Instead, it turned into a bloodbath.
Greek civilians raced into the mountains to join frontline troops, and together they managed to bottle up the Italians in the narrow passes. From across the sea, Crete sent the mountain men of its 5th Division. The Cretans could live off the land, skitter by night across cliff fronts, and kill as easily with a knife as they could with a gun. Instead of steamrolling to victory, the Italians found themselves struggling to hold their ground as Cretan phantoms picked them off from the crags. Dressed in rags, carrying their rifles across their shoulders like shepherd’s crooks, joking and cheerful despite the snow and deadly cold, the Cretans were soon spearheading the Greek attack. In one battle, a Cretan regiment was outnumbered ten to one and still chased back an entire Italian division.
Watching this unfold from afar, Hitler was aghast. Attacking Greece through the mountains, in the middle of the rainy season? With winter on the way? If mud didn’t stop the Italians, just wait for the snow. Right when the Third Reich was awing the world with its might, Hitler fumed, Mussolini’s bungling “struck a blow at the belief in our invincibility.” Christmas came and went, and instead of marching into Athens, the Italians were retreating into Albania. Germany would now have to step in and clean up this mess, if only to save face and avenge the disgrace.
Hitler took his time. He wasn’t going to repeat Mussolini’s mistake and monkey around with the weather. He left the Greeks and Italians snowbound in the mountains through the worst winter in a half-century. He didn’t even bother trying to stop British troops from coming to Greece’s aid. He waited till the weather warmed, on April 6, and then he gave Russia a look at its future.
“When it comes to hundreds of dive bombers at you and you can’t hit back at the swine, by god it’s nerving dear,” one Australian corporal wrote from Greece to his wife after the German invasion. “It makes the strongest man feel helpless as a baby.” German armored vehicles smashed through the mountain passes, while Luftwaffe planes machine-gunned and carpet-bombed anything that moved. The Greeks dug in courageously—so courageously, in fact, that after one garrison finally ran out of ammunition, the Germans spontaneously stood and saluted—but the long winter’s war had left them exhausted. The Greeks were soon forced to surrender, while some fifty thousand British Commonwealth troops scrambled aboard ships to escape to Crete, throwing aside their heavy weapons as they had at Dunkirk.
In just twenty-four days, Hitler mopped up Greece and captured Yugoslavia at the same time. Now for the finale: Crete.
This would take some finesse. Thanks to Mussolini’s bungling, the whole Greek adventure had put Operation Barbarossa behind schedule, but storming straight into Crete could be trouble. If Hitler invaded with a big ground force, he’d tie up troops that were already supposed to be on their way to Russia. But if he went in shorthanded, those mountain men could cause him the same headaches they’d just given Mussolini. Hitler assembled his generals and spelled out his dilemma.
That’s no dilemma, argued General Kurt Student, commander of the elite XI Air Corps. That’s the opportunity of a lifetime.
Of Student’s lifetime, at least. Student had grown up poor and clawed his way up through the ranks by taking jobs that were supposed to kill him. He started as a trench fighter in World War I, then was trained to fly and volunteered for dead man’s duty as a dogfight pilot over the Russian front. He became a legend for shooting down a notoriously elusive French plane, then bolting a German machine gun to its nose and taking it right back into combat. As one of the few German fliers to survive the war, he was recruited into an underground brotherhood that, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, was secretly rebuilding the German air force. Airborne shock and awe was Germany’s greatest weapon, Student was convinced, and he was willing to prove it with his own battered body; even though he was a fifty-year-old senior officer at the start of World War II and never learned to skydive, he personally commanded the invasion of Holland by slicing through shrapnel fire to arrive by seaplane. He was accidentally shot in the forehead by one of his own soldiers, but not even that stopped him; when Hitler was vexed by Crete, Student had recovered and was strong enough to step forward with a spectacular solution.
Crete was Hitler’s opportunity to launch the biggest airborne invasion in history. He could awe the world with the Third Reich’s newest and most terrifying innovation: a flying army. No military had ever attempted to swarm a major target by dropping in entirely from above, arriving from the clouds without the support of ground troops or sea reinforcements. Germany’s big Junkers were powerful enough to tow gliders holding a force of ten Storm Regiment commandos. Cut the gliders loose and they’re silent; steer them out of the blinding sunrise and they’re invisible. It was the ultimate sneak attack: a fighting force that could suddenly appear right over your head—anywhere, anytime—without a moment’s warning.
Hitler heard him out … then said no. Dangling that many men over the enemy’s guns? Far too risky.
But they weren’t talking about men, Student insisted; they were talking about the Fallschirmjäger, an elite corps of paratroopers known as “Hunters from the Sky.” You had to be extraordinarily ferocious, tough, ingenious, and athletic to even apply to be a Hunter, and even then, two of every three candidates flunked out. To earn the badge of the attacking eagle, you had to run an obstacle course under live fire; jump by night into forests; fire a submachine gun with accuracy while falling through the air at thirty-five miles per hour; survive for days on only the gear in the forty-seven pockets of your jumpsuit; and be able to disarm an enemy with your bare hands and use his own weapon against him. The Hunters could hit the ground, by day or by darkness, and come up fighting before a stunned enemy could react. A force of only eighty Fallschirmjäger had forced the surrender of fifteen hundred Belgian soldiers. Plus the Hunters relied on one of the Nazis’ secret weapons: before jumping, they were issued tablets of Pervitin, an early version of crystal meth.
Hitler started coming around. Despite his misgivings, he loved the Wagnerian overkill of Student’s plan: no clanking tanks or common foot soldiers, just wave after wave of Germany’s fiercest commandos raining down from the sky like apocalyptic demons. It was more than warfare; it was biblical doom. Hitler found the theatrics so tantalizing, he insisted they feature Germany’s greatest star, Max Schmeling, the world heavyweight boxing champion who’d knocked out Joe Louis. Having a celebrity like Max Schmeling leap out of a plane behind enemy lines was an astonishing command, but it neatly served two purposes.
Privately, it settled a personal grudge between the Führer and the famous fighter, who refused to join the Nazi Party and, it was rumored, had saved the lives of his Jewish trainer’s two sons by hiding them in his hotel room and smuggling them to safety in the United States. Publicly, it added another chilling image to the Nazis’ gallery of terror. A photo of the muscular German colossus as his big boots thumped down on the dust of Crete would send an unmistakable message: Our giants are coming, and they can’t be stopped. For a Third Reich so enraptured by death’s-head skulls, blood-red flags, and the raw rape symbolism of the swastika, with its two interlocked bodies representing, as Hitler put it, “the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man,” the sight of Germany’s two-fisted champion striding across the ancient world was irresistible. Crete was the birthplace of the modern world, the origin of every great achievement in civilization, and Hitler would show he could snatch it up in a matter of hours.