Over at War on the Rocks, Iskander Rehman has a very insightful analysis of the 1941 Battle of Crete. Good defense analysis in longform online is getting rare these days, and Rehman’s work in general deserves a follow.
Drop into hell
The Battle of Crete is (in)famous for several interrelated reasons:
- It was the first large-scale airborne assault in military history, surprising and overwhelming a well-defended fortified base.
- The invaders suffered enormous losses, with 80% of the German paratroopers killed within hours of the operation’s start.
The co-existence of these two facts is what makes Crete so remarkable. The Allied commander Bernard Freyberg blithely dismissed the possibility of an airborne attack:
For Gen. Bernard Freyberg — the highly decorated commander of Crete’s 32,000-strong garrison of British, Australian, and New Zealander troops, supplemented by close to 10,000 Greek soldiers — there was little cause for undue alarm. Plied with a steady stream of Ultra intercepts, the burly New Zealander had known for weeks that the Germans were preparing an invasion of the island. He retained something of a blithe self-confidence in his defensive preparations. So much so, in fact, that he calmly continued to enjoy his breakfast on his villa’s veranda, even as the bright blue sky above him grew increasingly pockmarked with Luftwaffe aircraft. Convinced that the bulk of the enemy’s invasion force would be ferried in by sea, where they would run afoul of the Royal Navy, the World War I veteran, like many of his fellow officers, remained dubious of the effectiveness of any large-scale airborne operation.
…and given how poorly things turned out for the Germans, he wasn’t exactly off-base.
The German air assault would never have been approved at all had political and military leaders been aware of the actual size and disposition of Crete’s defenses or the attitudes of the locals towards the invaders. German military intelligence did not detect many camouflaged Allied defensive positions, pathetically underestimated the strength of the garrison, and falsely assumed they’d be greeted as liberators. 1
The cost — in both men and critically important airlift assets — was severe. As Rehman observes, the absence of the latter would return to haunt the Germans when they tried and failed to reinforce their encircled troops in Stalingrad. There would be no more massed German airborne assaults after Crete. And yet the operation still succeeded in spite of its horrific cost.
The problem was that Freyberg never updated his motivated reasoning about how the Germans would seize the island until it was too late. The intelligence he received clearly indicated that the anticipated seaborne invasion would follow the establishment of a German air bridge. Freyberg still dispersed his forces around the island to counter the amphibious assault he still believed would be the main effort.
Nor did Freyberg do anything to tighten security around the airfields the Germans would seize (or destroy them if he could not). The Allies paid a high price too, in particular 59% of the British Mediterranean fleet sunk or crippled during the frantic evacuation of Crete’s defenders. In sum, the Allied and German efforts were both lackluster and the latter only succeeded due to a pre-existing preponderance of force in the region.
Crete as template
World War II has far more Cretes than popular accounts suggest. The German 1940 invasion of France was a near-run thing that, like Crete, might have failed altogether if the defenders were more capable. Blitzkrieg myth aside, the invasion force was far more horse-mobile than mechanized. The invasion of Greece preceding the airborne attack on Crete was initially a disaster. Hitler bailed out the bumbling Italians at some cost to other strategic priorities.
On the macro level, the Allies won despite catastrophic blunders with terrible human consequences. The entirety of Allied Southeast Asia was lost to Japan in the opening moves of the Pacific War. The USSR triumphed in spite of shocking political-military incompetence from Operation Barbarossa to even after Moscow adapted and counter-attacked. Debate still continues about whether the strategic bombing offensive in Europe really had a significant effect.
Crete is an example of a larger principle people often have much difficulty accepting: strategic behavior is mostly mediocre. Richard K. Betts once asked if “strategy is an illusion” and failed to really answer his own question. He settles on what I always considered to be a disguised Pascal’s Wager: we don’t know if strategy is an illusion or not, but we’re better off assuming it isn’t.
Most strategic behavior is mediocre because strategy itself is nontrivially difficult…and most people, organizations, and doctrines are the product of messy compromises. Andrew Marshall, after all, broke ground in the 1970s merely by showing how Soviet strategic behavior emerged from compromises between competing factions of Moscow’s military-industrial complex.
The luxury of mediocrity
That doesn’t sound revolutionary — until you factor in how much we assumed it was always driven by optimality. And to some extent some of us continue to make that assumption in spite of the overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary. We always allow ourselves the luxury of mediocrity, but struggle to grant it to our rivals. Even if doing so might give us exploitable advantages.
Great captains do exist, good strategies do exist, I’m not denying the presence of either. But strategy is a very bad place to be if you’re the kind of person that idealizes uncompromising excellence. Look instead to the Olympics, the arts, or any other arena in which obsessive and even self-destructive dedication yields Herculean performances. These activities have clear metrics or at least are amenable to individual distinction.
The mediocrity of strategic behavior is a perennial source of frustration. Even in far less serious contests lacking the life and death stakes of war (or even politics), people still have something important invested in the outcome. They rage at the limitations of their side, forever falling short of what is really necessary to achieve the goal at a desired cost.
I empathize with that feeling. It’s easy for me to talk about this when looking at past history, and far more difficult to remain emotionally detached when looking at anything I care deeply about. What Betts clumsily gets at is the inherent tension between trying to take strategic challenges seriously and accepting that we will often fall short even in the best of possible worlds.
It’s one thing to acknowledge that tension is always going to exist, another to truly accept it when the bill comes due.
Footnotes
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The failure is breathtaking even by the standards of the war’s worst boondoggles. The garrison was eight times the German estimate, and the friendly locals bludgeoned and hacked the paratroopers to death with farming tools. Even after the fall of the garrison, locals and Allied commandos continued guerrilla operations until the fall of the Reich itself in 1945. ↩