The Aftermath - The Battle for Crete
Allied prisoners of war on Crete
Cretan shepherds who helped New Zealanders evade capture after the Battle for Crete
Prisoners of War
The men taken prisoner by the Germans at Sfakia were marched back over the White Mountains to a prison camp near Canea. It was hot and they were suffering the effects of lack of food and water.
Conditions at the camp were very poor. There was little food and shelter and nothing much to do all day, although some of the men were sent out on work parties to bury the dead or to work on the airfield at Maleme. Initially the Germans tended to turn a blind eye to prisoners going out of the camp at night to find food, but as the months passed confinement became more stringent. Colin Burn remembers:
'The conditions in the camp were shocking. It was dusty and dirty and there was only sandy ground, with a few tufts of grass. The toilet facilities were shocking. All they had was a trench in the ground, dug in on the outside, the edge of the camp. Out in the open. Everyone had dysentery. It was nothing to see a hundred all lined up along the trench, and more waiting to get there. Chaps couldn't make it. If you soiled your clothes, all you had to do was go down to the beach and get in the tide. There was only one well, and the water used to get muddy in that.'
Colin Burn, interviewed by Megan Hutching, 5 December 2000. Colin Burn was on Crete until January 1942 when he was sent, via Greece, to Germany. He spent the rest of the war in camp and on working parties in Germany and Poland.
Norm Delaney remembers:
'The food was pretty poor, but the Germans couldn't help that, they didn't have any spare to give us. Our ships got bombed in the harbour; got a real thrashing beforehand, and, for instance, there were a lot of sacks of dried beans that got wet with sea water, and then they were given to us and boiled up. Well, it was better than nothing. We ate a lot of them. It was all in one big tub out in the open—they heated it and tipped the beans and whatever else there was. They ladled it out into our mess tins if we still had them, or anything we had, and we ate it. It was enough to keep us alive.
Just filled in our time talking and moaning, I suppose.
Just went under the wire. Our blokes had built the wires, and there was one part where they were a bit loose. But the Germans were so friendly once we were prisoners, I don't think they cared. One bloke told us, he said, "I see some of your friends steal grapes. They go over the road and come back with them at night." He should have shot them, but he didn't. I thought, that sounds alright to me. I'll go over the road too.'
Norm Delaney, interviewed by Megan Hutching, 30 November 2000. Norm Delaney was on the run for ten-and-a-half months, and eventually managed to get on board a small boat which took him back to Egypt.
Escapees supported by Cretans
Quite a number of men escaped to the hills where they were helped, at great personal risk, by the Cretan people. Some were re-captured and some managed to get off the island by boat or by submarine and return to Egypt. A few escaped by way of Greece. The majority of the men, however, were sent first by boat to Greece and then by train to prison camps in Germany from where, if they were non-commissioned, they were sent out in work parties to places such as quarries and factories to work for the Germans. There most of them stayed until they were liberated in 1945.
Carrying on the fight
A small number of New Zealanders were involved in the guerrilla warfare between the Cretans and the Germans. A number of British military people worked as agents on the island with support from Cairo, and some escaped POWs were parachuted back to the island, among them New Zealanders Staff Sergeant Tom Moir and Sergeant Dudley Perkins. The latter, whose outstanding leadership led to his being christened 'Vasili' by the Cretans, was killed in action on Crete in February 1944. (see Murray Elliott, Vasili: The Lion of Crete, Auckland, 1987)
Next page: The Controversies 
