The twentieth of May was a lovely early Mediterranean summer’s day. The diary of the New Zealand 22nd Battalion, positioned at Maleme, recorded “Cloudless sky, no wind, extreme visibility: e.g. details on mountains 20 miles to the south-east easily discernible.”40 There were early German air raids on most British positions, as there had been every morning in the previous two weeks. Then calm returned, briefly, until at eight o’clock bombing, heavier than before, was resumed. At Maleme there were numerous casualties. While they were being treated the noise of a new wave of German aircraft broke in. They were the Ju-52 tugs of the gliders of the Assault Regiment, which began to land in the dry bed of the Tavronitis River, running inland just to the west of Maleme airstrip. In the course of a few minutes, about forty crash-landed, bringing, in ten-man groups, the first battalion, commanded by Major Koch, who had led the assault on Eben Emael in Belgium the year before, part of the 3rd Battalion and regimental headquarters. As the gliders crashed in, they came under concentrated fire, from the New Zealand infantrymen dug in on the airfield and on Hill 107 which dominates it.
The Maleme battlefield, when visited, is, like most battlefields, much smaller than maps suggest beforehand. The airstrip appears to lie under the lip of Hill 107 (today the graveyard of the German invaders); the sea is clearly visible beyond; only the valley of the Tavronitis is, by a trick of topography, hidden from view. Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie Andrew, commanding 22nd NZ Battalion, and a Victoria Cross winner of the Great War, had allowed for faults in his line of sight by positioning his D Company on the bank of the river bed; A and B Companies were on Hill 107 and its slopes; C Company was actually on the airstrip. He had two tanks, two static 4-inch guns and several Bofors anti-aircraft guns. Together with the rifles and light and heavy machine-guns of his infantry, he deployed formidable firepower.
It took a heavy toll of Battalions II and IV of the Assault Regiment, which dropped by parachute, as did part of Battalion III. Casualties were particularly high among officers; the second battalion was to lose sixteen killed and seven wounded, most in the early part of the fighting. Yet casualties were high all around Maleme. The parachutists had been told that the garrison of Crete was small, only 12,000, an underestimate by nearly three-quarters, that resistance would be light and that the Cretans would show them a friendly welcome. All three predictions proved untrue. The Cretan civilians turned out with any sort of weapon to hand the instant the landings began, an act of collective courage for which they were to play a terrible price in massacre and individual reprisal as soon as the Germans got the opportunity. The British, New Zealand and Australian defenders fought with ferocity, indeed downright glee during the parachuting phase. Parachutists were shot by soldiers sitting down to breakfast, sometimes keeping score as if on a morning’s duck shooting. The sense of invulnerability that parachuting confers was quickly dispelled as bodies went limp at the end of the harness. Some of those who were not immediately hit felt outrage at the advantage being taken; others raised their hands in surrender in midair, to no good purpose. Where trees stood they were soon draped with parachutes from which dead bodies hung.
Parachutists who landed unharmed—and most of Battalions I and II of 3rd Parachute Regiment did so, together with the Parachute Engineer Battalion, between Maleme and Canea—had only to find their weapon canisters to be ready for action. Those groups quickly consolidated and started fighting as formed units. Around Maleme itself, even after they recovered from the chaos of their opposed descent, the survivors of Battalion III and from the glider parties remained desperately hard pressed. The New Zealanders, including those of 23rd and 21st Battalions who held the ground to the east of Maleme, were dug in and full of fight. As for the Germans, “even those who landed unwounded and unseen in a vineyard or field of barley could not fight effectively until they found their weapons. And if a container had fallen in the open, retrieving it was like a murderous game of grandmother’s footsteps.”41 Quite quickly the battalion was almost destroyed. The commander, his adjutant, three of his four company commanders and 400 of his 500-odd soldiers were killed outright or died of untended wounds among the olive trees and scrub of Hill 107.
General Freyberg, eating breakfast in his headquarters in the quarry near Canea, had greeted the arrival of the Germans at eight o’clock with the comment “They’re dead on time!,” his only known public acknowledgement of his access to Ultra intelligence.42“His attitude,” wrote the future Lord Woodhouse, later to be a leader of the Special Operations Executive in Greece, “was that he had clearly made all the necessary dispositions on the basis of his information, and that there was now nothing more for him to do except leave his subordinates to fight the battle.”43
Freyberg’s dispositions, despite his continuing misapprehension of the danger from the sea, did indeed prove effective in the central sector around Rethymno and at Heraklion in the east. Two Australian battalions, 2/11th and 2/1st, defended Rethymno airfield, supported by two Greek regiments. The Australians were well dug in and had good fields of fire, there being little vegetation in the area. They also enjoyed the advantage of ample warning because of delays in Athens, the German parachutists did not arrive until the afternoon, several hours after the descents at Maleme and Canea. The two battalions, I and III of 2nd Parachute Regiment, were also flown in along the coastline, the planes and jumpers presenting excellent targets in the last moment of their approach; some of the aircraft actually flew below the positions of the Australians hidden on the coastal hills. When the Australians opened fire they caused carnage. Several aircraft were brought down, others dropped their parachutists into the sea, where they were instantly taken to the bottom by the weight of their equipment. Those who survived found little cover from either fire or view. They were shot in large numbers, many falling to bands of Cretan irregulars.
The key to the success of the defence was the quality of the two battalion commanders, Campbell and Sandover, who kept their men in hand, organised effective fire and led counterattacks to mop up any remaining resistance. The 2nd Parachute Regiment was decisively defeated at Rethymno. It suffered very heavy casualties and its commanding officer, Colonel Sturm, was taken prisoner by Sandover on the morning of 21 May.
The 1st Parachute Regiment, dropping at Heraklion, suffered even worse ill-fortune. Its Battalions I and III fell among the best-trained defending units on the island, the 2nd Leicesters, 2nd Black Watch and 2nd York and Lancaster. Their soldiers were pre-war regulars, who knew their business. They were also supported by more than a dozen light antiaircraft guns which held their fire during the preparatory German air raids and whose positions were therefore not detected. When the troop-carrying Junkers 52s appeared, even later than at Rethymno, some as late as seven o’clock in the evening, fifteen were shot down in the two hours the parachute runs lasted. The parachutists who got clear were shot in large numbers by the British, as they hung in their harness, as they touched down or as they scrambled to seek cover and their weapon containers on the ground. Whole companies were destroyed—one had only five survivors; Battalion III of 1st Parachute regiment lost 300 killed, and 100 wounded out of a strength of 550. Among the casualties at Heraklion were three brothers, members of the illustrious family of Blücher, Wellington’s fellow commander at Waterloo, serving as a lieutenant, corporal and private.44
By the second day of the battle, 21 May, the advantage had swung decisively Freyberg’s way at Heraklion and Rethymno. Both airfields remained in British hands and, though there were parties of Germans still fighting in the countryside and within the Venetian walls of Heraklion, they were simply hanging on. It was only a matter of time before they would be overrun or forced to surrender—unless, that is, the battle went against the British elsewhere on the island. And it had already begun to do so.
Creforce lacked wireless sets, so that intercommunication between Freyberg’s sectors was at best intermittent, often nonexistent. Signalling to Wavell in Cairo on the night of 20 May, he reported: “We have been hard pressed. I believe that so far we hold the aerodrome at Maleme, Heraklion and Retimo and the two harbours. The margin by which we hold them is a bare one and it would be wrong for me to paint an optimistic picture. The fighting has been heavy and large numbers of Germans have been killed . . . The scale of air attack upon us has been severe. Everybody here realises the vital issue and we will fight it out.” Freyberg actually believed that the tide had turned. What he did not know was that the second sentence of his signal was crucially incorrect. Maleme airfield was about to be abandoned by the defenders under cover of darkness. The Germans would use it to fly in the infantry of 5th Mountain Division, thus turning the balance decisively their way. The Battle of Crete was about to be lost.
Not for want of courage. Both Andrew, the Victoria Cross winner commanding 22nd New Zealand Battalion, and Hargest, his superior commanding 5 New Zealand Brigade, were brave men and experienced veterans of the Great War; their soldiers were brave and experienced also. The unexpected nature of airborne warfare had unnerved them, however, while their means of intercommunication was erratic at best and Hargest in particular shared Freyberg’s anxiety about a landing from the sea. Andrew made one concerted effort to drive the Germans away from the airfield in late afternoon, when he sent the two Matilda tanks he had under command forward. Neither was in proper working order and one soon turned back. The other, which might have swept the airfield clear, so frightened were the parachutists of tanks, inexplicably drove past and descended into the Tavronitis River bed, where it soon grounded.
Soon after dark fell on 20 May Andrew came to the disastrous conclusion that his forward companies had been overrun and that his best procedure was to draw his other two companies back on to Hargest’s other battalions to the east, perhaps to launch a counterattack in daylight the following morning. In one of their few wireless contacts, Hargest appeared to agree with him, or at least to accept the decision of the man on the spot. Both were quite wrong. The two companies Andrew thought cut off were, though battered, holding their ground and still dominated the enemy, who were now exhausted, often to the point of falling asleep where they lay. Hargest had plentiful reserves, including a whole uncommitted battalion, but declined to organise a full-scale reinforcement of the airfield or Hill 107. During the night, as the New Zealanders in the forward positions learnt haphazard that they had been abandoned, they left their positions, and made their way eastward. The vital ground was falling by default.
In Athens the German senior commanders were concluding, on the night of 20–21 May, that the battle was lost. Student realised he faced the destruction not only of his division but of his reputation and career. He hastily convened a conference to make a new plan. Surplus parachutists would be formed into a battle group under Colonel Ramcke to land directly around the airfield, while Captain Kleye, a particularly daring pilot, was to attempt to land on the airfield at first light, to bring badly needed ammunition but also to test the defences.45
Kleye made a successful touch-down and take-off on the morning of 21 May. On his return to Athens, every available soldier was set to preparing the Junkers 52 fleet for the renewed assault. The effort took all day, during which the New Zealanders, partially reorganised by Brigadier Hargest, pushed forward to retake the ground abandoned the night before. They advanced under heavy air attack and against the fire of the surviving Germans, hidden in vineyards and olive groves. The 28th Battalion, composed of Maoris, New Zealand’s native warrior race, actually got back onto the airfield but, finding themselves unsupported, turned about. There were other successes as the New Zealanders probed forward. Then, in the late afternoon, the Ramcke parachute group fell in 5 Brigade’s area and the New Zealanders were forced to renew the business, as on the day before, of shooting parachutists as they fell out of the sky and mopping up parties that managed to land unscathed.
Ramcke’s descent would probably have merely added to the parachute catastrophe had not, simultaneously, the 5th Mountain Division begun to arrive in strength on Maleme airfield. It was not a tidy arrival. The New Zealanders within range opened a devastating fire, thickened by shells from captured Italian field guns fired by British gunners. Twenty-two Junkers 52s were hit on or before reaching the ground, a heavy loss to a transport fleet already severely depleted on the preceding day of action. The Germans, however, were ruthless, using captured British Bren gun-carriers to push wrecks off the runway and turning aircraft round in seventy seconds. On 21 May a battalion of 100th Mountain Regiment was flown in; by the 24th the whole division had landed, bringing the numbers transported by the troop-carrier fleet to nearly 14,000. During the arrival of the mountain division, the New Zealanders, reinforced by the 2/7th Australian Battalion and the 1st Welch Regiment, continued to battle on against the airheads around Maleme and Canea, often with success. It was during this phase of the fighting that Lieutenant Charles Upham, of the 20th New Zealand Battalion, won the Victoria Cross; he was to win another again later in the war, the only infantry soldier, and one of only three men, ever to be awarded two VCs.
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.