Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (26 page)

Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps had been gradually assembling in Rumania and Bulgaria since November, 1940. By February, 1941, he had 400 aircraft in these two countries. When the Simovic coup was launched, Richthofen had 135 fighter and reconnaissance aircraft in Rumania and 355 bombers and dive-bombers in Bulgaria. In early April he received Archer reinforcements from Germany, France, Sicily, and North Africa. On the morning of April 6, VIII Air Corps had about 600 aircraft. Richthofen stationed his fighter and reconnaissance aircraft at Arad, Deva, and Turnu-Severin in western Rumania, within easy range of Belgrade. The long-range bombers were placed at Wiener Neustadt, Austria, and at Sofia, Bulgaria, northwest and southeast of Belgrade, respectively. Both were within 200 miles of the Yugoslav capital.
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The Balkan campaign began with the saturation bombing of Belgrade on April 6. One hundred fifty bombers and dive-bombers (mainly He-111s and Stukas), heavily protected by fighters, bombed the city in relays for an hour and a half. The Yugoslav air force tried to intervene with about 400 inferior aircraft but was overwhelmed and virtually wiped out in the first attack. Two German fighters were shot down, but twenty Yugoslav fighters were knocked out of the sky and forty-four other Yugoslav aircraft were destroyed on the ground. The German bombers concentrated on the center of the city, where the public buildings were located. Before the raid was over, the Yugoslav government was totally paralyzed. Communications were totally disrupted and the Yugoslav High Command could not even transmit orders to its forces in the field. Some seventeen thousand civilians were killed in the attack.
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The Yugoslav air force had been destroyed and all central control of their armed forces was lost at Belgrade in the very first hours of the campaign. Richthofen had accomplished his strategic missions. The VIII Air Corps then switched to its tactical mission: support the German ground forces by attacking Yugoslav troop concentrations and targets of opportunity in the combat zone. Striking almost at will, the corps was quite successful in this mission as well.
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By April 18 the last organized Yugoslav resistance had ended.

The air battle for Greece proved more difficult for a number of reasons. First, Greece had been at war for some time, so a surprise victory of the magnitude of Belgrade was impossible. Second, Greece is a much more mountainous country, so atmospheric conditions made flying, and especially close air support, much more difficult. Third, the British quickly committed signifi-cant ground forces to the battle, in support of the Greeks. These included the I Australian Corps (6th Australian and 2d New Zealand Infantry Divisions) plus the 1st Tank Brigade and the British 2d Armored Division. Royal Air Force units (eighty operational aircraft under Air Vice-Marshal J. H. D’Albiac) flew missions from southern and central Greece from the first day of the campaign,
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while most of Richthofen’s units were committed to Belgrade and the support of Col. Gen. Baron Maximilian von Weichs’ second Army and Col. Gen. Ewald von Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group, which were responsible for the rapid conquest of Yugoslavia.
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Field Marshal Wilhelm von List’s Twelfth Army was charged with the task of overrunning Greece. His forces, closely supported by dive-bomber elements of the VIII Air Corps, broke through the Metaxas line in a three-day struggle and captured Salonika on the morning of April 9. That evening the Greek Second Army capitulated to the XVIII Mountain Corps, and Macedonia and western Thrace were in German hands. List continued his offensive the next day by attacking the I Australian Corps north of Kozani with his XLI Panzer Corps. By evening the British forces were withdrawing. The critical Vevi Pass was captured by the 1st SS Motorized Infantry Division the next day.
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The Allied forces were in full retreat for the rest of the campaign.

By April 19, Air Vice Marshal D’Albiac’s R.A.F. contingent had been forced back to the Athens airfields. Richthofen attacked them on the twentieth with a large force of fighters and bombers. D’Albiac sent up his last fif-teen Hurricanes to intercept them, but it was an unequal fight. Five of the Hurricanes were shot down and most of the rest were damaged, against a German loss of eight airplanes. This battle virtually assured air supremacy for the Luftwaffe.
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With enemy aerial opposition crushed, Richthofen turned his attention to the Greek navy. On April 21 and 22 his bombers and dive-bombers sank twenty-three Greek ships, including a destroyer and a hospital ship.
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Meanwhile, the British army retreated rapidly for the Isthmus of Corinth and the evacuation ports, for it was clear that the Allied cause in Greece was a doomed one.

Richthofen had his first experience in parachute operations in Greece, when he was ordered to cut off the British retreat at the Isthmus of Corinth in late April. He assembled more than 400 Ju-52s and many gliders at the former R.A.F. airfield at Larisa, south of Mount Olympus. At 5
A
.
M
. on April 26 the first elements took off, and, taking advantage of the early morning haze, dropped two battalions of the 2nd Parachute Regiment plus a parachute medical company and a parachute engineer platoon at the isthmus at 7
A
.
M
. on April 26. The drop altitude was only 400 feet.
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A large number of British troops were cut off when the paratroopers seized the bridge at the isthmus, but the airborne operation at Corinth was not an unqualified success. For one thing, the bulk of the British forces had already escaped. Second, although the bridge was seized intact according to plan, a lucky shot from a British antiaircraft gun detonated the demolition charges, even after the engineers had cut the demo cords. Several paratroopers were killed in the explosion, and the German advance was held up another twenty-four hours. Also, several aircraft and gliders were lost or damaged by antiaircraft and machinegun fire. Total German casualties at Corinth were 63 killed, 158 wounded, and 16 missing. Nine hundred British and 1,450 Greek troops were cut off and captured due to the loss of the isthmus.
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The main British retreat continued, however, and on May 1 the last Allied units evacuated the Greek mainland. Between April 24 and May 1, the Royal Navy had evacuated 50,732 men, including Yugoslavs and Greeks, from the mainland.
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This set the stage for the Luftwaffe’s next major campaign: the Battle of Crete.

Crete is a Greek island in the Mediterranean, about 180 miles south-southeast of Athens. Approximately 160 miles long and 8 to 35 miles in width, it is barren and mountainous, with little water and limited lines of communication, especially north to south. Today it is little visited and of little importance. In 1941, however, it assumed a special strategic significance. With it, the British could maintain air and naval superiority in the eastern Mediterranean, raid the Balkan coast, and threaten the peninsula with invasion (thus tying down many German troops). More important for Hitler, from Crete the British would be able to launch long-range air raids on the Rumanian oilfields at Ploesti, Nazi Germany’s main source of petroleum. Therefore, on April 20, Hitler decided to seize Crete by an airborne attack, in accordance with April 15 plans submitted to Goering by Loehr and Gen. Kurt Student, the ranking paratrooper commander in the Reich.
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The Crete operation was to come under the general direction of General Loehr, the commander of the 4th Air Fleet. He had two principal units under his command: Student’s XI Air Corps and Richthofen’s VIII. Student’s corps, the ground attack force, consisted of the reinforced 7th Air Division (three parachute regiments and one glider assault regiment), plus several parachute engineer, parachute antiaircraft, and medical battalions, or about 25,000 men in all. Student also controlled ten air transport groups (Ju-52s) of approximately 500 aircraft and 100 gliders, plus a reconnaissance squad ron.
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The reinforced 6th Mountain Division, elements of the 5th Mountain Division, and two battalions from the 5th Panzer Division (II/31st Panzer Regiment and the 55th Motorcycle Battalion) were temporarily attached to Student’s command for this operation.
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Richthofen controlled 2d Bomber Wing (with three Do-17 groups), 1st Lehr Wing (two Ju-88 groups and one group of He-111s), 2nd Stuka Wing (three groups), 77th Fighter Wing (three groups of Me-109s), 26th Destroyer Wing (two groups of Me-110s), and two reconnaissance groups. In all he had 650 operational aircraft, including 280 bombers, 150 Stukas, 90 Me-109s, 90 Me-110s, and 40 reconnaissance aircraft.
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In addition, Loehr had II Group, 4th Bomber Wing (for mine-laying operations in the Suez Canal), and the 126th Sea Reconnaissance Group in air fleet reserve.
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The British opposed this air armada with twenty-four Hurricanes, Gladiators, and Fulmars—only half of which were serviceable.
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Small wonder that the Allied garrison commander, New Zealand major general Sir Bernard C. Frey-berg, had serious misgivings about the feasibility of defending the island. He appealed to the British C-in-C Mediterranean for more aircraft, but Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell, who was busy fighting Rommel in the desert, told him that no additional airplanes would be forthcoming.

Goering’s final plan for the conquest of Crete was a hybrid of plans submitted by Loehr and Student. It called for the capture of the four main British airfields at Maleme, Canea, Retimo, and Heraklion. To make maximum use of Richthofen’s Stukas, the assault was to come in two waves: Maleme and Canea were to be taken in the morning of D-Day, and Retimo and Heraklion were to be seized in the afternoon. Ninth Air Corps was to be divided into three groups for the operation. Group West (Maj. Gen. Eugen Meindl) consisted of the glider assault regiment, three parachute battalions, a parachute machine gun company, and a miscellaneous assault battalion. Group Center (Maj. Gen. Wilheim Suessmann) was to attack Canea with the 3d Parachute Regiment, the 100th Mountain Infantry Regiment, a small gliderborne battalion, a parachute machine gun company, a parachute engineer battalion, and miscellaneous light artillery and antitank detachments. A second force under Suessmann’s overall command—the 2nd Parachute Regiment—was to attack Retimo, while Lt. Gen. Julius Ringel’s Group East took the airfield at Heraklion. At Crete, Ringel commanded the reinforced 1st Parachute Regiment, the 5th Mountain Division (minus the 100th Mountain Infantry Regiment), the II Battalion, 31st Panzer Regiment, and a light anti-aircraft battalion.
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Meindl and Suessmann, who were paratroopers, were to go in with the initial assaults. Ringel, who was not airborne qualified, left the initial attack to Col. Bruno Brauer (commander of the 1st Parachute Regiment) and was not sched uled to take personal command at Heraklion until the airfield was secured. Map
6
shows the Battle of Crete.

Richthofen had the tasks of providing close air support for all of these attacks, destroying all R.A.F. fighter units before the airborne attacks began, sealing off the battle area to prevent the British from reinforcing the airfields from the south, as well as clearing the sea lanes to Crete so that the German bridgeheads could be reinforced with infantry, artillery, and heavy equipment.

The Allied defenses of the island were much stronger than the Germans estimated. They included 42,640 men, of which 10,258 were Greeks, who were demoralized, ill-equipped, and of little combat value. The troops from the British Empire, however, had much higher morale than the Germans expected, considering the defeat that they had just sustained on the mainland. In addition, they were well positioned. Freyberg was a highly competent field commander and he apparently based his dispositions on the assumption that the Germans might launch an airborne attack, since the British fleet dominated the sea routes to the island. He placed 8,024 men at Heraklion under Brigadier B. H. Chappel’s 14th British Infantry Brigade; 6,730 at Retimo under Brigadier G. A. Vasey’s 19th Australian Infantry Brigade; 14,822 in the Suda Bay-Canea area under Maj. Gen. E. A. Weston; and 11,859 men at Maleme under Brig. Gen. E. Puttick, the temporary commander of Freyberg’s own 2nd New Zealand Division. (Puttick had only two brigades; the third New Zealand brigade had been so badly mauled in Greece that it had to be sent to Egypt to rebuild.) Freyberg also had twenty-two tanks and thirty-two heavy and thirty-six light antiaircraft guns. In addition, the British Mediterranean Fleet guarded the sea approaches to Crete with the bulk of its four battleships, eight cruisers, thirty destroyers, and the aircraft carrier
Formidable
.
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Adm. Andrew Cunningham’s dispositions set the stage for a major confrontation between his fleet and German air power, represented by Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps.