THE GLIDERS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 178, 30 July 1942, Page 4

THE GLIDERS

HOW THEY CAME

NAZIS ON CRETE

(By CAPTAIN GEOFFREY COX)

Through a gap in the trees I saw the gliders. One, two, three, four, five, they sailed in, surprisingly fast, swerving straight towards us. And the pull-through that I was using to try to get some of the grease out of my rifle, straight from the store, was sticking in the barrel. Working it out. I watched the planes. My mind seemed unable to take in the fact thatt hey were full of troops.. that at any second they might be in among us. Then at the last moment they gave an upward jerk and swooped towards the top of the hill, five hundred yards above us. I ran back towards headquarters to give the alarm, but already it was known and the Bren carriers were moving up the curving road, their crews with set, quiet faces behind their machine-guns and anti-tank guns. Back in the operations dugouts the red circles on the maps were already growing. "Parachutists landed here at 08.00 hours May 20; three gliders reported here 08.45 hours. Parachutes fell here, believed supplies only." On and on mounted the red pencil markings as the first dispatches came in. Intelligence officers marked them up quietly, as if there was nothing more normal in this world than parachute landings. ' Steadily, the picture filled out. Two main waves of parachutists and gliders had been landed, one around Maleme aerodrome, 12 miles west from Canea, another at three points around Canea town — the headland that we were on, the olive groves to the south-west, the hospital promontory on the coast road between Maleme and Canea. Death at Maleme At Maleme the most fearful battle of this three-dimensional warfare was in full swing. Here the troops around the aerodrome, crouching in their slit trenches after an hour of bombing and machine-gunning such as probably no troops in this world have ever known, looked up to see the sky above them filled with parachutists and material swaying down. They simply had to raise their rifles and machine-guns and fire straight up "We had a ceiling of cross fire from machine-guns about thirty feet above the aerodrome and they had to drop through that," the machinegun commander reported. "None of that first wave survived. We watched them kicking to try to swing clear of the fire, and then man after man would give a sudden jerk of his knees towards his head and we would know that he was finished.

"They dropped masses of material. The first thing I saw coming down towards me was a two-pounder gun, with pneumatic tyres, swinging from a triple parachute. We grabbed it and fired it from our post, but apparently you had to take the wheels off because on the recoil it ran halfway up the hill and nearly killed us all."

There were no worries about the aerodrome from these first waves. But to the west there was a dried-up watercourse where the parachutists could get immediate cover, could sort out their material, and get into formation. Into this the Germans poured stuff. Over twenty gliders were landed in it, and several troopcarriers were crash-landed there. By midmorning they had enough troops on land to be able to bring heavy fire down on our positions around the aerodrome, so that fresh waves landing on the drome had more chance of getting through. Frankenstinian Attack Our troops suffered from no "parachute nerves" once the fighting started. Frankenstinian and terrifying as this attack from above seemed, once the parachutists were on the ground they were just normal men, as easily killed by a bullet or a bayonet as anyone else. For the first few minutes they were even more easily killed. Many had their parachutes caught, in trees, or tangled in vines, long enough to hold them a sitting shot. Others sprained their ankles; others were severely shaken. For remember that it was no great fun for .these parachutists. Since 5 o'clock that morning they had been sitting jammed into planes waiting for the moment when they must jump out into enemy territory, into unknown areas filled with men whose one desire was to kill them. They had to iump into air filled with flying lead. Above Maleme they had to jump into a hail of A.A. shells. Once on the ground their planes could, for the first few vital minutes, give them no help for fear of killing their own men. No, a parachutist Is literallv easy meat for a man who gets at him as he drops or within the first few minutes he lands. The New Zpalanders found that. One group who fell among the Maoris were bayoneted before they could get rid of their parachutes. And as the day wore on and the confidence of our troops grew, it was only those parachutists who fell out of range of the waiting forces who had any real chance. One wave was dropped behind the lines of an engineer's unit. Headquarters asked the engineers' CO if he needed help. "They'll all be dead before you can get a man here." he replied. And three hours later they sent in a company roll found in the pocket of the commander of the unit that had dropped. On it were 126 names. "So far we have counted 112 dead," the engineers' commander had noted in pencil on the bottom. (To be continued)