by David Pratt
troops, discovering them gone,
withdrew as well. This sealed the fate of Crete.
Came morning, and the Germans now controlled
the hill and aerodrome at Maleme;
they soon began to fly in mountain troops,
in transport after transport, and with them
guns, motor bikes, and medical supplies.
The next day fighter planes began to land.
On the New Zealand side, a Maori squad
charged with fixed bayonets and wild war cries
and forced the Germans back. Two hundred Greeks,
a mob of women, children, and old men,
yelling and screaming, armed with sticks and knives
led by a fair haired English officer
charged the Germans, who took one look and ran.
But these were minor setbacks for the foe;
German positions had been reinforced
by mountain troops, and were too strong to fall.
The Kiwis and Australians were forced
to make a gradual retreat.
The day before, some German troops had dropped
near to Kastelli, on the northeast coast,
close to a strong battalion of Greek troops.
Half of the Greeks had guns, for which they had
three bullets each, but they attacked bravely,
knifing the German troops and clubbing them
with rifle butts. When the Germans took the town
they found the bloodied bodies of their men.
Seeing the wounds gave birth to the idea
that citizens had mutilated them
after they had surrendered. Furious,
they seized two hundred men, assembling them
in the town square. A father pleaded for his son,
He is only fourteen, Herr Kapitan, shoot me
instead. The German captain looked at him.
Shoot both of them, he said. They led them to
a field and executed them in groups of ten.
During the night, a fleet of Greek caiques,
each carrying a hundred German troops
or more, escorted by torpedo boats,
set sail for Crete from harbors in the north.
The Royal Navy intercepted them
sunk almost all the boats, survivors were
picked up next day by German ships and planes;
three hundred twenty seven men were lost.
John Pendlebury, chief archaeologist
at Knossos prior to the war, returned
to Crete as British consul, but in fact
was working for Intelligence. He’d walked
all over Crete, knew thousands, and spoke all
the Cretan dialects. He’d organized
a network in the villages around
Mount Ida. He left Iraklion by jeep
the second day of fighting, but he ran
into a squad of Germans. A gunfight
ensued in which he shot three enemy
but he himself was wounded in the chest.
A Cretan woman took him to her house,
gave him her bed and changed his bloodstained shirt.
A Wehrmacht doctor came to treat his wound.
Next day a group of paratroops came to
the house at dawn and executed him.
Bit by bit, the Allies were pushed back.
Stukas and Messerschmidts rained bombs
and blasted with machine guns. An Allied truck
bearing ten thousand eggs was hit by shells,
and made the biggest omelette of the war.
The Cretan women cared for wounded men,
tore up for bandages the sheets they’d saved
for wedding days. In explanation, they exclaimed,
What use will dowries be if we are slaves?
But in Rethymno and Iraklion
Australian and British troops still held
the towns and airfields, and had captured some
five hundred German troops, who said,
Before long you will be our prisoners.
Hitler became impatient: France, he said,
fell in eight days. Why does Crete still resist?
By now the Germans had sustained more than
three thousand casualties, more than in France,
more than in all the war up to that time.
The Germans doggedly pushed east toward
Haniá, their major goal the naval base
at Souda Bay. In furious attacks
the town of Galatas changed hands three times.
The Allies faced the Germans’ heavy guns
with rifles and machine guns and grenades;
the situation was becoming critical.
The C in C of Crete, Freyberg, cabled
to Wavell in Cairo, My men have reached
the end of their endurance, we are left
with options now of capture or retreat.
Wavell consulted Churchill, who agreed.
The troops began to pull back to the south,
protected by a rearguard action fought
by Greek battalions and commando troops.
Haniá was bombed again remorselessly,
but when the Germans came into the town
they found it empty. Once the fight was won
divisions of Italians sailed from Rhodes
and occupied the eastern part of Crete.
All that remained was to evacuate
as many of the Allied troops as possible.
The garrison that held Iraklion
gave out its weapons to the Cretan men,
departing from the harbour after dark;
four love-struck soldiers smuggled Greek girl friends
aboard the ship in British uniforms.
But at Rethymno, Aussies had no choice
but to surrender, and most ended up
despatched to prison camps in Germany.
As for the Allied troops around Haniá
the navy was detailed to pick them up
from Sfakia on the southern coast of Crete.
When Admiral Cunningham was told he could
lose ships, he said, it takes three years to build
a ship, it takes three hundred years to build
a new tradition. Guns were sabotaged,
supply dumps fired, and booby traps deployed.
Across the mountains and for forty miles
a broken mob of men with broken boots
with little food or water made its way.
By day the Stukas bombed them on the road
and Messerschmitts machine gunned them at will;
they dived for cover under trees and rocks.
By night they moved with caution in the dark.
The trail was littered with discarded caps
and belts, kitbags, gas masks, empty canteens.
Here and there trucks had run out of gas,
beside the trail lay wounded and the dead,
together with those men who’d given up.
A group of Cretan women asked the troops
who were still armed if they could have their guns;
For us, they said, the battle is not done.
Only the rearguard of one thousand Greeks
and two hundred commandos fought with verve,
leapfrogging backward to the southern coast.
The rough trail ended on the heights above
the port of Sfakia. The soldiers climbed
by narrow goat paths down the precipice.
By day the enemy controlled the air;
the soldiers hid in caves. The navy came
at night to take them off the rocky beach.
The fighting troops received priority
and stragglers fought in vain to join their ranks.
Many men had hardly strength to climb
the scrambling nets. The sailors on the ships
he
lped them aboard and welcomed them
with mugs of hot cocoa and sandwiches.
The navy rescued fifteen thousand men,
but thirteen thousand men were left behind.
Planes bombed the ships repeatedly en route
to Alexandria. Some men broke down,
but other soldiers said they’d all receive
evacuation medals with the apt
inscription EX CRETA. The ranking officer
on Crete surrendered to the enemy.
Most men fell into German hands and spent
the war in prison camps in Germany;
a few avoided capture and escaped
across the sea in dinghies, landing craft,
or caiques. A thousand men took to the hills
where they were given aid by families
of Cretans, till the navy took them off
by submarine. Upon the German side
all the surviving paratroops received
an iron cross. Shocked by the casualties,
Hitler declared airborne assaults passé,
henceforth for the remainder of the war
German paratroopers fought as infantry.
The Resistance, so the Cretans say, began
with the first parachute that fell on Crete.
The kapitani, men like Bandouvas,
Petrakis, and Polentas, dressed in black
like brigands. Heavily mustached, they wore
high boots and baggy pants. A sash around
the waist held a revolver and a knife.
Their heads were covered by a black head cloth
with a fringe that represented tears
the Cretans shed while under Turkish rule.
The Cretans called them palikari, men
who fought with courage and nobility,
‘Freedom or death’ the slogan on their lips.
Antonis Grigorakis was one such
kapitan. He was known as Satanas
because, the Cretans said, to have survived
so many bullets in his body he
must have been a devil. He gambled
heavily. Once in fury he shot off
his dicing finger, only to realize
too late his trigger finger was now gone.
Resistance fighters blew up German planes
and ships, hid allied troops and guided them
to embarkation points. They radioed
the sites of fuel and ammunition dumps,
and the departure times of tankers and
of convoys leaving Souda with supplies
for Rommel’s army in the Libyan sands.
They had a runner to take messages,
Georgiou Psychoundakis, aged 21,
a shepherd and a poet, humorous
and melancholy, from the village of
Agia Gonia, who would run all day
thirty or forty miles across the hills
to carry crucial messages from cave
to hideout, radio to submarine,
aware that capture meant a dreadful death,
and leaving for his family his sheep
which others stole from him while he was gone.
The clergy and