The Battle for Crete was Decided on a Little Hill

Following his Dünkirchen 1940, examining of the German side of the Battle of Dunkirk, Robert Kershaw here addresses the key battle for Hill 107 in the German airborne invasion of Crete in May 1941. He begins with the airborne operation to seize the Corinth Canal at the end of the invasion of Greece. Though the Canal itself was blown up during the operation, the Luftwaffe and Hitler considered it a victory, which is why Kurt Student, the commander of XI Fliegerkorps, the Airborne Corps within the Luftwaffe, was able to get Hitler’s approval of an even more daring operation, an airborne invasion of Crete.

In standard Osprey style, Kershaw sets up his narrative of the coming battle with an examination of the history of German airborne forces, and then delves into the plans for Operation Mercury and into the officers on both sides who would fight the Battle of Hill 107, which covered the key airfield at Maleme.

The key leaders on the Allied side were Lt. Col. Leslie Andrew and Brigadier James Hargest, commanding 22 New Zealand Battalion and 5 Brigade, respectively. On the German side were Lt. Gen. Student, Generalmajor Eugen Meindl of the Sturmregiment of the 7^th Flieger (Airborne) Division, and Generalmajor Julius Ringel, Commander of 5^th Gebirgs (Mountain) Division.

In the early hours of Mercury, almost everything appeared to go wrong for the Germans. The 7^th Flieger Division commander, Lt. Gen. Wilhelm Sussmann, was killed along with most of the division staff when his Ju-52 crashed on the way to Crete. Most of the Falschirmjager (paratroopers) missed their drop zones around Hill 107 and were scattered far and wide. As they floated to ground slowly, many were shot and killed by New Zealand soldiers and also by armed and angry Cretan civilians, which the Germans considered a violation of the rules of war, and would have harsh consequences for the civilians, as we will see. Fortunately for the Germans, lower-ranked officers gradually began to organize the disparate groups of Falschirmjagers into coherent groups and to advance up the slopes of Hill 107 despite suffering increasing losses as more and more Falschirmjager dropped into Crete over the course of the day.

The center of the book is the leadership decisions which determined the course of the battle. Andrew and Hargest were both WWI veterans (Andrew had received a VC for bravery), and Kershaw believes they still had the mentality of the static warfare of the Western Front they had experienced in that war. A small counter-attack force of two Matilda tanks early in the first day had no effect on the battle, the tanks breaking down after causing a bit of panic amongst the Falschirmjager. Under the pressure of the confusion of the airborne landing operation and unable (thanks to inadequate radios and severed telegraph lines) to properly communicate with his superiors except by couriers who were under constant attack from the Luftwaffe, Andrew chose to withdraw from Hill 107 on the evening of May 20, despite having brought the German assault to a standstill with heavy losses and still holding the key ground of Hill 107.

This enabled the Germans to land aircraft after aircraft on Maleme airfield, which proved to be the decisive event in the Battle for Crete. With the men of Ringel’s 5th Gebirgs Division added to the battle, they methodically swept the British and Greek defenders eastwards, though Student later criticized Ringel for failing to prevent the withdrawal of the British southwards where they were eventually evacuated from Crete by the Royal Navy.

Brigadier Hargest is equally deserving of harsh criticism at the Brigade level. He failed to properly execute the counterattack that had been planned before the invasion, sending in a little more than a battalion as reinforcements at the crucial moment, an inadequate force to support Andrew. Hargest also suffered the same communications problems that Andrew had, but one cannot deny that he proved inadequate to the moment, an officer simply unused to the aggressive demands of modern warfare. He made the wrong decision at the wrong time. When informed that Andrew had abandoned Hill 107, Hargest launched a lackluster counterattack in the night of May 20-21 that made some progress but did not retake the lost hill. Reinforcements continued to land at Maleme despite heavy losses in Ju-52 transport aircraft.

German leadership on the other hand, was much more aggressive, modern, and effective, as one would expect with the men who invented airborne operations. Subordinate officers took command of the operation, when the division commander was killed and caused enough confusion to 22 NZ Battalion that Andrew was driven to abandon the key ground. Though they were divided and in small numbers Meindl’s Sturmregiment did the heavy lifting of surrounding and seizing Hill 107, including Maleme Airfield. Ringel was a solid division commander, used to fighting in mountainous terrain, and his methodical approach swept the British from the field.

An attempted seaborne landing on the night of May 20/21 being a total failure (only 150 water-logged men ever reached Crete out of 2,250), Crete remains the only operation won entirely by an airborne/air-landing force. As is well known, the casualties to the 7th Flieger Division were so heavy (3,094 killed out of a total of 5,140 casualties) that Hitler abandoned the idea of conducting airborne operations in the future, though the Soviets and Western Allies did not. Of the aircraft involved, 271 Ju-52s were lost and 147 damaged, comprised 54%, which gutted the Luftwaffe’s transport force. Kershaw ends the book on a dark note, chronicling the massacre at Kondomari of 20 or so Cretan civilians in revenge for the killing of a large number of paratroopers by armed civilians during the battle. The massacre was captured by a military photographer, whose photographs were re-discovered decades after the war in German archives.

In the end, The Hill shows how the battle for Crete was won and lost on a little hill, and the importance of aggressive leadership at the battalion, brigade, and division level in the Second World War. It’s a book worth the reader’s time, and I look forward to additional works from Mr. Kershaw for Osprey.

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Note: The Hill is also available in e-editions.

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