EVENTS IN CRETE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 June 1941, Page 3

EVENTS IN CRETE

MASTERTON OFFICER’S STORY LANDING OF PARACHUTE TROOPS. DEVIOUS ROUTE TO EVADE NAZIS. “My experiences in Crete were rather extraordinary," writes Lieutenant Haddon Donald, son of Mr and Mrs V. E. Donald, of Masterton. in a letter to his parents. Lieutenant Donald was slightly wounded in the leg during the fighting in Crete. “Our battalion area included the Maleme aerodrome and C. Coy. was disposed right round the perimeter of the drome, so we were right in the hottest of the hot spots, this being near the spot where Jerry gained his foothold,” he writes. “On the morning of the blitz the dust and smoke was so thick in our area that you couldn’t see more than a few yards in front of you for fully half an hour after it stopped, during which time, of course, down came the parachutists and gliders in the middle of it. Two gliders landed about fifty yards from our copse but I saw no sign of them coming in till the dust cleared and by that time the Huns were all out and away. No parachutists landed actually where I was but everywhere else on the island they were cleaned up practically as fast as they landed, except on one spot on a flat riverbed just west of the aerodrome, which was only lightly held by the few troops which were available. Once they gained a foothold here they put out large red flags •to mark the ground they had occupied and went on pouring more troops into that particular spot till they had enough there to drive us out from the drome, after he had thinned us out pretty badly by dive bombing and machine gunning us from the air. I did an attack with my platoon following up behind two tanks which, however, developed mechanical trouble and had to retire within about 20 minutes, leaving us out in the open with machine guns blazing at us from all angles. My platoon suffered nearly 50 per cent casualties here with nine wounded and one killed, so I had to withdraw, getting all but two of the wounded away in spite of heavy mortar and machine gun fire. . . . The Germans came round between me .'and Company headquarters and were.only about fifty yards away, so I had to leave the last two wounded and make a :bolt for it. The Huns' shooting was very poor at this stage, or maybe I ran too fast for them. We pulled out from the drome at half past four the next morning, travelling light with our boots off so that we could go silently as the Hun had surrounded us during the night. We managed to get through and contacted the rest of our battalion who were in the same box as we were, so we sheltered under some olive trees while the German planes were circling overhead. In the meantime a party of Huns came up to within 30 yards of us before we realised they were coming. We saw them first, however, and I got up on a bank and let the first one have it between the eyes from about 25 yards-while he was trying to put up a Nazi flag on top of the hill. I then collected about a dozen men to do a rearguard while the others, about 200 in all, made their way back to our lines. I had some great shooting here, dropping three with three bursts with a Tommy gun, and getting them properly tied up ducking from place to place, letting off bursts whenever we saw anything. Eventually they retired, so we made off after the others who were well across by then, and I picked up the red Nazi flag on the way as a souvenir. However, coming down the last hill our own chaps started shooting at me, so I dropped the flag in a .hurry and they stopped firing. . . . We spent a day and a half at the R.A.P. under the doctors orders, till we woke up the second morning and looked out of the window of the house Barney and I had taken over for ourselves, when we saw about 12 to 15 Huns coming over the ridge in front. I hopped out on the roof of the house with a German rifle and had some very good sniping at about 700 yards as they went to ground as soon as they were fired on. ... When it was learnt that the place was surrounded, “we made a break for it with a Tommy gun and a rifle between us. We picked our fearful way through the back streets and managed to clear the village without incident, keeping going till nearly midday when lo and behold we saw two parties amounting to about 300 Huns converging in front of us. We had no option but to hide up, which we did under some creepers on a bank, one Maori boy having joined us. We stayed here in cramped positions all day with Huns all round us, one of them actually jumping over Barney’s head when he climbed down over the bank. Just before dusk I crawled along to see Barney to decide what to do, eventually settling on the plan of retracing our steps back through the German lines and then doing a 35-mile trek back through the foothills and into the mountains if necessary to outflank the Hun, so that we could make our way back behind our own lines. We knew the Hun would not expect to see us and so thought we may get away with it, which eventually we did. . . . Next morning we started off at daybreak keeping to the trees and watercourses till we came nearly to a Greek village where we thought we would get some breakfast. I went up towards the first house on my own with the Tommy gun and was frantically waved away by a Greek woman who came down about ten minutes later to the bush in which I was hiding and said in sign language that there were 150 Germans in the village. . . . All but two of the Germans left the village and after a good meal. Lieut. Donald and his party made their way down a village to safety-.