“The British Are Evacuating, We Are Not” — The Anzac Bayonet Charge That Routed Germany’s Elite

At 11:00 on the morning of the 27th of May, 1941, a sunken dirt road east of Chania on the north coast of Crete held the last organized infantry the allies still had on the island. The lane ran inland from the coast road, cut below the level of the fields and walled in by bamboo and olive trees. The men lying along it had been fighting backwards for 7 days, ever since German paratroopers came down on the airfield at Maleme.

They were at the end of what a body can do, and there was nothing behind them except a mountain track and a fishing village on the far coast. Coming toward them through the groves in open order was a battalion of German mountain troops who expected to find nothing standing in the way. They were Australians and New Zealanders mixed together in a way no staff officer had planned.

The 28th Maori Battalion held one stretch of the lane. Alongside them were the remains of the 21st,  22nd, and 23rd New Zealand Battalions, worn down by a week of holding ground and then  giving it up again. Further along lay two Australian Battalions of the 19th  Brigade, the 2/7 and the 2/8.

Both of them survivors of the campaign in Greece who had reached Crete with rifles and almost nothing else. Between them they made up the New Zealand 5th Brigade and a scratch Australian force, and they were all that stood on the coastal approach. The battalion walking toward  them belonged to the 141st Mountain Regiment of the German 5th Mountain Division.

These were Alpine soldiers flown into Maleme on transport aircraft once the airfield fell, and for a week they had walked over everything the defenders put in front of them. They came down the axis toward the sunken road at the pace of men who had watched an army withdraw ahead of them for 7 straight days. Their machine gun teams weren’t deployed forward and their mortars weren’t  set up behind.

Nothing in that week suggested the ditch in front of them would be held by anybody. By that hour, Crete had already been written off in Cairo. General Freyberg had signaled that his force was finished, and the island couldn’t be held. And the withdrawal south over the White Mountains toward the fishing village of Sfakia >>  >> was already moving on the roads.

The formal authorization from General Wavell wouldn’t reach Crete until 10 minutes to 4:00 that afternoon, hours after the orders had gone out, and the columns had started walking. The men in the sunken lane were the rear guard of an island their own high command had given up on, and every one of them knew what a rear guard on a lost island was for.

Along the position, a bayonet went on to a rifle, and the sound carried. Others followed it, and the noise of steel locking onto muzzles >>  >> ran the length of the lane while the Germans were still walking. There was no artillery to call on, no smoke, and no aircraft overhead that belonged to anyone on their side. What these men had >>  >> was a ditch, a slope of open ground in front of it, and several hundred meters of barley and olive grove between them and the Alpine  infantry of the German army.

What they did with it in the next hour was the most effective thing the Allies did on Crete from the first day to the last. Crete sits in the Eastern Mediterranean, about 160 km south of the Greek mainland, and in the spring of 1941, it was the last piece of Greece the Allies still held. Souda Bay on the north coast was the reason.

It was the best deepwater anchorage in the Eastern Mediterranean, and whoever owned it could reach the sea lanes running to Egypt. The garrison was a mixture of British, New Zealand, Australian, and Greek units, a great many of them evacuated off the Greek mainland weeks earlier without their heavy equipment. On the 20th of May, the Germans opened the largest airborne assault ever attempted, dropping paratroopers onto the airfields strung along that coast.

The critical ground was Hill 107, the high point above the airstrip at Maleme. The 22nd New Zealand battalion held it through the first day and cut the paratroopers below it to pieces, and by evening the German airborne assault on the western sector was  close to collapse. On the night of the 20th, with his communications broken and his forward companies out of contact, the battalion commander pulled off the hill without authorization from above.

>>  >> By morning, the Germans had the high ground and the runway underneath it. Nobody got either of them back. That runway decided the campaign inside 48 hours. German transport aircraft began landing under fire and kept landing, wheeling in with mountain troops of the fifth mountain division while wrecked machines were dragged clear of the strip to make room for the next wave.

The 141st regiment came onto the island through that gate. Every hour the airfield stayed in German hands added another company of fresh Alpine infantry to a battle where the defenders had no reinforcement coming to them at all, and no way  of stopping the aircraft that were delivering it.

The Australians on Crete were men who had already lost one campaign that year. The 2/7 battalion sailed from Alexandria in March, 759 strong, >>  >> and went into Greece with the force sent to hold the Germans north of Athens. That force was pushed off the Greek mainland inside a month, fighting rear guards the whole way south.

What reached Crete came off the ships with personal weapons >>  >> and whatever a man could carry on his back. There was no artillery and no transport waiting on the beach for them, and the island had no depots to draw on because everything on Crete had been stripped for the mainland campaign. A counterattack toward Maleme on the night of the 21st failed to retake the airfield, and after that the fighting became a chain of rearguard positions along the coast road.

At Galatos on the 25th, the New Zealanders went in with bayonets and two light tanks and took the village back in the dark. They had to give it up again the next day because there was nothing behind them to hold it with once the Germans  brought up fresh companies. On [snorts] the 26th of May, the line covering Hania and Galatos >>  >> broke for good and the defense west of Suda Bay came apart in the space of a few hours.

Freyberg signaled Cairo that his force was exhausted and the position hopeless. The only road out ran south through the white mountains over a pass and then down a gorge to Sfakia on the far coast. And it was a stony track rather than a road for most of its length. Getting an army onto it required somebody to stand behind the army while it walked.

The withdrawal moved on foot in daylight under aircraft that owned the sky, and one German pushed down the coast road would have caught those columns strung out in the open with nothing to fight back with and nowhere to go. So the New Zealand 5th Brigade and the two Australian battalions were put across the coastal approach east of Chania in the sunken lane the troops on the island had taken to calling 42nd Street.

It wasn’t a street. It was the Sikelarian Road, a dirt lane running inland from the coast about 5 km east of Chania sitting low enough below the surrounding fields to hide a standing man. Bamboo grew thick along its edges and olive groves covered the ground in front of it. Anything approaching that ditch arrived close and arrived suddenly, which was the only advantage the position had to offer.

Through the night of the 26th, the units filtered in and sorted themselves out along the lane in the dark. The Maori battalion took one section of it. >>  >> The Australians of the 2/7 and 2/8 settled into another with the New Zealand battalions filling the ground between. There was no continuous trench, no wire, no mines, and no gun battery behind them to fire a defensive task on call.

The position was a ditch full of infantry carrying bayonets and whatever ammunition had survived the walk from the west, and the officers spent the night working out how few rounds that actually came to. Morning on the 27th came hot and quiet. German patrols worked forward through the groves, feeling for the edge of the position, and the men in the lane held their fire and let them come on, rather than give away where the line ran.

Aircraft crossed overhead on their way to the coast road and  the columns walking south, and nobody in the ditch had anything to shoot back at them with. For a few hours nothing came at 42nd  Street except the sound of an air war going on somewhere behind it. Men slept where they lay in a ditch in the open with their boots on.

At about 11:00 the leading companies of the 1st Battalion of the 141st came out of the olive groves and started across the open ground toward the lane. They were in open order, moving at a walk with no bombardment coming down ahead of them. There was no attempt to work around a flank first, and no reconnaissance by fire.

After 7 days of pursuit, there was no reason to expect the ditch to be held by anyone willing to stay in it once the shooting started. It was the last mistake that battalion made on Crete. What happened next didn’t come down from a headquarters. The order to fix bayonets went along the position from the men who were standing in it, and the Maori battalion came out of the lane first, with the Australians rising on their flank and going forward alongside them.

There was no covering fire, and no smoke  screen, and no artillery preparation, because none of those things existed on that part of the island anymore. Several hundred infantry climbed out of a ditch in broad daylight and walked and then ran straight at a battalion of German mountain troops caught standing in open ground.

The Germans got perhaps one volley away before the line reached them. Mountain infantry are trained to fight at distance in broken country with machine guns sighted on the approaches and mortars ranged in behind and every part of that becomes useless when the enemy is already inside the gun line and closing. The work in the first olive grove was done at arms length with bayonets and rifle butts at a range where a man could hear the breathing of the man he was fighting.

Inside a few minutes the leading German companies had stopped functioning as companies at all. Then the battalion broke. Men who had walked across half of Crete without being stopped by anybody turned and went back through the olive trees and the Anzacs went after them through the same trees. The pursuit ran roughly 1,500 m west of the sunken road.

For that entire distance the 141st was a regiment of Germany’s Alpine infantry running away  from soldiers it had written off the day before as a spent force. Nothing else the defenders attempted anywhere on Crete pushed the German advance back that far. The Maori battalion  counted about 80 Germans left on the ground behind the charge.

German records  for the same action put their own losses at 121. Against that the Maori battalion war diary recorded six of its own men gone and 10 wounded. Those are the figures written down at the time by the two sides and they describe a battalion of Alpine infantry taken apart by men who were supposed to be finished as a fighting force.

The Australians of the 2/7 and 2/8 never produced a separate count for their part of it. The charge stopped because of the sky rather than the enemy. Pushing west through the groves took the attackers out from under the tree cover and into ground  the German Air Force could see And with aircraft working that coast from first light until  dark, a massive infantry standing in the open would have lasted minutes.

The pursuit was called off while the  men were still moving forward. They turned around and walked back east to the sunken lane they had come out of, carrying their wounded with them, and settled into the same ditch they had left an hour earlier. What that hour bought was the  road south. The German advance along the coastal axis stopped where the charge had left it.

And when it came on again, it came carefully, probing forward instead of marching. Behind 42nd Street, thousands of men were already on the  track through the White Mountains, strung out over kilometers of bare hillside with no cover of any kind above them. Every hour the German spent reorganizing was another hour of that column getting further away from the aircraft and the machine guns, and closer to the only beach that could still take them off.

The march itself was its own ordeal. The route climbed to a pass and then  dropped into the Imbros Gorge, a rock corridor with no water in it, in late May heat on the Mediterranean. Men who had thrown away everything except their rifles >>  >> walked it in single file, and those who fell out of the column stayed where they fell.

At the far end, the track ran out on a shelf above Sfakia, and the last stretch down to the water was a goat path that had to be taken in the dark, one man at a time, with the beach below full of soldiers waiting for ships that might not come. The Royal Navy came in after nightfall on four consecutive nights, destroyers and cruisers standing off the beach while landing craft ferried men out through the surf.

Between the 28th of May and the 1st of June, the fleet lifted more than 10,700 soldiers off Sfakia and carried them to Alexandria. Every ship had to be clear of the island and well out to sea before daylight because the sky over Crete belonged to the Germans and the fleet was losing ships on that run at a rate the Mediterranean command couldn’t sustain for a fifth night.

On the morning of the 1st of June, the men still waiting above the beach worked out that no more ships were coming for them. More than 5,000 were still on that shore. The rear guard was in that group by design because the units holding the perimeter were always going to be the ones furthest from the water when the last  boats pulled away.

They had spent the retreat standing between the German advance >>  >> and the columns walking south and standing there was precisely what put them at  the back of the queue when the queue ran out. That day at Komitades in  the hills above Sfakia, Lieutenant Colonel Theo Walker of the 2/7 Battalion handed over what remained of the force on the beach to an Austrian officer of the German 100th Mountain Regiment.

Across the whole campaign, 12,254 Allied soldiers went into captivity on Crete. A large share of them came from the battalions that had held ground so the ships could load. Some of them had made the charge at 42nd Street 5 days earlier and walked back into the ditch afterwards. The 2/7 Battalion had left Alexandria in March with 759 men.

By the 2nd of June, 72 of them were back in Alexandria.  The rest were in German hands or in the hills with Cretan villagers >>  >> or gone. That is a battalion reduced to under a tenth of its strength in 11 weeks across two campaigns without ever losing a position it had been ordered to hold. The battalion was rebuilt from nothing over the following year and went back into the war in New Guinea with a new set of faces under the same color patch and the 2/8 went with it.

Neither unit ever fought in Europe again. The Cretans who took those men in paid for it. German reprisals against villages along the withdrawal route began within weeks of the surrender and continued through the occupation and the island stayed under German control  until May of 1945. Australian and New Zealand soldiers were still being sheltered in Creton Hill villages years after the battle ended, moved from house to house  and fed out of families’ own rations.

A few of them were still being taken  off the south coast by submarine in 1943. None of that appeared in the dispatch at the time.  German accounts of Crete treat the action at 42nd Street as the sharpest thing the defenders managed on the whole  island. Their airborne divisions had taken losses at Maleme and Galatos heavy enough that Hitler never again authorized a large airborne operation for the rest of the war, which meant the German paratrooper became an infantryman for the remaining four years.

The mountain troops flown in afterwards expected the ground fighting to be a simpler business and for six days it was exactly that. On the seventh day a battalion of them was chased through an olive grove by men who had run out of everything except bayonets. The men who made that charge had no formal reason to be fighting side by side.

The Maori battalion and the two Australian battalions >>  >> belonged to different brigades and different national forces thrown into the same ditch by a retreat that had scrambled the order of battle beyond recognition. They shared that lane for one night and came out of it together the following morning without anyone above them arranging it.

The memorial that stands on the Sfakion road today carries both countries on it, which is the only honest way that particular hour was ever going to be recorded. Crete cost the allies the island, most of two divisions and a quantity of shipping the Mediterranean fleet couldn’t spare. It cost the Germans their airborne arm as an offensive weapon and it cost  the 141st Regiment a battalion of Alpine infantry in about an hour on a dirt lane outside Chania.

The signal from Cairo authorizing the evacuation of Crete, the paperwork that made the whole retreat official, arrived at 10 minutes to 4:00 on the afternoon of the 27th of May. By then, the men on 42nd Street had been back in their ditch for hours, having already worked out for themselves  what they were going to do about it.

“The British Are Evacuating, We Are Not” — The Anzac Bayonet Charge That Routed Germany’s Elite

At 11:00 on the morning of the 27th of May, 1941, a sunken dirt road east of Chania on the north coast of Crete held the last organized infantry the allies still had on the island. The lane ran inland from the coast road, cut below the level of the fields and walled in by bamboo and olive trees. The men lying along it had been fighting backwards for 7 days, ever since German paratroopers came down on the airfield at Maleme.

They were at the end of what a body can do, and there was nothing behind them except a mountain track and a fishing village on the far coast. Coming toward them through the groves in open order was a battalion of German mountain troops who expected to find nothing standing in the way. They were Australians and New Zealanders mixed together in a way no staff officer had planned.

The 28th Maori Battalion held one stretch of the lane. Alongside them were the remains of the 21st,  22nd, and 23rd New Zealand Battalions, worn down by a week of holding ground and then  giving it up again. Further along lay two Australian Battalions of the 19th  Brigade, the 2/7 and the 2/8.

Both of them survivors of the campaign in Greece who had reached Crete with rifles and almost nothing else. Between them they made up the New Zealand 5th Brigade and a scratch Australian force, and they were all that stood on the coastal approach. The battalion walking toward  them belonged to the 141st Mountain Regiment of the German 5th Mountain Division.

These were Alpine soldiers flown into Maleme on transport aircraft once the airfield fell, and for a week they had walked over everything the defenders put in front of them. They came down the axis toward the sunken road at the pace of men who had watched an army withdraw ahead of them for 7 straight days. Their machine gun teams weren’t deployed forward and their mortars weren’t  set up behind.

Nothing in that week suggested the ditch in front of them would be held by anybody. By that hour, Crete had already been written off in Cairo. General Freyberg had signaled that his force was finished, and the island couldn’t be held. And the withdrawal south over the White Mountains toward the fishing village of Sfakia >>  >> was already moving on the roads.

The formal authorization from General Wavell wouldn’t reach Crete until 10 minutes to 4:00 that afternoon, hours after the orders had gone out, and the columns had started walking. The men in the sunken lane were the rear guard of an island their own high command had given up on, and every one of them knew what a rear guard on a lost island was for.

Along the position, a bayonet went on to a rifle, and the sound carried. Others followed it, and the noise of steel locking onto muzzles >>  >> ran the length of the lane while the Germans were still walking. There was no artillery to call on, no smoke, and no aircraft overhead that belonged to anyone on their side. What these men had >>  >> was a ditch, a slope of open ground in front of it, and several hundred meters of barley and olive grove between them and the Alpine  infantry of the German army.

What they did with it in the next hour was the most effective thing the Allies did on Crete from the first day to the last. Crete sits in the Eastern Mediterranean, about 160 km south of the Greek mainland, and in the spring of 1941, it was the last piece of Greece the Allies still held. Souda Bay on the north coast was the reason.

It was the best deepwater anchorage in the Eastern Mediterranean, and whoever owned it could reach the sea lanes running to Egypt. The garrison was a mixture of British, New Zealand, Australian, and Greek units, a great many of them evacuated off the Greek mainland weeks earlier without their heavy equipment. On the 20th of May, the Germans opened the largest airborne assault ever attempted, dropping paratroopers onto the airfields strung along that coast.

The critical ground was Hill 107, the high point above the airstrip at Maleme. The 22nd New Zealand battalion held it through the first day and cut the paratroopers below it to pieces, and by evening the German airborne assault on the western sector was  close to collapse. On the night of the 20th, with his communications broken and his forward companies out of contact, the battalion commander pulled off the hill without authorization from above.

>>  >> By morning, the Germans had the high ground and the runway underneath it. Nobody got either of them back. That runway decided the campaign inside 48 hours. German transport aircraft began landing under fire and kept landing, wheeling in with mountain troops of the fifth mountain division while wrecked machines were dragged clear of the strip to make room for the next wave.

The 141st regiment came onto the island through that gate. Every hour the airfield stayed in German hands added another company of fresh Alpine infantry to a battle where the defenders had no reinforcement coming to them at all, and no way  of stopping the aircraft that were delivering it.

The Australians on Crete were men who had already lost one campaign that year. The 2/7 battalion sailed from Alexandria in March, 759 strong, >>  >> and went into Greece with the force sent to hold the Germans north of Athens. That force was pushed off the Greek mainland inside a month, fighting rear guards the whole way south.

What reached Crete came off the ships with personal weapons >>  >> and whatever a man could carry on his back. There was no artillery and no transport waiting on the beach for them, and the island had no depots to draw on because everything on Crete had been stripped for the mainland campaign. A counterattack toward Maleme on the night of the 21st failed to retake the airfield, and after that the fighting became a chain of rearguard positions along the coast road.

At Galatos on the 25th, the New Zealanders went in with bayonets and two light tanks and took the village back in the dark. They had to give it up again the next day because there was nothing behind them to hold it with once the Germans  brought up fresh companies. On [snorts] the 26th of May, the line covering Hania and Galatos >>  >> broke for good and the defense west of Suda Bay came apart in the space of a few hours.

Freyberg signaled Cairo that his force was exhausted and the position hopeless. The only road out ran south through the white mountains over a pass and then down a gorge to Sfakia on the far coast. And it was a stony track rather than a road for most of its length. Getting an army onto it required somebody to stand behind the army while it walked.

The withdrawal moved on foot in daylight under aircraft that owned the sky, and one German pushed down the coast road would have caught those columns strung out in the open with nothing to fight back with and nowhere to go. So the New Zealand 5th Brigade and the two Australian battalions were put across the coastal approach east of Chania in the sunken lane the troops on the island had taken to calling 42nd Street.

It wasn’t a street. It was the Sikelarian Road, a dirt lane running inland from the coast about 5 km east of Chania sitting low enough below the surrounding fields to hide a standing man. Bamboo grew thick along its edges and olive groves covered the ground in front of it. Anything approaching that ditch arrived close and arrived suddenly, which was the only advantage the position had to offer.

Through the night of the 26th, the units filtered in and sorted themselves out along the lane in the dark. The Maori battalion took one section of it. >>  >> The Australians of the 2/7 and 2/8 settled into another with the New Zealand battalions filling the ground between. There was no continuous trench, no wire, no mines, and no gun battery behind them to fire a defensive task on call.

The position was a ditch full of infantry carrying bayonets and whatever ammunition had survived the walk from the west, and the officers spent the night working out how few rounds that actually came to. Morning on the 27th came hot and quiet. German patrols worked forward through the groves, feeling for the edge of the position, and the men in the lane held their fire and let them come on, rather than give away where the line ran.

Aircraft crossed overhead on their way to the coast road and  the columns walking south, and nobody in the ditch had anything to shoot back at them with. For a few hours nothing came at 42nd  Street except the sound of an air war going on somewhere behind it. Men slept where they lay in a ditch in the open with their boots on.

At about 11:00 the leading companies of the 1st Battalion of the 141st came out of the olive groves and started across the open ground toward the lane. They were in open order, moving at a walk with no bombardment coming down ahead of them. There was no attempt to work around a flank first, and no reconnaissance by fire.

After 7 days of pursuit, there was no reason to expect the ditch to be held by anyone willing to stay in it once the shooting started. It was the last mistake that battalion made on Crete. What happened next didn’t come down from a headquarters. The order to fix bayonets went along the position from the men who were standing in it, and the Maori battalion came out of the lane first, with the Australians rising on their flank and going forward alongside them.

There was no covering fire, and no smoke  screen, and no artillery preparation, because none of those things existed on that part of the island anymore. Several hundred infantry climbed out of a ditch in broad daylight and walked and then ran straight at a battalion of German mountain troops caught standing in open ground.

The Germans got perhaps one volley away before the line reached them. Mountain infantry are trained to fight at distance in broken country with machine guns sighted on the approaches and mortars ranged in behind and every part of that becomes useless when the enemy is already inside the gun line and closing. The work in the first olive grove was done at arms length with bayonets and rifle butts at a range where a man could hear the breathing of the man he was fighting.

Inside a few minutes the leading German companies had stopped functioning as companies at all. Then the battalion broke. Men who had walked across half of Crete without being stopped by anybody turned and went back through the olive trees and the Anzacs went after them through the same trees. The pursuit ran roughly 1,500 m west of the sunken road.

For that entire distance the 141st was a regiment of Germany’s Alpine infantry running away  from soldiers it had written off the day before as a spent force. Nothing else the defenders attempted anywhere on Crete pushed the German advance back that far. The Maori battalion  counted about 80 Germans left on the ground behind the charge.

German records  for the same action put their own losses at 121. Against that the Maori battalion war diary recorded six of its own men gone and 10 wounded. Those are the figures written down at the time by the two sides and they describe a battalion of Alpine infantry taken apart by men who were supposed to be finished as a fighting force.

The Australians of the 2/7 and 2/8 never produced a separate count for their part of it. The charge stopped because of the sky rather than the enemy. Pushing west through the groves took the attackers out from under the tree cover and into ground  the German Air Force could see And with aircraft working that coast from first light until  dark, a massive infantry standing in the open would have lasted minutes.

The pursuit was called off while the  men were still moving forward. They turned around and walked back east to the sunken lane they had come out of, carrying their wounded with them, and settled into the same ditch they had left an hour earlier. What that hour bought was the  road south. The German advance along the coastal axis stopped where the charge had left it.

And when it came on again, it came carefully, probing forward instead of marching. Behind 42nd Street, thousands of men were already on the  track through the White Mountains, strung out over kilometers of bare hillside with no cover of any kind above them. Every hour the German spent reorganizing was another hour of that column getting further away from the aircraft and the machine guns, and closer to the only beach that could still take them off.

The march itself was its own ordeal. The route climbed to a pass and then  dropped into the Imbros Gorge, a rock corridor with no water in it, in late May heat on the Mediterranean. Men who had thrown away everything except their rifles >>  >> walked it in single file, and those who fell out of the column stayed where they fell.

At the far end, the track ran out on a shelf above Sfakia, and the last stretch down to the water was a goat path that had to be taken in the dark, one man at a time, with the beach below full of soldiers waiting for ships that might not come. The Royal Navy came in after nightfall on four consecutive nights, destroyers and cruisers standing off the beach while landing craft ferried men out through the surf.

Between the 28th of May and the 1st of June, the fleet lifted more than 10,700 soldiers off Sfakia and carried them to Alexandria. Every ship had to be clear of the island and well out to sea before daylight because the sky over Crete belonged to the Germans and the fleet was losing ships on that run at a rate the Mediterranean command couldn’t sustain for a fifth night.

On the morning of the 1st of June, the men still waiting above the beach worked out that no more ships were coming for them. More than 5,000 were still on that shore. The rear guard was in that group by design because the units holding the perimeter were always going to be the ones furthest from the water when the last  boats pulled away.

They had spent the retreat standing between the German advance >>  >> and the columns walking south and standing there was precisely what put them at  the back of the queue when the queue ran out. That day at Komitades in  the hills above Sfakia, Lieutenant Colonel Theo Walker of the 2/7 Battalion handed over what remained of the force on the beach to an Austrian officer of the German 100th Mountain Regiment.

Across the whole campaign, 12,254 Allied soldiers went into captivity on Crete. A large share of them came from the battalions that had held ground so the ships could load. Some of them had made the charge at 42nd Street 5 days earlier and walked back into the ditch afterwards. The 2/7 Battalion had left Alexandria in March with 759 men.

By the 2nd of June, 72 of them were back in Alexandria.  The rest were in German hands or in the hills with Cretan villagers >>  >> or gone. That is a battalion reduced to under a tenth of its strength in 11 weeks across two campaigns without ever losing a position it had been ordered to hold. The battalion was rebuilt from nothing over the following year and went back into the war in New Guinea with a new set of faces under the same color patch and the 2/8 went with it.

Neither unit ever fought in Europe again. The Cretans who took those men in paid for it. German reprisals against villages along the withdrawal route began within weeks of the surrender and continued through the occupation and the island stayed under German control  until May of 1945. Australian and New Zealand soldiers were still being sheltered in Creton Hill villages years after the battle ended, moved from house to house  and fed out of families’ own rations.

A few of them were still being taken  off the south coast by submarine in 1943. None of that appeared in the dispatch at the time.  German accounts of Crete treat the action at 42nd Street as the sharpest thing the defenders managed on the whole  island. Their airborne divisions had taken losses at Maleme and Galatos heavy enough that Hitler never again authorized a large airborne operation for the rest of the war, which meant the German paratrooper became an infantryman for the remaining four years.

The mountain troops flown in afterwards expected the ground fighting to be a simpler business and for six days it was exactly that. On the seventh day a battalion of them was chased through an olive grove by men who had run out of everything except bayonets. The men who made that charge had no formal reason to be fighting side by side.

The Maori battalion and the two Australian battalions >>  >> belonged to different brigades and different national forces thrown into the same ditch by a retreat that had scrambled the order of battle beyond recognition. They shared that lane for one night and came out of it together the following morning without anyone above them arranging it.

The memorial that stands on the Sfakion road today carries both countries on it, which is the only honest way that particular hour was ever going to be recorded. Crete cost the allies the island, most of two divisions and a quantity of shipping the Mediterranean fleet couldn’t spare. It cost the Germans their airborne arm as an offensive weapon and it cost  the 141st Regiment a battalion of Alpine infantry in about an hour on a dirt lane outside Chania.

The signal from Cairo authorizing the evacuation of Crete, the paperwork that made the whole retreat official, arrived at 10 minutes to 4:00 on the afternoon of the 27th of May. By then, the men on 42nd Street had been back in their ditch for hours, having already worked out for themselves  what they were going to do about it.