by John Keegan
The Red Army’s primacy in airborne tactics was to be severely retarded, however, by Stalin’s great military purge of 1937-8, of which forward-looking officers were the principal victims. Its airborne units survived, and were to mount a number of operations in the Second World War, notably on the river Dnieper in the autumn of 1943, but they were never accorded the independent and decisive role their advocates had hoped for them. In Germany, however, the concept of airborne operations was taken up enthusiastically by the Wehrmacht’s new generation of military pioneers. As in France, where military parachute training was deemed an airforce activity, it was the Luftwaffe which was constituted the directing authority. In 1938 General Kurt Student, a flying veteran of the First World War, was appointed Inspector of Parachute Troops and shortly afterwards was given command of the first parachute division, designated 7 Flieger. It was this division which provided the units used in Norway and Holland in 1940. By 1941 its associated units, constituting Student’s XI Air Corps, stood ready to extend the German conquest of the Balkans deeper into the Mediterranean area.
Hitler’s closest military advisers, the operations officers of OKW, were anxious that XI Air Corps should be used to capture Malta. When asked to advise whether Crete or Malta was the more important objective in the Mediterranean, ‘All officers of the Section,’ General Walter Warlimont recalled, ‘whether from the Army, Navy or Air Force, voted unanimously for the capture of Malta, since this seemed to be the only way to secure permanently the sea route to North Africa.’ Keitel and Jodl, their chiefs, accepted their conclusions; but when on 15 April they confronted Student with this opinion he overcame them. He had already decided that Malta was too strongly garrisoned and defended to yield to an airborne assault. Crete, on the other hand, with its ‘sausage-like form and single main road’, offered an ideal target to his parachutists; moreover, he argued, they would be able to reach out towards the other Mediterranean islands required by German strategy-makers – not only Malta but also Cyprus – and thereby consolidate an impregnable land-sea position intermediate between Fortress Europe and Britain’s increasingly tenuous foothold in the Middle East.
Goering, who saw in Student’s plan an opportunity to rehabilitate the reputation of the Luftwaffe after its failure to overcome the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, warmly endorsed his subordinate’s conception and on 21 April presented it to Hitler. Since the capture of Crete had not figured in his original plans, Hitler was initially resistant but eventually agreed to lend it his support and on 25 April issued Führer Directive No. 28, codenamed Merkur (Mercury) for the Crete operation. Student, who was to remain the driving force of the operation throughout its inception and course, at once arranged for 7th Airborne Division to be brought to Greece from its training centre at Brunswick; he also persuaded OKH to let him use one of the divisions earmarked to garrison Greece, the elite 5th Mountain, and to lend him some of the light tanks from the 5th Panzer, which were not needed for Barbarossa. The mountain division was to provide a follow-up force, transported in local craft under Italian naval protection. The airborne division, consisting of three parachute and one airlanding regiment, was to storm the island by direct assault, flying in a fleet of 600 Junkers 52 aircraft, some of which would also tow eighty gliders carrying light tanks and the manpower of the 7th Division’s spearhead, I Battalion of the 1st Assault Regiment. An air force of 280 bombers, 150 Stukas and 200 fighters would cover and support the operation. In all, 22,000 soldiers were to be committed; command of the whole campaign was to be under General Alexander Löhr’s Fourth Air Fleet.
Student’s plan was straightforward. He intended to use each of his three parachute regiments against the three towns on the north coast of the island, from west to east Maleme, Retimo and Heraklion, where airstrips were located. Once captured, these would be used for the landing of heavy equipment and as bases to ‘roll up’ the British defences along the single road which ran along the island’s 170-mile length. At Maleme, which he had decided should be his Schwerpünkte, he intended to commit the 1st Assault Regiment, which would crash-land in gliders directly on to the airfield. Although he expected to be outnumbered by the defenders, he was sure that surprise, the high quality of his troops and the air superiority assured by the Luftwaffe’s overwhelming strength would subdue them in a few days of brutal action.
His judgement that his force was superior in quality to the British garrison was correct. Major-General Bernard Freyberg, its commander, was a fire-eater, a legendary hero of the First World War in which he had won the VC commanding a battalion of the Royal Naval Division on the Somme, after an equally gallant – and romantic – passage of arms at Gallipoli. There he had been among the party which had buried the poet Rupert Brooke on the island of Skyros and later, on lone reconnaissance, he had swum the Hellespont, as Leander had done in legend and Lord Byron in reality a hundred years before him. Winston Churchill had christened him ‘the Salamander’ in tribute to his fire-resisting qualities.
Few of Freyberg’s troops on Crete in the summer of 1941, however, matched his robustness. One brigade of regular British infantry had been brought direct from Egypt to garrison the island and was what the Germans called kampffähig – ‘combat fit’. The rest were fugitives from the Greek fiasco. Two brigades of the 2nd New Zealand Division – with which Freyberg, who had spent his youth in New Zealand, had a special affinity – were intact and also one Australian brigade. The rest of the 40,000 troops on the island were remnants, disorganised and many of them disheartened. All, moreover, lacked essential equipment. ‘Crete’, wrote the New Zealander Charles Upham (who was to end the war as a double VC), ‘was a pauper’s campaign, mortars without base plates, Vickers guns without tripods.’ A handful of tanks and a regiment’s worth of artillery had been brought to the island; but the defenders lacked most essential heavy equipment and, above all, aircraft. On 1 May there were only seventeen Hurricanes and obsolete biplane Gladiators on Crete, and all were to be withdrawn before the Germans arrived. Worst of all, the British defenders could not count on local assistance. Since the 5th Cretan Division had been mobilised for war against the Italians and had been captured on the mainland, the only Cretan soldiers left on the island were recruits and reservists, with one rifle between six and five rounds per rifle.
The role of Ultra
Crete nevertheless might and perhaps ought to have been held; for, unbeknown to the Germans, their intentions were betrayed to the British well before the first parachutists had emplaned. The whole logic of an airborne operation was thereby compromised from the start. Like the proponents of armoured warfare and strategic bombing, the military parachutist pioneers had conceived their operational theory in reaction to the trench warfare they had witnessed in the First World War. It was the self-betrayal of the effort needed to mount a trench-breaking offensive which had affronted them: the laborious assembly of men and material, the ponderous and protracted process of preliminary bombardment, the agonised inching forward across no-man’s land through barbed-wire barriers and earthwork zones. The bombing enthusiasts had reacted to that spectacle with the argument that high explosive was better delivered against the centres of production from which the enemy’s artillery and machine-gun defences were supplied. The apostles of armoured warfare had argued – and in 1939-40 demonstrated – that deep defences were best overcome by launching against them a weapon impervious to the firepower the defenders deployed. The military parachutists proposed an intermediate but even more arresting alternative: to overarch ground defences by airpower which would deliver aggressive infantrymen at the soft spots immediately behind the enemy’s front, his headquarters, communication centres and supply points. It was a brilliantly daring leap of strategic imagination; but its success rested on the precondition that the enemy remain unaware of the stroke poised against him – otherwise the parachutists committed to deliver it would suffer the same (if not worse) fate as the infantrymen of the trenches going over the top against the enemy alerted by the
preliminary bombardment. Their helplessness during descent, the necessary lightness of the equipment they would use to fight if they survived, doomed them to undergo appalling losses against defenders who had been warned of their approach.
The British defenders of Crete had been warned. Ultra, the intelligence source derived from the interception and decryption of enemy ciphers by the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley, had hitherto yielded little information of value to the conduct of ground operations between the British and the Germans. Until the end of the campaign in France, Bletchley had had great difficulty in breaking the cipher ‘keys’ used on the German Enigma ciphering machine through which the different Wehrmacht headquarters communicated. The difficulties were in part intrinsic – the Enigma machine was designed to confront an eavesdropper with several million possible solutions to an intercept – and in part those of any experimental enterprise: Bletchley was accumulating procedures which hastened the process of breaking but had not yet systematised them. There was another difficulty: Bletchley’s success depended chiefly upon the exploitation of mistakes made by German Enigma machine operators in encipherment procedure. German army and navy operators, perhaps because they were drawn from old-established signals services, made few mistakes. It was the younger Luftwaffe which provided Bletchley’s listeners with the bulk of their opportunities; but, though ‘breaks’ into the Luftwaffe key considerably assisted the Air Defence of Great Britain to resist and deflect bombing attacks during the winter blitz of 1940-1, they were of less use in opposing the Germans in the Battle of the Atlantic or in the ground campaigns in Greece and North Africa.
Crete, however, was to be a Luftwaffe campaign. Thus the vulnerability of its ‘Red’ key, as Bletchley denominated it, to British decryption on a regular, day-to-day basis and in ‘real time’ – at a speed, that is, equivalent to that at which German recipients of Enigma messages deciphered them themselves – was to compromise the security of the parachute operation from the outset. On 26 April, for example, the day after Hitler issued his Merkur directive, two intercepted ‘Red’ messages were found to refer to Crete: the Fourth Air Fleet mentioned the selection of bases for ‘Operation Crete’, while its subordinate VIII Air Corps asked for maps and photographs of the island. Thereafter the warnings accumulated almost daily. On 6 May Ultra revealed that German headquarters expected preparations to be completed by 17 May and outlined the exact stages and targets of the German attack. On 15 May it detected that D-Day had been postponed from 17 May to 19 May. And on 19 May it warned that 20 May was to be the new attack date and that the German parachute commanders were to assemble immediately with maps and photographs of Maleme, Retimo and Heraklion. All this information, disguised as intelligence collected by a British agent in Athens, was transmitted in ‘real time’ to Freyberg, who thus, on the morning of 20 May, knew exactly when, where and in what strength Student’s parachutists and glider infantry were going to land.
Between foreknowledge and forestalment, however, there always yawns the gap of capability. That predicament was Freyberg’s. Against an attacking force whose defining characteristics were mobility and flexibility he opposed a defending force almost totally bereft of the means of movement. Its units were in the right place, but, should one be driven from any of the vital airstrips, it could not be replaced; the Germans would be enabled to land reinforcements and heavy equipment and the battle for the island would probably be lost in consequence.
Defending Maleme airstrip were the 21st, 22nd and 23rd New Zealand Battalions. New Zealanders were to be reckoned by Rommel, on his experience in the desert campaign, the best soldiers he met in the Second World War: resilient, hardy, self-confident, they had little opinion of any soldiers but themselves. When on the early morning of 20 May they brushed themselves clean of the dust thrown up by the Luftwaffe’s preparatory bombardment and cocked their weapons to resist the parachute assault they knew must follow, they harboured no sense of the harshness of the battle to come. Lieutenant W. B. Thomas of the 23rd Battalion found his first sight of the German parachutists ‘unreal, difficult to comprehend as anything at all dangerous’:
Seen against the deep blue of the early morning Cretan sky, through a frame of grey-green olive branches, they looked like little jerking dolls whose billowy frocks of green, yellow, red and white had somehow blown up and become entangled in the wires that controlled them. . . . I struggled to grasp the meaning behind this colourful fantasy, to realise that those beautiful kicking dolls meant the repetition of all the horrors we had known so recently in Greece.
Lieutenant Thomas’s sense of unreality was understandable. He was witnessing the first purposeful parachute operation in history. The Germans’ earlier jumps, in Norway and Holland, had been small-scale, lightly opposed and strongly supported by conventional ground forces. The Sprung nach Kreta was a true leap into the unknown, the pitting of pioneers in a military revolution against forces they could overcome only by their own unaided effort. Student’s men were in a sense primitives: the British and American equivalents, already training for future parachute operations of their own, would regard their equipment and technique with horrified incredulity. The Germans had no control over their descent; they jumped from their Junkers 52s, in groups of twelve, their parachutes opened by static line, but were then suspended by a single strap attached to the harness in the middle of the back. Slipstream and wind carried them indeed ‘like dolls’ to their landing, from the shock of which their padding, helmets and rubber boots were supposed to protect them. Those not injured by the impact – and jump injuries were numerous – then collected their weapons from parachuted containers, assembled in squads and moved to the assault. The glider infantry of the 1st Assault Regiment, crash-landed in groups of fifteen, reinforced them with heavier equipment.
Student’s theory of airborne assault took no account of Cretan terrain or New Zealand tenacity. The harsh and broken ground around Maleme injured many of his parachutists as they landed and pulverised a high proportion of the gliders; the New Zealanders dealt pitilessly with the survivors. They shot the enemy in the air: ‘You’d see one go limp and kind of straighten up with a jerk and then go limp again, and you knew he “was done for”.’ They shot them as they landed, so that next day a visiting staff officer to 23rd Battalion found ‘bodies everywhere, every ten-twelve yards. One stepped over them as one went through the olive groves.’ Sixty New Zealanders released from a field punishment centre in Maleme, where they were serving time for minor military offences, killed 110 Germans in the first hour of the assault.
The losses suffered by the German parachute battalions around Maleme in the first hours of 20 May were truly appalling. One company of III Battalion, 1st Assault Regiment, lost 112 killed out of 126; 400 of the battalion’s 600 men were dead before the day was out. Only a hundred men of the glider-borne I Battalion survived its landing unwounded; II Battalion also suffered heavily. IV Battalion, led by Captain Walter Gericke (who would survive to command the West German army’s parachute division as a NATO general), alone preserved the bulk of its strength. It and the survivors of the other three struggled throughout the day of 20 May to assemble their remaining strength, fight off the remorseless New Zealanders and move towards their objective, the Maleme airstrip. They made no progress; in the 21st New Zealand Battalion’s area the parachutists who fell in the streets of the village of Modhion were attacked ‘by the entire population of the district, including women and children, using any weapon, flintlock rifles captured from the Turks a hundred years ago, axes and even spades.’ They helped to add to the 1st Assault Regiment’s casualties, which by the end of the day included two battalion commanders killed and two wounded, together with the regimental commander. The 1st Assault Regiment, which regarded itself as the Wehrmacht’s elite, had by nightfall suffered much – perhaps 50 per cent losses – and achieved nothing.
Its sister regiments, 1st, 2nd and 3rd Parachute, directed against Heraklion, Retimo and Suda respectively, all on the
north coast, also suffered heavily on 20 May. In one or two places, airborne assault achieved its intended suprise: near Suda, Crete’s main port, ten glider infantrymen who landed close to an artillery regiment killed 180 gunners who lacked small arms to defend themselves. Elsewhere, though, it was generally the Germans who were slaughtered. The 3rd Parachute Regiment, landing just east of the 1st Assault Regiment around Canea and Suda, arrived directionless; their commander, Süssmann (who also commanded the division), had died in a glider crash on take-off. Its I Battalion, led by Baron von der Heydte, an untypical parachutist by reason both of his undisguisedly aristocratic disdain for Nazism and of his marked intellectuality – he was to write a remarkable memoir of the Cretan campaign and end his career as a professor of economics – got down relatively unscathed. Its III Battalion, however, was almost wiped out during the day’s fighting, justifiably in the view of the New Zealanders, whose senior medical officer had been shot, with many of his patients, by members of this battalion during their initial assault. Its II Battalion attacked a feature defended by the New Zealand Division’s logistic troops; Company Sergeant-Major Neuhoff describes the results of his encounter with the petrol company of its Composite Battalion: ‘We advanced to attack the hill . . . we proceeded, without opposition, about half way up . . . suddenly we ran into heavy and very accurate rifle and machine-gun fire. The enemy had held their fire with great discipline and allowed us to approach well within effective range before opening up. Our casualties were extremely heavy, and we were forced to retire leaving many dead behind us.’ Yet their opponents, as the New Zealand official history records, were ‘for the most part drivers and technicians and so ill-trained for infantry fighting’.