Book Review: 'Crete 1941: The Battle and the Resistance'

Cover designed by Kristen Haff. © 2014 Penguin Books

The Battle of Crete - the first large-scale military engagement conceived and executed by airborne forces in history - has long been overshadowed by other World War II battles that took place in 1941. Planned by Luftwaffe General Kurt Student (the "Father of Germany's Airborne Force") and approved by a reluctant Adolf Hitler, Operation Mercury was a daring if rather risky endeavor: the capture of the Greek island of Crete by a large airborne force that was to be reinforced primarily via an "air bridge" from the mainland and only tangentially by a seaborne force embarked on a modest flotilla of caiques. Hitler greenlit Unternehmen Merkur almost at the last minute with one proviso: that the invasion of Crete be carried out with resources available in the Greek theater of operations and not much else lest it interfered with the Fuhrer's larger plan to invade the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

The staff officers who planned Unternehmen Merkur were sure that their plan would result in a spectacular and easy victory for the still-new German airborne contingent. The war in Europe, after all, had been going Hitler's way for the most part; save for the Battle of Britain in 1940, the Axis powers had defeated the Allies on various fronts. France and the Low Countries had been knocked out of the war; Eastern Europe had been callously divided between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia after the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (which Hitler was about to abrogate), and Axis armies now occupied the Balkans, including Yugoslavia, Albania, and now Greece. Operation Mercury was to be the capstone to Hitler's Mediterranean campaign to keep British forces tied down in the periphery of the Greater German Reich and distract world attention from his buildup to Unternehmen Barbarossa. 

The reality of Operation Mercury, like most plans in modern warfare, was quite different from what General Student and his staff envisioned. Lapses in the Luftwaffe's use of the encrypting machine codenamed Enigma allowed British codebreakers to intercept and "read" the Germans' coded messages regarding Unternehmen Merkur, thus giving the British and Commonwealth intelligence officers an unprecedented amount of intelligence about the target of the airborne assault, the forces involved, and even the date of its D-Day.

As Antony Beevor points out in his impressive work about the Battle of Crete, Operation Mercury had the potential of becoming the Allies' first major defeat of a German invasion in World War II. Yet, a series of factors, including a tactical misunderstanding by the Commonwealth commander on Crete, New Zealand's Gen. Bernard Freyberg, a shortage of artillery, armor, and functional radios, and no local air support from the Royal Air Force, allowed triumph to slip through the Allies' fingers and handed Hitler a spectacular - if perhaps Pyhrric - victory and secured his southern flank as he turned his lethal attention to the Eastern Front.

Nazi Germany expected its airborne attack on Crete in 1941 to be a textbook victory based on tactical surprise. Little did they know that the British, using Ultra intercepts, had already laid a careful trap. It should have been the first German defeat of the war when a fatal misunderstanding turned the battle around.

Prize-winning historian and bestselling author Antony Beevor lends his gift for storytelling to this important conflict, showing not only how the situation turned bad for Allied forces, but also how ferocious Cretan freedom fighters mounted a heroic resistance. Originally published in 1991, Crete 1941 is a breathtaking account of a momentous battle of World War II.

My Take

Crete 1941: The Battle and the Resistance is not exactly a new book; its first edition was published in 1991 to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the airborne attack on Crete and its aftermath. I have not read the original edition of Crete 1941; I only started reading Mr. Beevor's works in 2009 (when Penguin published D-Day and the Battle for Normandy) and only now am I exploring his older works, such as The Battle for Spain and, of course, this book.  

As an American reader, I'm certain that Operation Mercury is little-known outside of the professionals in the fields of military history and the airborne community. The Battle of Crete captured the imaginations of people on both sides of the war in 1941, albeit with different results in the German camp and the Allied one. The success of Student's daring and ambitious use of airborne forces galvanized American and British generals into creating large units of parachutists and glider-borne infantry, which they intended to use to support amphibious assaults and combined arms operations on the Continent later in the war. They would also later attempt to use airborne forces on a strategic operation a la Unternehmen Merkur once during the autumn campaign in Northwest Europe in 1944 with less-than-resounding success.

The Germans, on the other hand, were alarmed by how closely-run their victory on Crete was. They classified the high casualty rate of the airborne troops incurred during Unternehmen Merkur as Top Secret. As a result, the losing side of the Battle of Crete was clueless as to why Hitler forbade any more large-scale airborne drops and relegated the Luftwaffe's elite parachute divisions to fight as conventional infantry. As Beevor states in Crete 1941, "For General Student, his 'disastrous victory' on Crete also led to a painful anti-climax. Along with his leading officers he was invited to Hitler's headquarters, the Wolfsschanze, where congratulations were made with presentations of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. Then, during coffee after lunch, the Fuhrer abruptly turned to him. 'Of course, you know, General,' he said, 'we shall never do another airborne operation. Crete proved that the days of parachute troops are over. The parachute arm is one that relies entirely on surprise. In the meantime the surprise factor has exhausted itself.'"

Crete 1941: The Battle and the Resistance also delves into the fierce resistance to the German invasion put up by Crete's civilian population both during the actual battle and the Axis occupation that followed. This, in addition to the high losses suffered by Student's forces, was a nasty shock to the Germans because it was the first active resistance to German hegemony in the war. In most of the occupied nations, particularly in the West and in the Balkans, the Underground emerged a year or so after the German victories of 1940 and 1941. Cretans fought bravely and savagely from the first day of Unternehmen Merkur to the last days of the Axis occupation in the fall of 1944. The guerrillas that participated in the Cretan resistance kept thousands of German troops - badly needed in Russia and other fronts - tied down on the island, even though their ambushes and acts of sabotage often incurred the Nazis' lethal wrath. Many Cretan villages were razed to the ground by the Germans, and many of their inhabitants were executed for supporting "bandits" and "terrorists" backed by Britain's Special Operations Executive and America's Office of Strategic Services - the precursor to today's Central Intelligence Agency.

Once again, Antony Beevor gives readers a fascinating and informative glimpse at a battle that even many World War II buffs are only peripherally aware of. His prose is crisp, clean, and easy to follow, and the book is chock-full of interesting personalities that seem drawn from a World War II thriller by Alistair MacLean. I strongly recommend Crete 1941: The Battle and the Resistance  to fans of non-fiction and history lovers alike.