At eight o'clock on the morning of 20 May 1941, the sky over western Crete filled with Junkers Ju 52 transports flying low and slow over the olive groves. Out of their doors tumbled the Fallschirmjäger, Germany's elite paratroopers, straight onto the rifles of New Zealand infantry waiting around Maleme airfield. One company of the Assault Regiment's III Battalion lost 112 men killed out of 126. The battalion had about 400 of its 600 men killed on the first day.

Twelve days later Crete was German. Yet the Battle of Crete was the kind of victory that ends a doctrine. The losses among the paratroopers and their transport aircraft shocked Berlin, and Hitler drew a conclusion that shaped the rest of the war: no more great airborne invasions.

It is also a story about air power from both ends. The Luftwaffe owned the sky, the Royal Air Force was absent, and the Royal Navy learned in a single week what dive-bombers could do to warships without fighter cover.

Directive 28: an island taken from the air

Crete mattered to both sides. From its harbours the Royal Navy could threaten the Axis flank in the Aegean, and from its airfields British bombers could reach the Romanian oil fields at Ploiești. After the fall of mainland Greece in April 1941, Hitler signed Directive 28 on 25 April, ordering the island's capture.

The Royal Navy still controlled the waters around Crete, so a seaborne invasion looked suicidal. The Luftwaffe, on the other hand, had total air superiority. Student, the father of the German airborne arm, got his chance: 750 glider troops, 10,000 paratroopers, 5,000 mountain troops flown in by transport aircraft and 7,000 more by sea. Fliegerkorps VIII assembled around 280 bombers, 150 dive-bombers, 90 Bf 109s and 90 Bf 110s to support them, while about 530 Ju 52 transports and 100 gliders stood ready to carry the troops. It would be the first mainly airborne invasion in history.

The planning was rushed. Units were earmarked for the invasion of the Soviet Union and had to be released by the end of May, and German intelligence was badly wrong. The Abwehr reported about 5,000 British troops on the island and predicted that the Cretans would welcome the Germans. The real garrison was roughly three times what the Germans expected, and the Cretans fought.

The Armchair Historian's animated account of Germany's worst airborne disaster, from the first drops to the fall of Maleme.

Freyberg knew they were coming

The defenders had an advantage the Germans never suspected. British codebreakers were reading Luftwaffe Enigma traffic, and the Ultra decrypts revealed the assembly of Fliegerkorps XI, the target, the objectives and finally, on 19 May, the probable date: the next day. To protect the source, the intelligence reached Freyberg disguised as reports from a spy in Athens. His Creforce numbered roughly 40,000 British, Commonwealth and Greek troops, many of them evacuated from Greece without their heavy equipment.

Knowing was not the same as reading it right. The decrypts also mentioned seaborne landings, and Freyberg, expecting an amphibious assault, kept strong forces on the coast. That left fewer men around Maleme, the main German objective. He had wanted to make the airfields unusable, but Middle East Command overruled him. F. H. Hinsley, the official historian of British wartime intelligence, later concluded that it is hard to measure how much the intelligence actually shaped the battle.

20 May: the olive groves

German doctrine dropped weapons in separate canisters, so many paratroopers hit the ground armed with little more than pistols, knives and grenades. In the first minutes after landing they were badly outgunned. Gliders that came down near Maleme were hit by mortar fire seconds after landing. At Kastelli, Greek troops and armed civilians routed a detachment of paratroopers.

A second wave arrived in the afternoon, at Rethymno at 16:15 and at Heraklion at 17:30, and ran into defenders who were waiting for it. Of 493 transport aircraft used that day, only seven were lost to anti-aircraft fire. The killing happened on the ground. Among the paratroopers was the former world heavyweight boxing champion Max Schmeling, then a lance corporal, who survived.

By nightfall the Germans had taken none of their objectives. On the German side it looked like a failure. On the British side, many believed the invasion had been beaten.

Hill 107 and the night that lost Maleme

Everything turned on a single hill. Hill 107 overlooked Maleme airfield and was held by the 22nd New Zealand Battalion under Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie Andrew VC. During 20 May German attacks cut his communications with his two western companies, and he assumed they had been overrun. His request for the 23rd Battalion to reinforce him was refused, and a small counter-attack failed.

That night Andrew withdrew from the hill with his brigadier's consent. His western companies, out of touch, only discovered the withdrawal in the morning and pulled back too. In Athens, Student decided on 21 May to throw everything at Maleme, the one sector where his men had made progress, after an early reconnaissance flight over the airfield drew no fire.

The Ju 52s then began landing mountain troops onto an airfield still under Allied artillery fire. Aircraft were blown apart on the strip; others crash-landed on the beach or put down in fields, unloaded and took off again. The historian Robert Citino describes the blazing wrecks of more than 80 aircraft littering Maleme. Brutal as it was, it worked. A New Zealand counter-attack went in late, in daylight on 22 May, into Stuka attacks and dug-in paratroopers, and failed.

Return From Crete (1941), a period newsreel held by Archives New Zealand, showing New Zealand troops back from the battle.

No RAF, and the Navy pays

In mid-May the RAF's four squadrons on Crete had about two dozen aircraft, of which only about a dozen were serviceable, and they faced the whole of Fliegerkorps VIII. According to The National Archives, none remained by 20 May. From that day the island and the seas around it belonged to the Luftwaffe in daylight.

At night the Royal Navy still ruled. On 21/22 May a British cruiser force caught a convoy of caiques carrying German reinforcements and broke it up, and a second convoy was turned back the next day. But the price came at sunrise. Stukas and bombers sank the cruisers HMS Gloucester and HMS Fiji on 22 May. On 23 May, 24 Ju 87 Stukas caught Lord Louis Mountbatten's destroyers off western Crete and sank HMS Kashmir and his own HMS Kelly within minutes.

When the order to evacuate came on 27 May, Admiral Andrew Cunningham had to send his battered fleet back for the army, through the same skies. About 18,000 men were lifted out between 28 May and 1 June, most of them from Sfakia on the south coast. The cost to the Navy was three cruisers and six destroyers sunk or scuttled, with the carrier HMS Formidable and the battleships Warspite and Barham among the ships damaged, and 1,828 sailors dead. For the British it was the costliest naval engagement of the war.

Counting the cost

British estimates of German losses ballooned after the battle. A New Zealand newspaper reported 12,000 killed and wounded and 5,000 drowned; Churchill spoke of well over 15,000 casualties. The British official historians later settled on 6,116, compiled from the most reliable German records, and the New Zealand historian Dan Davin estimated 6,698. Historians generally accept a range of 6,000 to 7,000, and a 1948 RAF staff study put casualties among the parachute and glider troops alone at about 4,500. Student himself spoke after the war of about 4,000 killed and missing.

The Luftwaffe lost 284 aircraft destroyed or written off between 13 May and 1 June, according to the official historians and to the aviation historians Christopher Shores, Brian Cull and Nicola Malizia, 147 of them in combat. For the transport fleet the figures range from about 150 Ju 52s lost, the number given by Imperial War Museums, to about 170 lost or severely damaged in a 1948 RAF staff study.

The defenders paid dearly too. The British and Commonwealth forces lost 1,742 killed and 11,835 taken prisoner from a garrison of slightly more than 32,000, and more than 5,000 Greek soldiers were captured. Cretan civilians suffered most of all, in the fighting and in the German reprisals that followed.

The day of the paratrooper is over

On 17 July 1941, at a reception for Knight's Cross recipients, Hitler told Student what he had concluded from Crete. Airborne troops, in his view, were a weapon of surprise, and the surprise was gone. Student later called Crete the graveyard of the German airborne force.

After the Battle of Crete, the Fallschirmjäger never again jumped in a major invasion. They fought on as elite infantry, at Monte Cassino and in Normandy, and the German airborne arm was never rebuilt on the scale of 1941. The battle did not, as is often claimed, delay the invasion of the Soviet Union directly: that date had been set before Merkur was planned. But it did cost the Luftwaffe transport crews and aircraft it would badly miss in the East.

The Allies drew the opposite lesson. Impressed by what the paratroopers had achieved, Britain and the United States expanded their own airborne forces into full divisions, which would drop over Sicily, Normandy and Arnhem. The British Army's failure to defend its airfields led directly to the creation of the RAF Regiment on 1 February 1942. Crete had shown both sides what a vertical envelopment could do, and what it cost. Only one of them chose to try again.

Kings and Generals' documentary on the Battle of Crete, with clear maps of the Maleme, Rethymno and Heraklion sectors.

Sources: Wikipedia (Battle of Crete, Battle of Maleme, Kurt Student, Junkers Ju 52, Andrew Cunningham), Imperial War Museums, The National Archives (UK), Robert M. Citino (MHQ / HistoryNet), I. S. O. Playfair et al. (British official history), D. M. Davin (New Zealand official history), F. H. Hinsley, Shores, Cull and Malizia, Spartacus Educational