The Hill 1940

Individuals in conflict can decisively influence the outcome of a battle. Examples abound, Leonidas and his desperate lonely Spartan defence of the narrow pass at Thermopylae in 480 BC, against the entire might of the invading Persian army. An unknown standard bearer from Ceaser’s Tenth Legion leapt into the sea off Deal in 55BC and secured a foothold for the first Roman invasion of Britain. A single cavalry officer, carried a message causing the British Light Brigade to charge the Russian guns at the wrong end of the ‘Valley of Death’ at Balaclava in 1854. US General George Armstrong Custer in deciding to attack a massive Indian village at the Little Bighorn in 1876 caused the loss of the greatest number of American soldiers perishing in a single day since the end of the American Civil War, over a decade before. General von Paulus’ failure to break out the 6th German Army at Stalingrad in 1942 from Russian encirclement possibly cost Germany the Second World War.

It is the actions of similarly important individuals that resulted in the loss of Hill 107 on Crete in May 1941, the key event that decided the entire campaign to capture the island..

The impact of these men forms the narrative structure of the The Hill. Each chapter is subdivided into ‘acts’ titled by an individual, New Zealand or German, who acts in such a way as to influence the course of the fight. The narrative in effect reads like a play or script, whereby key personalities are alternatively and consecutively followed, telling the story of the struggle between defenders and attackers. The New Zealanders are holding a hill in the face of desperate German parachute assaults, which seek to capture the dominating high ground overlooking the only airfield where they can air-land reinforcements to secure the rest of the island of Crete. .

Hill 107 is an unremarkable feature 351 feet high overlooking the point where the Tavronitis river estuary flows into the Mediterranean on the northwest coast of the island. Fresh water attracted village settlements, and the hamlet at Maleme was established on the hill’s lower northeast slope near the river by shepherds from the village of Lakkoi, from the southern foothills of the White Mountains. Such fresh water outlets also attracted pirates, who plundered the locals. A vantage point like hill 107 provided village security to give warning. The height overlooked a kilometer long by half-kilometer wide primitive red-clay dirt landing strip. Maleme aerodrome, concreted today, was barely finished in 1941.. 

Viewed from the dried-up Tavronitis river bed, the west slope of hill 107 is high and intimidating, with stepped terraces that enclosed small fields. It was spanned by a 130-yard metal girder bridge, perched on concrete piles. Today a modern highway bridge crosses the river alongside. Sections of the metal girders are punctured by ragged bullet holes or peeled back by shrapnel strikes. The steep sides of the western slope rise steadily in undulating fashion inland, toward southern mountain foothills.

The northern slope facing the line of the aerodrome runway is gentle. Its summit slightly higher than the plateau that extends east, a ragged line silhouetted by clumps of olive trees. In 1941, the gently descending slope had open areas, planted with barley and young vines, extending down to the airstrip, which had a soft sandy beach beyond the perimeter. Today there is a multiplicity of olive groves. The summit of point 107, called Kavkazia hill by the Cretans is stony red-packed clay, with clumps of dried grass. On its east side, the largely dried up river Sfakoriako has carved steep-sided gullies in places, overgrown with vegetation, cacti and bamboo shrubs.  

The village of Malame nestled inside the northeastern side of the hill, is due east of an ancient Minoan tomb, only discovered at the eve of the twentieth century. Combatants were unaware of its presence. Village houses were ugly earth-floor flat-roofed fortress-like structures, opened around the base for livestock, living accommodation was above. An occasional balcony might contain only one isolated chair. The main street descended to the sea, and was narrow with tight alleys between houses. Rickety shutters afforded scant protection against radiant heat and bright sunlight. Large families occupied small houses, within a village community numbering about 200 souls.

Creeping villa expansion today with brightly colored tourist holiday homes with noisy taverns and night clubs has completely transformed the formerly peaceful idyllic coastline. Three churches served the small community. They were the only ostentatious dwellings with priests, which provided social guidance and community leadership. Only the basement of the original Agia Marina church remains from the war, but the most recent, built alongside, still has one of the original 1941 bullet scarred venerable icons. Another church and some village houses were relocated when airfield construction started in 1940.

Only rarely is it possible to positively identify the decisive point of a battle in modern warfare. Hill 107 was one of these during the night of the 20th/21st May 1941. It decided the eventual outcome of the German airborne invasion of Crete. Its loss was as decisive as that of Harold Godwinson’s death on Senlac Hill at Hastings in 1066, which irrecoverably changed the future political and social development of Great Britain. It likewise decided the outcome of this nine-day campaign.

The book does not seek to comprehensively narrate the campaign. It deals instead with what was felt, heard or seen, left and right of the mark one eyeball, on and around the hill during the battle. Events are narrated through the filter of these historical eyewitnesses. Each one was either a decision maker or taker. Chapter headings identify who the person was, influencing the key events relating to the subject of that chapter. Two primary perspectives are explored – German and New Zealand – with another, the civilian Cretan view, when caught up in the events.

The New Zealand perspective is from the summit of hill 107, juxtaposed against the German view, looking up from below. The detail of what was seen was influenced by the azimuth of the sun, moving east to west across the sky. Germans clinging to the western slopes were dazzled during the morning peering up from the shadow of the low ground. During the afternoons the New Zealanders were in the glare, their concealed positions, precisely illuminated by the direct rays of the sun, standing out in sharp relief. Drawing upon many original archived New Zealand and German unit post combat reports and letters, diaries with personal accounts from both sides and supplemented by vivid individual interview testimonies, Kershaw has brought the three-day battle for The Hill to human life.

Robert Kershaw was a Parachute Regiment officer who has seen active service in Northern Ireland, the Gulf and Bosnia and commanded his own battalion. He has written fourteen well received military histories published in over ten countries; for the press and featured in numerous TV documentaries. He walks conflict sites extensively around the world, gathering material for books and battlefield tours, as was the case for Hill 107 in Crete.

When the Germans jumped on the morning of the 20th May, they had never lost a battle thus far in the war. The New Zealanders, after fighting a succession of desperate rearguards during the evacuation of mainland Greece, had never won one. Success previously had been measured by the ability to break-clean in retreat. . 

Nobody behaved during these three fateful days as they might be expected to, these were uncharted circumstances for both sides. Mutual surprise is a factor throughout, coming from unseen terrain containing unexpected enemies, a feature common to all airborne insertions. Nobody in history to date had ever seen a strategic objective conquered from the air alone, and it has not been done since. The narrative reads like a Shakespearean tragedy, the actors tell their own stories on and around the summits and shadows of Hill 107.