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 ...