It was now their turn to move forward, crouch-running below the level of the battlements. Up ahead, the Canea Gate was bathed in magnesium light. Tanner saw Germans on the walls firing down towards this new attack.
He did not follow them. Instead, he crouched and fired down on the enemy below. Men screamed and fell, and now Pendlebury’s charge was upon the paratroopers. Tanner saw Pendlebury skewer one German and then others were fighting hand-to-hand with rifles as clubs, bayonets and knives. Peploe sent another flare into the sky and ordered his men on the wall to cease fire. Tanner briefly glimpsed his assailant in the garden, firing into the mass with his pistol, but before he could aim a shot, the German had disappeared under the gate.
Tanner now fired his last flare, out over the gate. Several bullets fizzed by, and one of the men further along the wall cried out and collapsed. Retreating paratroopers had already begun to fall back, away from the town, melting into the shadows, but as the flare burst, it was possible to see some of them hurrying away. Tanner pushed the Schmeisser onto his back, unslung his rifle and fired. He saw one man fall, but even with the flare they were hard to discern among the mass of buildings, trees and vegetation beyond the walls. Fighting could still be heard to the north near the sea, but by the Canea Gate the din of battle soon receded, until there was nothing more than the occasional, desultory crack of a rifle.
9
As the defenders of Heraklion were preparing their final charge on the Canea Gate, eighty-five miles away Major General Freyberg was signalling to General Headquarters, Middle East, in Cairo his assessment of the day’s fighting. The old quarry high on the Akrotiri outcrop had been transformed over the past three weeks into the working headquarters and command post of Creforce. Trestle tables lined the hollow cavern cut into the rock, electric lamps had been rigged up from the rough stone roof, radio sets and telephones had been connected, with a mass of wire running out from the entrance and down the hill. Camouflage nets had been draped over the entrance to mask it from the air. Inside, staff officers tapped at typewriters, while on a map table, progress, as far as it was known, was carefully plotted.
It was ironic that Freyberg was able to send a coded message more than seven hundred miles across the sea to Cairo and yet have very little communication with his forces stretched out on the coastal plain just a few miles in front of him. Freyberg had seen more action than most, and he knew that battles were always messy, chaotic affairs. A lot of smoke, a lot of noise and always conflicting messages. From their vantage point he and his staff had seen plenty of German transport planes plunging into the sea and onto the rocky Cretan ground; they had heard the sounds of fighting all day. Other than that, they had seen very little.
Instead, they had been reliant on deciphering what messages had come through: increasingly jittery ones from Colonel Andrew, commander of the New Zealanders of 22nd Battalion at Maleme, who was clearly out of radio contact with his two companies on the far side of the airfield. Freyberg appreciated that this was always a difficult judgement for a commander. Were one’s men overrun and defeated? Or was it simply that the rather flimsy telephone lines that linked battalion to company had been cut? Freyberg suspected the latter. He knew that Brigadier Hargest had initially promised reinforcements from 23rd Battalion for Colonel Andrew, but that would have meant moving them away from the coastal sector they were defending. Yet Freyberg knew what Hargest and Andrew did not: that the same intelligence that had warned him paratroop drops would be made at around 8 a.m. that morning had also advised that a further ten thousand enemy troops were to be transported to Crete by sea. True, there had been some inconsistencies in the intelligence signals over the past few weeks, but Freyberg had decided to trust the latest. Warnings of a seaborne invasion force had last been passed on exactly a week before, and since subsequent intelligence signals had proved uncannily accurate, Freyberg saw no reason to doubt that the Germans were indeed about to arrive from the sea too.
It was with this in mind that he had urged caution to Hargest. It would be wrong, he felt, to reinforce Maleme when logic suggested that infantry armed with Brens and rifles should never be overrun by Germans armed with little more than sub-machine-guns. Elsewhere, around Galatas and in Prison Valley, it seemed the enemy had taken a drubbing, yet fighting had been heard all day and, as at Maleme, communications between units had been extremely problematic. It didn’t matter how many telephone wires wound their way out of the Creforce quarry – if they were cut somewhere along the line, they were completely useless. Indeed, most information that day had come from runners rather than by phone, messengers arriving at the quarry’s entrance, red-faced, sweat-drenched and exhausted.
As darkness had fallen and the fighting had at last died down, Freyberg hoped his commanders in the field were making the most of the opportunity to repair lines, get runners through to dispersed companies and prepare themselves for robust counter-attacks at first light with the troops they had. Sending massed reinforcements to panicked battalion commanders was not the answer because that would upset his carefully prepared dispositions – dispositions that had been made with the promised subsequent seaborne landings in mind.
That afternoon German operation orders had been discovered on a dead German officer in Prison Valley and had revealed that objectives for the first day had been all three airfields: Maleme, Heraklion and Rethymno. News from Heraklion and Rethymno had been sketchy to say the least, but the last communications both suggested huge German casualties and gave no sense that the airfields – or harbours for that matter – were in immediate danger.
With a tumbler of Scotch beside him, Freyberg sat at one of the trestle tables, pencil in hand, paper in front of him, ready to draft a signal to GHQ in Cairo. ‘Today has been a hard one,’ he wrote – and indeed it had. He took a mouthful of whisky, the strong aroma masking the dank mustiness of the cavern. ‘We have been hard-pressed,’ he added. ‘So far, I believe, we hold aerodromes at Rethymno, Heraklion and Maleme, and the two harbours.’ He paused, thinking. It was true the enemy had not taken their objectives but he was worrying about what was to come the following day: more airborne troops and ten thousand men by sea. That being so, the situation looked less secure. ‘Margin by which we hold them is a bare one,’ he scribbled, ‘and it would be wrong of me to paint an optimistic picture.’ He paused again, drank another glug of whisky. Was that too pessimistic? No, because he had always made it quite clear he felt the island was inadequately defended, and it was best to prepare his masters for the worst, should it come. However, he could always end on a brighter note. ‘Fighting has been heavy,’ he continued, ‘and we have killed large numbers of Germans. Communications are most difficult.’ He sat back, read it through again, then added one last afterthought: ‘A German operation order with most ambitious objectives, all of which failed, has just been captured.’
He stood up, passed the scrawled note to a clerk, then wandered out through the camouflage netting to the mouth of the quarry. The night was warm, although there was a light breeze. A faint whiff of smoke blended with the ever-present scent of herbs and grass. Under the light of the moon and the stars, the dark outline of the coast could clearly be seen and beyond, away to the south, the imposing mass of the White Mountains. Occasional desultory small-arms fire rang out; a dog barked in the town of Canea below. Freyberg finished his whisky, wondering whether he would be able to stand in the same place at the same time tomorrow night, or whether by then his forces would have been overrun.
Tanner stood on the battlements, looking out over the town. To the south, fighting was still going on but it was lessening now. He felt certain the Germans there would soon fall back once they knew their other thrust had failed. In any case, as he could now see, it looked as though the two platoons from A Company had just arrived – he could see Captain Bull and several others approaching Peploe from the direction of Kalokerinou; for all he knew, those from C and D Companies had already been sent to join the fight by the sea. He wondered what was happening over by the airfield. Turning his head, he listened for any sound of battle, but there was none – the airfield was surely still theirs.
Laughter from below made him look down thirty feet to the open area around the mouth of the Canea Gate. The mood among the town’s defenders there was euphoric. Clear of the shadows, soldiers and Cretan
