GERMAN PARATROOPERS SNATCH CRETE FROM BRITAIN
Crete, Eastern Mediterranean • May 20, 1941
With the start of marathon German operations against the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, a month away, Adolf Hitler needed to ensure that his oil supplies in and around Ploiești, Romania, where he had sent a German “military mission,” would not come under Allied bomber attack from stationary bases in the Eastern Mediterranean. The most likely source of those attacks was the island of Crete, lying several hundred miles south of Axis-occupied Greece (see map). Just three weeks before, 50,000 out of nearly 60,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers and airmen had escaped German capture in Greece for the safety of British-held Crete and Egypt in a Dunkirk-like evacuation. Other than the rock citadel of Gibraltar located at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, Crete was the last Allied holdout in the northern Mediterranean.
On this date, May 20, 1941, the first of 23,000 German paratroopers descended from a cloudless sky over Crete, garrisoned now by 45,000 Allied men (which included 9,000 Greek troops). Operation Merkur (Mercury) was the final phase in the Axis Balkans campaign (Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete) and also the first time in history that an entire invasion force was deployed from the air under hostile fire. German Fallschirmjaeger captured Maleme Airfield in bitter fighting on May 20–21, 1941, which allowed German supplies and reinforcements to be flown into Crete, though not without losing huge numbers of aircraft (250 trimotor Junkers Ju 52s) and landing craft to Allied and partisan (native Cretan) resistance.
Maleme was the turning point in the battle for Crete. By Day 5 much of the Allied resistance had been broken, the Luftwaffe having knocked out most of the island’s guns and antiaircraft weapons on the first day. Even so, German airborne losses were massive enough—one in four killed or missing (Crete was dubbed the Fallschirmjaegers’ graveyard)—that Hitler forbade any further large-scale parachute operations in the future, telling the operations commander, Maj. Gen. Kurt Student, that the surprise factor had now been exhausted and the day of mass jumps was over. Consequently, Hitler took his elite paratroopers out of Barbarossa’s plans as well as other potential operational surprise deployments; the paratroopers instead were used as elite infantry regiments on the Eastern Front and in Italy. On the flip side, British, Commonwealth, and Greek defenders were forced to evacuate Allied territory for the second time in a month, leaving another 17,497-plus men in German captivity and over 4,100 dead on the battlefield. The only comforting news—this from an Allied perspective—came out of the North Atlantic Theater in late May, courtesy of the Royal Navy, which reported the sinking, with heavy loss of life, of the newly constructed German battleship Bismarck, reputably the most heavily armed and deadly war vessel in the world.
Narrowly viewed, Crete’s seizure gave the Axis an advantageous position in the Eastern Mediterranean for the next four years. From a big picture perspective, the Axis Balkans adventure had set back Hitler’s Barbarossa timetable by weeks, though the delay spared the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) from having to cope with the foul Russian Rasputitza, the season of Spring mud. Nevertheless, Hitler told more than one confident that if his Italian partner, Benito Mussolini, hadn’t invaded Greece and needed German aid to undo the fiasco, the entire European war, at least on the Eastern Front, would have turned out differently. “We could have anticipated the Russian cold by weeks and conquered Leningrad and Moscow. There would have been no Stalingrad,” he lamented.
Battle of Greece and Crete, April–May 1941
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Above: Greece and the Mediterranean island of Crete during Axis occupation, 1941–1944. Map depicts the German, Italian, and Bulgarian occupation zones. In mid-1941 the Germans made prisoners of the Anglo-Greek garrison on the island, which might have afforded the Royal Navy safe harbors from which to harass the Axis southeastern flank as well as provide a launch platform for Allied air attacks on Axis targets to the north, in particular Romanian oilfields. Notwithstanding the shellacking the Royal Naval had given the Italian fleet at Taranto (November 11, 1940), after the fall of Crete British warships exercised dubious control of the Eastern Mediterranean for several years running.
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Left: Taken by a British combat photographer on May 20, 1941, this photo was edited for propaganda purposes to show a black smoke trail from a damaged German Junkers Ju 52 transport. German paratroopers suffered heavy casualties within the first hours of the invasion, including airborne commandos of a German Army outfit, the Brandenburgers assigned to the Abwehr (military intelligence), as the men hit the ground. Some 400 of the III Battalion’s 600 men were killed before the end of the first day. Germans suffered an estimated 6,000–7,000 casualties during the Battle of Crete, which lasted from May 20 to June 1, 1941.
Right: A Fallschirmjaeger and a 10-man DFS 230 transport glider in Crete. The British Navy based at Alexandria, Egypt, retained control of the waters around Crete, so Hitler was forced into an airborne invasion if he wanted to snatch Crete for the Axis. The Luftwaffe lost heavily in the fight for Crete: 220 aircraft were destroyed outright and another 64 were written off due to damage, for a total of 284 aircraft lost, with several hundred more damaged to varying degrees. These losses were later to impact negatively on German attempts to defend Stalingrad.
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Left: Captured German troops on Crete, late May 1941. Many German troops in the Crete invasion were not trained in airborne assaults and suffered as a consequence. The British and Americans, however, were impressed enough by the potential of airborne assault forces that they began to build and train their own airborne divisions, which they used spectacularly in their invasions of France and Germany in 1944–1945.
Right: British soldiers surrender to German paratroopers. From a disastrous start, the Germans recovered spectacularly. By June 1 all but 500 of Crete’s defenders had surrendered. Crete proved a Pyrrhic victory bought at the price of future German airborne operations. The 117‑sq.-mile British island fortress of Malta, which lay roughly in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea just 538 miles west of Crete, would have been a magnet for a German airborne invasion, but Hitler would not countenance such a thing after taking high casualties on Crete.