Natural Born Heroes

CHAPTER 6

Until now, we would say that the Greeks fight like heroes. From now on, we will say that heroes fight like Greeks.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL, 1941

SECRETLY, HITLER was dealing with a problem of his own. He was about to risk everything on Operation Barbarossa, his master plan to conquer the Soviet Union. If he miscalculated, Germany was doomed. But if Hitler played it right and brought the Russian Bear to its knees, no power on earth could defy him.

Once Germany grabbed control of Russia’s oil fields, plus all those Soviet farms, tanks, and Red Army soldiers, the Third Reich would have the biggest, fastest, best-equipped fighting force the world had ever seen. Ponder that, America. Franklin D. Roosevelt would have to gulp hard before coming to Britain’s aid. Hitler didn’t necessarily intend to invade the United States—he’d be content for the present with all of continental Europe—but if pushed, he could make life in the United States very ugly, very fast. South American friends were standing by; Brazil and Argentina were already pro-fascist, and bringing Mexico on board was just a matter of promising the return of California, New Mexico, and Arizona and the easing of America’s economic bootheel. The Imperial Japanese Navy and German U-boats would strangle American shipping, while Germany’s long-range Amerika Bombers, still in demo but coming along nicely, could unload a firestorm on Washington, D.C., and make it all the way back to Munich without refueling.

But Hitler had to move fast. Russia, as Napoleon learned the hard way, is a mousetrap that opens only briefly each summer before snapping shut on your neck. In 1812, Napoleon marched into Russia with nearly a half-million soldiers and most of Europe under his command; he came home with ten thousand skeletal survivors and soon lost his own country. Russia is too vast, too cold, and too populated with fighting men to risk the slightest miscalculation. If you’re lucky, you have a four-month window: you have to get in as soon as the snows thaw in early spring, and be in control before rasputitsa, autumn’s quagmire season. Once the rasputitsa rains start falling, Russian roads dissolve into wheel-sucking mud swamps. Bullets didn’t defeat Napoleon; he was doomed the moment the mousetrap snapped and his foundering soldiers began dying from frostbite, exhaustion, and starvation.

Hitler knew the risks but liked his odds. Germany had the best army in Europe, while Stalin had done a spectacular job of turning the Red Army into possibly the worst. Stalin was always fretting that any general good enough to defend the country was also good enough to seize it, so he kept executing the best Russian officers and replacing them with lackeys. The troops under their command were often poor peasants who’d never touched a rifle in their lives. Field weapons were scarce and outdated, and the units lucky enough to have functioning artillery lacked enough shells for target practice.

So on November 13, late at night and all alone, Hitler made his decision. It was time to become invincible. It stung him that England was still standing after four months of hellacious bombing, but no matter; he could circle back later for the kill. “The German armed forces must be prepared, even before the end of the war against England, to overthrow the Soviet Union in a rapid campaign,” Hitler told his generals. He chose the name Barbarossa—“Red Beard”—after the swashbuckling German emperor of the twelfth century who, legend had it, was still asleep in a Bavarian cave, attended by ravens and awaiting the call to restore Germany to its ancestral glory.

Barbarossa would be unleashed, Hitler decided, on May 15, 1941. By Christmas, swastikas would be flying over London and Moscow. America wouldn’t even have a chance to react. The war would be over. It was foolproof.

STEP #1: CONQUER CRETE

“Mastery of the eastern Mediterranean was dependent upon Crete,” said General Franz Halder, one of Hitler’s top strategists. As Greece’s largest island, Crete was the perfect staging area for Germany’s eastern push. But that left Hitler in a jam, because Mussolini had already gone behind the Führer’s back and tried grabbing Greece on his own. “If there’s any trouble beating the Greeks,” Mussolini had boasted, “I’ll resign from being an Italian.” Greece will be ours by December, Mussolini assured Hitler. Consider it a Christmas present.

Instead, it turned into a bloodbath.

Greek civilians raced into the mountains to join frontline troops, and together they managed to bottle up the Italians in the narrow passes. From across the sea, Crete sent the mountain men of its 5th Division. The Cretans could live off the land, skitter by night across cliff fronts, and kill as easily with a knife as they could with a gun. Instead of steamrolling to victory, the Italians found themselves struggling to hold their ground as Cretan phantoms picked them off from the crags. Dressed in rags, carrying their rifles across their shoulders like shepherd’s crooks, joking and cheerful despite the snow and deadly cold, the Cretans were soon spearheading the Greek attack. In one battle, a Cretan regiment was outnumbered ten to one and still chased back an entire Italian division.

Watching this unfold from afar, Hitler was aghast. Attacking Greece through the mountains, in the middle of the rainy season? With winter on the way? If mud didn’t stop the Italians, just wait for the snow. Right when the Third Reich was awing the world with its might, Hitler fumed, Mussolini’s bungling “struck a blow at the belief in our invincibility.” Christmas came and went, and instead of marching into Athens, the Italians were retreating into Albania. Germany would now have to step in and clean up this mess, if only to save face and avenge the disgrace.

Hitler took his time. He wasn’t going to repeat Mussolini’s mistake and monkey around with the weather. He left the Greeks and Italians snowbound in the mountains through the worst winter in a half-century. He didn’t even bother trying to stop British troops from coming to Greece’s aid. He waited till the weather warmed, on April 6, and then he gave Russia a look at its future.

“When it comes to hundreds of dive bombers at you and you can’t hit back at the swine, by god it’s nerving dear,” one Australian corporal wrote from Greece to his wife after the German invasion. “It makes the strongest man feel helpless as a baby.” German armored vehicles smashed through the mountain passes, while Luftwaffe planes machine-gunned and carpet-bombed anything that moved. The Greeks dug in courageously—so courageously, in fact, that after one garrison finally ran out of ammunition, the Germans spontaneously stood and saluted—but the long winter’s war had left them exhausted. The Greeks were soon forced to surrender, while some fifty thousand British Commonwealth troops scrambled aboard ships to escape to Crete, throwing aside their heavy weapons as they had at Dunkirk.

In just twenty-four days, Hitler mopped up Greece and captured Yugoslavia at the same time. Now for the finale: Crete.

This would take some finesse. Thanks to Mussolini’s bungling, the whole Greek adventure had put Operation Barbarossa behind schedule, but storming straight into Crete could be trouble. If Hitler invaded with a big ground force, he’d tie up troops that were already supposed to be on their way to Russia. But if he went in shorthanded, those mountain men could cause him the same headaches they’d just given Mussolini. Hitler assembled his generals and spelled out his dilemma.

That’s no dilemma, argued General Kurt Student, commander of the elite XI Air Corps. That’s the opportunity of a lifetime.

Of Student’s lifetime, at least. Student had grown up poor and clawed his way up through the ranks by taking jobs that were supposed to kill him. He started as a trench fighter in World War I, then was trained to fly and volunteered for dead man’s duty as a dogfight pilot over the Russian front. He became a legend for shooting down a notoriously elusive French plane, then bolting a German machine gun to its nose and taking it right back into combat. As one of the few German fliers to survive the war, he was recruited into an underground brotherhood that, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, was secretly rebuilding the German air force. Airborne shock and awe was Germany’s greatest weapon, Student was convinced, and he was willing to prove it with his own battered body; even though he was a fifty-year-old senior officer at the start of World War II and never learned to skydive, he personally commanded the invasion of Holland by slicing through shrapnel fire to arrive by seaplane. He was accidentally shot in the forehead by one of his own soldiers, but not even that stopped him; when Hitler was vexed by Crete, Student had recovered and was strong enough to step forward with a spectacular solution.

Crete was Hitler’s opportunity to launch the biggest airborne invasion in history. He could awe the world with the Third Reich’s newest and most terrifying innovation: a flying army. No military had ever attempted to swarm a major target by dropping in entirely from above, arriving from the clouds without the support of ground troops or sea reinforcements. Germany’s big Junkers were powerful enough to tow gliders holding a force of ten Storm Regiment commandos. Cut the gliders loose and they’re silent; steer them out of the blinding sunrise and they’re invisible. It was the ultimate sneak attack: a fighting force that could suddenly appear right over your head—anywhere, anytime—without a moment’s warning.

Hitler heard him out … then said no. Dangling that many men over the enemy’s guns? Far too risky.

But they weren’t talking about men, Student insisted; they were talking about the Fallschirmjäger, an elite corps of paratroopers known as “Hunters from the Sky.” You had to be extraordinarily ferocious, tough, ingenious, and athletic to even apply to be a Hunter, and even then, two of every three candidates flunked out. To earn the badge of the attacking eagle, you had to run an obstacle course under live fire; jump by night into forests; fire a submachine gun with accuracy while falling through the air at thirty-five miles per hour; survive for days on only the gear in the forty-seven pockets of your jumpsuit; and be able to disarm an enemy with your bare hands and use his own weapon against him. The Hunters could hit the ground, by day or by darkness, and come up fighting before a stunned enemy could react. A force of only eighty Fallschirmjäger had forced the surrender of fifteen hundred Belgian soldiers. Plus the Hunters relied on one of the Nazis’ secret weapons: before jumping, they were issued tablets of Pervitin, an early version of crystal meth.

Hitler started coming around. Despite his misgivings, he loved the Wagnerian overkill of Student’s plan: no clanking tanks or common foot soldiers, just wave after wave of Germany’s fiercest commandos raining down from the sky like apocalyptic demons. It was more than warfare; it was biblical doom. Hitler found the theatrics so tantalizing, he insisted they feature Germany’s greatest star, Max Schmeling, the world heavyweight boxing champion who’d knocked out Joe Louis. Having a celebrity like Max Schmeling leap out of a plane behind enemy lines was an astonishing command, but it neatly served two purposes.

Privately, it settled a personal grudge between the Führer and the famous fighter, who refused to join the Nazi Party and, it was rumored, had saved the lives of his Jewish trainer’s two sons by hiding them in his hotel room and smuggling them to safety in the United States. Publicly, it added another chilling image to the Nazis’ gallery of terror. A photo of the muscular German colossus as his big boots thumped down on the dust of Crete would send an unmistakable message: Our giants are coming, and they can’t be stopped. For a Third Reich so enraptured by death’s-head skulls, blood-red flags, and the raw rape symbolism of the swastika, with its two interlocked bodies representing, as Hitler put it, “the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man,” the sight of Germany’s two-fisted champion striding across the ancient world was irresistible. Crete was the birthplace of the modern world, the origin of every great achievement in civilization, and Hitler would show he could snatch it up in a matter of hours.

Besides, wasn’t it time the Nazis were greeted as heroes for a change? German troops weren’t really invading Crete, General Student pointed out; they were liberating it. The Cretan islanders were so sick of being ruled by the Greek king, Hitler would become their idol as soon as they realized the arrival of the Germans meant the end of the monarchy. In fact, Student had it on good authority that a super-secret underground of Cretan rebels was eager to greet its new German friends and had already worked out a pass code. “Top Dog!” the Germans were supposed to call out. “Big Buck!” the Cretan underground would reply, and the celebration would begin.

Hitler relented. He dubbed Student’s plan Operation Mercury, after the Roman god of thievery and lightning speed, and set the go date for May 20. It took twenty-four days to capture the mainland; Hitler would allow twenty-four hours for Crete.

One day. Then it was on to Russia.

. . .

May 20, 1941, dawned beautifully, so Colonel Howard Kippenberger of the New Zealand 10th Brigade grabbed a plate of porridge and went outside to enjoy the sun rising over the Aegean. Weird, he thought as he settled in under a plane tree. What happened to the sun? A minute earlier, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but now all of a sudden he’s sitting in shadows. Wait … He jerked his head up, stunned.

Overhead, German gliders were silently soaring in, so many they darkened the sky. Kippenberger grabbed for his rifle, but he’d left it in his room. Kippenberger had never seen anything like it. There had to be hundreds of commandos inside those gliders. Hard behind was a sea of transport planes, with wave after wave of elite Fallschirmjäger paratroopers pouring out the jump doors.

“STAND TO YOUR ARMS!” Kippenberger shouted, praying that not too many of his troops were splashing naked in the sea at that moment. By the time he got his rifle, Germans were on the ground and scrambling for position. Bullets splintered the olive trees; snipers had already nested, with sight lines toward the little house serving as Kippenberger’s headquarters. Above, the sky was so hectic with men and machines that one stunned soldier felt he was witnessing the Martian occupation of Earth from H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds.

Many of Kippenberger’s men were mechanics and drivers, not frontline soldiers. They backed up, firing desperately and uncertainly, while Kippenberger hurried to the top of a hill to get a clear view of how much trouble they were in.

Lots, it turned out.

When it came to troops, Crete was an island of castaways. Nearly every soldier there was a refugee from the fighting on the Greek mainland—a hodgepodge of Australians, New Zealanders, Brits, and Greeks. As ordered, they’d chucked their heavy weapons when they were ferried to Crete, where they’d hunkered down to await one of two things: either massive reinforcement or a speedy retreat. Anything else would be a massacre. One battalion didn’t even have boots; their ship had been torpedoed on the way to Crete, so they’d dumped their rifles and shoes to swim for it.

“Forces at my disposal are totally inadequate to meet the attack envisaged,” concluded Major General Bernard Freyberg of New Zealand after he arrived on Crete to take command. Was Freyberg seriously expected to defend one of the most strategically important islands in the Mediterranean with, as he put it, “gunners who had lost their guns, sappers who had lost their tools, and R.S.A.C. drivers who had lost their cars”? He wasn’t sure what Hitler had in mind, but if it was even a fraction of the firepower unleashed on the mainland, the Brits were doomed.

Coming from a wild man like Freyberg, gloom like that had to be taken seriously. Churchill loved Freyberg and had nicknamed him the Salamander, after the myth that salamanders are created by fire. Freyberg had left New Zealand as a young man to join Pancho Villa’s rebels in Mexico, so hungry for action that he’d traveled across the globe to plunge into a war he only dimly comprehended, in a language he didn’t speak. When World War I broke out, young Freyberg jumped into a series of swimming races in Los Angeles and won enough prize money to pay for passage to England. He enlisted and quickly made his mark by stripping naked for a suicide mission: to distract Turkish forces during the invasion at Gallipoli, he smeared his body with grease, dived off of a troop ship, and swam two miles through the bone-chilling Gulf of Saros to light diversionary flares on a beach behind enemy lines. He became England’s youngest general at twenty-eight and was wounded so many times that one of Churchill’s party tricks was to get Freyberg to peel off his shirt so other guests could count his twenty-seven battle scars.

But even for the Salamander, Crete was too much—or, rather, too little. Freyberg should have at least had some local troops who knew the terrain, but he’d been robbed of even that slim advantage: the Cretan division was still stranded back on the mainland.

The drug-enhanced Hunters were on the ground and moving fast, wriggling free of their harnesses and breaking open the weapon crates thumping down nearby. In minutes, the Fallschirmjäger were better equipped than the British. Besides motorcycles and surgical equipment, the crates also had specially designed field guns powerful enough to blow a hole through a tank. Quickly, the Germans grouped into attack formation and began advancing, cutting telephone lines to British headquarters as they moved.

But hold on a moment. Up on his hill, Kippenberger noticed one German squad was going the wrong way. Instead of advancing, they were edging backwards. Suddenly they were running, falling, shouting—and being chased by the 8th Greek Regiment.

Kippenberger couldn’t believe his eyes. When he’d first spotted the 8th Greeks, he cringed; they were so dangerously exposed, he thought, “it was murder to leave such troops in such a position.” But now look at them! Outgunned and outmanned, they improvised from a stand-your-ground defense to a hit-and-run guerrilla offense, flipping the element of surprise back to their favor. The Greeks had only vintage rifles and a handful of shells, but that’s all they needed. As soon as their fire drove the Germans back, they raced to the dying paratroopers, stripped away their weapons, and charged on.

And the 8th wasn’t outnumbered for long. A mob of villagers armed with sickles and axes ran to join them. One farmer fashioned a bayonet by lashing a knife to the end of his shotgun; another old Cretan used his cane to beat to death two paratroopers who’d gotten snarled in their harnesses in his back garden. A priest named Father Stylianos Frantzeskakis rang the church bell to summon his parishioners, then grabbed his uncle’s hunting rifle and led his congregation into combat. A teenage boy followed him, dragging an old Turkish sword that was so long it scraped along the ground. “My mother sent me,” the boy told Father Frantzeskakis. A monk headed into the fray with a rifle in his hand and a hand ax in his belt; later, the same hatchet-wielding holy man reappeared with a German submachine gun, presumably after killing the German who’d carried it.

A bewildered young British officer named Michael Forrester found himself at the head of “a weird counter-attack,” as he called it. Forrester had gotten separated from his unit and stumbled across a leaderless band of Greek soldiers under fire from a German platoon. With their backs against the sea, the Greeks were trapped. Forrester decided to take command, even though just about the only Greek word he knew was Aeria!—“Charge!” Maybe he could toot commands on a tin whistle? Sure, why not. Forrester hurriedly taught his new force a signal code—one tweet to stand by, two to move—and then fixed his bayonet for a do-or-die attempt to break through the German net.

“I decided that the time had come for action and alerted my force with my whistle,” Forrester would later say. “We had not gone very far before I realized that we had been substantially reinforced by a considerable number of the inhabitants of Crete—men and women—armed with old shotguns, garden tools, sticks, broom handles, some with kitchen knives strapped on to the end of them.” With Forrester shrilling away on his whistle, the mob charged. The Germans dropped their weapons and put up their hands.

Back at his command post in Athens, General Kurt Student was getting minute-by-minute updates by radio. He unsnapped his holster. “I waited with my pistol continuously by my side,” he said, “ready to use it on myself if the worse came to the worst.”