20 May in military history: Battle of Crete, 1941

20 May 1941 · 85 years ago

Why Crete

Crete became the collecting point for many of the British and Commonwealth troops brought out of mainland Greece in April 1941. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the Mediterranean naval commander, wrote that some 25,000 were being reorganized there, most with nothing but rifles. A US Army study published in 1953 explains the stakes: in British hands the island kept the eastern Mediterranean under British naval and air superiority and put the Romanian oil fields within reach of bombers; in German hands it would cover Greece and the Aegean and serve as a base against Egypt and the Suez Canal.¹

According to the same study, General Kurt Student, commander of XI Air Corps, put a plan for taking Crete to Göring on 15 April, Hitler chose Crete over Malta on 20 April, and five days later Directive No. 28 named the operation MERKUR. General Löhr of the Fourth Air Force was put in charge, and the study counts about 600 troop carriers, 100 gliders and an invasion force of about 25,000 men, among them the 7th Airborne Division and the 5th Mountain Division.²

Major General Bernard Freyberg, commander of the New Zealand Division, led the defense. The US study counts about 27,500 British and Imperial troops and 14,000 Greeks; Christopher Buckley's 1952 popular history, written at the British government's request, gives 28,614 British, Australian and New Zealand troops on 20 May. The attack was expected: Buckley writes that two German airmen fished out of the sea on 18 May told their Cretan captors it would come soon after dawn on 20 May.³

Out of a cloudless sky

Bombers and fighters struck the Maleme, Canea and Suda Bay areas early on 20 May; Buckley has the air attack begin at 6.30 in the morning. The US study puts the first glider landings at 08:00, near Maleme airfield and on the beaches near Canea, with about 2,000 parachutists jumping in waves of 200. An officer quoted by Buckley, who put the moment at about 7.30 a.m., saw the gliders pass "as silently as ghosts with just a swishing sound instead of the usual roar".⁴

Many paratroopers were killed in the air or soon after landing. Near Maleme, Buckley writes, Cretan civilians joined the fight with knives, staves and old rifles. Asked by telephone whether he needed help against a German company, a New Zealand engineer commander answered, "They’ll all be dead before you can get a man here".⁵

The commander of the 7th Airborne Division, Wilhelm Süssmann, was killed before he reached the island; Buckley writes that his glider crashed on Aegina. In the afternoon, the US study says, a parachute combat team of regimental strength jumped over each of Retimo and Heraklion; they suffered even more casualties than at Maleme and took neither the airfields nor the towns. By evening, the study concludes, not a single airfield was securely held by the Germans.⁶

The night Maleme slipped away

The Germans needed an airfield to land reinforcements, and Hill 107 rose above Maleme airfield. Both were held by the 22nd New Zealand Battalion, and at 9 p.m., Buckley writes, its commander, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew, in touch with only two of his five companies, decided to pull back; Buckley quotes an authoritative verdict that the withdrawal was "probably the most decisive single step in the battle for Crete". The US study also has the defenders falling back from Hill 107 that evening.⁷

On 21 May German transports began landing on the airfield while it was still under fire; the study times the first landings of mountain troops at 16:00. In a passage Buckley quotes from the Australian war correspondent John Hetherington, one troop carrier "was down and away within seventy seconds". From that point, says the US study, "the fate of Crete was sealed".⁸

The fleet pays

The fleet's task was to stop any German landing from the sea. On the night of 21 to 22 May a British force caught the first German convoy off the island. Cunningham called the encounter "a heavy blow to the Germans", and the US study says most of the convoy's motor sailers and freighters were sunk.⁹

Then the Luftwaffe turned on the ships, and the US study says the fleet was forced to withdraw from the Aegean. On 22 May, Cunningham wrote, "things commenced to go awry": the destroyer Greyhound and the cruisers Gloucester and Fiji were sunk that afternoon. Early on 23 May all forces were ordered to withdraw, an order Cunningham and Buckley trace to a misread signal saying the battleships had no pom-pom ammunition left. Yet Cunningham added: "I have never felt prouder of the Mediterranean Fleet than at the close of these particular operations".¹⁰

Galatas to Sphakia

The mountain troops pushed east toward Canea and Suda Bay. Buckley describes the evening of Sunday 25 May, when the Germans broke into the village of Galatas and Colonel H. K. Kippenberger led a scratch force of New Zealanders back in; after twenty minutes of fighting, he writes, "the Germans broke".¹¹

It was not enough: on 28 May, according to the US study, Freyberg ordered the bulk of his force back across the mountains to the south coast. Ships of the Mediterranean Fleet took off the Heraklion garrison on the night of 28 to 29 May and then lifted troops from Sphakia. Before flying out, Major General Weston, commander of the rearguard, acting on Middle East Command's instructions, told Lieutenant Colonel Colvin to pass on the order "to contact with the enemy and to capitulate"; the decision, Buckley writes, "came as a thunderclap to the majority of the troops". The Germans reached the south coast on 1 June.¹²

Counting the cost

Buckley, using Middle East Command figures of November 1941, counts 14,967 of the 28,614 British, Australian and New Zealand troops evacuated to Egypt, "rather more than 52 per cent", and adds that "the proportion is really lower still", since over 3,000 more troops landed after the battle had begun; the US study gives about 14,800 out of 27,500 and adds that the 14,000 Greek troops were also left behind, dead or captured. On 10 June 1941 Winston Churchill told the House of Commons that 17,000 men had been brought off and that about 15,000 had been lost in killed, wounded, missing and prisoners, not counting the Greeks and Cretans.¹³

German after-action reports, the US study says, give losses of between 3,986 and 6,453 men. Buckley prints the official German figure of 1,971 killed, 2,594 wounded and 1,888 missing, but argues from graves counts that German losses "can scarcely have been less than 8,000". Churchill had told the Commons that about 5,000 Germans were believed drowned at sea and at least 12,000 killed or wounded on the island. The US study notes that only two battalions sailed in that convoy and that most of the shipwrecked were apparently rescued. Interrogated after the war, Student said that Crete "alone cost us 4,000 killed and missing out of 20,000 men thrown in", in a passage Buckley quotes from Milton Shulman.¹⁴

For the fleet Buckley counts more than 2,000 officers and seamen dead and three cruisers and six destroyers sunk; the US study speaks of nearly 2,000 Royal Navy casualties.¹⁵

Well worth fighting?

The US study, which dates the German seizure of Crete from 20 May to 1 June 1941, called it the first major military operation carried out by airborne forces acting independently of regular ground forces, and a decisive victory of air power over a navy in restricted waters. Churchill defended the decision: "this sombre, ferocious battle, which was lost, and lost, I think, upon no great margin, was well worth fighting". Buckley saw an irony: the battle that caused such dismay in Britain "was considered by the Germans themselves to be their first serious setback".¹⁶