B (32:51)
Germany invaded its partner, the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, with the largest invasion in history. Three and a half million people on a 17, 1800 mile front. So the question is, what were they doing on May 20th to June 1st in Crete? Look at the Mediterranean. If you want to supply Rommel, it would be better to supply them via Malta. Greece is way to the east. It's very hard to get rail service into Greece from Europe as compared to Italy, for example, through Sicily. So why were they there? They were there because Hitler had a directive that he did not want any peripheral theaters opening up that would detract from the main thrust into Russia. Lo and behold, the Yugoslavian underground overthrew the government in the spring. So he had to go into Yugoslavia and restore a fascist. Once he was in Yugoslavia. Mussolini, who had declared war belatedly on the Axis, was angry that he wasn't getting his share. He didn't know anything about going into Russia, but he had invaded in October, Greece and he had taken Albania. And he was in a mess October of 1940. So Hitler then said, okay, I've got a mess on my hands. I've got Rommel with only two or three divisions. I got a supply in North Africa. I've got troops now in Yugoslavia. Mussolini has screwed things up. I've got to go bail him out in Greece. And I am diverting men and materiel from the planned buildup to go into Russia. So he took Greece, and it was pretty much declared secure in May. But a lot of the British got out of Greece and about 30,000 got to Crete. And they still had Egypt. And Cairo and Alexandria were there under British control. So what happened was Hitler came up with the idea, we just have to close down the theater. So we've got Greece. We'll go halfway across the Mediterranean and take Crete and make air bases there. And therefore Rommel will be in Egypt. Basically, he'll be at the end of the Libyan border, and we can just stop anything from happening that would interfere with Army Group South. Okay? The problem was that they had never really done a parachute drop, so they didn't have maritime superiority. The British Navy in the Mediterranean was the largest navy, and they had done very well against the Italians and scared the Italians. They had blown up a lot of cruisers and injured battleships and carriers. So they dropped soldiers into Crete, mostly in the Chania area. The two capital cities are Chania and Heraklion. And they tried to surprise them, and it didn't work. The Greeks fought just absolutely courageously, and they had just primitive weapons. And the British who had evacuated there were only about 20,000, but they were not well supplied enough to help the Greeks. But between the two, they held out for about four days. And each time the Luftwaffe brought in a new group of soldiers, they were rendered inert. So they were getting worried, and they started to build up from Greece. So then they started. They brought in some Italian ships at night, they started landing some troops, and then they made a whole effort. Had the New Zealand commander of Allied forces Freyberg, been more aggressive, he could have taken the airfield and held it, and they wouldn't have been able to land at Marmalade. So anyway, the point is, after 10 days, they landed enough German troops. Eventually they would get up to about 20,000. They took this long island halfway between Libya, Egypt and Greece. And they said, at this point, we're going to close down this theater and we're not going to supply Rommel. He'll just have to hold still, because now we're going into Russia. The problem with the campaign was that the British fought so ferociously and the Greeks did that. They damaged about or destroyed 500 Luftwaffe Bf109s, Stuka dive bombers, logistical planes. And this was on top of the other four or five hundred they had lost in Greece. And this was on top of the blitz that had just ended. That was July 1940 to January, February 1941, where they lost 2,000 planes. And they had lost 23,000 soldiers going into Poland dead. Another 25,000 in the Victory in France. And then in the quagmire, they've lost another three or four thousand. So they had lost about five divisions of some of their top people, and they had lost, probably in aggregate, 3,000 planes. So when they went into Russia, even though they had this huge force, they didn't realize that logistically they did not have the air power to support the armies because they had lost so many transport planes. Hitler was so shocked about the 2,000 dead Germans. They killed more British and Greeks, and he said, no more. Never again are we going to have major paratroop drops. The Americans looked at it, and so did the British, and they Said, wow, this worked. So they got the opposite message and they created more sophisticated airborne. They looked at the German system and they saw, well, either parachutes are lousy, you can't steer them. We can improve, we can improve. And they did. But Hitler only used them on special operations to free Mussolini or somebody. But they never wanted to do it again. There were a couple of sidelights to the battle. Patrick Lee Feymore, the famous classicist and novelist was there. There was a lot of British expatriates that loved to live in Crete. And he staged. He dressed up with, I think his name was Stanley Moss. They dressed up as German officers and they went in to Heraklion and they captured a three star in German and they said, we're here to pick you up for a mission. And they got him to the. They drove and kidnapped him and drove him across the island, hiked over the mountains to the south and then the PT boat took him to, to Britain. It's in one of his novels, if you read, I mean one of his books. I met him when I was living in Greece. In 73, a group of us went in Areopagus. He lived in the Mani. He built with his wife a home, couldn't believe it. He drank heavily and he was smoking non stop. And I think he lived to be in his late 90s. Paul Ray, the classicist, knew him very well. But this tragedy of what happened is that they, when they kidnapped that general, I think his name was Muller or something, not Mueller, Muller was the other one. But they did all of these reprisals. That was the first time that the German army had. The Luftwaffe always had a reputation of not being tyrannical, bloodthirsty Nazis. They were in charge of the POW camps and they were pretty wild. They killed hundreds of Greek patriots in reprisals for the kidnap. So Patrick Lee Fehmar and Stanley Moss, they meant well, but they got off and then they took it out on the Greeks and that really the generals that were left that maybe his name was Mueller. The Greeks tried him after the war and they executed him for what he did to Greeks there. There was another really tragic story. There was a famous aristocrat from a very wealthy family, John Pendleberry. And he had been blinded in one eye, I remember when he was young. But he had written the Palaces of Crete and he was a brilliant Cambridge classicist and he'd excavated in Greece. And anyway, in his late 30s or middle 30s he and his wife went to Crete and he was in charge of the excavations and he knew Very well that there's a lot of German archaeologists. He got along with him and the war broke out and he had enlisted in British Intelligence on Crete, and he knew that island backwards and forwards, as did Patrick Lee, former. So during this resistance, he was trying to help. He wasn't a spy, he wasn't a guerrilla. He was uniformed and he was sort of an advisor, showing British troops where the best routes were, bridges and stuff. And he got shot in the chest. He would have lived. A German doctor who had been captured. I think he had been captured. He treated him, removed the bullet. He was fine. The next day, the Germans came in to the village and they saw him and he protested that he was a British officer. And they said, you don't have your dog tags on. And they had just removed his shirt because of the thing. And so they took him out and put him against the wall and shot the greatest Minoan, Mycenaean classicist of his generation. If you go today to the British, Americans have very beautiful war cemeteries. I was on the War Monuments Board Commission, and the British have the War Graves Commission. You go to Hunia and they have beautiful graves. They're a little bit different than the way that we do it. They don't have lawns as much, but they have rose bushes and stuff by each grave. And you can find John J.S. pendleberry. So every time I've gone to Crete, eight or nine times, I always go up there. It's very tragic to see he was executed by the German. The other thing about Crete was once they got the island, it played almost no role. They didn't have the wherewithal to bring in a lot of German bombers, aircraft to bomb Cairo or Alexandria and get the Suez Canal. It was a depot, but they had no navy. The British still had maritime supremacy. So they tried to bring U boats into the Mediterranean. I think of the 40U boats that went into the Mediterranean, 39 were sunk because the British brought in oil from Iraq and the Gulf, through the Suez Canal, through the Mediterranean, out Gibraltar. And once they did away with the Italian navy, and they had blown up the captured French navy. The Germans had no Mediterranean fleet, so the British ran the whole Mediterranean. So to supply Rommel or to supply Crete was almost impossible because you had to do it by night, by air, or you had to get a convoy from Greece all the way over there or from Italy. And it was very difficult to do so, for I think there was about 5,000 people killed, roughly 2,000 Germans, maybe 2,500 Greeks and British but then it was never retaken. It just stayed there as a backwater. It was kind of like the Greek islands themselves that the Germans occupied. There was a lot of good literature written about the battle for Crete and documentaries.
