The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  The hastily mobilized Yugoslav army, lacking both anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, did not stand a chance against the might of the Luftwaffe and German panzer divisions. The Germans noted that Serbian units resisted with rather more determination than Croats or Macedo nians, who often surrendered at the first opportunity. One column of 1,500 prisoners was attacked in error by Stukas, killing a ‘horrifying number’ of them. ‘That’s war!’ was Richthofen’s reaction.

  The invasion of Yugoslavia created an unexpected danger to the Aliakmon Line. If the Germans came south through the Monastir Gap near Florina, as surely they would, then the Allied positions would be outflanked immediately. The troops on the Aliakmon Line had to be pulled back to meet this threat.

  Hitler wanted to cut off the Allied expeditionary force in Greece and destroy it. He did not know that General Wilson had a secret advantage. For the first time, Ultra intercepts decoded at Bletchley Park were able to provide a commander in the field with warnings of Wehrmacht moves. But both the British and Greek commands were dismayed by the rapid collapse of the Yugoslav army, which killed only 151 Germans in the whole campaign.

  Greek forces defending the Metaxas Line up near the Bulgarian border fought with great bravery, but eventually part of the German XVIII Mountain Corps broke through via the south-eastern extremity of Yugoslavia and opened the route to Salonika. On the morning of 9 April, Richthofen heard the ‘astonishing news’ that the 2nd Panzer Division had entered its suburbs. Yet the Greeks continued to mount counter-attacks near the Rupel Pass, which forced a now more respectful Richthofen to divert bombers to break them up.

  On 11 April, the British 1st Armoured Brigade south of Vevi found itself facing part of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. Major Gerry de Winton, the commander of the signal squadron, remembered the valley scene in the evening light as ‘just like a picture by Lady Butler, with the sun going down on the left, the Germans attacking from the front, and on the right the gunners drawn up in position with their limbers’. An Ultra intercept indicated that this stand was effective: ‘Near Vevi Schutzstaffel Adolf Hitler meeting violent resistance.’ But such actions were few. A withdrawal from mountain pass to mountain pass began, with the Allied units managing to stay just one jump ahead of the Germans. Greek units lacking motor transport could not keep up, so a great hole in the line opened between W Force and the Greek Army of Epirus on the Albanian front.

  Tanks and vehicles, unable to cope with the stony tracks, had to be abandoned and destroyed as withdrawing columns were harassed by relentless air attacks. The few Hurricane squadrons of the RAF, completely outnumbered by Richthofen’s Messerschmitts, could do little to help. And during the retreat, pulling back from one improvised airfield to another, their men were uncomfortably reminded of the Fall of France. Any German pilots shot down, however, faced rough handling from Greek villagers longing for revenge.

  On 17 April, the Yugoslavs surrendered. Invaded from Austrian territory in the north, from Hungary, from Romania, as well as from Bulgaria by List’s army, their scattered forces had stood little chance. The 11th Panzer Division felt very satisfied with itself. ‘In just under five days seven enemy divisions destroyed,’ a Gefreiter noted in his diary, ‘a huge amount of war materiel taken, 30,000 prisoners captured, Belgrade forced to surrender. Own losses very small.’ A member of the 2nd SS Division Das Reich wondered: ‘Did [the Serbs] perhaps believe that with their incomplete, old-fashioned and badly trained army they could form up against the German Wehrmacht? That’s just like an earthworm wanting to swallow a boa constrictor!’

  Despite the easy victory, Hitler the Austrian was bent on vengeance against the Serbian population, whom he still regarded as the terrorists responsible for the First World War and all its ills. Yugoslavia was to be broken up, with morsels of territory given to his Hungarian, Bulgarian and Italian allies. Croatia, under a fascist government, became an Italian protectorate, while Germany occupied Serbia. The Nazis’ harsh treatment of the Serbs was to prove dangerously counter-productive, since it led to the most savage guerrilla war and interfered with their exploitation of the country’s raw materials.

  The retreat in Greece, with Yugoslavs mixed in among Allied forces and Greeks, produced hallucinatory images. In the middle of one military traffic jam, a Belgrade playboy wearing co-respondent shoes was spotted in an open Buick two-seater accompanied by his mistress. And a British officer thought he was dreaming when he saw ‘by moonlight a squadron of Serbian lancers in long cloaks pass like ghosts of the defeated in wars long past’.

  With all contact lost between the Greek army on the left and W Force, General Wilson ordered a retreat to the Thermopylae Line. This was made possible only by the brave defence of the Vale of Tempe, in which the 5th New Zealand Brigade managed to hold off the 2nd Panzer Division and the 6th Mountain Division for three days. But an Ultra intercept warned that the Germans were breaking through on the Adriatic coast towards the Gulf of Corinth.

  Allied troops in Greece felt deeply embarrassed to be destroying bridges and railways as they withdrew, yet the locals continued to treat them with the greatest friendship and forgiveness. Orthodox priests would bless their vehicles and village women gave them flowers and bread as they departed, even though their own prospects under enemy occupation were extremely bleak. They did not know how terrible their fate would be. Within a few months, a loaf of bread would cost two million drachmas, and in the first year of occupation over 40,000 Greeks starved to death.

  On 19 April, the day after the Greek prime minister had committed suicide, General Wavell flew into Athens for consultations. Because of the uncertain situation, his staff officers carried service revolvers. The decision to evacuate all of Wilson’s troops was taken the following morning. Over Athens that day, the last fifteen Hurricanes took on 120 German aircraft. The British legation and the Military Mission headquarters in the Hotel Grande Bretagne began to burn papers, of which the most important were the Ultra decrypts.

  When news of the evacuation order spread, the Allied troops were still cheered on their way. ‘Come back with good fortune!’ the Greeks called. ‘Return with victory!’ Many officers and soldiers were close to tears at the idea of leaving them to their fate. Only the need for speed amid the chaos of departure concentrated their minds. With a strong rearguard of Australians and New Zealanders to hold back the Germans, the remnants of W Force made their way to the embarkation points either south of Athens at Rafina and Porto Rafti or on the southern coast of the Peloponnese. The Germans were determined not to allow another Dünkirchen-Wunder–or Dunkirk miracle–to take place.

  Although General Papagos and King George II of Greece wanted to fight on while the Allied expeditionary force remained on the mainland, the commanders of the Army of Epirus, facing the Italians, decided to surrender to the Germans. On 20 April, General Georgios Tsolakoglou began negotiations with Generalfeldmarschall List on condition that the Greek army should not have to deal with the Italians. List agreed. On hearing of this, an outraged Mussolini complained to Hitler, who once again did not want his ally to be humiliated. He sent Generalleutnant Alfred Jodl of the OKW to take the surrender ceremony, with Italian officers present, instead of a furious List.

  The thrill of easy victory was expressed by a German artillery officer in the 11th Panzer Division, who wrote to his wife on 22 April: ‘If I saw the enemy, I would fire at them and always experienced a wild, genuine pleasure in fighting. It was a joyous war… We are suntanned and certain of victory. It’s a wonderful thing to belong to such a division.’ A Haupt-mann with the 73rd Infantry Division reflected that peace would come even to the Balkans with a New European Order ‘so that our children would experience no more war’. Immediately after the first German units had driven into Athens on 26 April, a huge red swastika flag was raised over the Acropolis.

  That same day at dawn, German paratroop units landed on the south side of the Corinth Canal in an attempt to cut off the Allied retreat. In chaotic fighting, they suffered hea
vy casualties at the hands of some New Zealanders manning Bofors guns and a few light tanks of the 4th Hussars. The paratroopers also failed in their main mission to seize the bridge. The two sapper officers who had prepared its demolition managed to creep back and blow it.

  While the Germans celebrated their victory in Attica, the evacuation of Wilson’s forces continued at a desperate pace. Every means available was used. Blenheim light bombers and Sunderland flying-boats just managed to take off with men uncomfortably crammed into bomb-bays and gun turrets. Wooden caiques used for fishing or island traffic, tramp-steamers and any other ship available steamed south towards Crete. The Royal Navy sent in six cruisers and nineteen destroyers to take off a beaten army once again. The roads into the embarkation ports of the southern Peloponnese were blocked with hastily sabotaged military transport. In the end, only 14,000 men were made prisoner out of the 58,000 sent to Greece. Another 2,000 had been killed or wounded during the fighting. In terms of manpower, the defeat could have been much worse, but the loss of armoured vehicles, transport and weapons was disastrous at a time when Rommel was advancing on Egypt.

  Hitler was relieved to have secured his southern flank, but just before the end of the war he attributed the delay in launching Barbarossa to this campaign. In more recent years, historians have argued over the effect Operation Marita had on the invasion of the Soviet Union. Most accept that it made little difference. The postponement of Barbarossa from May to June is usually attributed to other factors, such as the delay in distributing motor transport, principally vehicles captured from the French army in 1940; or problems of fuel distribution; or the difficulty of establishing forward airfields for the Luftwaffe due to the heavy rains late in the spring. But one consequence of which there is little doubt was the way that Operation Marita helped convince Stalin that the Germans’ thrust south meant that they were focusing on the capture of the Suez Canal, not on an invasion of the Soviet Union.

  Crossing the Aegean, the overloaded vessels carrying the remnants of W Force tried with limited success to avoid Richthofen’s Stukas, Junkers 88s and Messerschmitts. Twenty-six were sunk, including two hospital ships, and over 2,000 men were killed. Over a third of the casualties were inflicted when two Royal Navy destroyers, HMS Diamond and HMS Wryneck, tried to save the survivors from a sinking Dutch merchantman. Both were sunk in turn by succeeding waves of German aircraft.

  Most of the evacuated troops, some 27,000, were landed in the great natural harbour of Suda Bay on the north coast of Crete during the last days of April. Exhausted men trudged out to shelter in olive groves, where they received hard tack biscuits and tins of bully beef. Stragglers, fitters, base units without officers and British civilians mingled in chaos, not knowing where to go. Freyberg’s New Zealand Division disembarked in good order, along with several Australian battalions. They all expected to be taken back to Egypt to continue the battle against Rommel.

  An invasion of Malta had been studied by the OKW early in February. Both the German army and the Kriegsmarine supported the plan to secure the convoy route to Libya. But Hitler decided that it should wait until later in the year, after the defeat of the Soviet Union. The British on Malta would prove a nuisance to the resupply of Axis forces in Libya, but Allied bases on Crete posed a greater danger in his view since the island could be used for bombing raids against the Ploesti oilfields. For similar reasons, Hitler urged the Italians to hold on to their islands in the Dodecanese at all costs. A German occupation of Crete would also have a positive advantage. The island could be used as a Luftwaffe base for bombing the port of Alexandria and the Suez Canal.

  Even before the fall of Athens, Luftwaffe officers began studying the possibility of an airborne assault on the island. General der Flieger Kurt Student, the founder of German airborne forces, was especially keen. The Luftwaffe felt that it would restore its prestige after the failure to defeat the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain. Göring gave the project his blessing and took Student to see Hitler on 21 April. Student outlined a plan to use his XI Fliegerkorps to take Crete, and then later make a drop in Egypt when Rommel’s Afrika Korps approached. Hitler was slightly sceptical and predicted heavy casualties. He rejected the second part of Student’s project outright, but gave his approval to the invasion of Crete on condition that it did not delay the start of Barbarossa. The operation was given the codename Merkur (Mercury).

  Crete, as both Wavell and Admiral Cunningham knew only too well, was a difficult island to defend. The harbours and existing airfields were almost all on the north coast. They were extremely vulnerable to attack from Axis airfields in the Dodecanese, as were ships resupplying the island. At the end of March, Ultra intercepts had identified the presence in Bulgaria of part of General Student’s XI Fliegerkorps, which included the 7th Fallschirmjäger (Paratroop) Division. In mid-April, another signal revealed that 250 transport aircraft had been transferred there too. Evidently a major airborne operation was being planned, with Crete a likely target, especially if the Germans wanted to use it as a stepping stone to the Suez Canal. A flurry of Ultra intercepts in the first week of May confirmed that Crete was indeed the target.

  Ever since the British occupation of the island in November 1940, it had been clear to British planners that the Germans could capture Crete only by airborne assault. The strength of the Royal Navy in the eastern Mediterranean and the lack of Axis warships ruled out an amphibious attack. Brigadier O. H. Tidbury, the first commander on the island, made a careful reconnaissance and identified all the likely German drop zones: the airfields of Heraklion, Rethymno and Maleme, as well as a valley southwest of Chania. On 6 May, an Ultra intercept confirmed that Maleme and Heraklion would be used for the ‘air landing of remainder XI Fliegerkorps including headquarters and subordinated army units’, as well as forward bases for dive-bombers and fighters.

  British forces had been on Crete for nearly six months but little had been done to turn the island into a fortress as Churchill had demanded. This was partly due to inertia, confused thinking and the island being low on Wavell’s list of priorities. The road from the less exposed south coast had barely been started and airfield construction had languished. Even Suda Bay, which Churchill had seen as a second Scapa Flow for the navy, lacked facilities.

  Major General Bernard Freyberg, the commander of the New Zealand Division, reached Crete aboard HMS Ajax only on 29 April. Characteristically, he had waited until almost the last moment in Greece to make sure that his men got away. Freyberg, a great bear of a man, had long been a hero to Churchill for his bravery during the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign. Churchill called him the ‘great St Bernard’. The day after his arrival, Frey-berg was summoned to a conference by Wavell, who flew into Crete that morning in a Blenheim bomber. They met in a seaside villa. To Freyberg’s dismay, Wavell asked him to stay on Crete with his New Zealanders and command the defence of the island. Wavell briefed him on their intelligence about the German attack, which was then estimated to consist of ‘five to six thousand airborne troops plus a possible sea attack’.

  Freyberg was even more dejected when he discovered the lack of air cover available, and he feared that the Royal Navy would not be able to provide protection against a ‘seaborne invasion’. He appears to have seized the wrong end of the stick right from the start. He could not imagine Crete being taken in an airborne attack, so he put increasing emphasis on a seaborne threat. Wavell, however, was perfectly clear in his own mind, as his signals to London showed, that the Axis simply did not have the naval strength to come by sea. This fundamental misunderstanding on Freyberg’s part influenced both the original disposition of his forces and his conduct of the battle at the critical moment.

  The Allied troops on the island under Freyberg’s command became known as Creforce. Heraklion airfield to the east was defended by the British 14th Infantry Brigade and an Australian battalion. Rethymno airfield was covered by two battalions of Australians and two Greek regiments. But Maleme airfield in the west, the Germans’ ma
in objective, had only a single New Zealand battalion to defend it. This was because Frey-berg believed that an amphibious assault would come on the coast just west of Chania. As a result he concentrated the bulk of his division along that stretch, with the Welch Regiment and another New Zealand battalion as reserve. No forces at all were positioned on the far side of Maleme.

  On 6 May, an Ultra decrypt showed that the Germans were planning to land two divisions by air, more than double the number of men that Wavell had first indicated. Further confirmation and details of the German plan arrived, making it absolutely clear that the main effort was an airborne assault. Unfortunately, the Directorate of Military Intelligence in London had mistakenly increased the number of reserves being transported by sea on the second day. Yet Freyberg went much further, imagining the possibility of ‘a beach landing with tanks’, which had never been mentioned. After the battle, he admitted: ‘We for our part were mostly preoccupied by seaborne landings, not by the threat of air landings.’ Churchill, on the other hand, was exultant at the detail offered in the Ultra decrypts about the airborne invasion. It was a rare chance in war to know the exact timing and the primary objectives of an enemy attack. ‘It ought to be a fine opportunity for killing the parachute troops,’ he had signalled to Wavell.

  While the Allied defenders had a huge advantage in their information, German military intelligence was extraordinarily inept, perhaps due to over-confidence after all Germany’s easy victories. A summary on 19 May, the eve of the attack, estimated that there were only 5,000 Allied troops on the island, with just 400 at Heraklion. Photo-reconnaissance flights by Dornier aircraft had failed to spot the well-camouflaged British and Dominion positions. Most astonishing of all, the briefing claimed that the Cretans would welcome the German invaders.