Besides, wasn’t it time the Nazis were greeted as heroes for a change? German troops weren’t really invading Crete, General Student pointed out; they were liberating it. The Cretan islanders were so sick of being ruled by the Greek king, Hitler would become their idol as soon as they realized the arrival of the Germans meant the end of the monarchy. In fact, Student had it on good authority that a super-secret underground of Cretan rebels was eager to greet its new German friends and had already worked out a pass code. “Top Dog!” the Germans were supposed to call out. “Big Buck!” the Cretan underground would reply, and the celebration would begin.
Hitler relented. He dubbed Student’s plan Operation Mercury, after the Roman god of thievery and lightning speed, and set the go date for May 20. It took twenty-four days to capture the mainland; Hitler would allow twenty-four hours for Crete.
One day. Then it was on to Russia.
. . .
May 20, 1941, dawned beautifully, so Colonel Howard Kippenberger of the New Zealand 10th Brigade grabbed a plate of porridge and went outside to enjoy the sun rising over the Aegean. Weird, he thought as he settled in under a plane tree. What happened to the sun? A minute earlier, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but now all of a sudden he’s sitting in shadows. Wait … He jerked his head up, stunned.
Overhead, German gliders were silently soaring in, so many they darkened the sky. Kippenberger grabbed for his rifle, but he’d left it in his room. Kippenberger had never seen anything like it. There had to be hundreds of commandos inside those gliders. Hard behind was a sea of transport planes, with wave after wave of elite Fallschirmjäger paratroopers pouring out the jump doors.
“STAND TO YOUR ARMS!” Kippenberger shouted, praying that not too many of his troops were splashing naked in the sea at that moment. By the time he got his rifle, Germans were on the ground and scrambling for position. Bullets splintered the olive trees; snipers had already nested, with sight lines toward the little house serving as Kippenberger’s headquarters. Above, the sky was so hectic with men and machines that one stunned soldier felt he was witnessing the Martian occupation of Earth from H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds.
Many of Kippenberger’s men were mechanics and drivers, not frontline soldiers. They backed up, firing desperately and uncertainly, while Kippenberger hurried to the top of a hill to get a clear view of how much trouble they were in.
Lots, it turned out.
When it came to troops, Crete was an island of castaways. Nearly every soldier there was a refugee from the fighting on the Greek mainland—a hodgepodge of Australians, New Zealanders, Brits, and Greeks. As ordered, they’d chucked their heavy weapons when they were ferried to Crete, where they’d hunkered down to await one of two things: either massive reinforcement or a speedy retreat. Anything else would be a massacre. One battalion didn’t even have boots; their ship had been torpedoed on the way to Crete, so they’d dumped their rifles and shoes to swim for it.
“Forces at my disposal are totally inadequate to meet the attack envisaged,” concluded Major General Bernard Freyberg of New Zealand after he arrived on Crete to take command. Was Freyberg seriously expected to defend one of the most strategically important islands in the Mediterranean with, as he put it, “gunners who had lost their guns, sappers who had lost their tools, and R.S.A.C. drivers who had lost their cars”? He wasn’t sure what Hitler had in mind, but if it was even a fraction of the firepower unleashed on the mainland, the Brits were doomed.
Coming from a wild man like Freyberg, gloom like that had to be taken seriously. Churchill loved Freyberg and had nicknamed him the Salamander, after the myth that salamanders are created by fire. Freyberg had left New Zealand as a young man to join Pancho Villa’s rebels in Mexico, so hungry for action that he’d traveled across the globe to plunge into a war he only dimly comprehended, in a language he didn’t speak. When World War I broke out, young Freyberg jumped into a series of swimming races in Los Angeles and won enough prize money to pay for passage to England. He enlisted and quickly made his mark by stripping naked for a suicide mission: to distract Turkish forces during the invasion at Gallipoli, he smeared his body with grease, dived off of a troop ship, and swam two miles through the bone-chilling Gulf of Saros to light diversionary flares on a beach behind enemy lines. He became England’s youngest general at twenty-eight and was wounded so many times that one of Churchill’s party tricks was to get Freyberg to peel off his shirt so other guests could count his twenty-seven battle scars.
But even for the Salamander, Crete was too much—or, rather, too little. Freyberg should have at least had some local troops who knew the terrain, but he’d been robbed of even that slim advantage: the Cretan division was still stranded back on the mainland.
The drug-enhanced Hunters were on the ground and moving fast, wriggling free of their harnesses and breaking open the weapon crates thumping down nearby. In minutes, the Fallschirmjäger were better equipped than the British. Besides motorcycles and surgical equipment, the crates also had specially designed field guns powerful enough to blow a hole through a tank. Quickly, the Germans grouped into attack formation and began advancing, cutting telephone lines to British headquarters as they moved.
But hold on a moment. Up on his hill, Kippenberger noticed one German squad was going the wrong way. Instead of advancing, they were edging backwards. Suddenly they were running, falling, shouting—and being chased by the 8th Greek Regiment.
Kippenberger couldn’t believe his eyes. When he’d first spotted the 8th Greeks, he cringed; they were so dangerously exposed, he thought, “it was murder to leave such troops in such a position.” But now look at them! Outgunned and outmanned, they improvised from a stand-your-ground defense to a hit-and-run guerrilla offense, flipping the element of surprise back to their favor. The Greeks had only vintage rifles and a handful of shells, but that’s all they needed. As soon as their fire drove the Germans back, they raced to the dying paratroopers, stripped away their weapons, and charged on.
And the 8th wasn’t outnumbered for long. A mob of villagers armed with sickles and axes ran to join them. One farmer fashioned a bayonet by lashing a knife to the end of his shotgun; another old Cretan used his cane to beat to death two paratroopers who’d gotten snarled in their harnesses in his back garden. A priest named Father Stylianos Frantzeskakis rang the church bell to summon his parishioners, then grabbed his uncle’s hunting rifle and led his congregation into combat. A teenage boy followed him, dragging an old Turkish sword that was so long it scraped along the ground. “My mother sent me,” the boy told Father Frantzeskakis. A monk headed into the fray with a rifle in his hand and a hand ax in his belt; later, the same hatchet-wielding holy man reappeared with a German submachine gun, presumably after killing the German who’d carried it.
A bewildered young British officer named Michael Forrester found himself at the head of “a weird counter-attack,” as he called it. Forrester had gotten separated from his unit and stumbled across a leaderless band of Greek soldiers under fire from a German platoon. With their backs against the sea, the Greeks were trapped. Forrester decided to take command, even though just about the only Greek word he knew was Aeria!—“Charge!” Maybe he could toot commands on a tin whistle? Sure, why not. Forrester hurriedly taught his new force a signal code—one tweet to stand by, two to move—and then fixed his bayonet for a do-or-die attempt to break through the German net.