Operation _Merkur_, the German airborne invasion of Crete, is an iconic operation in military history. It pitched an elite airborne division against Creforce, a rag-tag force of British and Commonwealth escapees from Greece. The outcome to the Germans seemed assured. Yet, not only had the Germans underestimated the size of the defending force, they lacked an appreciation of the willingness to fight of the defenders, and had wrongly understood the reception they would receive from the Cretan civilians. To add to their woes their uniforms were ill-suited to the climate and other conditions they were to encounter on the island, and the dropping of their primary weapons in separate containers proved to be a grave doctrinal error.For many of the fallschirmjäger, the events of the first day ensured that this turned into a struggle for their own personal survival as the need for water and ammunition became paramount, while being hunted by Allied troops and civilians alike. It was a disaster and could have been fatal to the invader, except for the intransigence in the higher levels of command of their foes.Just how Creforce snatched defeat from the jaws of victory has been the subject of numerous books over the decades, with many recent accounts focusing on the interpretation or misinterpretation of the Ultra decrypts by the Creforce commander, New Zealander Major-General Bernard Freyberg.Using just a small proportion of the wealth of photographs taken during the invasion, many by the invading German forces, along with modern day comparisons or contextual images of sites of importance of the battle, from Australian, British, German and New Zealand official and private sources, the authors place the location of these images in their proper settings and add a new perspective to the story of this most famous airborne operation of the Second World War.
