Journalist Cat McGregor stumbled upon the Galatas-New Zealand connection while visiting Crete.
Turn inland from Kalamaki, a beach resort outside the ancient city of Chania, and the road quickly starts to rise straight and steep. As you go further, the tourist apartments give way to modest homes with bougainvillea and branches of lemons spilling over their garden walls. If you keep going, you pass olive groves and small herds of goats, remnants of the era before tourism came to this spectacular stretch of coastline on the northern side of Crete.
It was here, near the top of this hill, that on the evening of May 25, 1941, several hundred New Zealand soldiers waited for the order to march into the village of Galatas. The brutal fight to retake Galatas from the Germans was among the final engagements of the Battle for Crete. It was also one of Germany’s first defeats of World War II, and would come to be seen as a defining moment in New Zealand military history.
Eighty-two years later, I walked the road to Galatas, where every year a smattering of New Zealanders join the locals to commemorate the fight for the village. It’s also a celebration of the bond between the people of Crete and those of New Zealand, other small, earthquake-prone islands on the opposite side of the world.
Grapes and gratitude
The ceremony is held in the Galatas village square, in front of the war memorial that sits between the street of Neozilandon Polemiston – New Zealand warriors – and the church of Agios Nikolaos.
As the Greek military band tunes up, I approach a couple of young women who turn out to be locals attending the event in the company of their grandmother who sits beside them, 97-year-old Chariklia Fournarakis. She’s lived in Galatas her whole life, and clearly remembers the soldiers who came to save her village all those years ago. “We gave grapes to the New Zealanders, what we had from the fields, from the farms, what little we had, because of course there was poverty,” she tells me through an interpreter.
Following the retreat from Allied outposts at Chania and Maleme airfield – the latter lost in a blunder that turned the tide squarely in Germany’s favour – New Zealand forces pulled back towards Galatas as waves of Luftwaffe paratroopers landed around the hilltop village. Fournarakis tells me she remembers the names of two New Zealand soldiers, David and Les. The latter survived; David, she says, was killed. “He was approaching a German parachutist who was hanging from a power line, and another German came up behind and shot him.” She puts her hand on her heart, then smiles and embraces me. “She wants to meet every New Zealander who comes here,” her interpreter says. “She wants to say thank you.”
Nearby is Dunedin-raised Peter Ford, who has been coming to Galatas since the early 1990s. He points across the square: that’s where his father and three others were pinned down in a foxhole for days by enemy fire. Aucklander Peter Cooper is here in memory of his Uncle Richard, who was critically wounded on the second day of fighting and died in hospital in Athens, aged 21. Lynn Grayden rattles off her father Alex’s service number; he and his fellow West Coasters served in the 20th battalion alongside legendary war hero Charles Upham, under the command of Colonel Howard Kippenberger, who planned and led the counterattack to recapture Galatas.
Ragtag bunch
The Battle for Crete isn’t part of our national consciousness in the same way as Gallipoli and the Somme. But, says Cooper, “it’s very much part of New Zealand’s history, particularly this battle here – it was exclusively New Zealand.” While some who fought in Galatas were well-trained soldiers, casualties in the preceding days had been so heavy that Kippenberger was forced to launch his counterattack with what Cooper calls a “ragtag group”, which included military cooks, band members and truck drivers. When the order was given, they stormed into Galatas, bayonets drawn. “I shall never forget the deep-throated, wild-beast noise of the yelling, charging men as the 23rd [battalion] swept up the road,” wrote an officer in a letter home. “The howling and shouting of the infantry sounded like the baying of dogs,” remembered a gunner in one of the two tanks that accompanied the attack. “As it rose and fell, it made my flesh creep.”
Cretan Patriotism
At 6.30pm, the official Galatas commemorations begin with prayers led by the local Greek Orthodox bishop and priests from the church next door. Although I can pick out the odd “Neozilandon” in the speeches, this ceremony is as much a remembrance of the local people’s suffering as it is a tribute to the Allied soldiers who fought alongside them. Fournarakis, who was a teenager when the Germans arrived in Galatas, steps up to the microphone to read from her self-composed mantinada, a traditional Cretan form of poetry: “There is no stone in Crete that did not bleed. Because it was painted by heroes who fell in battle.”
Locals remember the Battle for Crete as a clash of foreign militaries, but even more so as a time when Cretans – largely without their young men, who were away fighting on the mainland – staged a valiant defence of their homeland against a ferocious invading army.
“The civilians were fighting for their land, their homes, their family, their country and their neighbours with everything they had: axes, knives, ancient weapons, makeshift spears of broom handles with knives on the end, swords, even rocks from the ground,” says George Bikogiannakis, a long-time Galatas resident now living on the coast. “The Germans never understood this and after they conquered Crete, they revenged the Cretan patriotism.” According to local sources, more than 2000 islanders were executed in the first few months of the occupation alone.
Despite the danger, many in Crete did what they could to support the Allied soldiers. One who owed his life to the kindness of strangers was Norman Ormsby, who was brought into the home of Dr Nikòlaos Tererákis after being badly wounded near Chania, 6km east of Galatas. For the next few weeks, Ormsby was kept hidden while Dr Tererákis and his family nursed him back to health, until the risk to the family became too great and Ormsby fled into the hills. The family never saw him again.
Ormsby seldom spoke about his experiences in Crete, nor about the POW camps where he spent the remainder of the war after being captured by German soldiers who surrounded his hideout in the hills. But he never forgot the kindness of the Tererákis family, according to his son Matthew. After his father’s death, Matthew was put in contact with Dr Federica Kantunakis, a Chania local who offered to help search for traces of Dr Tererákis in the local historical records. After a long and anxious wait, Matthew and his siblings received the email they’d been hoping for: Federica had found Dr Tererákis’ family.
Ultimate Push
“Everyone knew that Crete was lost, and the knowledge was bitter,” writes Angus Ross in his official history of the 23rd Battalion in World War II. “And then out of the dull ashes of defeat there rose a flame, only a brief flash, but one that will be vivid in the memory of those who were there until their dying day. And that was the counterattack on Galatas.”
The village had already changed hands twice in the days before the New Zealand soldiers made their ultimate push to retake it from the Germans. The fighting was at close quarters and savage, with Luftwaffe bombs raining down, and when the guns eventually fell silent, the streets were strewn with the dead and wounded. New Zealanders had succeeded in driving the enemy out, inflicting on the Wehrmacht what is generally considered one of its first defeats of the war.
The triumph was short-lived. The New Zealand forces were depleted and exhausted, their ammunition all but spent, and there were fears that their presence would put civilians in unacceptable danger from German bombers. The New Zealanders withdrew from Galatas the following day, joining their Allied comrades in retreating, first eastwards to Chania and then over the White Mountains to an evacuation point on the south coast. In the chaos of withdrawal and with transport at a premium, thousands of soldiers – many of them wounded – were left behind. Some, like Norman Ormsby, initially evaded the Germans and, with locals’ help, eventually joined an Allied network hiding out in the caves dotting the hills. Others were rounded up almost immediately.
Written in gold
Also in Galatas are a group of New Zealand ex-service members with the Pilgrim Bandits, a charity that aims to support injured military veterans by putting them in physically and mentally demanding situations. They’ve just completed a four-day tramp following the route of the evacuating New Zealand forces, trekking over the mountains and down to the port at Sfakia just as their forebears did 82 years earlier. As they walked, they no doubt tried to imagine the fatigue, fear and grief – for the lives lost, and for those left behind – felt by those in whose footsteps they followed.
The names of New Zealand soldiers were “written in gold” for their actions in Crete, according to George Bikogiannakis, including for their ultimately futile attempt to save Galatas. I can’t help wondering whether the departing servicemen felt that way themselves as they trudged solemnly towards the coast.
Many New Zealanders made it onto the evacuation ships at Sfakia, but more than 2000 were left stranded, forced to await their inevitable capture by advancing German forces. In total, 671 New Zealand servicemen died in Crete. Most of them are buried at Souda Bay War Cemetery, in rows of neat white graves overlooking the port where they had made landfall just days before their deaths.
Between the named gravestones are numerous others marked simply “Known Unto God” – young soldiers who were never identified because their tags were made of leather, not metal, and had disintegrated in the ground.
The day after the Galatas ceremony, a British-led service is held at Souda Bay in memory of the more than 1500 Allied servicemen who are buried here. There’s one final ceremony, at Maleme, a primary German paratrooper landing site, now home to that country’s war dead. The Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof, or German war cemetery, is the final place of rest for some 4500 soldiers, many of them parachutists shot out of the sky by Allied soldiers and Cretan defenders as they descended onto this ancient and starkly beautiful island. By the time they hit the ground, they were already dead.
Grattitude and peace
On May 26, 82 years to the day since his father’s life was saved, Matthew Ormsby sat down with Dr Tererákis’ son Lakis at one of the long communal tables laid out for supper in the Galatas village square.
Earlier that day, Matthew had presented the Tererákis family with a taonga: a piece of obsidian that had been in the Ormsby whānau for more than a century, encased in a block of tōtara inset with pāua shell.
In the accompanying dedication, the Ormsbys wrote: “The pāua shell represents the four points of the compass, keeping the obsidian connected to its home of origin no matter where it is in the world, thereby keeping our connection with you.”
A small fragment of Aotearoa given in gratitude, and in peace.
