PARATROOPS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 176, 28 July 1942, Page 4

PARATROOPS

OUT OF THE SKY

ABOVE CANEA ON CRETE

IHere is the first of three articles by Captain Geoffrey Cox, the New Zea-

land Rhodes scholar, describing the descent of Nazi paratroops on Crete. Captain Cox's work has been described by the London Daily Express as one of the finest pieces of

deseriptive writing of the war.]

Above the powder-grey olive trees of Perivolia they were like scraps of paper floating in a slow wind, like white shrapnel bursts from anti-air-craft guns, like white petals. Under the great vellow-nosed Junkers 52's that came on in steady threes over the shoulder of the mountains, handful after handful of them was being thrown out into the morning haze. Mai tin said, "Good God, look at that —right into the olive trees," but no one said "Parachutists." it was as if we didn't want to use the word, as if it still didn't seem quite possible that those really were parachute troops swaying down, that the Germans really were having a go at an air-borne landing.

In the morning haze it was suddenly very quiet in the tree-covered plain and the low hills behind Canea. For now the parachutists were dropping the bombers and fighters had stopped the air barrage they had put up for the previous hour. Since 7 o'clock they had been roaring like mad, fighter after fighter diving with engines and machine-guns roaring, lines of bombers moving in and sowing their loads up and down across the hills, the anti-aircraft guns thudding, and away up the coast, where the reddish sand that was Maleme aerodrome just showed in the mist, the Bofors guns had been baying like big dogs ever since it was light.

It had come to mad climax when five bombers laid a line of 1000-kilo bombs from the hills to the tented hospital by the sea. The great brown geysers of earth had spouted up one after another, noiselessly for a second, till you wondered what had happened, and then came the noise and the blast, and you knew.

Five of us were watching from our positions on Alikituri, the bare, rounded peninsula that stands like a Gibraltar above Canea and Suda Bay. We had been ducking in and out of shelter since dawn as the planes wheeled overhead, machine-gunning the road and the slopes before they formed up, low down, only 50 or 00 feet up over tha sea, for their journey home. It was a heavy blitz, but we had had heavy blitzes for days now, and there was nothing to prove that it meant anything special. Then out of the west had come planes flying slowly on in groups of three, and under them these white specks that suddenly made the whole thing seem unreal, Martian.

Above the edge of Canea a plane was steadily losing height. "There's one hit, anyway," I said to Harry. But no smoke poured from it, arid it was unlike the Junkers and Messerschmitts that still moved overhead. Its wings were much wider, its body shorter. Swiftly it curved round and settled out of sight near the wireless masts, and suddenly we knew what it was. A glider.

What you noticed at once was how quickly it all happened. The parachutists dropped from only 300 feet up, and they swung down in, at the most, half a minute. There were no figures swaying and dangling in the air as easy targets. Within a few minutes the sky was clear of them, and only an occasional flash of white showed where one had caught in a tree or on a hillside. But once this first wave was down, the valley and the shores below us were, for a short spell, just the same quiet, lovely Crete that we had watched for the past three weeks. Only two or three planes remained. It took an effort to realise that that wide, tree-filled valley behind Canea was now to be a battlefield, that we must fight over that green strip that ran down to the sea beside the hospital, that at any moment up these slopes from the town might come the first grey-uniformed patrols with their Tommy guns and grenades. The Silence Breaks Steadily the silence broke. It broke with a sound that was ugly and comforting, the dry snake rattle of Bren machine-guns firing in the olive groves. Bluish smoke from them drifted up. Behind Perivolia the first New Zealand patrols were closing in on the parachutists uropped there. From Maleme, too, the Bofors started up again, and we knew that they must be trying to land them directly on the aerodrome. In the sunny morning I ran down the road and the sweat poured from under my tin hat. Three thoughts filled my mind. Draw a rifle at once— a revolver is no use against this crowd, except at close quarters, and the next wave might be right amongst us. Warn the troops with whom for the past 10 days I had been working producing a newspaper for the troops that to-day, till the situation cleared, we would become fighting troops again; and get to our headquarters area where our unit was concentrated, so that if they landed around us here on the headland we would not be a lone party easily knocked off.

I onJy just got my rifle and got to the olives where my men were quartered in time. For overhead the sky filled again with fighters and bombers. This time it was our area they were going for. The bullets whined through the trees, cutting off leaves, kicking up spurts of dust on the hillside. (To be continued.)