Introduction
โThe heroic Greek Army โฆ have revived before our eyes the glories which, from the classic age, gild their native land.โโ Winston Churchill, 9 February 1941
I have read countless military histories of the Battle of Crete. Inevitably, many cover the same ground: the German airborne plan, Maleme, Hill 107, the fighting around Galatas, Rethymnon and Heraklion, the withdrawal across the mountains and the evacuation from the south coast. They are necessary histories, and without them much of what follows could not be understood. But I did not want to write another account of the Battle of Crete in which the same battle is simply fought again
What I write here is, of course, in its own way a military history. There are regiments, positions, commanders, attacks and withdrawals, because without them there is no battle to understand. This time, however, I have triedโin my own wayโto add something more. I wanted to look at the battle principally from the Greek side: at an island whose own 5th Cretan Division had already gone away to war; at the Greek regiments assembled on Crete in the wreckage of the mainland campaign; at the cadets, gendarmes and policemen who found themselves fighting an airborne invasion; and at the people who came out of their towns and villages and joined them.
The Battle of Crete was different in many respects. Here an invading army descended from the sky not merely upon military positions but among villages, fields, monasteries and towns. The distinction between battlefield and home became uncertain almost immediately. Greek soldiers fought beside New Zealanders, Australians and British troops, while around them doctors, priests, old men, boys and women became caught up in the battle, sometimes as witnesses, sometimes as helpers and sometimes as combatants themselves.
The official histories tell us where the battalions and regiments stood and what happened to them. The eyewitnesses allow us to come closer: to a doctor walking towards Kastelli with his medical bag and his fatherโs old Mannlicher; to civilians breaking into a weapons store at Heraklion when word came that the parachutists had landed; to local marksmen moving through the familiar tracks of Rodopos; and to a priest setting out towards Kandanos among a gathering of armed villagers.
It is there, between the military history and the people who experienced it, that I have tried to place this story.
An Island Whose Soldiers Had Already Gone
By the middle of May 1941 Crete had endured months of war without yet becoming its principal battlefield. Along the northern side of the island lay the cultivated country through which much of the coming battle would be fought: olives and vines, villages clustered around their churches, monastery walls, dry riverbeds and dusty roads, with low ridges breaking the plain before the land rose towards the White Mountains. It was country in which distance could deceive. A road which appeared straightforward on a map might twist through broken ground and cultivated enclosures; a ridge scarcely noticed from the coast might command the track beneath it; a village might stand astride the easiest passage from one piece of ground to another. The landscape was not merely the setting for what followed. It helped determine how men moved, where they could defend, and where an enemy descending from the sky might find himself isolated almost as soon as his parachute touched the earth.
Yet the army which properly belonged to the island was largely absent. Months earlier, after Italy invaded Greece, the men of the 5th Cretan Division had crossed to the mainland and gone north to the Albanian front, leaving behind the villages from which many of them had been recruited. Then, in April 1941, German forces broke through the Balkans, the mainland campaign collapsed, and the war rolled southwards until Crete became the final substantial Allied position in Greece. The force waiting there was consequently an extraordinary mixture. Major-General Bernard Freyberg commanded Creforce, containing New Zealanders, Australians and British troops, many of them themselves survivors of the retreat from mainland Greece, while alongside them stood approximately 11,500 Greek military personnel: newly organised infantry regiments, depot and garrison troops, gendarmes, reservists and the young cadets of the Hellenic Military Academy.
The Greek formations had not arrived on this battlefield under anything resembling normal circumstances. Some had been assembled hurriedly from training establishments and depots; weapons were unevenly distributed, ammunition was limited and heavier support weapons scarce. Yet to describe these troops principally by what they lacked is to lose sight of the more important questions: where they were placed, what they had been ordered to defend, who commanded them, and what they did when the German airborne army descended among them. The answer runs almost the whole length of the northern battlefield. In the west, the 1st Greek Infantry Regiment held the Kastelli area while the cadets of the Hellenic Military Academy occupied ground around Gonia and Kolymbari on the Rodopos Peninsula. Farther east, Lieutenant-Colonel Howard Kippenbergerโs 10th New Zealand Brigade incorporated the 6th and 8th Greek Infantry Regiments, defending the country from Prison Valley and Galatas southwards towards Agia and Alikianos, while the 2nd Greek Infantry Regiment formed part of the wider ChaniaโSuda defence. At Rethymnon stood the 4th and 5th Greek Infantry Regiments, depot troops and gendarmes; at Heraklion the 3rd and 7th Greek Regiments, the Heraklion Regimental Depot Battalion and other Greek troops formed part of the defensive system around the city and its approaches.
These were not the battalions of an intact 5th Cretan Division waiting at home for an invader. That division had already gone away to fight, and the Greek Army defending Crete in May 1941 had, to a considerable extent, been reconstructed amid national military collapse. On the morning of 20 May the sound of aircraft came across the island. There had been bombing and reconnaissance for weeks, but this was altogether different: bombers and fighters swept across defensive positions and roads, followed by the slower formations of transport aircraft carrying the German airborne force. Then the parachutes began to open, scattered across the sky above airfields, villages, fields, monasteries and olive groves, sometimes drifting down onto precisely the ground from which the defenders were watching them descend. Greek soldiers looked upwards beside New Zealanders, Australians and British troops; gendarmes and policemen watched from the towns; and in the villages men began searching for rifles which had survived earlier wars or government attempts to collect them. The German plan had been conceived as a military operation against an Allied garrison, but almost from the moment the first parachutes touched Cretan soil it began to become something else as well.
Kolymbari and the Cadets
Among the Greek troops waiting in western Crete were nearly three hundred young men whose presence there was itself a consequence of the collapse on the mainland. They were first-year cadets of the Hellenic Military Academy and, as the campaign in Greece came apart, they had repeatedly asked to be sent to fight. When the alternative became remaining in occupied Athens to perform policing duties, they refused. The Academy obtained transport, moved south through the Peloponnese and crossed to Crete by sea, reaching Kolymbari on 29 April. There, under Lieutenant-Colonel Loukas Kitsos, the cadets occupied ground around Gonia Monastery and the Rodopos Peninsula, on the western edge of the larger Maleme battlefield. To the east lay Tavronitis and Maleme; westward the country opened towards Kastelli; behind the coastal strip rose the rougher ground of Rodopos. The Academy was therefore not detached from the main battle but stood upon one of its margins, in country through which German forces might move westwards or turn against the neighbouring Greek positions.
One of those young men was Konstantinos Korkas. I met him without then understanding quite what that meeting represented. In May 2021, during the eightieth-anniversary commemorations of the Battle of Crete, I was present at both Suda Bay War Cemetery and Maleme, and among those attending was Korkas, then one hundred years old. I spoke with him briefly; at the time it was simply an encounter with an elderly Greek veteran at a remembrance ceremony. Only much later, while researching this story, did I understand that the old soldier standing there had been one of the first-year cadets who crossed to Crete in April 1941 and fought around Gonia and Kolymbari on 20 May. Only a month after those commemorations, on 21 June 2021, Korkas gave an oral-history interview to the Istorima Archive, and his testimony takes us behind the formal military account. He remembered the cadets repeatedly asking to fight as the mainland campaign collapsed and their refusal to accept a future performing police duties under occupation. Their journey to Crete was therefore more than a troop movement ordered from above: these young men had deliberately sought a place where they could continue the war.
By 20 May the Academy had been preparing to leave Gonia and disperse its cadets among other Greek formations, and much of its equipment had been collected or put aside. The arrival of the German aircraft made all such arrangements irrelevant. Rifles were issued again and the cadets moved onto the heights around Gonia and Kolymbari while German airborne troops descended across the western battlefield. There they encountered elements of the German Storm Regiment in country which was difficult enough without an enemy dropping into it from above: slopes broken by scrub and cultivation, narrow tracks and folds in the ground where visibility could shorten abruptly and contact between groups disappear. For young men whose military careers had scarcely begun there was no gradual introduction to battle. One moment they were cadets awaiting reassignment; the next they were fighting German paratroopers on the western edge of Maleme.
In Crete 1941 Eyewitnessed, Hadjipateras and Fafalios preserve the recollections of people who experienced the battle at first hand. This brings another element into this same landscape. Local men appeared behind the Greek positions asking to join the defence, and because so many of Creteโs usual fighting men were absent with the 5th Division, those coming forward were not simply another reserve of military-age soldiers; among them were older men and younger people carrying whatever weapons could be found. They possessed, however, something the Germans did not: the Rodopos Peninsula was their country, and the tracks between olive groves, the turns through scrub and dry ground, the folds between one ridge and the next, and the routes which vanished behind a wall or grove before emerging somewhere unexpected were known to men who had lived there all their lives. The eyewitness account describes local marksmen moving through this country around the German positions and helping to relieve pressure upon the Greek defenders.
By evening the cadets were themselves in danger of being trapped, and with ammunition dangerously low Kitsos ordered a withdrawal through the difficult country to the south. Guided by local inhabitants and men of the Kolymbari Gendarmerie, the Academy moved during the night along tracks and through gullies, eventually reaching Deliana the following morning. Korkas remembered not merely the movement but its physical reality: the shortage of ammunition, the thirst and exhaustion, and the steady retreat through an island increasingly penetrated by German forces. In time the cadets joined the wider movement towards the south coast and Sfakia, where the logic of defeat finally overtook them. There was insufficient shipping to evacuate the Academy as a formation and the cadets were dispersed. There is something about Korkasโs testimony which closes the distance between 1941 and the acts of remembrance which still take place on Crete. In 2021 I stood briefly with a man of one hundred at commemorations of a battle fought eighty years before, without knowing that several years later I would be writing about the young cadets at Gonia or that the elderly veteran I had met had once been one of them. In May 1941 Korkas had looked up and seen the German aircraft approaching; eight decades later he had returned to the ground on which that battle was remembered.
Kastelli
Farther west, the 1st Greek Infantry Regiment, commanded by Colonel I. P. Papadimitropoulos, held the Kastelli Kissamou sector. Here the country opened into the broad plain around Kastelli, enclosed by hills and sea, with the town at its northern edge and routes running eastwards towards Maleme and southwards into the interior. Papadimitropoulos commanded two battalions and a machine-gun company, with his command post on the high ground south of Kastelli. One battalion guarded the eastern entrance to the valley, the other the western approach and the Mesogeia valley, and together they had a clear task: to protect the Maleme sector from the west and prevent an airborne or seaborne landing from creating another German foothold along the coast.
At about eight on the morning of 20 May roughly seventy German parachutists with heavy weapons descended some three kilometres east of the Greek positions. They belonged to a detachment of the German Storm Regiment under Lieutenant Mรผrbe, and after assembling they moved against the eastern Greek battalion. Papadimitropoulos committed his reserve while another Greek company worked around the German position by tracks to the south before turning north and attacking from behind. Armed Cretan civilians entered the fight as well, and the German detachment, caught between opposing groups, was destroyed as an organised force. The Greeks captured a 57mm gun, mortars, sub-machine guns, anti-aircraft weapons, a radio and ammunition, some of which passed almost immediately into the hands of the civilians fighting beside them.
It is into this precisely defined military action that Theocharis Mylonakis walked. Mylonakis was a doctor from Herethiana, about seven kilometres southeast of the Kastelli plain, who had only recently returned from the Albanian front by making his way back along the Peloponnese coast in a small boat. After reporting to military headquarters at Chania he had been posted as a reserve assistant surgeon with the Greek force in the Kastelli area. On the morning of the invasion he saw the aircraft and the parachutes opening above the plain. His sixty-year-old father possessed a long Mannlicher rifle which he had concealed rather than surrender during an earlier government requisition of weapons, and the older man intended to go out and fight himself. Mylonakis persuaded him to hand over the rifle and then set off towards Kastelli carrying his medical bag, the Mannlicher and twenty or twenty-five cartridges, uncertain whether all of them would even fire.
Coming down towards the plain he encountered villagers from Potamida and Kaloudiana and two soldiers from the Greek force, and soon they were among the olive trees firing at the newly landed Germans. Other civilians appeared from different directions; more soldiers joined them and British troops were also involved. One civilian, Costis Xanthoudakis, found a German machine gun and, according to Mylonakis, learned how to operate it there on the battlefield, so that in one of the stranger reversals of the day the airborne assault itself began to provide weapons to some of those resisting it. Yet there is another moment in Mylonakisโs account which deserves to remain because it prevents the civilian struggle from becoming a simple tale of vengeance. When the immediate fighting had subsided, Greek and German wounded were taken to Kastelli Primary School and Mylonakis treated both. Among the Germans was a man he had himself shot through the thigh; when another man prepared to kill the wounded prisoner, Mylonakis stopped him. In a campaign soon to become associated with savage violence between occupier and civilian, that small act belongs to the record too.
Papadimitropoulosโs regiment continued to hold the Kastelli area after the first day while German aircraft bombed and strafed the position and the battle around Maleme grew steadily in importance. Kastelli remained a danger on the German western flank, for so long as an organised Greek force survived there the enemy could not simply forget the country behind him. Eventually ammunition and increasing German pressure made organised resistance impossible; men were captured, others dispersed and some made their way into the interior. But the fighting around Kastelli had never been peripheral. Geography had placed it on the western edge of the Maleme battlefield, and geography ensured that what happened there mattered.
Alikianos and the Southern Ground
South of the coast the land begins gradually to change. The flatter country around Chania gives way to orchards, vineyards and olive groves, then to low ridges and valleys before rising more sharply towards the White Mountains. Roads from Chania pass through Agia and Alikianos and continue towards Fournes and the interior, and what can now appear a quiet sequence of villages among cultivated ground formed in May 1941 the southern edge of the ChaniaโSuda battlefield. The responsibility for much of this country belonged to Lieutenant-Colonel Panagiotis Karkoulas, commanding the 8th Greek Infantry Regiment, the southern group of Kippenbergerโs 10th New Zealand Brigade. The regiment was physically separated from other parts of the brigade and occupied not a single continuous line but a scattered series of positions imposed upon the shape of the country itself.
Karkoulas established his command post in the church at Agia, from where his companies were spread across the southern approaches: one held Agia itself, another guarded the bridge at Alikianos, a third occupied Hill 145 and a fourth stood on the higher ground southeast of Agios Georgios. It was a defensive system of villages, road junctions, river crossings and dominating pieces of ground connected by tracks and by the assumption that each position could help sustain the others. Armed civilian groups were already present in Alikianos and the neighbouring villages when the German Parachute Engineer Battalion descended close to Karkoulasโs positions. On 20 May German engineers attacked towards Alikianos and Agia, seeking to open movement through the southern country, but at the bridge Greek troops and armed villagers stopped them short, while another German company moving against the hydroelectric installation at Agia was repulsed and attacks towards the surrounding heights were also checked.
During the afternoon came one of those accidents peculiar to airborne warfare. German transport aircraft dropped containers of weapons and ammunition intended for their own troops, but the containers fell instead among the positions of the 8th Greek Regiment, allowing men who had previously lacked adequate arms to equip themselves from German supplies. The aircraft which had come to sustain the airborne force had, briefly and inadvertently, helped arm those resisting it. The Germans failed to clear the AgiaโAlikianos position on the first day, and Karkoulasโs men, assisted by New Zealand instructors and armed Cretans, remained in place while the larger battle developed farther north around Maleme. Local civilians continued to cooperate with the regiment, and the fighting spread through Alikianos and the neighbouring villages.
For several days the position endured while food and ammunition diminished, German aircraft returned repeatedly and the ground pressure increased. What had begun as an isolated Greek position became more isolated still as events elsewhere turned against Creforce, until by 25 May, after renewed air attack and persistent German probing, Karkoulasโs force was close to exhaustion. During the night the regiment withdrew southwards through the country towards Fournes and Theriso, and on 27 May the remnants reached Drakona after several days of fighting and movement. There the 8th Regiment effectively ceased to exist as an organised formation. Most of its men dispersed; Karkoulas, with a reduced group of officers and other ranks, later surrendered at Chania. Yet the ground they had held was not remote from the main Battle of Crete. Agia and Alikianos lay upon the southern flank of the ChaniaโSuda defence, where German movement through the interior might have turned the Allied position, and for several critical days that route had remained contested.
Prison Valley, Galatas and Chania
North of Karkoulasโs regiment stood another Greek formation within Kippenbergerโs 10th New Zealand Brigade: the 6th Greek Infantry Regiment, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel M. Grigoriou. Its positions ran through some of the most heavily contested country south of Galatas, from the approaches around Dampia, through Galatas cemetery and Potisteria, towards Annibali Tower. Ammunition had arrived only shortly before the invasion and had not yet been fully distributed when elements of the German 3rd Parachute Regiment began landing in and behind the Greek positions. Here was the peculiar violence of airborne warfare in its most concentrated form: the enemy did not necessarily advance from the direction in which the defenders were facing but could appear behind a company, beside a command post or in the gap between neighbouring units, so that within minutes the geography of a carefully prepared defensive position could become almost meaningless.
The 6th Regiment was struck from several directions and severely disrupted. Companies lost contact, men were forced back and portions of the regiment ceased to function as coherent sub-units; by midday the original regimental structure had largely broken apart. Yet the men themselves had not stopped fighting. Groups of dispersed Greek soldiers were collected by officers, British liaison personnel and members of Kippenbergerโs staff, hundreds gathering around Galatas and near neighbouring New Zealand positions, and during the afternoon Greek troops moved forward again towards Dampia and Galatas cemetery, recovering ground from which they had been driven earlier in the day. Among the British officers associated with rallying Greek soldiers was Captain Michael Forrester, while Cretan civilians also entered the fighting, so that around Galatas the formal divisions between Greek regiment, Allied troops and local population became increasingly difficult to see on the ground.
The importance of this sequence lies partly in what it tells us about Grigoriouโs regiment. To say merely that the 6th Greek Regiment broke on 20 May is true but incomplete. Its regimental structure had indeed been shattered by parachutists landing around and behind it, but within hours many of the same soldiers had been gathered and were moving towards the Germans again. The battlefield around Galatas and Prison Valley became a confused landscape of villages, cemeteries, roads, cultivated enclosures and low ridges in which positions changed hands and groups of men fought with whatever organisation remained available to them.
Farther east, the 2nd Greek Infantry Regiment, itself seriously short of rifles and ammunition, formed part of the wider ChaniaโSuda defensive system and remained involved as the Allied command arrangements were reorganised, later fighting within a force under Brigadier George Vasey alongside Australian troops. Seen together, these deployments give the Greek position a coherence easily lost when the regiments are treated separately: Karkoulasโs 8th held the southern country around Alikianos and Agia, Grigoriouโs 6th stood immediately north around Galatas and Prison Valley, and the 2nd Regiment contributed to the positions nearer Chania and Suda. They formed part of the southern and western shield around the principal Allied base.
Maleme, however, had changed the battle. Once the Germans secured the airfield sufficiently to bring in mountain troops and heavier equipment, their strength increased while that of the defenders diminished, and the fighting moved inexorably eastwards towards Galatas, Chania and Suda. From that point the Allied troops were no longer fighting to restore the position of 20 May but to prevent the western front from collapsing altogether, and the villages and ridges which had been individual defensive localities on the first day became stages in a retreat that was slowly gathering momentum.
Rethymnon
At Rethymnon the battle assumed a different shape. Here the northern coastal plain is narrower, pressed between the sea and the rising country to the south, and east of the old town the ground opens towards Perivolia, Platanes and the airfield through olive groves, villages, ridges and dry watercourses. The defensive positions occupied this entire strip and Greek and Australian troops were interwoven through it. Rethymnon town itself was defended principally by Greek forces under Colonel Stamatios Pothoulakis, commander of Military District II, whose Regimental Depot Battalion and gendarmes occupied positions in and around the town, including Perivolia and Atsipopoulo. Eastward lay the airfield sector under Australian Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Campbell, where the Australian 2/1st and 2/11th Battalions stood alongside the 4th Greek Infantry Regiment under Colonel M. Trifon and the 5th Greek Infantry Regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel I. Servos.
Trifonโs 4th Regiment occupied ground between and south of the Australian positions around the airfield, while Servosโs 5th stood farther south in reserve around Adele, Pigi and Agios Dimitrios. These dispositions were not neat lines drawn across empty country but ran through an inhabited landscape. Perivolia, Platanes, Stavromenos, Adele and Pigi were villages in which people lived and worked, joined by roads and tracks that suddenly acquired military significance because they connected one defensive locality with another. During the afternoon of 20 May German parachutists descended across this entire system, some landing directly among Greek and Australian positions while others were scattered across olive groves and broken ground and had to fight simply to assemble.
The Greek troops did not remain confined to their original positions. On 21 May detachments of Servosโs 5th Regiment moved towards Platanes and Stavromenos, clearing ground and attacking German groups while Australian troops counterattacked elsewhere around the airfield; Trifonโs 4th Regiment fought south of the airfield and cooperated with Australian patrols against scattered parachutists. The fighting therefore moved through the landscape rather than remaining fixed around the initial landing grounds, Greek and Australian soldiers advancing and withdrawing through the same villages and olive country against German units which themselves were often fragmented by the nature of their descent.
This is why it is unsatisfactory to describe Rethymnon simply as an Australian battle in which Greek troops were also present. It was, in a meaningful sense, a Greek-Australian battle. Campbellโs Australians held key positions around the airfield; Trifonโs Greeks occupied the ground between and behind parts of that system; Servosโs regiment provided depth and then moved forward offensively; and Pothoulakisโs depot troops and gendarmes defended Rethymnon itself. For several days the German airborne force failed to secure what it had been sent to take, yet the local success concealed the growing disaster farther west, where Maleme had been lost, German reinforcements were arriving and Chania and Suda were becoming untenable.At Rethymnon the fighting continued because the order to evacuate never reached the sector in time. The men around the airfield therefore fought on without knowing that the larger battle had moved beyond them, and only on 29 May did the Greek commanders learn that the western position had collapsed and German ground forces were approaching from Chania. Servos withdrew the 5th Regiment towards Arkadi, where it dispersed; Cretan soldiers could make for villages and families, while mainland Greeks, far from home, faced a much more difficult future. Trifonโs 4th Regiment, containing a larger proportion of mainland soldiers, moved towards Adele and surrender. Their battle had not ended because they had been defeated in their own sector. It ended because the battle around them had disappeared.
Heraklion
At Heraklion the defensive picture changed again. The city stood behind its old walls with the harbour to the north and the airfield stretching eastwards along the coast, while roads ran south through Mastampas towards Knossos and the interior and westward through Therisos towards the Giophyro River. The defence therefore had to protect not merely an airfield but a city, harbour and network of approaches. The overall Allied commander was Brigadier Brian Chappel, commanding the British 14th Infantry Brigade from his headquarters at Nea Alikarnassos, while the Greek forces came under Colonel Charalampos Papathanasopoulos, commander of Military District III.
The western part of this defensive system was largely Greek. Major Demetrios Kasimates commanded the Heraklion Regimental Depot Battalion, whose men occupied positions around the western walls extending towards the Giophyro River and Therisos. Behind and around them stood the 7th Greek Infantry Regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel Euangelos Chairetes, most of it positioned near Therisos as reserve while two companies were detached farther east towards Kakon Oros. South of Therisos stood the 3rd Greek Infantry Regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel A. Beteinakes, with its command post at Mastampas and its troops covering the southern approaches between the roads towards Knossos and Phoinikia. Thus a broad Greek defensive arc guarded the western and southern side of Heraklion while British and Australian formations concentrated more heavily upon the airfield.
Against this system came German airborne forces under Colonel Bruno Brรคuer, and during the afternoon of 20 May the transports appeared over Heraklion and parachutists began descending across the approaches to the city and the airfield. It is within this military framework that the testimony of Christos Bantouvas takes its place. Bantouvas remembered standing in Agia Ekaterini Square when news arrived that parachutists had landed outside Chaniporta. He and others ran towards a warehouse where weapons were stored, broke open the door and armed themselves. The battle had not arrived somewhere beyond the city: it was at its gates, among streets, houses and familiar roads which now formed part of the same defensive ground occupied by Kasimates, Chairetes and Beteinakes.
Bantouvas remembered three overlapping elements in the defenceโthe military, the police and the civiliansโand people came from surrounding villages as the fighting developed. Women carried food and water to those engaged, while testimony elsewhere in eastern Crete records women carrying ammunition and, in some cases, weapons. This was not an organised civilian army but a population entering a battle which had suddenly been placed among it, and the official military record fits remarkably closely around the eyewitness account. Beteinakesโs command post at Mastampas became surrounded; previously unarmed reservists in the city were issued weapons from a depot and moved towards the threatened position; Papathanasopoulos himself became caught in the fighting there before the encirclement was relieved. Meanwhile Kasimatesโs depot troops and Chairetesโs 7th Regiment stood between German forces and Heraklion itself, while Greek troops, police, gendarmes and armed civilians continued operating against isolated German groups over the following days.
The German airborne assault failed to capture Heraklion airfield, but success at Heraklion could not undo the loss of Maleme. Once German reinforcements were established in western Crete and Chania and Suda had collapsed, the fate of the eastern sectors became increasingly detached from their own tactical performance. British and Commonwealth troops at Heraklion could eventually be taken off by sea, although the evacuation itself would be costly; for most of the Greeks there could be no comparable departure, because their country was already occupied and Crete itself was being overrun. The Commonwealth formations could leave the battlefield. For the Greeks, the battlefield was home.
When the Island Joined the Battle
It is tempting to treat civilian resistance as a separate episode, something which followed the military battle or existed alongside it, but the evidence will not allow such a division. Civilians were present almost from the beginning: at Rodopos local marksmen appeared behind Greek positions; at Kastelli armed villagers joined Papadimitropoulosโs regiment against the German landing; at Alikianos local men fought beside Karkoulasโs 8th Regiment; around Galatas civilians appeared among Greek troops returning to the fight; and at Heraklion Bantouvas remembered military, police and civilians fighting at the same time. Their participation was not uniform and it was not centrally directed, but the phenomenon itself is beyond dispute.
One reason for its unusual character lay in the absence of the 5th Cretan Division. Many of Creteโs trained military-age men were far away, and those who came forward in May therefore included people who would not normally have belonged to any field formation at all. Their weapons reflected the same improvisation: old service rifles, hunting guns, weapons hidden from earlier requisitions and German arms recovered during the fighting, together with whatever else lay at hand. What united these disparate people was not military organisation but place. The enemy had not appeared beyond the horizon or on some distant frontier; he was descending into fields which people worked, onto roads they travelled, beside monasteries and villages they had known all their lives.
The testimony of Father Stylianos Frantzesakis, preserved in Crete 1941 Eyewitnessed, brings this aspect of the battle especially close. Frantzesakis had been a priest for only five years when news came that German parachutists were descending. He took his uncleโs rifle, went to the church and rang the bell, and armed men began to gather. People from across Selino moved towards Anovo-Floria and Messavlia as the threat developed towards Kandanos, their numbers increasing as they went, until by evening they were still moving along the roads and tracks into the darkness. Among them walked a boy of perhaps sixteen or seventeen carrying an old Turkish sword nearly a metre long. It was an awkward weapon for a boy on foot, tied to his belt with a piece of rope so that the point scraped along the road behind him, and when Frantzesakis asked where he thought he was going, the answer reduced the great events of the day to something intensely local and human. The boyโs father was dead. His mother had given him the sword and sent him with the others.
There is no need to turn the incident into anything more than it was, for its power lies precisely in the smallness of its details: an old sword, a piece of rope, a village road, a boy and a mother who had decided that he should go. The German airborne assault had been conceived with all the machinery of modern warโtransport aircraft, gliders, bombers, automatic weapons, signals, carefully trained parachute troops and an elaborate operational planโyet on the ground beneath it a boy was walking towards the fighting with a weapon from another age dragging behind him.
Defeat and Continuation
By the final days of May the outcome was no longer seriously in doubt. The loss of Maleme had given the Germans the foothold they needed, and through it came reinforcements, mountain troops and heavier weapons while the western Allied position contracted eastwards until Chania and Suda could no longer be held. Then began the withdrawal across the mountains towards Sfakia. For the British and Commonwealth troops there remained at least the possibility of evacuation by sea; for the Greek formations defeat took many different forms. Karkoulasโs 8th Regiment disappeared as an organised formation after its withdrawal through Fournes, Theriso and Drakona, Servos took the 5th Regiment towards Arkadi and dispersed it, Trifonโs 4th Regiment moved towards Adele, and other Greek soldiers joined the retreat southwards. Some reached Sfakia and a small number escaped from the island, but most did not.
Cretan soldiers possessed one advantage unavailable to many of the mainland Greeks: they could leave their formations and move towards villages where family, friends and knowledge of the country offered some possibility of concealment. Mainland soldiers had no such natural refuge. Some were hidden by Cretan families; others became prisoners. The formal battle ended, but the distinction between military and civilian life which had begun to disappear on 20 May was not restored with it. Civilian participation in the fighting had consequences under occupation, and reprisals came quickly and brutally. In the months and years which followed, civilians concealed stranded Allied servicemen, carried food and messages, hid weapons and guided men through the mountain country; escape routes developed, Allied agents returned, and resistance organisations emerged in an island where the occupation had begun in violence.
The Battle of Crete was nevertheless a military defeat, and there is no reason to disguise it. Greek courage did not prevent the loss of the island any more than New Zealand, Australian or British courage did, but defeat and ineffectiveness are not the same thing. The Greek forces of May 1941 had been assembled amid the wreckage of a national campaign while Creteโs established division remained far away. Some units possessed too few rifles, almost all lacked equipment expected of modern infantry, and none could expect protection from an effective Greek air force. Yet the detail of their positions tells its own story. Papadimitropoulos guarded Kastelli and the western approach towards Maleme; Kitsos and his cadets stood on the Rodopos ground around Gonia and Kolymbari; Grigoriouโs 6th Regiment fought around Dampia, Galatas cemetery, Potisteria and Annibali Tower; Karkoulasโs 8th held Agia, the Alikianos bridge, Hill 145 and the heights near Agios Georgios. At Rethymnon, Trifonโs 4th Regiment occupied ground within the Australian defensive system while Servosโs 5th stood in depth around Adele, Pigi and Agios Dimitrios; at Heraklion, Kasimates, Chairetes and Beteinakes defended the approaches running from the western walls and Giophyro through Therisos to Mastampas and the southern roads. Those names and places matter because they put the Greek Army back onto the battlefield.
But around those military positions stood another Crete. A doctor came down from Herethiana carrying his medical bag, his fatherโs Mannlicher and a pocketful of doubtful cartridges, and later treated the German he had himself shot; local marksmen moved through the familiar country of Rodopos; villagers at Alikianos fought beside Karkoulasโs regiment and armed themselves from German supply containers; in Heraklion civilians broke open a warehouse for weapons while soldiers, gendarmes and police fought around them; at Gonia a young Konstantinos Korkas took up his rifle with the other cadets and moved towards the heights; and in Selino a priest rang his church bell and watched armed men gather.
As darkness came, among those setting out towards the fighting was a fatherless boy with an old Turkish sword tied awkwardly to his belt, its point dragging along the road behind him.
Perhaps, in the end, there is no better image of Greek courage in the Battle of Crete. The weapon was hopelessly unequal to the war descending upon the island, and the boy must have known little of what waited along the road ahead. But his father was dead, his mother had given him the sword, and when the others went towards the fighting, he went with them.
โThe Greeks and Cretans โฆ fought with the utmost bravery and suffered so heavily.โโ Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 10 June 1941
Bibliography
Hellenic Army General Staff, Army History Directorate. The Battle of Crete: May 1941. Athens: Hellenic Army General Staff, Army History Directorate, 2000.
The principal Greek military source for this account, including the command structure, organisation, deployment and operations of the Greek formations; the fighting in the western sector, Rethymnon and Heraklion; the Military Academy cadets; Greek militia; and the wider conduct of the campaign.
Hadjipateras, Costas N., and Maria S. Fafalios. Crete 1941 Eyewitnessed. Foreword by C. M. Woodhouse. Anixi Attikis: Efstathiadis Group, 1989.
An anthology of eyewitness recollections and contemporary material relating to the battle, used here particularly for the accounts of Theocharis Mylonakis, Christos Bantouvas, Father Stylianos Frantzesakis and local participation around the Rodopos Peninsula. The recollections describe events experienced during the battle but were not necessarily recorded contemporaneously in 1941.
Korkas, Konstantinos. Oral-history interview. Istorima Archive, 21 June 2021.
First-hand retrospective testimony concerning the Hellenic Military Academy cadets, their decision to continue the war, their journey to Crete, the German attack of 20 May 1941 and their subsequent withdrawal.
Berdeklis, Georgios P. ฮฮฝฮฑฮผฮฝฮฎฯฮตฮนฯ ฮตฮฝฯฯ ฮฯ ฮญฮปฯฮนฮดฮฟฯ (1940โ1944) [Memories of a Cadet (1940โ1944)].
A cadetโs recollections covering the period of the Battle of Crete and the experience of the Hellenic Military Academy.
Finokaliotis, Georgios. โฮฮฌฯฮท ฯฮทฯ ฮฯฮฎฯฮทฯ: ฮ ฮฃฯฯฮฑฯฮนฯฯฮนฮบฮฎ ฮฃฯฮฟฮปฮฎ ฮฯ ฮตฮปฯฮฏฮดฯฮฝ ฯฮทฮฝ 20ฮท ฮฮฑฮฮฟฯ 1941โ [โBattle of Crete: The Hellenic Military Academy on 20 May 1941โ]. Haniotika Nea, 23 May 2022.
Used in conjunction with the Academy and Korkas material for the cadetsโ movements and fighting in western Crete.
Hellenic Military Academy. Historical account of the Hellenic Military Academy and its cadets during the Battle of Crete, May 1941.
Used for the Academyโs movement to Crete, its deployment around Kolymbari and Gonia Monastery, and the fighting of 20 May.
Churchill, Winston S. โGive Us the Tools.โ Broadcast address, London, 9 February 1941.
Used for Churchillโs contemporary description of the โheroic Greek Armyโ and his tribute to the Greek resistance to the Axis invasion. The quotation provides the opening epigraph to this account.
Churchill, Winston S. โDefence of Crete.โ Statement to the House of Commons, 10 June 1941. Hansard, House of Commons Debates.
Churchillโs parliamentary statement following the fall of Crete, including his contemporary tribute to โthe Greeks and Cretans, who fought with the utmost bravery and suffered so heavily.โ Used for the closing epigraph.
Davin, Daniel M. Crete. Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War 1939โ45. Wellington: Historical Publications Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, 1953.
Used particularly for the western battlefield, including Maleme, Prison Valley, Galatas and Alikianos, and for the relationship between Greek and New Zealand formations.
Long, Gavin. Greece, Crete and Syria. Australia in the War of 1939โ1945, Series 1โArmy, Volume II. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1953.
Used particularly for Australian operations and the combined Greek-Australian defence of Rethymnon.
Playfair, I. S. O., G. M. S. Stitt, C. J. C. Molony and S. E. Toomer. The Mediterranean and Middle East, Volume II: The Germans Come to the Help of Their Ally (1941). History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Military Series. London: HMSO, 1956.
Used for the wider strategic and operational context of the campaign.
Buckley, Christopher. Greece and Crete 1941. London: HMSO, 1952.
Used as a British historical study of the campaigns in Greece and Crete.
Stewart, I. M. D. G. The Struggle for Crete: A Story of Lost Opportunity. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Used for the wider operational history and subsequent analysis of the campaign.