain battalions and attack Canea. Landing from echelon small ships depending on situation at sea.”48 This message stayed Freyberg’s hand. When Maleme airfield finally fell to the incoming waves of mountain soldiers, he still retained at least three uncommitted battalions near Canea.
The Germans were lucky to win the Battle of Crete and the British need not have lost. It is certainly difficult to explain how they came to lose, with the German plans plain before them for several days in advance. Freyberg had force as well as foreknowledge. How did he come to misapply it?
Much has been made of his over-concern at the threat from the sea. Nothing is said of the quality of Ultra intelligence supplied to him. The solution to the mystery of his bad decision-making may lie there. He was not, it should be remembered, supplied with the raw decrypts because it had been decided at Bletchley not to release them, not even to the Prime Minister. That decision was certainly correct. The decrypts were often literally enigmatic or full of German military technical terms and abbreviations; most were “random scraps of secret correspondence which had to be read without the background or context which would
have explained their sometimes impenetrable allusions.”49 Yet, as Bennett concedes, Bletchley’s Hut 3, which dealt with the interpretation (not the decrypting) of all German army and air force decrypts, was full of German scholars who could make quick and accurate translations of the decrypts, but as yet (in 1940–41) it contained scarcely any trained intelligence officers; interestingly, according to Welchman, Hut 6, which did the decrypting, contained scarcely anyone with more than a smattering of German. The result, Bennett concedes, was that “at the beginning of 1941 no one had enough evidence to do more than guess how illuminating the new source of intelligence might become once land fighting was widespread again, or how it could best be used.” He goes on, “Nor had anyone much experience of weaving together separate items from it into a pattern intelligible to field commanders and capable of making their battle plans.”50 “It was in fact some time,” he says, speaking of his experience in Hut 3, “before the cryptanalysts’ achievement was matched by an equal ability on the part of [the interpreters] to convert the product of their skill into precise military intelligence, assess it correctly, and apply it correctly in the field.”
Bennett’s reflections on the early work of Hut 3—precisely in the Crete period—are of the greatest relevance to the understanding of Freyberg’s conduct of the battle, since they disclose the serious shortcomings of the Ultra messages he was sent. What those messages reveal appears to be a complete picture of the impending airborne invasion. What they do not disclose, crucially, is who was going to land where. The objectives—Maleme, Rethymno, Heraklion—are given; so is the strength of the force, 7th Parachute Division, a reinforced 5th Mountain Division. The units of the force are not, however, matched with the target zones. The crucial synthesis of the German operation order, OL 2/302 of 13 May 1941, the work of Bletchley interpreters, not the transcript of the German intercepts themselves, leaves it unspecified how the Assault Regiment and the nine battalions of Parachute Regiments 1, 2 and 3 are to be allotted between targets.
It may be that the intercepts did not so specify. We cannot know. “The translations of the decrypts . . . have not been released [to the Public Records Office].”51 It is most unlikely, however, that they did not. Military operations orders, in whichever army, conform to a standard pattern, which always specifies, among other points, aim, timing, objectives and units allotted to objectives. It is most unlikely that, among the Enigma intercepts decrypted, there lacked the evidence that Maleme was to be the objective of both the Assault Regiment and 3rd Parachute Regiment in the first wave on 20 May.
Had Freyberg known that, which would have identified Maleme as the main German objective, his mind would have been greatly clarified. He would have been able to leave the garrisons at Rethymno and Heraklion to look after themselves, as they did very successfully, to worry less about the seaborne landing, and to concentrate readily and forcefully at Maleme, with the object of defeating the initial landings and denying the airfield to subsequent arrivals. He had ample force available. The Assault Regiment, even if it had enough gliders to lift all its soldiers, which it did not, numbered at most 2,400; 3rd Parachute Regiment numbered only 1,650. The New Zealand Division, with its associated Australian and British battalions, exceeded the German total of 4,000 men, by an ample margin; the count may be reckoned as seven German battalions to seventeen British, which also had tank and artillery units the Germans lacked.
Freyberg should have been able to organise a victory. If he did not, it was partly because intelligence did not serve him well. The facts were there, but they were fed to him through the “sieve” or “filter,” as the process is now known in the intelligence world, of interpretation by young, inexperienced and largely unmilitary officers in Bletchley’s Hut 3, who seem to have been more concerned to provide a smooth narrative on the Oxbridge essay pattern—most were academic linguists—than the sharp assessment of enemy aims and capabilities that a hardened operational intelligence analyst would have composed. Intelligence is only as good as the use made of it. That is the hard lesson of Crete, the “open and shut intelligence example,” and the truth of the case remains as clear now as better interpretation would have made it then.
CHAPTER SIX
Midway: The Complete Intelligence Victory?
THE DEFEAT of Admiral Von Spee’s East Asiatic Cruiser Squadron in 1914 laid the basis for Japan’s conquest of the oceanic perimeter of its Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere in 1941–42, for the island colonies that von Spee abandoned in his retreat from the Pacific were instantly occupied by Japanese naval expeditionary forces. Japan entered the First World War as an ally of Great Britain, in answer to a request for naval assistance in hunting down German armed merchantmen. Japan’s motive in responding to the British request was not, however, one of diplomatic goodwill but strict self-interest. Ever since its re-entry into the world in 1854, after centuries of self-imposed sequestration, and particularly since its creation of a modern army and navy in the century’s last decades, Japan had sought to become a major Pacific power. Its long-term ambition was to dominate China, but its ruling class recognised that the established great powers, particularly Britain and Russia, which had their own designs on China, would check any attempt at large-scale annexation. The policy of the United States was an even more important obstacle, since it was benevolent and largely disinterested. While commercial America sought to create and protect markets in China, political and missionary America hoped to make the country democratic and Christian. Since America was a great Pacific power, its attitude was a major factor in determining Japan’s strategic policy. By 1908 the Japanese navy was considering the problem of fighting the United States navy in Pacific waters; by 1910 it was studying the question of attacking the Philippines, over which the United States had extended a protectorate at the end of the Spanish–American War of 1898.1
The Japanese navy recognised that to conduct a naval war against the United States in the Pacific, even as a theoretical exercise, required bases beyond the home islands. By 1914 Japan had already considerably extended its territorial reach. As a result of its victory in the war against China in 1894–95 it had acquired the great offshore island of Formosa (Taiwan) and the nearby archipelago of the Pescadores; it had established an effective protectorate over Korea, which became a Japanese colony in 1910, and secured concessions in the Liaotung Peninsula, the strategic promontory enclosing the Yellow Sea; it had also extracted a “lease” over the productive province of Kwantung. The great powers, wanting for themselves the territory Japan had won, intervened after the China War, forcing it to disgorge the Liaotung Peninsula, in which Britain, Germany and Russia set up their own maritime enclaves, the Russians at the anchorage of Port Arthur.
Japan took its revenge in 1904, opening a war against Russia which resulted in major victories in Manchuria and the destruction of most of Russia’s naval power. It had, however, learnt a lesson: that the white imperialists—then including the Americans, temporarily in an imperialist phase—would not allow an Asian state to acquire colonial possessions desired, actually or potentially, by themselves.
Germany’s abandonment of its Pacific colonies and Britain’s request for naval assistance in August 1914 thus presented Japan with an opportunity not to be missed. Australia and New Zealand, moving briskly to stake their own claims, seized what looked like the best German possessions: New Guinea, Papua, the Solomon Islands and the Bismarck archipelago, including the strategic anchorage of Rabaul, were occupied by Australia, Samoa by New Zealand. Japan, which quickly organised two South Seas squadrons, managed to lay hands on much of Micronesia, including the Mariana, Caroline and Marshall Islands, by early October. The equator became the effective sea frontier between an extended Australasia and a new Japanese empire of the Central Pacific. By November 1914 the Japanese foreign minister had agreed informally with his British counterpart that Japan, at the peace, would retain all German islands north of the equator.
Economically, Micronesia was of trifling worth. G
eopolitically, however, when it was mandated to Japan by the League of Nations in 1919, its changed ownership transformed the strategic situation in the North Pacific. Japan, before 1914 a purely regional power, became after 1919 the possessor of a great, potentially offensive bastion, extending almost to the International Date Line and threatening the American possessions of Guam, Wake, Midway and even distant Hawaii in the Central Pacific, as well as the Dutch East Indies, the American-protected Philippines and the constellation of British Central Pacific islands from the Solomons to the Gilberts and beyond. Beyond implied Australia and New Zealand, ultimately dependent on British naval power for their security.
