Letter from Crete
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Crete feels like another New Zealand island. We look for signs of home whenever we leave our small scrap of land at the bottom right-hand corner of the world map - someone somewhere in deepest Burkina Faso has probably blurted, "It's just like Masterton!" - but for the past week, this Mediterranean rock has seemed as familiar as a place just up the road. To be here for the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Crete has meant singing "God Defend New Zealand" as fast black shapes of swallows dab the blue sky, and watching an actor dressed in New Zealand infantry uniform play dead on an airfield where yellow poppies grow in the dirt, and slowly, slowly pacing along the rows of headstones of 446 New Zealanders buried at a seaside cemetery. Private J F Barnett, aged 25. Lance Corporal W J Charles, aged 34. Major T F Fyfe, aged 48. The nameless and ageless are here, too: their blank stones can only state, "Known Unto God."
We all know the mumbled chorus as we stand and put down our cheap glass of beer when the lights dim at the Returned Serviceman's Club at six o'clock every evening: "We shall remember them." You could say that act of memory is a bit different when you follow the 7000 New Zealanders who came to this distant, unlikely destination 60 years ago, and all the talk is of the dead and the living, of a date in history, of war. You overhear a New Zealand veteran saying, "So I said to him,'You can stick your stripes where the monkey hides his nuts!"' You talk to another old soldier who remembers watching German parachutists through his binoculars - they landed on a hill away from the battle, took off their heavy uniforms, and sunbathed for the next three hours. Another old soldier tells you about hiding in the mountains and eating a donkey: "Now that's a very tough meat. You could chew it all day." And another old soldier cries. You shake his hand, and keep it there.
All those New Zealand voices under a sun as hot as it was on May 20,1941, when German troops began the first airborne invasion in history. They parachuted down in their thousands, shot us up and chased us out in 10 days of fighting. And so for this past week, Crete has also no doubt felt like a German island. their veterans have returned as well, to attend their own massive graveyard, just past a popular stretch of beach. Follow the signs. There is the Hotel Albatross, and Studio Relax, and the Aegean Palace Hotel, and a line of shops selling inflatable lobsters, and then there is a sign saying Late Minoan Tholus Tomb, and then there is Deutsche Soidatanfriedhof. Outside the cemetery, there is a museum display, including a photo of the Gonia monastery. The caption reads, "This is where skeletons of the dead were kept before burial." The old joke about German efficiency has left your mind by the time you pace slowly, slowly past the headstones. Herman Lampe, aged 22. Hans Tusche, aged 19. Helmut Homrich, aged 17 ...
What a beautiful place Crete is. The earth is red and hard, just right for olive trees with their leaves as light as feathers, and the best oranges in the world, and - begonias. You are in New Zealand again. That most quaint of all household plants is everywhere, on the roadside and in fields, and in windowboxes outside a cathedral in a village square, where you talk to an old soldier who says, "I'm from Morrinsville." There was a village feast that night. Cucumbers, and peppers, and bloody big tomatoes, all delicious, tasting like summer, like home. There was much Greek dancing. There was much silence as some mad old English devil attempted to lead the crowd into a sing-song of "It's a Long Way to Tipperary". There was much applause when a Maori cultural group from the New Zealand defence force lined up on a stage flanked by two orange trees.
Famously, the 28th Maori Battalion led a bayonet charge on Crete. The bayonets were 18 inches long. "They cleaned the blood off like this," said an old soldier from Patea, who wiped his hand along an invisible blade. And then he pulled out his wallet. "I've kept this for 60 years," he said, and gently held in his palm a stained patch of white silk from a German parachute. He also had two photos taken in May 1941. The first showed a group of Germans about to board a plane; one had a camera attached to his belt. "That camera," he said, "is in Stratford now." It was picked up after a bayonet charge.
You heard so many war stories, and you went back for more. The woman from Waitara who never knew her father: "My mother married at 19. She was a mother at 20, and a widow at 21." And the German with a knight's cross worn around his throat who was asked what he remembered of New Zealand soldiers, and he said, "Zey were big man." And the old soldier from Gisborne who remembered the Maori bayonet charge, and added, "I had a go, too." You heard so many voices from home, from Hamilton, Ashburton, Rotorua, a familiar sound on hot, lovely days where the air at dusk smells of wild thyme, and you sit down at a taverna on the shores of the Mediterranean and hoe into a plate of swordfish, and you cannot possibly imagine what it was like 60 years ago.
We all know the mumbled chorus as we stand and put down our cheap glass of beer when the lights dim at the Returned Serviceman's Club at six o'clock every evening: "We shall remember them." You could say that act of memory is a bit different when you follow the 7000 New Zealanders who came to this distant, unlikely destination 60 years ago, and all the talk is of the dead and the living, of a date in history, of war. You overhear a New Zealand veteran saying, "So I said to him,'You can stick your stripes where the monkey hides his nuts!"' You talk to another old soldier who remembers watching German parachutists through his binoculars - they landed on a hill away from the battle, took off their heavy uniforms, and sunbathed for the next three hours. Another old soldier tells you about hiding in the mountains and eating a donkey: "Now that's a very tough meat. You could chew it all day." And another old soldier cries. You shake his hand, and keep it there.
All those New Zealand voices under a sun as hot as it was on May 20,1941, when German troops began the first airborne invasion in history. They parachuted down in their thousands, shot us up and chased us out in 10 days of fighting. And so for this past week, Crete has also no doubt felt like a German island. their veterans have returned as well, to attend their own massive graveyard, just past a popular stretch of beach. Follow the signs. There is the Hotel Albatross, and Studio Relax, and the Aegean Palace Hotel, and a line of shops selling inflatable lobsters, and then there is a sign saying Late Minoan Tholus Tomb, and then there is Deutsche Soidatanfriedhof. Outside the cemetery, there is a museum display, including a photo of the Gonia monastery. The caption reads, "This is where skeletons of the dead were kept before burial." The old joke about German efficiency has left your mind by the time you pace slowly, slowly past the headstones. Herman Lampe, aged 22. Hans Tusche, aged 19. Helmut Homrich, aged 17 ...
What a beautiful place Crete is. The earth is red and hard, just right for olive trees with their leaves as light as feathers, and the best oranges in the world, and - begonias. You are in New Zealand again. That most quaint of all household plants is everywhere, on the roadside and in fields, and in windowboxes outside a cathedral in a village square, where you talk to an old soldier who says, "I'm from Morrinsville." There was a village feast that night. Cucumbers, and peppers, and bloody big tomatoes, all delicious, tasting like summer, like home. There was much Greek dancing. There was much silence as some mad old English devil attempted to lead the crowd into a sing-song of "It's a Long Way to Tipperary". There was much applause when a Maori cultural group from the New Zealand defence force lined up on a stage flanked by two orange trees.
Famously, the 28th Maori Battalion led a bayonet charge on Crete. The bayonets were 18 inches long. "They cleaned the blood off like this," said an old soldier from Patea, who wiped his hand along an invisible blade. And then he pulled out his wallet. "I've kept this for 60 years," he said, and gently held in his palm a stained patch of white silk from a German parachute. He also had two photos taken in May 1941. The first showed a group of Germans about to board a plane; one had a camera attached to his belt. "That camera," he said, "is in Stratford now." It was picked up after a bayonet charge.
You heard so many war stories, and you went back for more. The woman from Waitara who never knew her father: "My mother married at 19. She was a mother at 20, and a widow at 21." And the German with a knight's cross worn around his throat who was asked what he remembered of New Zealand soldiers, and he said, "Zey were big man." And the old soldier from Gisborne who remembered the Maori bayonet charge, and added, "I had a go, too." You heard so many voices from home, from Hamilton, Ashburton, Rotorua, a familiar sound on hot, lovely days where the air at dusk smells of wild thyme, and you sit down at a taverna on the shores of the Mediterranean and hoe into a plate of swordfish, and you cannot possibly imagine what it was like 60 years ago.
