Unconquerable Crete: An Epic Poem

troops, discovering them gone,

  withdrew as well. This sealed the fate of Crete.

  Came morning, and the Germans now controlled

  the hill and aerodrome at Maleme;

  they soon began to fly in mountain troops,

  in transport after transport, and with them

  guns, motor bikes, and medical supplies.

  The next day fighter planes began to land.

  On the New Zealand side, a Maori squad

  charged with fixed bayonets and wild war cries

  and forced the Germans back. Two hundred Greeks,

  a mob of women, children, and old men,

  yelling and screaming, armed with sticks and knives

  led by a fair haired English officer

  charged the Germans, who took one look and ran.

  But these were minor setbacks for the foe;

  German positions had been reinforced

  by mountain troops, and were too strong to fall.

  The Kiwis and Australians were forced

  to make a gradual retreat.

  The day before, some German troops had dropped

  near to Kastelli, on the northeast coast,

  close to a strong battalion of Greek troops.

  Half of the Greeks had guns, for which they had

  three bullets each, but they attacked bravely,

  knifing the German troops and clubbing them

  with rifle butts. When the Germans took the town

  they found the bloodied bodies of their men.

  Seeing the wounds gave birth to the idea

  that citizens had mutilated them

  after they had surrendered. Furious,

  they seized two hundred men, assembling them

  in the town square. A father pleaded for his son,

  He is only fourteen, Herr Kapitan, shoot me

  instead. The German captain looked at him.

  Shoot both of them, he said. They led them to

  a field and executed them in groups of ten.

  During the night, a fleet of Greek caiques,

  each carrying a hundred German troops

  or more, escorted by torpedo boats,

  set sail for Crete from harbors in the north.

  The Royal Navy intercepted them

  sunk almost all the boats, survivors were

  picked up next day by German ships and planes;

  three hundred twenty seven men were lost.

  John Pendlebury, chief archaeologist

  at Knossos prior to the war, returned

  to Crete as British consul, but in fact

  was working for Intelligence. He’d walked

  all over Crete, knew thousands, and spoke all

  the Cretan dialects. He’d organized

  a network in the villages around

  Mount Ida. He left Iraklion by jeep

  the second day of fighting, but he ran

  into a squad of Germans. A gunfight

  ensued in which he shot three enemy

  but he himself was wounded in the chest.

  A Cretan woman took him to her house,

  gave him her bed and changed his bloodstained shirt.

  A Wehrmacht doctor came to treat his wound.

  Next day a group of paratroops came to

  the house at dawn and executed him.

  Bit by bit, the Allies were pushed back.

  Stukas and Messerschmidts rained bombs

  and blasted with machine guns. An Allied truck

  bearing ten thousand eggs was hit by shells,

  and made the biggest omelette of the war.

  The Cretan women cared for wounded men,

  tore up for bandages the sheets they’d saved

  for wedding days. In explanation, they exclaimed,

  What use will dowries be if we are slaves?

  But in Rethymno and Iraklion

  Australian and British troops still held

  the towns and airfields, and had captured some

  five hundred German troops, who said,

  Before long you will be our prisoners.

  Hitler became impatient: France, he said,

  fell in eight days. Why does Crete still resist?

  By now the Germans had sustained more than

  three thousand casualties, more than in France,

  more than in all the war up to that time.

  The Germans doggedly pushed east toward

  Haniá, their major goal the naval base

  at Souda Bay. In furious attacks

  the town of Galatas changed hands three times.

  The Allies faced the Germans’ heavy guns

  with rifles and machine guns and grenades;

  the situation was becoming critical.

  The C in C of Crete, Freyberg, cabled

  to Wavell in Cairo, My men have reached

  the end of their endurance, we are left

  with options now of capture or retreat.

  Wavell consulted Churchill, who agreed.

  The troops began to pull back to the south,

  protected by a rearguard action fought

  by Greek battalions and commando troops.

  Haniá was bombed again remorselessly,

  but when the Germans came into the town

  they found it empty. Once the fight was won

  divisions of Italians sailed from Rhodes

  and occupied the eastern part of Crete.

  All that remained was to evacuate

  as many of the Allied troops as possible.

  The garrison that held Iraklion

  gave out its weapons to the Cretan men,

  departing from the harbour after dark;

  four love-struck soldiers smuggled Greek girl friends

  aboard the ship in British uniforms.

  But at Rethymno, Aussies had no choice

  but to surrender, and most ended up

  despatched to prison camps in Germany.

  As for the Allied troops around Haniá

  the navy was detailed to pick them up

  from Sfakia on the southern coast of Crete.

  When Admiral Cunningham was told he could

  lose ships, he said, it takes three years to build

  a ship, it takes three hundred years to build

  a new tradition. Guns were sabotaged,

  supply dumps fired, and booby traps deployed.

  Across the mountains and for forty miles

  a broken mob of men with broken boots

  with little food or water made its way.

  By day the Stukas bombed them on the road

  and Messerschmitts machine gunned them at will;

  they dived for cover under trees and rocks.

  By night they moved with caution in the dark.

  The trail was littered with discarded caps

  and belts, kitbags, gas masks, empty canteens.

  Here and there trucks had run out of gas,

  beside the trail lay wounded and the dead,

  together with those men who’d given up.

  A group of Cretan women asked the troops

  who were still armed if they could have their guns;

  For us, they said, the battle is not done.

  Only the rearguard of one thousand Greeks

  and two hundred commandos fought with verve,

  leapfrogging backward to the southern coast.

  The rough trail ended on the heights above

  the port of Sfakia. The soldiers climbed

  by narrow goat paths down the precipice.

  By day the enemy controlled the air;

  the soldiers hid in caves. The navy came

  at night to take them off the rocky beach.

  The fighting troops received priority

  and stragglers fought in vain to join their ranks.

  Many men had hardly strength to climb

  the scrambling nets. The sailors on the ships

  he
lped them aboard and welcomed them

  with mugs of hot cocoa and sandwiches.

  The navy rescued fifteen thousand men,

  but thirteen thousand men were left behind.

  Planes bombed the ships repeatedly en route

  to Alexandria. Some men broke down,

  but other soldiers said they’d all receive

  evacuation medals with the apt

  inscription EX CRETA. The ranking officer

  on Crete surrendered to the enemy.

  Most men fell into German hands and spent

  the war in prison camps in Germany;

  a few avoided capture and escaped

  across the sea in dinghies, landing craft,

  or caiques. A thousand men took to the hills

  where they were given aid by families

  of Cretans, till the navy took them off

  by submarine. Upon the German side

  all the surviving paratroops received

  an iron cross. Shocked by the casualties,

  Hitler declared airborne assaults passé,

  henceforth for the remainder of the war

  German paratroopers fought as infantry.

  The Resistance, so the Cretans say, began

  with the first parachute that fell on Crete.

  The kapitani, men like Bandouvas,

  Petrakis, and Polentas, dressed in black

  like brigands. Heavily mustached, they wore

  high boots and baggy pants. A sash around

  the waist held a revolver and a knife.

  Their heads were covered by a black head cloth

  with a fringe that represented tears

  the Cretans shed while under Turkish rule.

  The Cretans called them palikari, men

  who fought with courage and nobility,

  ‘Freedom or death’ the slogan on their lips.

  Antonis Grigorakis was one such

  kapitan. He was known as Satanas

  because, the Cretans said, to have survived

  so many bullets in his body he

  must have been a devil. He gambled

  heavily. Once in fury he shot off

  his dicing finger, only to realize

  too late his trigger finger was now gone.

  Resistance fighters blew up German planes

  and ships, hid allied troops and guided them

  to embarkation points. They radioed

  the sites of fuel and ammunition dumps,

  and the departure times of tankers and

  of convoys leaving Souda with supplies

  for Rommel’s army in the Libyan sands.

  They had a runner to take messages,

  Georgiou Psychoundakis, aged 21,

  a shepherd and a poet, humorous

  and melancholy, from the village of

  Agia Gonia, who would run all day

  thirty or forty miles across the hills

  to carry crucial messages from cave

  to hideout, radio to submarine,

  aware that capture meant a dreadful death,

  and leaving for his family his sheep

  which others stole from him while he was gone.

  The clergy and