by John Sadler
None of this was of particular interest to the Cretans who were solely interested in driving out the invader. In the course of the struggle some 3,474 islanders were killed, many of these in the course of the final German entrenchment around Chania when hostages were murdered almost as a matter of course.
Once the main Axis forces had retreated from mainland Greece in 1944, the island’s shrunken garrison was effectively abandoned and withdrew to a fortified enclave around the capital. Here they survived in a state of siege until the last gasp of the Reich when Admiral Dönitz, as Hitler’s successor, formally ordered their capitulation in May 1945.
To accept the surrender of the German governor, the RAF flew him to Heraklion – the aircraft landed initially at Maleme; a highly symbolic reversal. David Hunt, who had been with Creforce HQ four years earlier, recorded the moment with some understandable satisfaction:
It was an agreeable example of the wheel turning full circle. At that time the Germans were all concentrated at the west end of the island, and our main concern was to keep the Cretans from falling on them. The solution was to move them all into the Akrotiri Peninsula, where I had watched the gliders landing four years earlier, and put a cordon of British troops across the neck. From there they were taken away by ships and sent to Souda Bay. I was glad to have seen the day.3
General Kurt Student was one of those German officers charged with war crimes. He was probably never an ardent Nazi but clearly empathised with the National Socialist dream of a strong Greater Germany and was, at best, prepared to play along to achieve his career goals. Many others, of course, fitted in with this acquiescence.
Student’s trial took place on Lüneburg Heath in May 1947 and, whilst he was acquitted on the majority of counts, was convicted on others. There has to be a question of the soundness of the verdict for there was no evidence of him having specifically ordered acts which would constitute war crimes. Still plagued by the effects of his old head injury, the architect of Germany’s airborne elite was subsequently freed on medical grounds and sank quietly from view.
It was upon the necks of his former subordinates that the axe fell most heavily; three of the island’s military governors, Andrae, Muller and Brauer, were put on trial for their lives in Athens. The first escaped with life imprisonment when the sentences were handed down in December 1946 but the other two were both hanged on 20 May 1947 – symbolically on the anniversary of the battle. This was felt, certainly in Brauer’s case, to be both distasteful and unfair, smacking more of retribution than due process.
The Battle for Crete effectively ended Wavell’s active career as it had done Student’s. His position, already weakened by reverses in the Western Desert, became untenable in the wake of the failure at Crete. Churchill was only seeking an excuse to rid himself of Wavell whom he clearly disliked, and the victor of Beda Fomm found himself shunted sideways into obscurity.
Public opinion in the USA seemed largely unaffected by this further Allied reverse and Vichy continued to glower in hostile neutrality. There was an inevitable backlash from the Antipodes. In Australia the disaster hastened the government’s fall and, from New Zealand, Prime Minister Fraser journeyed to London, demanding a fuller explanation as to why the Dominion troops had been left with what was now perceived as an impossible situation. Before doing so, on 7 June, he penned a highly critical cable:
Operations in Crete seem to have been largely the result of chance. The driving from the Greek mainland of various forces (including New Zealanders) with different degrees of equipment but on the whole ill supplied and to some extent disorganised, with an embarrassing number of refuges, seems to have found them on the island, which it was then decided to hold. As you know we had no previous knowledge that it was intended to defend it, and it seems clear to me now that the island was, in fact, indefensible with the means at Freyberg’s disposal against the scale of attack which eventually developed. It seems to me also that it should have been as clear before the decision to defend Crete, as it is now that troops without adequate air protection (which it was known could not be provided) would be in a hopeless position, though it is obvious that the scale of the German air attack was larger and more intense than was foreseen.4
Freyberg became the main target for his political master’s wrath. This was blatantly unfair, for the General had been placed in an impossible position, his loyalty split between the normal chain of command and the demands of the home government. For a professional soldier such as he, there could be no question of refusing Wavell’s orders to accept command of Crete; that would have been unthinkable and rightly so. The full position should have been disclosed to the Dominion government by the War Cabinet whose stance was, at best, misleading.
The meeting became very heated with Fraser exhibiting the full wisdom of hindsight:
No matter who your Commander-in-chief or what his rank may be, [the Prime Minister thundered] it is your duty to keep us in touch with the situation … when you are ordered to take part in operations you will personally find out whether there is air cover for operations anticipated and you will communicate with us and tell us you are satisfied; and secondly your troops will not be exposed without tank support to hostile tank attack.5
As a sop the Dominions were granted an additional, if largely token, presence in the councils of the War Cabinet but two precepts were identified and agreed:
(1) No further operations of a similar nature were to be mounted unless the Dominion troops taking part could be guaranteed adequate air cover and (2) they would not be expected to take on mechanized opponents with nothing more than ‘their rifles and their courage’.6
The defeat had actually cost the Allies some 1,750 soldiers killed, as many wounded, and over 12,000 marched into captivity. The Royal Navy lost something in the order of a further 2,000 men during the course of the various battles at sea. For that vast, motley horde left on the shore at Sphakia, capitulation meant a further, grinding march back up the steep, broken defile of the Imbros Gorge, over the furnace bowl of the Askifou, the long descent to Vrysses and, eventually incarceration in a makeshift POW pen on the site of the No. 7 General Hospital. And here they languished. Conditions were primitive, supplies irregular and sanitation uncertain. The stench of decaying flesh clung, cloying and sickly, to the heavy, heat-laden air. From the surrounding districts sporadic bursts of fire echoed as the Axis ‘dealt’ with suspected partisans. Other troops, deployed as the Sonderkommando von Kuhnsberg, tracked Allied survivors and escapees hiding in the hills.
Despite the savagery of reprisal, many locals risked the German bullets to bring food to the prisoners, a number of whom, inevitably, succumbed to dysentery. In time most were transported, firstly to the mainland and then to camps far away to the east. In defiance of convention some 800 were forced to work on the repair of Maleme airstrip.
The story of the resistance on Crete is a heroic one. A series of rather swashbuckling characters such as Paddy Leigh Fermor, W. Stanley Moss, Jack Smith-Hughes, Xan Fielding, Tom Dunabin and Ralph Stockbridge worked with local guerrilla bands in conditions of great hardship and danger. Coming in by caique and submarine, the raiders teamed with partisans for selective sabotage and intelligence gathering. Offensive operations were fraught with risk, not just for the initiators but also the populace who could expect no mercy from the murderous ruthlessness of the occupiers.
Pendlebury had died during the fight for Crete; others followed. Mike Cumberlege was captured in 1942 off the mainland coast and, after three years in the dreadful confines of Flossenburg concentration camp, was executed with three others only four days ahead of the liberation.
Gunner D.C. Perkins, whom the Cretans christened Captain Vassilios, escaped from Galatas prison camp and, with a fellow NCO, Tom Moir, crossed to the south coast to look for a boat. The pair were assisted and sheltered by locals. Moir succeeded in getting away in a stolen boat; Perkins had to wait to be taken off by submarine. Both returned, Moir to look for other escapees – after a nu
mber of exploits he was finally recaptured – Perkins, now trained in sabotage, attached to Xan Fielding’s cadre. From July 1942 the pair were firmly established in the White Mountains, working with local guerrilla bands. An attempt at a concerted rising, orchestrated by Mandli Bandervas, proved abortive and brought down a hurricane of reprisals. Perkins reformed the survivors into a company-sized unit which operated from the village of Koustoyerako.
Perkins, Captain Vassilios, became the stuff of local legend, leading his andartes in a dazzling series of raids and ambushes. On one occasion the partisans surrounded a German patrol of twenty men who barricaded themselves in a stone hut. Perkins went forward and winkled them out with Mills grenades. Half the Germans were killed in the attack, the rest were simply shot out of hand. For all the romantic dash this was a bitter war of close quarters and no mercy. Perkins himself was wounded in the spine by a German bullet – the local butcher acted as surgeon, without the benefit of anaesthetic.
Operations on Crete were supported by a host of buccaneering small boats and by air drops of arms and ammunition. The Allies and andartes lived hard in the arid mountains in cold winters and baking summers. They went in fear of betrayal by German sympathisers, of whom, even on Crete, there were many, and in the knowledge their actions could bring down fearful wrath on innocent civilians. One of the effects of this close cooperation was to avoid the pernicious polarisation between partisans from the left and right which scarred the resistance effort on the mainland, and lit the fuse for the bitter civil strife that followed the German withdrawal.
The purpose of the resistance was primarily intelligence gathering, sabotage and low intensity operations. There was not the intention to arm the populace for a general rising. This was a prudent and highly effective policy for the andartes were able to tie down a very large number of Germans and their despised Italian allies. Although the Cretans were intensely anti-royalist they were equally opposed to Communism and the left was never able to gain an effective toehold. As a result the island was spared the two years of murder and strife that wasted the nation as a whole.
Perhaps the most celebrated guerrilla action on Crete, and that which guaranteed lasting fame for both W. Stanley Moss and Patrick Leigh Fermor, was the spectacular abduction of the island’s governor, Major General Heinrich Kreipe. A veteran of the Russian front, the General must have viewed his posting to the island as something of a ‘cushy number’. The preferred, initial target had been the detested General Muller who had a particularly savage reputation.
On 26 April 1944, as the General’s gleaming staff car swept from the impressive gates of his official residence at the Villa Ariadne, Moss and Leigh Fermor, both dressed as Wehrmacht, were waiting to flag down the vehicle. Both Kreipe and his driver were abducted; the latter being surplus was, subsequently, quietly done to death. With one of the kidnappers at the wheel the British drove confidently through the streets of Heraklion, the governor’s official pennants deterring any check.
The car was abandoned on the coast road toward Rethymnon with a scattering of documents in English and a note to the Germans advising the abduction was solely the work of British agents and officers from the Greek Government in exile. This may not have entirely eliminated the threat of reprisals as a number of villages were torched around this time, possibly as a consequence of separate actions. On 14 May at 11.00 p.m. General Kreipe was taken off by boat to begin his captivity.
When, in February 1944, Perkins himself fell in an ambush, his sorrowing followers buried him. His grave, so far from home, became something of a shrine and a photograph, from 1951, carried the following note:
Grave of the most fearless of fighters ever to leave New Zealand, known to all Cretans as the famous Kapitan Vassilios. Killed over 100 Germans single handed during the occupation. Led a guerrilla band, and fell from machine gun fire in February 1944, near Lakkoi – the last gallant Kiwi killed in Crete. This man is honoured by all Cretans.7
A man could wish for no finer epitaph – and indeed this could be applied to all those men who had come so far to fight and die for freedom. Although the battle might be lost, such sacrifice was never in vain.
Chapter 11
Remembrance
The New Zealanders and other British, Imperial and Greek troops who fought in confused, disheartening and vain struggle for Crete may feel that they played a definite part in an event which brought us far-reaching relief at a hingeing moment.
Winston Churchill.
On 29 September 1945, 100 officers and men of the New Zealand Division, including their commander General Freyberg, attended a memorial service on Crete. For the three days the party remained on the island they were lavishly feted by locals. As early as June that year the site for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) cemetery, to be located in Souda Bay, had been decided.
The final resting place for those who died in the fight for Crete was designed by Louis de Soissons, the architect of, inter alia, Welwyn Garden City and who was also to be responsible for the design of all CWGC cemeteries in Greece, Italy and Austria. One can traverse the globe and all of the many hundreds of CWGC graveyards are instantly recognisable; the white Portland stone markers, bearing name, unit, number, rank and date of death beneath a regimental crest of those, most poignantly, ‘known unto God’.
All British and Commonwealth cemeteries exude the calm of an English country garden, the perfect rows of headstones aligned as though on final parade, verdant with flowers and meticulously tended grass. That at Souda, located three miles east of Chania in the cusp of the Akrotiri Peninsula, contains 1,509 burials dating from the fighting, nineteen from the Great War and thirty-seven others moved from the former consular plot in 1963.
The cemetery overlooks the placid waters of the bay, still used by Greek warships. The design is symmetrical with a total of sixteen plots, the memorial standing centrally. The forecourt is attractively paved in limestone and marble, patterned with smooth, rounded pebbles. Many of those who lie there are marked as unknown – during the occupation the Germans moved the impromptu battlefield burials to four large grave pits at Chania, Galatos, Rethymnon and Heraklion. Those who have no known grave are commemorated on the Allied War Memorial at Phaleron Cemetery, Athens.
In the flush of their pyrrhic victory, the Germans constructed a memorial, latterly surrounded by modern tourist development, on a mound west of Chania, showing a diving eagle grasping a swastika, the badge of the Fallschirmjäger. Below is a stone plinth commemorating those who died in the struggle. It speaks well for the tolerance of the Cretans that this odious memento was left standing in 1945. It has, apparently, since fallen into disrepair.
An official German war cemetery was constructed on the slopes of Hill 107 and opened on 6 October 1974. There is a marked difference in the appearance of German as opposed to Allied sites, most noticeable, not here, but on the Western Front. There is none of the calm melancholy of the country garden; more Wagner than Mozart, dark flat plinths and an absence of planting, a brooding, Teutonic sadness.
On Hill 107 there is a total of 4,465 graves divided into four plots, each commemorating one of the four main areas of conflict. Olive groves struggle down the western flank to the dry banks of the Tavronitis and, from the summit, one can clearly see the airstrip at Maleme below, the strength of the position is immediately clear.
Beneath the low walls of each plot, each stone tablet records the names of two who fell, the 300 whose remains could not be found are remembered on the memorial. At the foot of the hill the entrance portico houses a small exhibition. It is a fitting place and one of the early superintendents was none other than George Psychoundakis who, at the request of the Association of German Airborne Troops, brought Brauer’s remains from their war cemetery in Athens.
The inscription on the memorial plaque reads:
In this graveyard rest 4465 German dead from the war years 1941 - 1945. 3352 of them died during the battle of Crete between 20 May and 1 June 1941 … They gave t
heir lives for their Fatherland. Their deaths should always make it our duty to preserve peace among nations.
There are other remembrances – an RAF memorial at Maleme, one for the Royal Artillery on the Akrotiri Peninsula, the Stavremenos monument to the Cretan resistance and a plaque at Prevelli Monastery which records:
This region after the battle of Crete became the rallying point for hundreds of British, Australian and New Zealand Soldiers, in defiance of ferocious German reprisals suffered by the monks and native population. They fed, protected and helped these soldiers to avoid capture and guided them to the beachhead where they escaped to the free world by British submarines.
In the Naval Museum in Chania which overlooks the lovely Venetian harbour, there is an extensive exhibition charting the history of the battle through models, excellent and numerous photographs, maps, displays of uniform, small arms and equipment. Further information is housed in the archives here, those in the Chania History Museum and at the Historical Museum in Heraklion.
For those travelling to Sphakia the War Museum, run by M. Hatzidakis and his son, at Askifou is not to be missed – a wonderfully eclectic collection of battlefield relics, expended munitions, machine guns, sub-machine guns, rifles and pistols, an MP40 and a Thompson next to an ancient percussion survivor pressed into service by the resistance.
For the battlefield tour it is probably best to begin at Maleme with the German cemetery, the airfield is still very much in use by the Greek military and perceived trespassers are not likely to be made welcome. The airstrip is, in any event, best glimpsed from the summit of Hill 107. The iron bridge over the Tavronitis still stands adjacent to its modern replacement and is accessible on foot.