The decisions that shaped the battle before the first German parachute opened

Hill 107 is not much of a hill by Cretan standards. At 107 metres above sea level, it would barely register on many of our E-MTB rides, yet climb onto it above Maleme and the western battlefield of May 1941 opens below you. The airfield lies immediately to the north, beyond it is the Gulf of Chania, and to the west runs the broad bed of the Tavronitis. Eastwards, the coastal plain leads towards Platanias, Chania and Suda Bay, while behind the hill the land rises towards the foothills of the White Mountains.

Standing there with a battlefield map, it is very easy to explain how the Battle of Crete was lost. Perhaps too easy, because we know that Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie Andrew’s 22nd New Zealand Battalion withdrew from Hill 107 during the night of 20–21 May. We know that the Germans subsequently consolidated around Maleme Airfield, that transport aircraft began bringing in troops of the 5th Mountain Division and that the balance of the battle shifted decisively. We can look down from the hill, trace the ground with a finger and wonder how anybody could possibly have allowed it to happen.

But we possess something Andrew, his company commanders and the men fighting around Maleme did not possess: we know what happened next. That makes Hill 107 a useful place from which to study the Battle of Crete, but also a dangerous one. If we begin the story there, we risk making the loss of the hill the explanation for everything that followed, reducing the battle to a sequence of tactical decisions made during twenty-four confused hours around Maleme.

The more interesting question begins earlier. Why, on the morning of 20 May 1941, had the defence of Crete reached the point where the loss of one small hill and the airfield beneath it could have such enormous consequences? To answer that, we have to leave Maleme and go back several months, and considerably farther away.

An Island Worth Having

Crete mattered because of where it was. The island sat across the eastern Mediterranean between mainland Greece and North Africa. Suda Bay offered the British one of the finest natural anchorages in the region, while Crete could help protect British maritime communications, support operations in the Aegean and potentially provide airfields from which aircraft might operate towards the Balkans.

Its position also made it important to Germany. British aircraft operating from Greece or Crete represented at least a potential threat towards the Balkans and the Romanian oilfields upon which the German war economy depended, while British control of Crete complicated Axis operations across the eastern Mediterranean. Both sides could therefore see the island’s strategic value, but recognising that value was the easy part. Finding the troops, aircraft, guns, vehicles, engineers, communications equipment and shipping required to defend it was considerably more difficult.

Britain was not fighting a war for Crete in isolation. The Middle East Command was responsible for an enormous theatre: there was war in the Western Desert, Malta had to be sustained, East Africa demanded resources, Egypt and the Suez Canal had to be protected, and British forces were increasingly committed to Greece. Every battalion, aircraft and anti-aircraft gun sent to Crete was therefore something that could not be used somewhere else.

This was the contradiction at the heart of the island’s defence. Crete was important enough that Britain was determined not to surrender it without a fight, but for much of the period before May 1941 it was not important enough to receive everything necessary to make that defence secure.

Suda Bay First

British troops arrived on Crete at the beginning of November 1940, shortly after Italy invaded Greece. Their initial purpose is important, because they were not the advance guard of an army preparing to defend the entire island against a German airborne invasion that nobody yet knew would occur. The immediate British requirement was principally to secure Suda Bay as a naval refuelling base, and that shaped the early defences.

The anchorage mattered, as did coast defence and anti-aircraft protection. The conception was initially centred upon protecting the naval base rather than constructing the integrated island defence that would be required six months later. There was time to improve matters, and work was done, but the Middle East was chronically short of resources. Equipment dispatched to Crete had to cross waters increasingly exposed to Axis air attack, and some of it never arrived.

Wavell later acknowledged the problem quite plainly. Crete’s value was understood, but strengthening it substantially would have required troops and material needed for other Middle Eastern commitments. The British therefore did not fail to recognise that Crete mattered; they failed to reconcile its importance with everything else they were trying to do.

Then Came Greece

The Italian invasion of Greece transformed the strategic situation. Greek forces stopped the Italians and drove them back into Albania, leaving Britain with a political and military decision. Supporting Greece offered strategic possibilities and demonstrated that Britain would assist a country resisting Axis aggression, but it also required forces that General Sir Archibald Wavell could ill afford to spare.

Churchill strongly favoured intervention. The decision remains controversial, but whatever judgment is made about the Greek campaign itself, its consequences for Crete are clear. When Germany invaded Greece in April 1941, the British and Commonwealth expeditionary force was forced into a rapid retreat and evacuation, and thousands of British, Australian and New Zealand troops reached Crete.

On paper, the island’s garrison had suddenly become considerably stronger; on the ground, the reality was different. These were not fresh formations arriving according to a carefully prepared reinforcement plan, but men who had just escaped from a defeated campaign. Units had become separated, vehicles and heavy weapons had been abandoned, communications equipment had been lost, and some men arrived without personal weapons. Others belonged to administrative organisations rather than infantry formations.

The difference between men on an island and combat power is considerable. Crete had plenty of the former, while what Freyberg desperately needed was more of the latter.

Three Weeks

Major-General Bernard Freyberg VC arrived to command the defence at the end of April, and the German attack began on 20 May. He therefore inherited the problem rather than created it. That does not place his subsequent decisions beyond criticism, but it matters when judging them. The island had already been occupied by British forces for approximately six months, while Freyberg had about three weeks to organise its defence using the troops and equipment available to him.

The geography dictated much of the problem because there was no single objective. Maleme Airfield had to be protected, as did the Chania–Suda area. Farther east were Rethymno and Heraklion, each with an airfield that could potentially be seized by airborne forces. These positions were separated by substantial distances, something a map can easily conceal.

I have ridden much of this ground. Distances that look modest on paper become rather different when crossed through olive country, village roads, riverbeds and broken terrain. Even on a modern E-MTB, with good tracks and no Stukas overhead, the relationship between the different sectors becomes much clearer once you physically travel between them. In 1941 the problem was considerably worse: transport was inadequate, communications were fragile and German aircraft dominated the daylight sky. Moving substantial bodies of troops after the battle began was therefore neither quick nor straightforward.

Freyberg had to defend several places simultaneously while retaining sufficient strength to react when the German main effort became apparent. That required reserves and mobility, and both were in short supply.

Knowing the Germans Were Coming

There is another reason the Battle of Crete has remained controversial: the British had intelligence. Through the interception and decryption of German signals, British intelligence obtained remarkable information about German intentions. Freyberg knew that an airborne attack was coming and that German plans also contained a seaborne element.

This has sometimes been simplified into an accusation that Freyberg misunderstood the intelligence and expected the Germans primarily to come by sea, but the evidence is more complicated. He clearly anticipated airborne attack; his troops were deployed around the airfields precisely because they were obvious German objectives. At the same time, the threat from the sea could not simply be ignored. German planning did include seaborne reinforcement, and the British could not know in advance exactly how the operation would unfold.

The intelligence itself was also extraordinarily sensitive. Its source had to be protected, restricting how freely it could be distributed and discussed. The problem was therefore not that Freyberg somehow failed to notice that Germany possessed parachutists, but the much more familiar military problem of interpreting intelligence and converting it into dispositions on the ground. Enemy intentions had to be assessed and forces positioned against several possible courses of action, knowing that moving them later might prove extremely difficult.

ULTRA reduced uncertainty; it did not abolish it.

The Battle for the Sky Had Already Been Decided

There was one area in which the situation was much clearer: the Germans controlled the air above Crete. This was not because the RAF had failed to understand the importance of air power. The problem was one of resources, geography and operational circumstance.

The Luftwaffe could operate from airfields in recently occupied mainland Greece, placing Crete within easy reach. German fighters, bombers and reconnaissance aircraft could therefore operate over the island in strength. The RAF faced the opposite problem. Its small force on Crete was subjected to repeated attacks and attrition, reinforcement and maintenance were difficult, and aircraft operating from Egypt had to cover considerable distances simply to reach Crete.

Shortly before the invasion, the remaining serviceable fighters were withdrawn from the island. That decision is sometimes presented as though Britain simply abandoned the skies above Crete, but the reality was harsher. Keeping a handful of increasingly vulnerable aircraft on bombed airfields beneath overwhelming German air power risked losing them without materially changing the balance.

By 20 May the defenders therefore faced an airborne invasion without meaningful local fighter protection. The consequences reached far beyond aircraft fighting aircraft, because German reconnaissance could observe movement, bombers and fighters could attack roads, headquarters, gun positions and communications, and troops moving in daylight risked being caught in the open. The Royal Navy could dominate German surface forces, but would have to operate beneath hostile aircraft.

Air superiority gave the Germans something equally important: freedom to make mistakes and then reinforce whatever success survived them. That would become critical at Maleme.

The Navy Could Stop Ships, Not Aircraft

The Royal Navy represented the reverse side of the problem. At sea, Britain remained formidable, and the German plan included attempts to reinforce Crete by sea. Royal Navy forces intercepted these movements and inflicted serious losses, demonstrating that British naval superiority in the eastern Mediterranean remained very real.

The fleet paid heavily for doing so. Without adequate fighter protection, warships operating close to Crete were exposed to sustained Luftwaffe attack, ships were sunk and damaged, and naval casualties mounted. The result was a strange division of military power: Britain could make the sea extraordinarily dangerous for German troop movements, while Germany could make the sky extraordinarily dangerous for British ships.

Neither fact cancelled the other, and neither solved Freyberg’s problem on the ground.

The Missing Reserve

This brings us back towards Maleme. A defender confronted by several possible enemy landing areas ideally needs enough strength to protect each critical objective while retaining a mobile reserve capable of moving rapidly towards the decisive point. Crete made that extremely difficult.

The Allied forces were distributed between widely separated sectors, much of their transport had been lost in Greece, communications were unreliable and German air superiority restricted movement. There were reserves, but not the sort of powerful, highly mobile operational reserve that could be rapidly concentrated wherever the German attack succeeded.

That distinction would matter enormously because the initial German airborne assault on 20 May was not an effortless victory. Quite the opposite. German paratroopers landed scattered across defended ground, some were killed before reaching their weapons containers, units became disorganised and officers were killed. At Rethymno and Heraklion the defenders inflicted severe losses and prevented the Germans from immediately securing the airfields, while around Maleme the German position was also precarious.

Operation Merkur could have failed. That is what makes the events around Hill 107 so important—not because its loss proves that one New Zealand battalion lost Crete, but because Maleme provided the Germans with something they desperately needed: a way to reinforce success.

Back on Hill 107

Return to the summit and look down again, and the battlefield appears different once the preceding six months are included. Below is Maleme Airfield, across the Tavronitis are the areas into which German airborne troops descended, and eastwards are the New Zealand positions and, beyond them, the road towards Chania and Suda.

Now add what cannot be seen: a Middle East Command attempting to fight several campaigns with insufficient resources; an island whose original British defence had been designed principally around Suda Bay; equipment lost on the journey across the Mediterranean; thousands of troops arriving from Greece exhausted and without much of their equipment; a commander given three weeks to reorganise them; widely separated defensive sectors; inadequate transport; fragile communications; limited reserves; and, above everything, a sky controlled by the enemy.

None of that means the loss of Maleme was inevitable. It was not. German airborne losses on 20 May were extremely heavy, and the assault around Maleme was sufficiently precarious that relatively small differences in Allied decisions, communications or reinforcement might have produced a different result.

But that is precisely the point. A defence already operating close to its limits had very little capacity to absorb mistakes.

Andrew’s Night

Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie Andrew therefore deserves better than to appear merely as the man who abandoned Hill 107. During the night of 20–21 May he was attempting to understand a battlefield from which reliable information was disappearing. Communications with some of his companies had failed, he did not know precisely which positions remained secure, his battalion had been heavily engaged, German troops were around and within the defensive area, and requests for assistance had produced limited results.

We can now reconstruct the German situation from their records, but Andrew could not. We know that some of the German forces were exhausted, scattered and vulnerable; Andrew could not know that either. His withdrawal had enormous consequences, but judging the decision solely by those consequences tells us very little about the conditions under which it was made.

A better question is why the defence of such an important position had reached the stage where a battalion commander, with incomplete communications and an uncertain picture of his own forward companies, could make a decision capable of affecting the entire campaign. That takes us back to everything that happened before 20 May.

Reinforcing Success

Once the Germans consolidated their position around Maleme, the battle began to change. Transport aircraft came in despite Allied artillery fire and despite losses; mountain troops arrived, and weapons and supplies followed. The Germans were converting an uncertain airborne lodgement into a conventional land force.

That was the operational turning point. The crucial difference was no longer simply between German and Allied courage, or even between the tactical performance of individual units, but between their ability to generate combat power at the place that mattered. The Germans could increasingly reinforce Maleme, while the Allies struggled to reinforce it sufficiently to throw them out.

A counter-attack during the night of 21–22 May failed to recover the airfield. With every additional German aircraft that landed, the task became harder and the opportunity to reverse the position narrowed.

Was Crete Already Lost?

No, and the title should not be read literally. Crete was not doomed before the Germans arrived, and the enormous losses suffered by the airborne forces on 20 May demonstrate otherwise. There were moments when the German operation stood close to failure.

What had happened before 20 May was subtler. Britain had created a defence with very little margin for error. The strategic value of Crete had been recognised, but resources were required elsewhere. The intervention in Greece had added thousands of men to the island while simultaneously delivering many of them in a condition that required reorganisation and re-equipment. Air superiority had been surrendered because the RAF lacked the means to contest it locally, while the defenders had to protect several widely separated objectives without adequate mobility or communications.

Then the Germans attacked. When their plan went badly wrong in several places, they were still able to identify the one area where sufficient success had been achieved and concentrate upon it: Maleme. The Allies could not respond with equal speed.

The Ground Corrects the Map

This is why I continue to return to these battlefields by bicycle. The map remains indispensable, and I use the Hellenic Army General Staff maps, wartime maps, official histories and contemporary accounts to reconstruct where units stood and how the battle developed. But the ground adds another dimension.

On an E-MTB, Hill 107, the Tavronitis, Xamoudochori and the surrounding villages can be connected in a morning, yet even with electric assistance, modern tracks and no enemy aircraft overhead, the terrain imposes itself. Ridges interrupt sight lines, riverbeds divide ground that looks continuous on paper, olive groves conceal movement, and short distances become surprisingly complicated. It becomes easier to understand how two units apparently close together could experience very different battles.

It also becomes easier to understand the importance of mobility. A reserve is useful only if it can reach the place where it is required while there is still time for it to matter, and that is as true on Crete as anywhere else.

Before the First Parachute

The Battle of Crete began at approximately eight o’clock on the morning of 20 May 1941, when German aircraft filled the sky over western Crete and the first assault descended around Maleme. The conditions under which that battle would be fought had been forming for much longer.

They had been shaped when Britain first occupied Crete principally to protect Suda Bay, by shortages across the Middle East, by the decision to intervene in Greece and by the subsequent evacuation. They had also been shaped by equipment that never reached the island, by aircraft that could no longer be maintained there, by the distances between Maleme, Rethymno and Heraklion, and by the difficulty of moving troops rapidly once the Luftwaffe controlled the sky.

None of those things predetermined defeat, but together they created a defence in which the consequences of a local setback could become extraordinarily large. That is what happened at Maleme.

Standing on Hill 107 today, the temptation is still to look down at the airfield and say: this is where Crete was lost. I no longer think that is quite right. This is where the consequences became visible; the decisions that made those consequences possible had been taken elsewhere, over many months, long before the first German parachute opened over Crete.

That makes Hill 107 not the beginning of the story, but the place where all the earlier stories finally met.

Sources and Further Reading

Christopher Buckley, Greece and Crete 1941 (HMSO, 1952).

Dan Davin, Crete, Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War 1939–45 (War History Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington, 1953).

I. S. O. Playfair et al., The Mediterranean and Middle East, Volume II: The Germans Come to the Help of Their Ally (1941) (HMSO, 1956).

Charles Cruickshank, Greece 1940–1941 (Davis-Poynter, 1976).

Callum MacDonald, The Lost Battle: Crete 1941 (Macmillan, 1993).

Antony Beevor, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance (John Murray).

General Sir Archibald Wavell, despatch on operations in the Middle East, including Greece and Crete, published in the London Gazette.

Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, narrative of the Battle of Crete, published in the London Gazette.

Air Historical Branch, The Campaign in Crete, May 1941.

Air Historical Branch, Report on RAF Operations in Crete, 17 April–31 May 1941.

Air Historical Branch, translated German document, The Invasion of Crete, Luftflotte 4 report, November 1941.

Hellenic Army General Staff, Battle of Crete histories and battlefield maps.