By May 1941, Great Britain was slowly being strangled and was down to less than six months of the food and essential supplies required to continue the war. In his memoirs, Winston Churchill would say that the only thing that really scared him during the Second World War was the U-boat threat.

On the morning of 9 May 1941, the German submarine U-110 was part of a Wolfpack that attacked a convoy south of Iceland. One of the escorts, HMS Bulldog, depth charged U-110 and severely damaged it. On the second pass, the Bulldog dropped more depth charges below the U-boat and forced it to the surface.

The German crew abandoned the sub, thinking it was going to sink. But it didn’t. The crew tried to re-board but some machine gun fire from a quick thinking sailor on the Bulldog convinced most of them of the folly of that action. None the less, the U-boat captain died trying: he assumed there was no need so he didn’t destroy the cipher books, message logbooks, or the Enigma machine, used to decode messages from fleet headquarters, before abandoning ship. A boarding party from the Bulldog recovered it all.

The capture of U-110 was an intelligence bonanza for Dr Alan Turing and the British code breakers at Bletchley Park. The Allies were already reading the Luftwaffe’s mail, within the month they were also reading the Kriegsmarine’s. The combination of the two allowed the British to reroute convoys away from German reconnaissance planes, surface raiders, and U-boats, not to mention target Rommel’s supply convoys between Italy and Libya. Merchant marine losses dropped significantly. It was the turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic that year.

On 12 May 1941, Group Captain Beamish walked into LieutGen Freyberg’s “office” in the quarry on the neck of Crete’s Akrotiri peninsula, ostensibly to get his ass chewed for the Luftwaffe’s “Daily Hate”, and the RAF’s lack of response, but actually to give the commander his brief on the latest Ultra intercept. Of the 35,000 Allied troops on the island, only Beamish and Freyberg knew of the source, and even existence, of the “Most Reliable Sources” or “Orange Leonard” communiques.

OL-2168, dated 12 May 41 was the analysis of a Luftwaffe order delaying the invasion of Crete from 17 May to 20 May due to the need for an Italian tanker filled with aviation fuel to make its way down the Adriatic. The Luftwaffe order also detailed a change in the invasion’s task organization: the initial landing would still be made by the 7th Fallschirmjaeger Division, but the follow on troops would not be made by the 22nd Air Landing Division, which would stay in Romania, but by the 5th Mountain Division, which was badly mauled in the Greek campaign but reorganized and reinforced for Crete. After the parachutists seized an airfield, the 5th Mountain would be air bridged to Crete from Greece just as the Luftwaffe gad done for Franco’s army from Morocco to Spain five years before.

But the Bletchley Park analyst that composed OL-2168 either misread the order, or more likely, presented the worst case scenario to cover his ass. OL-2168 stated that the invasion of Crete would be made by not two, but three divisions, the 7th FJ, 22nd AL, and 5th Mtn with airborne and air landing components, and a supporting sea borne landing. Freyberg assumed the 5th Mtn was going to make an amphibious assault, as opposed to a landing on a stretch of beach already secured by the parachutists. Despite all of the other evidence to the contrary: a Luftwaffe commander, airfield objectives, lack of German or Italian landing craft, British naval dominance around Crete at night etc. (including future OL comms that clarified the situation) Freyberg was convinced the amphibious invasion was the main effort and altered his orders and disposition accordingly. Nearly half his troops, and almost all of his artillery, now guarded beaches against a non-existent threat.

Churchill’s “fine opportunity for killing parachutists” was slowly turning into a fine opportunity for killing and capturing British, Commonwealth, and Greek troops.

On 27 April 1941, the German army raised the Nazi flag over the Acropolis in Athens and the last Allied troops were evacuated to Crete from the Peloponnese. Crete was the obvious next target. The loss of Crete would isolate Turkey, seal the flank of the upcoming German invasion of the Soviet Union, put permanent Luftwaffe bomber airfields in range of Egypt, prevent the British from easily supporting the already troublesome Greek and Jugoslav partisans, and most importantly, keep British bombers from targeting Hitler’s only dependable supply of natural oil, the Ploesti oil fields in Romania. The three big, and new or expanded airfields on the north coast of the island were the keys to Crete. On 30 April 1941, MajGen Bernard Freyberg was given command of Crete with the explicit task of keeping the airfields out of German hands.

Freyberg was a larger than life and barrel chested man, personal friend of Winston Churchill, and the senior operational officer from New Zealand. He earned the Victoria Cross in the First World War, and was fearlessly aggressive: he was wounded 27 times though he did tell Churchill once that it was only half that as “you usually get two wounds each time – one coming in and one going out”. As the 2nd Zealand Division commander, he inherited “Creforce” with more than 40,000 soldiers. He had three of his Kiwi brigades, one large Australian brigade group, the British brigade sized garrison, three Greek brigades, and a surprisingly effective composite Greek brigade consisting of Greek officer cadets, NCO and basic trainees, their cadres, and the Cretan gendarme. A formidable force to repel any German invasion, on paper at least.

Unfortunately, 15,000 were noncombatant soldiers from which he could only form a single under strength composite brigade. The rest were “mouths to feed” and “useless, except for causing problems with the civilians”. Crete had a food shortage that the extensive vineyards, and olive and orange groves were no help mitigating. Furthermore he had woefully inadequate artillery and AA, only 24 working tanks, few trucks, and only 15 fighter aircraft. Moreover, the exiled Greek Royal family was on the island, and made the local political situation delicate. But most troubling were the few operational radios, and a supply and communication’s system based on runners and vulnerable wire along the single coast road. However, what he lacked in essential resources, it was thought was made up with numbers, a generous to a fault, warlike, and zealously anti-German population, and near perfect intelligence.

The morning Freyberg assumed command, he met with RAF Group Captain George Beamish, ostensibly to discuss the appalling air defenses of the island. But Beamish had a more important additional duty: he was the only officer on the island allowed to decode and view the “Orange Leonard” communiques, the Ultra intercepts of high level Luftwaffe operations orders. Through Beamish and Ultra, Freyberg knew the German objectives (the airfields, particularly Maleme), the German units involved (7th FJ Div, and 22nd Airlanding Div), the invasion method (airborne with supporting seaborne landing), the German commander (Luftwaffe Gen Kurt Student, the Father of the Fallshirmjaeger), the supporting air groups, their airfields, and finally the invasion date – 16 May.

Later that evening, Winston Churchill cabled his support to his friend and said the upcoming battle was, “a fine opportunity for killing parachute troops”.

TBy late April, 1941, the British, Commonwealth and Greek forces were in full retreat to the Peloponnesian peninsula where the British navy was already evacuating thousands of troops to Crete off the east coast. In order to reach the Peloponnese, the evacuating troops had to cross over the narrow Isthmus of Corinth which was cut by a canal that linked the Gulf of Corinth and the Aegean Sea.

At dawn on 26 April 1941, the 2nd Fallschirmjaeger (parachute) Regiment landed on both sides of the canal to seize the bridges in order to cut off the withdrawal and open up an avenue for the pursuing panzers to cross the canal. The parachute landings surprised the defending Australian battalion, but by the time the Germans managed to get organized and find their weapons (Fallshirmjaeger parachuted unarmed and gathered their weapons from canisters parachuted separately), the Australian infantry and British Matilda tanks were already counterattacking. However, German Stuka dive bombers broke up the attacks, and within the hour there was hand to hand fighting on both sides of the highway bridge and foot bridge.

About 0800, the bridge exploded. There are two theories: 1. The Australians detonated the charges (the simple and most likely theory) and 2. The German paratroops seized the bridge, cleared the explosives, cut the wires, and a rogue shell fired by a Kiwi artillery piece eight miles away set the explosives off (an account given by a German officer who would have suffered severe repercussions for allowing the bridge to be destroyed. Needless to say this account is most favored by German historians and airborne enthusiasts).

You, intelligent reader, judge for yourself.

In any case the bridge was destroyed, and the 2nd FJ took extensive casualties. The 1st SS Leibstandarte Division was delayed crossing the canal, which allowed another 22,000 Allioed troops to evacuate from Nafplio. The cut off British rearguard, the 4th New Zealand Bde retreated to Megara, near Athens, and was evacuated with great difficulty by the British navy the next day.

From 10 April to 30 April 1941, Lieutenant General Leslie Morshead’s 9th Australian Division defeated every attempt by Rommel’s Afrika Korps to seize the vital city and port of Tobruk on Libya’s northeast coast. On 1 May, Rommel invested the city with five Italian divisions and continued on to Egypt before the British could regroup. The British Navy provided enough supplies for the the garrison to hold out indefinitely, despite much hard fighting when the Italians made a deliberate assault. The Australians’ aggressive nighttime patrolling and numerous spoiling attacks kept the Italian’s attacks to a minimum. Furthermore, they launched raids on Afrika Korps supply lines from the city which caused great frustration to Rommel’s precarious logistics situation. Morshead held out until the end of August when his Australians were replaced by Poles, Czechs, and Brits brought in by the British Navy.

The British naval victories at Taranto and Cape Matapan allowed Adm. Cunningham to anchor the 14th Destroyer Squadron in Valletta Harbor on Malta to raid Axis shipping heading to Libya. The first fruits of that opportunity came on the night of 15-16 April, 1941 just off the coast of Sfax, Tunisia.

Three days before, four troopships carrying the remainder of the 15th Panzer Division (less vehicles), and one ammunition ship carrying three basic loads, departed Naples escorted by three Italian destroyers. The British, informed by ULTRA intercepts, tracked the convoy by seaplane until it was in the shallow waters off Tunisia, where it couldn’t disperse if attacked.

On the evening of 15 April, the four destroyers of the squadron: HMS Jervis, HMS Nubian, HMS Mohawk, and HMS Janus, exploited the Italian’s lack of radar and snuck to within 2000m of the convoy. Just before 2 am, the British destroyers ambushed the convoy and immediately sank or damaged all three destroyers with torpedoes or 4.7″ guns. They then turned their guns on the defenseless and cornered transports and sank all five. Only the heroic efforts of an Italian ensign, the surviving officer aboard the destroyer Luca Tarigo, prevented a one sided victory. The young 20 year old officer rallied what remained of the crew, and attacked the British flotilla as they were systematically destroying the transports. He managed to put two torpedoes into HMS Mohawk, whom had to be abandoned and scuttled.