How Hitler Could Have Won World War II by Bevin Alexander

wasted in a foolish and reckless manner.
    Crete, home of the ancient Minoan civilization, is a large Greek island (3,200 square miles) 180 miles south of Athens, and some 250 miles north of Egypt and eastern Libya, or Cyrenaica. It is 152 miles long, but only 8 to 35 miles wide.
    Once the Balkans had been seized by the Germans, Crete strategically fell into a twilight zone. For the British, long-range bombers based on Crete could reach the Ploesti oil fields in Romania, 675 miles north, but RAF bases on the island could be blasted by German aircraft a hundred miles away in southern Greece. For the Germans, occupation made no more sense, because aircraft based there would be farther from Cairo and Alexandria than planes in eastern Cyrenaica.
    The situation was entirely different in regard to Malta. This small British-ruled island group (122 square miles), only 60 miles south of Sicily and 200 miles north of Tripoli, was a dagger sticking into Italian and German backs in North Africa. Here the British had based airplanes, submarines, and warships with the explicit purpose of interdicting traffic to Libya.
    The danger of Malta was emphasized to everyone when the British sank a transport meant for Rommel’s Africa Corps on the night of April 15–16, 1941. British threats from Malta soon made nearly every passage to Libya a throw of the dice. Sometimes the ship got through, sometimes it didn’t. Sunken Italian and German cargo vessels began to litter the seabed of the Sicilian Narrows between the two continents.
    Hitler didn’t consider the question of Crete seriously until the RAF landed air and army units on the island on November 1, 1940. Soon thereafter Hitler’s attention focused on Malta. After Marshal Graziani’s humiliating defeat, Hitler decided to send German forces to Libya. Mussolini, fearing loss of his possession, now wanted help.
    Officers examined the possibility of neutralizing Crete and Malta solely by air raids. But any successful bombing campaign lasts only as long as it is continued. The only certain way to eliminate a threat is to seize the ground with troops, and Admiral Raeder and the navy high command agitated for an assault on Malta. Capture of this island, they asserted, was “an essential precondition for a successful war against Britain in the Mediterranean.”
    Raeder and his senior officers were trying to reverse a preliminary decision of February 22, 1941, when the OKW informed them that Hitler planned to delay the conquest of Malta until the autumn of 1941 “after the conclusion of the war in the east.” Thus Hitler was expecting to dispose of the Russians in a swift summer campaign, then turn back at his leisure and deal with the small problem of Malta!
    Several OKW staff officers—awake to the danger of Malta after the ship bound for Rommel went down—also pleaded with Jodl and Keitel to urge Hitler to tackle the island at once.
    It was no wonder that they, Raeder, and his officers were wrought up. The decision ignored Rommel’s urgent needs and subordinated everything to a war against the Soviet Union—whose dimensions, duration, and outcome could not possibly be foreseen. Furthermore, the defending garrison at Malta was small, because convoys to the island had to run a gauntlet of attacks from Italian air and sea forces. Yet the British controlled the eastern Mediterranean and could put as large a force as they desired onto Crete.
    Hitler’s final decision came on April 21, 1941, as the campaign in the Balkans was winding down. He decided to attack Crete, which was given the code name Operation Mercury. Malta would have to wait. Crete, Hitler declared, was more important. He wanted to eliminate all danger of British sea and air forces from southeastern Europe. British forces on Malta would be dealt with by the Luftwaffe. Furthermore, Barbarossa, the attack on Russia, was set for June 1941, and Mercury had to be completed before