Kidnap in Crete Read online

  Without warning, one of his men fired at the cowering civilians. The noise was deafening; ejected rounds sprayed onto the floor, and the Cretans were blown back, dead, their bodies slamming against the wall. Schuster asked the soldier what he thought he was doing: the paratrooper shrugged and said they would have died anyway in the crossfire.

  Colonel Papadimitrakopoulos and his men mounted a reckless charge across open ground shouting ‘Aera!’ (‘Like the Wind’) – the battlecry of the Evzones, the elite troops who had fought for Greece since the middle of the nineteenth century. (When the Germans had marched into Athens in mid-April, it had been an Evzone who had been forced at gunpoint to take down the national flag flying over the Acropolis and replace it with the German swastika. The Evzone did what he was told took, but refused to hand over the Greek flag. Instead he calmly wrapped it round him, before throwing himself off the ancient building, dying a martyr’s death on the yellow stone a hundred feet below.)

  Many Cretans now fell in Colonel Papadimitrakopoulos’s charge, cut down by automatic fire. The fighters who reached the building smashed their way in through the door and windows, struggling with the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. When it ended, only eighteen of the seventy-two who had jumped that day were still alive. The survivors stumbled into the blazing light, their hands above their heads. A Cretan with a badly wounded arm lunged at one of the soldiers with a bayonet, plunging it in and killing him. Bedding stopped any more revenge attacks and put the survivors in the town jail for their own safety.

  At Maleme, the young Mihalis Doulakis watched his father beat to death with his walking stick a young Fallschirmjäger; the soldier had become hopelessly tangled in the lines of his parachute, unable to get at his emergency gravity knife in his breast pocket to cut the rigging. Similar scenes to those Colonel Bedding witnessed in the battle for Kissamos Kasteli were repeated all over the island. A song from the old days once again became popular:

  Where is February’s starry sky

  That I may take my gun, my beautiful rifle and bandolier,

  Go down to Maleme’s airfield,

  To capture and kill the Germans.

  Cretans staked out wells, waiting for the soldiers, who they knew would be desperate for water; it was a trick their grandparents had learnt in the uprising against the Turks. It was a tactic that Pendlebury had urged the Creforce commanders to adopt, explaining the need for snipers to cover water sources and wells. A few days before the invasion, Pendlebury had used a captured German topographical map to identify a spring just outside the gates of Heraklion: ‘All the German soldiers who land to the west of Heraklion will need water and will be drawn by that spring,’ he told Satanas. ‘Therefore we must fortify that point. One can see it exactly opposite the Venetian walls so we can hit them from there.’

  The 14th Infantry Brigade manning the garrison at Heraklion was commanded by Brigadier Brian Herbert Chappel, a regular army officer from Bedfordshire. Chappel had set up his headquarters in a cave among the West Wadi, an outcrop of rocks to the east, between the town and the airfield. One of the many visitors to the cave was John Pendlebury, come to badger him for arms. Patrick Leigh Fermor was working at Chappel’s brigade headquarters, employed, in his own words, as a ‘junior intelligence dogsbody’. He remembers John Pendlebury arriving at headquarters one day with Kapitan Satanas: ‘I was enormously impressed by that splendid great figure with his rifle,’ he recalled of Pendlebury. ‘He had a Cretan guerrilla with him festooned with bandoliers . . . the great thing was that [John’s] presence filled everyone with life and optimism and a feeling of fun’. The kapitans were chronically short of weapons, and it made Pendlebury ‘angry to think that the British garrison had 400 unissued Lee Enfield rifles lying in the ancient Venetian galley sheds alongside Heraklion harbour, which could be used to arm and defend’.

  Chappel agreed to release some weapons to Satanas, who had been charged with distributing them. He took them to his home village of Krousonas and gave them to a sergeant of the gendarm­erie, saying: ‘You will give one to each man and keep a note for me and a register.’ Each man received a rifle and about one hundred rounds of ammunition and Satanas and Pendlebury had a record of where the guns went.

  At Rethymnon, a town about halfway between Heraklion and Chania, twenty-three-year-old Giorgios Tzitzikas had been sent by his commanding officer to carry a message to garrison headquarters that the Germans were descending on the villages of Pervolia, Misiria and Pigi, just to the east of the town. At headquarters he found chaos: frightened officers were trying to hide, terrified of being bombed. He delivered his message and, as he started back, realised that the headquarters was next door to a building where new gendarmerie recruits were billeted. The barracks was deserted; Tzitzikas went inside, hoping to find weapons. On the upper floor in the sleeping quarters he found two Mannlicher rifles, ammunition pouches and bayonets. Seizing them he ran outside into a disorganised crowd of gendarmes, soldiers, and civilians shouting, ‘To Pervolia, to Pervolia, save our town, lads’, and handed one of the Mannlichers to a comrade. On the way a gendarme captain tried to take the rifle away from him, saying he had stolen it. Tzitzikas pointed the gun at the captain, saying: ‘I’ll kill you if you take another step, because I took it from where the gendarmes had abandoned it, and now I’m going to use it.’

  Very soon Tzitzikas was in action, fighting to stop the paratroopers entering Heraklion. Late in the day he charged a German machine-gun post which was dominating a gorge and which had inflicted terrible losses on the Cretan fighters. As he ran, Tzitzikas tripped on a wire and crashed to the ground, breaking the stock of his weapon. He recovered and crept to the machine-gun post where he shot the gunner in the back. The soldier toppled onto the gun and his comrades fled. Tzitzikas, now alone, heard people shouting: ‘Greeks, Greeks’ as a rallying cry; then a woman’s voice: ‘Greeks, Greeks! I’ve got a gun, come and get it.’ Tzitzikas moved off in the direction of the noise to rejoin the fighting: civilian men and women, of all ages, killing the enemy with anything they could lay their hands on.

  Late on that first afternoon came the second wave of Fallschirmjäger, including Martin Pöppel and his comrades. Pöppel himself landed in an olive grove and, apart from getting caught in a tree, arrived almost unopposed. The temperature on the ground was soaring; many of the men took off their jump smocks and hid them in the undergrowth, disobeying the regulations that said the men should take off their smocks, unbuckle their equipment, put the smocks back on and put the equipment on over their uniforms. They formed up and set off for the airfield. The savage fighting continued into the evening. When the Allied forces began to run out of ammunition the local militia came to their aid, flushing out pockets of the enemy all over Heraklion.

  Thousands of documents were retrieved from dead paratroopers and taken to the Allied intelligence officers. Geoffrey Cox, an intelligence officer and former war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, ended the day with two sackfuls of captured papers in his dugout. Before going to sleep he decided to see what they contained: among the paybooks, codebooks, aerial photographs and other military papers, he found a bloodstained carbon copy of a typescript. Cox read the document by torchlight and, with the help of a German dictionary, concluded that it was the operation order for 3rd Fallschirmjäger. At the bottom of the order was an instruction that it should be burnt once read and was not to be carried into action. Cox took it immediately to General Freyberg, who asked him to read the report out loud.

  Freyberg sat listening behind a wooden trestle table; in front of him was a hand grenade with which he planned to stall any sudden attack. What Cox read were not only the orders for the 3rd Fallschirmjäger, but a summary of the whole invasion plan for Crete, detailing the attacks on four strongpoints: the port of Chania, the airfield at Maleme, and the towns of Rethymnon and Heraklion. It also revealed the Germans’ intelligence regarding the size of Allied forces on the island as being inaccurate, putting them at only 5,000, when in fact there
were more than 22,000.

  When Cox had finished, Freyberg sent a signal to Wavell in Cairo. ‘Today has been a hard one. We have been hard pressed. So far, I believe, we hold aerodromes at Rethymnon, Heraklion and Maleme and the two harbours. The margin by which we hold them is a bare one, and it would be wrong of me to paint an optimistic picture. Fighting has been heavy and we have killed large numbers of Germans. Communications are most difficult . . . [I have seen] a German operation order with most ambitious object­ives, most of which failed.’

  The German invaders had not succeeded in taking any of their first-day objectives; huge numbers of dead and wounded paratroopers lay all over the drop zones – nearly 2,000 killed after less than twenty-four hours. The enemy seemed to be clinging on by their fingertips. Creforce and the Cretans had all but won the battle.

  See Notes to Chapter 4

  5

  The Next Nine Days

  On the evening of 20 May 1941, in his headquarters on the second floor of the Hotel Grande Bretagne, Athens, Generalleutnant Kurt Student took stock. On one wall of the apartment was pinned a large map dotted with paper flags marking the positions of Axis and Allied units; in the centre of the room was a large, brilliantly lit table on which stood field telephones, a tangle of wires, stacks of paper, two black files and an ashtray full of cigarette stubs. Assessing the situation with Student were his ADC, Major Reinhardt, Generalmajor Julius ‘Papa’ Ringel of the 5th Mountain (Gebirgsjäger) Division and Generalleutnant Alexander Löhr. As commander of Luftflotte 4, Löhr had been responsible for bombing operations on the Eastern front, including the fire-bombing of Belgrade, which killed thousands of civilians and turned the Yugoslav capital into a blazing marker for subsequent raids. It was to the highly decor­ated Löhr that Hitler had handed overall responsibility for the Luftwaffe element of Operation Merkur.

  The atmosphere in the room was tense. A large number of senior commanders lay dead or dying on Crete. The elite assault regiment had been all but wiped out; aerial reconnaissance reported that the surviving invaders appeared to be scattered and disorganised. Ringel’s mountain troops were still on the Greek mainland and could not join the fighting until an airfield had been secured for them to land their transport planes.

  In Germany, Hitler had forbidden his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to report on Merkur until the outcome was absolutely certain. Just before midnight the corrected casualty reports for 1st and 3rd Fallschirmjäger came in: they were catastrophic. General Löhr thought the invasion had been a fiasco and believed the operation should be aborted; Reinhardt asked his chief if he could start organising the withdrawal. In spite of the pressure to halt the battle, the highly ambitious Student wanted to continue. They should concentrate on securing the large coastal airfield at Maleme; he ordered Ringel to ready his mountain troops to be airlifted on to Crete at first light the next day.

  Maleme was overlooked by the high ground known as Hill 107, which was the key to the airfield’s defences. Hill 107 was defended by the New Zealand 22nd Infantry Battalion. During the first day of the battle, the Wehrmacht had disrupted the battalion’s communications and cut off the western elements from their comrades to the east of the ridge. Thinking the men in the west had been overrun, the battalion commander withdrew in the night to regroup. At the same time soldiers on the airfield itself heard German voices and, thinking they were surrounded, they too withdrew. At dawn the soldiers on the west of Hill 107 also withdrew. Maleme was now undefended.

  Very early in the morning of the 21st, the second day of the battle, a Junkers 52, piloted by Hauptmann Kleye, flew onto the western edge of the airfield. The German troops on the newly captured Hill 107 watched as the aircraft’s wheels touched the ground. Shells exploded near the plane; it taxied to a halt, swung round, then the engines roared as Kleye revved them hard and lumbered back into the sky. Kleye had been sent by Student to discover the extent of the airfield’s defences. He radioed to his general that a landing and disembarkation was possible, but only if executed with maximum speed.

  At about the same time Freyberg received the following Ultra decrypt:

  Personal for General Freyberg Most Immediate

  On continuation of attack Colorado [Crete] reliably reported that among operations planned for Twenty-first May is air landing two mountain battalions and attack Chania. Landing from echelon of small ships depending on situation at sea.

  Freyberg seriously misinterpreted the signal, and then sent one of his own:

  Reliable information. Early seaborne attack in area Chania likely. New Zealand Division remains responsible coast from West to Kladiso River. Welch Battalion forthwith to stiffen existing (sea) defences from Kladiso to Halepa.

  Later that day hundreds of Junkers aircraft appeared over Maleme airfield, carrying 8,500 men of the 5th Gebirgsjäger (Mountain Division) and their commanding officer Colonel Ramcke. The pilots began the descent, braving the shells that were exploding on the runway. Nearly twenty aircraft were hit, crashing on to the airfield in flames. Soldiers scrambled from the ones that managed to land, hidden by the swirling red dust thrown up from the propellers. They were badly shaken by the battering their transports had taken, but they now had a foothold and used it to keep the runway open. More and more Junkers landed, weaving between the burning wreckage that littered the runway. An Allied artillery commander with a view of the airfield reported that the German troops ‘needed seventy seconds to land, clear the men and gear and take off’.

  Cox reported the prevailing belief at headquarters that a seaborne invasion was imminent and that the airborne invasion was only a preliminary diversion. Freyberg had five battalions with which to counter-attack Maleme but he kept almost all of them watching the coast for a German armada. Throughout the rest of the morning the men of the Sherwood Rangers looked on in tortured frustration as, one after another, Junkers transport aircraft passed them, landed and unloaded men and materiel; they were forbidden to traverse their guns because coastal artillery was only to be used against the naval invasion.

  In Heraklion, a group of German paratroopers penetrated the city’s West Gate, dividing into two attacking forces – one moving down Kalokerino Street towards Lion Square and the centre of the town, the other probing to the north, parallel to the sea, heading towards the harbour. There was prolonged opposition from armed civilians and retired soldiers; one, Colonel Tzoulakis, used his rifle to pin down a group of paratroopers near a burning mattress shop. He lost his life to machine-gun fire.

  Near the harbour some civilians, including a boy scout, fired from the roof of the Ionian Bank at paratroopers in the building opposite, which caught fire. The soldiers surrendered and as they came forward, throwing down their weapons and manhandling a small air-portable field gun, a group of British soldiers from the Yorks and Lancasters appeared and started firing at the civilians on the roof, mistaking them for the enemy. The civilians shouted, pointing at the paratroopers who quickly gave themselves up to the soldiers and were marched off to a temporary POW compound near Liberty Square.

  A fierce firefight in the tiny Barrel Makers Square saw another group of paratroopers overwhelmed and killed, their bodies left where they fell. Near Lion Square a popular policeman, well known in the city for his daily walks with his pet dog, was seen firing a Steyr sub-machine gun at fighter aircraft strafing the city at roof height. He too died, blown up in the bombing; only his leg, still with a boot on, was ever found.

  Kapitan Satanas was in Heraklion with Pendlebury, desperate to get hold of his troop of one hundred armed guerrillas waiting ready at his home village of Krousonas. The two men thought that this small force might be able to launch flank attacks on the growing force of paratroopers collecting to the west of the city. They split up, Pendlebury and his driver taking the shorter, quicker route – a distance of about ten miles – on roads that went dangerously close to enemy positions; Satanas headed south through Knossos, a longer but safer route. After they parted company Pendlebury went back for a fin
al time to his office near Lion Square to get a message to his Cretan fighters that they must somehow take and occupy the ridge overlooking Heraklion airfield to the east of the city. Then he set off, heading straight towards the Germans.

  A few miles south of the city, the Villa Ariadne’s caretaker, Manolaki Akoumianakis, received Pendlebury’s message stressing the importance of holding the ridge. Manolaki’s son Micky was missing, thought to have been killed fighting on the mainland. The old man vowed vengeance on the boy’s life; hours later Manolaki himself was dead, killed in an attack trying to hold the ridge. His body, still clutching his straw hat, was found by his daughter Philia. He would not be buried for another month – the time it took for his son Micky to return safely to the island.

  The battle lines in Heraklion continued to shift back and forth throughout the next day. The Germans took the port and city centre, but were then pushed out on the west side. There was more fierce fighting round the West Gate and at one point the townspeople saw a white flag and thought the Germans wanted to surrender. They were wrong; the white flag party was carrying an ultimatum: surrender or be carpet-bombed. The Cretans refused to give in. The Fallschirmjäger commanding officer, Major Schultz, who had led the first successful penetration of Heraklion’s city walls, ordered his soldiers to withdraw to clear the way for the Luftwaffe to carry out the bombardment. It was Friday 23 May. The bombers droned over Heraklion and the ground shook under the endless detonation of high explosive. Terrified civilians and defenders fled to the south of the city towards Knossos. Fire, flame and smoke engulfed everything; the day became known as Black Friday.