He was still thinking about when and how he might try out his theory when small-arms fire interrupted his reverie. It was coming from the west of the town, a burst of machine-gun fire, the crack of rifles and the dull explosions of grenades. There was shouting too, faint yet distinct on the evening breeze.
Once more nausea filled his guts, his blood pulsed and his legs weakened. Oh, God, he thought, don’t let them attack here.
7
Dusk and dawn – the best times to attack. When the light is changing rapidly and the shadows are long. For the defender, it is hard to adjust to this constantly altering light, but for the attacker there is still enough light to see. Desultory small-arms fire had continued to crack out all evening, but so far they had advanced to within two hundred metres of the town without being noticed.
Balthasar paused briefly as his men crept forward, flitting between trees and through the groves. Bringing his binoculars to his eyes, he looked up again at the walls. There were men up there. Another hundred metres, he thought, and then we can have a go.
Von der Schulenberg’s party had left ahead of them, circling to the north. There were just over a hundred men in each group, and in one respect this was an advantage: one did not want a large force at this stage. Infiltration and surprise were more easily achieved with fewer men. The enemy would have little idea how many there were of them, so all they had to do was hold their nerve, get that crucial breakthrough into the town, and he felt sure they had a good chance of success.
Balthasar moved forward again. There was still smoke on the air, but also a more fragrant smell, clear and sharp. Cicadas were calling noisily, almost deafeningly. Well, that would only help them. He was satisfied that the plan was the right one. A hundred metres from the edge of the town, they were all to open fire with their rifles, aiming for as many men on the walls as they could see. Then, Leutnant Mettig, from 2 Company, would lead the diversion: two hastily put together platoons, only thirty men. They were to work their way through the houses at the foot of the walls, kill anyone in their path, then make a big noise attacking the main gate. Meanwhile, the rest of them would go round to the right and storm the walls.
He was 150 metres away now, once more ahead of his men. Suddenly he heard a noise up ahead, then low voices, clear enough over the sound of the night insects. Urgently, he signalled to the men either side of him, some ten metres away, to wait. Pressing himself into the trunk of a tree, he listened. Two or maybe three men were coming; he heard the click of weapons and footsteps through the grass. Getting nearer, and then voices again – Greeks. They were just a few metres away now, and Balthasar breathed in. His heart hammered in his chest. Still the approaching men had not seen or heard anything untoward; the noise of cicadas was evidently proving a good distraction.
Three men. Cretans, not soldiers, but carrying rifles, creeping forward, and past him, but then something made one turn. Balthasar knew that feeling – a sixth sense that something else was there. It was, however, the last movement the man made because, in that moment, Balthasar plunged forward with his rifle, the twenty-three-centimetre blade of his Gebrheller bayonet glinting in the gloom, and thrust it into the man’s chest. A gasp, and the Cretan fell backwards, but already Balthasar had pulled out the blade and swung the rifle into the side of the next man’s head, knocking him sideways. The third tried to run, but he was startled and scared and within a few steps Balthasar had caught up and had stuck the blade through his back. He fell forward with a cry, and Balthasar punched down with the bayonet again. The second man was groaning on the ground, and Balthasar kicked him hard in the side, rolled him over and then, placing the tip of the bayonet over the man’s heart, pressed downwards. Quickly, he wiped his blade on his victim’s side, then signalled to his men to continue forward. Surprise. It was such a good weapon, and now there were three less enemy to worry about.
He moved forward again, through another olive grove, this time so dense the branches were touching one another so that he had to crouch to get through. At its edge he paused again and glanced to either side of him. Yes, there were his men, ready. In front of him was a small, rough field, a donkey standing in one corner. Dogs began barking to his left. Up ahead, the first houses, mostly white with flat roofs, although some were pitched, with terracotta tiles. They stretched away towards the walls alongside rough dirt roads. Balthasar looked at his watch: 1948. Two minutes.
He moved to his right, hurrying deftly between the trees, past men clutching rifles, until he reached Schulz.
‘Ready, Oberleutnant?’ said Schulz. Above, stars were beginning to twinkle.
‘Yes, Herr Major,’ said Balthasar. He could now see the walls clearly and a few men on top. Bringing his rifle into his shoulder, he aimed carefully, training his sights on one particular man, a Greek soldier, his helmeted head silhouetted against the fading sky.
Schulz looked at his watch. ‘All right, Balthasar,’ he said. ‘Let us begin.’
Balthasar felt strangely calm. His heart rate had lowered, his breathing was steady. This was what he was trained to do; in truth, it was what he enjoyed doing – the thrill of the fight, the euphoria of action. His target was, he guessed, ninety metres away, moving slowly. Balthasar steadied himself, waited for the man to stop moving, then squeezed the trigger.
The crack of the shot rang in his ears, but his aim had been good. Atop the walls the man crumpled, and now there was more rifle fire, a deafening fusillade. In moments, the night had come alive, and men were running forward, towards the houses, bursts of sub-machine-guns and return rifle fire filling the air. Balthasar was now beside Schulz, hurrying through the olive grove away from the main gate.
Balthasar had been half expecting enemy troops to be dug in around the edge of the town, but there appeared to be no one. The only return shots were coming from the walls and the houses in front. Good. As he was now up ahead he could see the crumbling walls and their point of attack. He took a couple of deep breaths, nodded to Schulz, then sprinted across a short stretch of open ground. Bullets spat around him, but he reached the wall around the first house unscathed. Others followed. He saw one man fall, but the rest were making the crossing safely. Moving off again, he hurried forward, using the darkening shadows for cover. There would be enemy in the houses, he knew, but he had told his men to ignore them as much as possible – to keep within the shadows, and to move swiftly to the walls. Shots rang out nearby and he heard the ricochet of a bullet. Forward he went, and then he was at the walls.
Slinging his rifle across his back, he swung his MP40 to his front, and pulled back the cocking handle ready. A large part of the wall had collapsed – the stone had evidently been taken away, reused, he supposed, so that now there was no more than a three-metre climb. Opposite, on the other side of the road, a building extended from the walls and it occurred to him that it might be possible to work their way through that and into the town. Other men had now joined him. He signalled to several to start climbing the walls, then saw Obergefreiter Möhne hurrying from the shadows.
‘Möhne!’ he hissed. ‘With me!’ He scurried across the street as several shots rang out from the windows above. Pressing himself against the wall between the window and the doorway, he took out a grenade, unscrewed the cap, dropped it beside the doorway and moved away. A blast, and then he stepped out in front of it, kicked open the shattered wood and, opening fire, ran inside. Without pause he raced through the smoke. Ahead, a set of wide stone stairs. He sped up, vaguely conscious of men following and further gunfire. Reaching the first floor, he stretched out his arms and fired another burst, then scrambled onto the landing and pounded up a second flight of stone stairs.
Men behind him, and now men ahead – Greek soldiers – coming down the stairs. Another burst, and two enemy tumbled down towards him. Were there others? Jumping over the dead men, Balthasar continued up. Then, at the top, he took out another grenade, unscrewed the cap, counted to three, and lobbed it onto the next landing. A second later the grenade exp
loded, the sound deafening in the confines of the stone walls so that Balthasar’s ears rang. Springing onto the landing he fired again into the swirling cloud of dust and smoke, kicked open a door and fired. A pistol shot rang out but the bullet whizzed harmlessly past his head, and now one of his men was spraying the room with bullets. A cry and another man collapsed to the ground. Balthasar saw that the room was otherwise empty. An officer, he thought as he hurried past the dead man and over to one of the two large windows.
Quickly he pulled out his magazine and replaced it, then cautiously peered through one of the windows. Below was the street and the gap in the walls. Men were clambering up but he saw two hit and tumble backwards. Where was the firing coming from? A muzzle flash from a building within the walls. Unslinging his rifle, he aimed at a dark window and fired.
‘Quick!’ he called. ‘Get some covering fire up here!’
Unteroffizier Rohde was now beside him. ‘The building is secure, Herr Oberleutnant,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Balthasar. ‘Now order some men up here. Where’s the MG? Get Möhne.’
One of the other men called to Möhne, who appeared a moment later with a private, Schütze Meier, in tow, clasping an ammunition box.
‘Get to the window, quick!’ ordered Rohde.
Balthasar turned to him. ‘We need to find a way into the walls.’
‘I think maybe on the floor below,’ said Rohde. ‘There is a door cut into a deep recess.’
Balthasar nodded as Möhne opened fire, the room quickly filling with the sharp stench of cordite. More men came into the room. ‘Show me,’ he mouthed above the din. Rohde led him downstairs and into a similar-sized room below. At the far end was the recess, a good metre deep, at the end of which was a wooden door.
‘This has to lead into the town,’ he said. He called more men to him, and they stood back as another grenade blasted open the thick oak door. The smoke and the shock of the explosion were an advantage when storming through a building such as this. Rohde fired blindly past the splintered wood, then hurried through, Balthasar following, holding his breath. They were in a narrow stone corridor, but Balthasar now saw a rectangular opening at the far end. Only an iron gate barred their way, but Rohde tried the handle and discovered it was not locked. Beyond, a flight of stone steps descended at a right angle to the street. Rohde glanced at Balthasar, his face taut.
‘Out of the way,’ said Balthasar. ‘I’ll go first. Cover me.’
Pressing himself against the wall, he peered through the gate. Outside, he could hear fighting but the street opposite looked quiet. His heart had quickened again, but he pushed open the gate, then stepped out and ran down the steps, his body tense, waiting for a bullet to smack into him. But it did not come, and he was able to cross the street undetected, then signal to the others to follow.
As a dozen men, one by one, hurried down the steps, Balthasar looked around. The light was fading rapidly, and the sky twinkled with stars. A road ran beside the wall, but immediately opposite there was a long row of buildings. As he crouched in the shadows of one, he could see that the enemy occupied the buildings opposite the broken wall and that, even with the help of the MG firing, his men were struggling to get across. They needed to storm the building, and preferably from more than one side.
Rohde was now beside him with Gefreiter Reinert.
‘Reinert, I want you to go back,’ he told the corporal. ‘Tell Möhne that we’re about to assault these buildings, and get the men the other side of the wall ready. Try to find Schulz. Rohde, you attack from the front, and I’ll take five men to the back.’
Reinert nodded, and hurried across the road. Balthasar watched him disappear safely, then divided his men and told Rohde to wait one minute before attacking. He led his group back along the road, keeping close into the shadows until they reached a narrow paved street. Turning into it, he was relieved to find a small alleyway off it that evidently ran along the back of the row of houses. Hurrying along, they rounded a bend and saw men moving from the alley into the rear of the building. Balthasar immediately opened fire, Greek soldiers screaming as they were cut down. He ran on, urging his men to follow. Pausing by the doorway at the rear of the building, he signalled to two of his men to take out grenades.
They unscrewed the caps and, at Balthasar’s gesture, threw them through the open door. As they exploded, the men turned and entered. Almost at the same moment, there were explosions from the front of the building too. Balthasar allowed himself a grim smile of satisfaction, then grabbed two of his paratroopers and said, ‘Stay here and guard this back door. Shoot anything that moves.’
Having given one an encouraging slap on the back, he stepped into the house.
Inside there was pandemonium. Dazed and coughing, Greek troops floundered through the smoke only to meet a burst of Schmeisser fire. Above, Balthasar heard a machine-gun clattering, so he hurried up the staircase. The stench was overpowering, but as he glanced up he saw a Greek soldier half aim a rifle at him. Before he could respond, the man had fired, the bullet grazing Balthasar’s upper arm. Cursing, he opened fire himself, the soldier tumbling down the stairs. Balthasar pushed him out of the way and continued upwards, two steps at a time. The MG was still pounding, so he took out his last grenade, lobbed it inside the room and, when it had exploded, emptied the rest of his magazine. The machine-gun stopped firing.
Cautiously, Balthasar stepped inside. Sulphurous smoke filled the room, rasping at the back of his throat. One man lay slumped over the machine-gun, his arm and side shredded. Another lay flat on his back, his face hideously disfigured by the grenade blast and his chest torn open. Two more lay under the window. One was groaning, so Balthasar took his Sauer pistol and punched a single bullet into the man’s chest. Blood was spreading across the stone floor, a darkening slick that was now seeping around his boot. He looked down at the MG. It was wrecked – annoying, but that could not be helped. From the back of the building came another burst of a sub-machine-gun but the rest of the house was now quiet.
‘We have it,’ said Rohde, from the doorway.
‘Well done,’ said Balthasar. ‘Now let’s get the rest of them across.’ Cautiously he moved to the window. Across the road, men were already clambering over the walls. ‘Quick!’ he shouted, then looked back along the road and saw more men streaming down the stone steps from the wall house.
‘Come on,’ he said to Rohde, then hurried out of the room and back downstairs over a number of Greek dead to the street below. There he paused and touched his arm. It stung and there was blood on his fingertips, but he was lucky the wound was no worse. He wiped his brow, suddenly aware that he was perspiring heavily. Fighting was hot work.
My God, we’re in, he thought. They had achieved the hardest part. Even so, as Balthasar was well aware, there was still much to be done before the town was theirs.
Captain Alex Vaughan had been with Pendlebury in a kafenio next to the Canea Gate when the shooting had begun. Already it had been a long afternoon, organizing Cretan raiding parties, helping Greek snipers pinpoint targets and distributing the booty taken from dead paratroopers. And this on top of several days of feverish activity in which he had had little sleep. He felt exhausted.
Vaughan was one of the very few people who knew that Pendlebury was not only vice consul but head of the Special Operations Executive on the island, the wing of British intelligence set up specifically to carry out clandestine sabotage against the enemy. Although Vaughan had a natural gift for languages and could hold his own in Greek, Pendlebury was almost a native. He spoke both ancient and modern Greek fluently, the latter with the Cretan patois, and having spent so many years at Knossos and excavating other ancient sites on the island, he knew the place intimately; indeed, he had walked and traversed the island more than most Cretans.
Pendlebury had established a network of informers that stretched all the way to the mainland, and three days earlier had received word from one – via a trip across the sea – that the German
invasion had just been postponed but was still imminent. Over the past months Pendlebury, along with Vaughan and his fellow SOE officers, Jack Hanford and Terence Bruce-Mitford, had devoted much energy to organizing the local kapitans into guerrilla forces should the invasion come. Vaughan, if he was honest, had always questioned the value of Crete to the Germans, but Pendlebury had insisted the enemy would invade, and for that, he argued, they needed to be prepared. He had been proved right that afternoon and, thanks to him, they now had arms stashes all over the island, but especially in the mountains, from where Pendlebury hoped the fight could be continued should the worst happen and the British be defeated.
The previous day, Hanford had left Heraklion to organize the guerrillas in the mountains, but Vaughan had remained behind with Pendlebury to help defend the town. ‘I’m sure the Greek regiments will fight,’ Pendlebury had said, ‘and so will the British. But the ones who will fight hardest are the Cretans. It is their island, after all.’ Therefore he had armed as many as he could, and while many of the guerrillas – or andartes, as they were known – had remained in their mountain villages, some had joined him in Heraklion, men like Alopex, the village patriarch of Sarhos, a village on the lower slopes of the Ida range, and the head of an influential family olive-pressing business.
Alopex had known Pendlebury for years, helping with his digs before the war and with organizing the planned resistance since the latter’s arrival back on the island the previous year. It was from Pendlebury that Alopex had learned English. Vaughan had recognized that this had been a smart move: Pendlebury was universally admired by the Cretan patriarchs, and Alopex’s close ties to this eccentric but beloved Englishman had only enhanced his own standing.
Alopex had also been at Pendlebury’s when the paratroopers attacked, and so too had Satanas, the most influential kapitan of them all. Satanas was from Krousonas, a large mountain village higher in the Ida Mountains than Alopex’s home. As Vaughan had discovered when he had first visited Krousonas, Satanas was the unquestioned village patriarch and a legend on Crete as a man who had fanatically fought the Turks more than forty years before. It was said that he had survived so many Turkish bullets that he must be the devil himself; that, Vaughan had been told in awed tones more times than he could remember, was why everyone knew him as Satanas.
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