Except … it never came.
The Allied commanders on Crete were so braced for defeat, they didn’t realize they’d already won. Without Maleme, the Germans had no lifeline back to the mainland. It was only a matter of days—hours, even—until the invaders ran out of food and bullets. But with phone lines down and radios failing, with Allied officers in the rear out of contact with fighters on the front, assumptions took over for action. When the colonel defending Maleme didn’t see the reinforcements he requested, he assumed headquarters wanted him to pull back; when headquarters learned he was pulling back, it assumed Maleme was a lost cause and diverted the reinforcements.
You don’t beat Kurt Student by giving him a second chance.
Before dawn of Day 2, German troop planes were taking to the sky, one after the other, roaring toward Maleme. Student had decided to “stake everything on one card.” He committed the 5th Mountain Division and the last of his Fallschirmjäger reserves to a final, all-or-nothing assault on the airfield.
Only a few New Zealand troops were still within firing range of the eastern end of the runway when they heard the first Junker approach. They blazed away, riddling the plane with bullets as it skidded down just long enough to drop off forty Mountain Division soldiers and then disappeared back over the Mediterranean. The New Zealanders shifted their aim toward the Germans sprinting for cover, gunning many of them down before they got a few steps across the runway. But a few reached the trenches and returned fire, creating cover for the next Junkers screeching down. More Germans tumbled off, scrambling into the gullies as a third plane approached, then a fourth….
The New Zealanders were stunned. Ten minutes ago, they were in a nice holding position against an exhausted enemy, waiting for orders to either mop up or march off. Now, suddenly, they were burning through the last of their ammunition, shooting helplessly against an enemy that was doubling, tripling, by the minute. Time was still on their side, but not for long. They had to attack immediately and put an end to the job they should have finished yesterday. They had to storm the hill before the Germans landed any more troops and fortified their hold on the airfield. This was their chance.
Bayonets were fixed. Grenades were handed around. And then the order came from the rear: Stand down.
Back at headquarters, Freyberg was still convinced that the real invasion was coming by sea. All these planes and paratroopers? Just a feint to lure Allied troops into the hills and leave the coasts undefended. Absolutely correct, agreed Brigadier James Hargest. Like Freyberg, the beefy old brigadier was a survivor of the Great War and thought he was still fighting it. Hargest spent the boat trip over to Crete reading War and Peace, and from the old Russians he took his cue. “In war,” Hargest preached, “steadiness and endurance are more important than any amount of strategic flair.” The key to Crete, he urged Freyberg, was caution and the coastline.
Which could explain why, days later and long after the golden opportunity was gone, Freyberg was walking the waterfront alongside a bewildered young bakery manager, watching for an enemy armada that would never appear.
“They were brave men, but no longer bold,” lamented Antony Beevor, the British military historian who wrote the definitive account of the invasion. “The Battle of Crete, a revolutionary development in warfare, was to be a contest in which fast reactions, clear thinking and ruthless decisions counted most.” Freyberg still had his boots sunk in the mud of the Somme, while Student—so feverishly inventive that he could use German parts to rebuild a shot-down French plane and fly it straight back into action—had no interest in refighting a war his country had already lost.
But still, there was a moment when the past might have prevailed, when trench-style tactics could have choked the Germans into submission. And that’s the moment when Freyberg flinched. “A single platoon, even a single Bren gun left in place on the airfield,” Beevor concludes, “could have swung the course of the whole battle.”
As waves of German troops fanned out from Maleme, Jack Smith-Hughes was soon scrambling to stay one step ahead of his friends and two steps ahead of the enemy. The Royal Navy couldn’t risk many ships on yet another Dunkirk, so anyone who didn’t reach southern Crete quickly wasn’t leaving. “Orders are every man for himself!” a sergeant shouted. Thousands of Allied soldiers scrambled frantically up and over the White Mountains, clinging to a crumbling trail that skirted “a near vertical wall of the road on one side and a drop fall of hundreds and hundreds of feet on the other,” as British infantryman Edward Frederic Telling would recall. “All with no lights.”
Jack Smith-Hughes was footsore and starving when he limped into the port at Sfakiá, and surprised when he was told he didn’t need to line up right away. More evacuations were planned for the next day, an officer promised, before climbing into a skiff himself. The next morning, Jack Smith-Hughes was staring into the barrel of a German rifle. Along with thousands of other Allied troops abandoned on Crete, Jack was forced at gunpoint to hobble back over the mountains he’d just crossed. When the prison gate closed behind him, Jack knew he had two choices: he could escape and get shot, or stay behind the wires and waste away. Already, men all around him were dying of wounds and disease.
Well, better a quick bullet than a slow death. One night, Jack followed a Cretan prisoner through the wire, and together they escaped into the hills. Before sentries could track them, they were grabbed by villagers and pulled out of sight. Jack was hidden and fed, nursed back to health on a Cretan villager’s diet of wild greens, dark bread so hard it had to be soaked in wine before biting, and fasolakia me katsiki—beans simmered with goat.
Jack was still too weak to hide out in the mountains, so his new friends came up with a Plan B: turn the pudgy blond Brit into a Cretan. The villagers renamed him Yanni and drilled him on the peculiarities of their dialect. Like the word for “adult”: on Crete, a grown-up is known as a dromeus, or “runner.” To be considered a full Cretan, you had to be strong and resourceful enough to run to someone’s aid. Until then, young Cretans are just apodromos—“not quite a runner”—and the ritual passage into adulthood was celebrated with the festival of Dromaia—“the Running.”
Gradually, Jack’s strength returned. By his standards, at least; keeping pace with a geriatric dromeus was a different story. Jack was taken under the wing of a bald and blue-eyed Cretan in his fifties who was so buoyantly unkillable that the Brits would code-name him Beowulf. Beowulf was once shot between the lungs but “suffered no visible ill effects.” Beowulf guided Jack to fresh hiding places, keeping him a jump ahead of German search parties and subjecting him to the ego-crushing experience of following an old Cretan into the mountains. Instead of struggling, they seemed to fall upward, bouncing from rock to rock for hours with an odd, effortless-looking elasticity. It wasn’t just the men; Cretan women could likewise carry heftier packs, cover longer distances, navigate through snow and dark, and thrive on a diet plucked from the ground as they passed.