Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [72]
On May 20, three weeks after Greece was occupied, Gen. Kurt Student’s Luftwaffe paratroops began landing on Crete—to face slaughter at the hands of forty thousand British defenders commanded by Maj. Gen. Bernard Freyberg. Thanks to Ultra, the entire German plan, and even its timings, was known to the British. On the first day, the battle appeared a disaster for the Germans. New Zealand infantrymen, perhaps the finest Allied fighting soldiers of the Second World War, dominated the struggle to hold the island’s key airfields. But that evening, a fatal mistake was made. Defenders withdrew from Máleme airfield to reorganise for a counterattack the next day. On the afternoon of May 21, a fresh battalion of German mountain troops crash-landed at Máleme in Junkers transports. Once they secured the airfield, reinforcements poured in. Freyberg’s force began to withdraw eastwards. The Royal Navy inflicted heavy loss on the German amphibious landings, but itself suffered gravely. “We hold our breath246 over Crete,” wrote Vere Hodgson on May 25. “I feel Churchill is doing the same. He did not seem to mind evacuation of Greece, but he will take the loss of Crete very hard.”
As the Germans strengthened their grip on the island and Freyberg received Wavell’s consent to evacuate, the Luftwaffe pounded the British fleet. Two battleships, an aircraft carrier and many lesser vessels were damaged, four cruisers and six destroyers sunk. Crete became the costliest single British naval campaign of the Second World War. On shore, the defenders lost 2,000 men killed and 12,000 taken prisoner. Some 18,000 were rescued and carried to Egypt by the navy. Freyberg persuaded Churchill to assert in his postwar memoirs that the campaign had cost the Germans 15,000 casualties. The true figure, well known by that time, was 6,000, including 2,000 dead. Some 17,500 German invaders had defeated a British force more than twice as numerous. By June 1, it was all over.
Strategically, the fall of Crete was a much less serious matter for the British than would have been the loss of Malta. Admiral Cunningham believed that, if the island had been held, the British would have paid a heavy price for continuing to supply it, in the face of overwhelming German air superiority. It was Hitler’s mistake to allow Student to deploy his parachute division against Freyberg’s garrison, rather than commit the Fallschirmjäger against Malta, Britain’s key Mediterranean island, which the Germans could probably have taken. But Churchill had promised the British people, and the world, that Crete would be staunchly defended. Its loss was a heavy blow to his authority, and even more to his faith in the fighting power of the British Army. Thoughtful civilians, too, perceived the limitations of their own forces. “The difference between the capability247 of the B[ritish] Army when dealing with the Italians and with the Germans is surely too plain to be missed,” Elizabeth Belsey, a Communist living in Huntingdonshire who was deeply cynical about her nation’s rulers, wrote to her army officer husband. “One can detect here and there, especially in Churchill’s speeches, hints that Britain realises the stickiness of her position.”
The prime minister was driven to offer threadbare explanations for the Mediterranean disaster, telling the House of Commons on June 10, “A very great number of the guns which might have usefully been employed in Crete have been, and are being, mounted in merchant vessels to beat off the attacks of the Focke Wulf and Heinkel aircraft, whose