“I decided that the time had come for action and alerted my force with my whistle,” Forrester would later say. “We had not gone very far before I realized that we had been substantially reinforced by a considerable number of the inhabitants of Crete—men and women—armed with old shotguns, garden tools, sticks, broom handles, some with kitchen knives strapped on to the end of them.” With Forrester shrilling away on his whistle, the mob charged. The Germans dropped their weapons and put up their hands.
Back at his command post in Athens, General Kurt Student was getting minute-by-minute updates by radio. He unsnapped his holster. “I waited with my pistol continuously by my side,” he said, “ready to use it on myself if the worse came to the worst.”
CHAPTER 7
FRANCE FELL IN FIVE DAYS,
WHY IS CRETE STILL RESISTING?
—ADOLF HITLER, in a message to General Kurt Student
TOO LATE, General Student was discovering that on Crete heroes aren’t an accident.
For more than a thousand years, in both fact and fable, the island has been a battleground between tyrants and rebels, gods and monsters. Crete was the birthplace of Zeus, the home of the Minotaur, the launch site of Daedalus and Icarus, and the homeland of canny backwoodsmen who, for generations, refused to bow to Turkish or Venetian warlords. From those myths and struggles emerged not only the heroic ideal but the means to achieve it—a folk science of mind and body that’s ancient, alive, and very teachable.
“They are good archers, every one with his bowe and arrowes, a sword and dagger, with long haire and bootes that reach up to their grine, and a shirt of male,” noted a British trader in the 1500s, who was just as intimidated by the festivals as the fighting: “They would drink wine out of all measure.”
Jack Smith-Hughes learned firsthand about the Cretan art of the hero during the German invasion, and it kept him breathing long after he should have been dead. Jack had pink cheeks and a bit of a belly—no surprise, since his greatest contribution for much of the war was running a field bakery and supplying bread to the front lines. Jack didn’t want to lose his supply trucks to enemy ambush, so he decided to reroute by water—and it was then, while dispatching a boatload of food to troops farther up the coast, that he found himself standing next to the Allied commander.
General Freyberg had gotten word that an Australian detachment was under fire without a working radio, so he’d sent a messenger by boat with orders to retreat. Instead of pivoting to other emergencies, Freyberg began pacing the waterfront. It was as if the fighting that raged elsewhere across the island had melted away and the only thing that mattered was one small pocket of beleaguered Australians. The baker wasn’t sure what to do and found himself pacing the jetty alongside his brooding commander. Was Freyberg cracking under the pressure? He was famous for keeping his cool during Gallipoli and the Somme, two of the most horrific bloodbaths of World War I, but now that he was on the verge of a stunning victory, he looked distracted and defeated.
We’re about to defeat Hitler’s best fighters, Jack thought. Aren’t we?
Freyberg’s underdog troops had rallied magnificently once the shock of the air attack had worn off. Many of the New Zealanders were country boys, and their confidence grew as they realized this was their kind of fight. A Hunter dropping from the sky wasn’t much different from a wild boar blasting from the bush back home in Kaikoura, so Kippenberger’s Petrol Company quickly adjusted their fire to the paratroopers’ four-meters-per-second drop speed, aiming for their feet to make kill shots to the chest.
So sharp was their marksmanship, one Fallschirmjäger battalion was convinced it had dropped into a den of supersoldiers. “It was particularly noticeable that a very large proportion of our casualties had been shot in the head,” a Fallschirmjäger sergeant-major would report. “The controlled fire and discipline of the enemy led us to believe that we were up against a specialist force of picked snipers.” Two of the New Zealanders held down the entire western side of a hill on their own—for six days.
Springtime on Crete is hot and dry, and German uniforms were wool. So it wasn’t long before the Cretan shepherds faded from the fray, settling in behind stone walls with sight lines on cool springs. “The only well where we could get water,” paratrooper Sebastian Krug would recall, “was being shot at all the time.” The New Zealanders caught onto the idea and set ambushes of their own, lying in wait near the paratroopers’ supply boxes. From the olive groves, the same cry began to ring out over and over:
“GOT THE BASTARD!”
This isn’t warfare. This is ritual suicide. Long past midnight, General Student was still at a table in his command room, stubbing cigarettes into an overflowing ashtray as he read the battle dispatches. His Luger remained ready by his hand.
Because of him, the Third Reich’s finest fighters were being slaughtered by shepherds and pig hunters. More than half of Student’s ten-thousand-man invasion force was dead, wounded, or captured. Many of the rest were lost or hiding for their lives. All three Blücher brothers, from the fabled fighting family whose patriarch led the Prussian army against Napoleon, were gone. Max Schmeling’s photo op nearly did him in; he’d parachuted through machine-gun fire, passed out after landing hard and injuring his back, then hid till nightfall and eventually crawled back to his unit. If there was a way out of this fiasco, Student didn’t see it.
Then something caught his eye. Amid the bad news, one thing should have been worse. Why hadn’t the Brits blown up Maleme, the small airfield on Crete’s northwest coast? That’s the first thing Student would have done if he were defending Crete: he’d have packed Maleme with dynamite and blasted it into a moon crater the second he saw a parachute pop open.
Crete is basically a rectangle, with two good-sized airfields along its northern coast. Master the airfields and you master the island. The Brits could get in and out by sea, thanks to its Royal Navy, but the Germans weren’t as strong in the water. With no place to land their planes, the Hunters would be stranded.
The airfield was well defended at Heraklion, in the center, but Maleme, in the west, was a different story. That’s where Student had thrown his biggest punch, swarming Maleme with fifty gliders full of Storm Regiment commandos and three companies of Fallschirmjäger. It was a gruesome operation: both gliders and paratroopers dropped right into a hail of burning flak that tore through flesh and parachute silk. By the time the survivors hit the ground, the trees were littered with their comrades’ bodies. “All over the place you could see dead and wounded Fallschirmjäger, some still hanging from their parachutes,” a Fallschirmjäger survivor named Helmut Wenzel later jotted in his diary. “There had been a lot of bloodshed and you could hear the crying and shouting of the wounded and dying.”
That’s when the Hunters showed what they were made of. Gathering and advancing through that nightmare of moaning men, attacking only with handguns and grenades, they managed to grab their heavy weapons from the drop boxes. Wenzel, with two severe wounds and just a pistol, staggered to his feet to join them. One force headed for high ground overlooking the airfield while the other charged the antiaircraft battery. By late afternoon the Germans had knocked out the big guns and captured the hill, but at a brutal cost: their officers were dead, their ammo was low, and only fifty-seven men were still alive. Most were so hurt and weak, they could barely stand. They prepared themselves to die. They had no hope against the Allied counterattack that was about to come storming up the hill.