Got this of another site. I thought i was worth posting
On 25 April 1941, Adolf Hitler signed Directive 28, ordering the Luftwaffe to seize the island of Crete, a hundred kilometres south of Greece, doubtless unaware of the coincidence of sending his forces against the Australian and New Zealand defenders on Anzac Day.
On a small, sun-blasted scrap of rock in the Mediterranean, the battle of Crete would end in a terrible defeat for those Anzacs, and for the Greeks and British who fought with them. But it would also batter the myth of the Nazi superman, and in particular the reputation of the Reich's famous airborne regiments, so heavy was the toll exacted from them in exchange for their victory.
It's not a part of the Anzac legend which enjoys much popular acclaim or even awareness, however. A disastrous loss in a long war, with any number of mistakes on our own side contributing to the failure. But it is worth attending to, especially this week, because the lives spent on Crete still bought the life we enjoy decades later.
It is also worth dwelling on both sides of the ledger, not just on what was earned, but on what was done to secure it. While Gallipoli resonates with the creation myths of Anzac, of the landing itself, the charge at the Nek, Lone Pine, Simpson and his donkey, no similar moments has Crete bequeathed us. But they are there, if you care to look. The desperate defence of Rethymno airfield. The haka of the Maoris before the battle of Galatas. The friendship and near suicidal bravery of the Cretan islanders themselves as their whole world fell apart.
The fighting on Crete was both ultra-modern and very old fashioned. An airborne assault on a defended island had never before been accomplished, and all the world watched on with the same sense of awe as accompanied the destruction of the Iraqi Army on CNN in the first Gulf War. But for all of the - at that time - amazing technology applied by the Luftwaffe and its parachute regiments to the invasion, much of the actual combat was ferociously medieval. Men killed each other in their thousands, often up close, with bayonets and empty rifles swung as crude clubs. The Cretans, men and women, young and old, defended themselves with axes, kitchen knives and garden hoes.
Towards the end, when the Germans thought themselves unbeatable, they stumbled into a rear guard of Australians and New Zealanders at '42nd Street', a defensive line strung along a sunken road through an olive grove, protecting the harbour at Suda Bay.
The Anzacs fixed bayonets and charged, slamming into 141st Mountain Regiment and destroying it in hand-to-hand fighting, which lasted for just a few minutes. So savage was the encounter that when the Germans later returned to the field to collect their dead, they could not believe that such awful damage could have be done to the bodies of their troops in honourable combat. The mutilations must have been war crimes, they argued.
But they were not. Horror is the inevitable consequence of war and having chosen to visit insensate horror upon the world, the Nazis at last had it visited upon them in that olive grove above the azure waters of the Mediterranean.
They were stunned by the cost of their 'terrible victory'. Unaccustomed to resistance, they had seen themselves as a warrior race, and their enemies as weak, effete, and decadent. The paratroopers who dropped onto Crete were professional soldiers. The Anzacs who opposed them were not. Reading the official Australian history of the war, one of the things that immediately strikes you is the authors' practice of including the civilian history of the officers and men who fought. In their real lives they were bakers, lawyers, labourers, school teachers, book keepers, farmers and so on. As with all of the armies of the free world, the ranks were filled with men and women who were simply citizens first, and warriors only for the duration.
And tomorrow, as always, we owe them our thoughts. The defenders of Crete, the ghosts of Gallipoli and Pozieres, of Kokoda and Kapyong, of Long Tan and Shah I Khot. Every man and woman, now and then, who ever made that simple promise, of their life for ours.
....; John Birmingham
