After the Battle #189: A Staged Surrender In Crete

A STAGED SURRENDER IN CRETE — On July 8, 1941, just over a month after the end of the battle of Crete, a two-page photo report was published in issue 14 of the Luftwaffe magazine Der Adler. It was the first portrayal of an incident in which a party of British soldiers surrender to a squad of German paratroopers. The nine images featured in this early photo report would be used again and again in numerous later publications. After the war, new images started to emerge, showing that the original series were part of a larger photo sequence. However, when viewed as a whole, the images revealed a number of inconsistencies between the actions depicted, and questions arose as to their authenticity. Puzzled by these, our author Nikos Valasiadis in 2008 decided to undertake a systematic research project, combining photo analysis with field work, the aim being to identify the exact location of the photo shoot, shed light on the events depicted, and establish whether the action shown was true or false. Explosion in Bergen Harbour — Karel Margry explains how on April 20, 1944, the Voorbode, a Dutch steamship commandeered by the Kriegsmarine and loaded with over 100 tons of dynamite and other ordnance, exploded in Bergen harbour in Norway, causing a catastrophe of unheard-of dimensions. More than half of the city’s buildings was destroyed or damaged by the blast and by the many fires that erupted all over the city, and over 150 people were killed with another 5,000 wounded. It was the largest explosion disaster to occur in Norway in the Second World War. Commando Tragedy in Holland — On the night of February 27/28, 1944, a party of six French commandos from No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando landed on a beach north of The Hague in German-occupied Netherlands, their mission — code-named Operation ‘Premium’ — being to reconnoitre a route for putting Allied secret agents ashore at this point. The operation went wrong and the six Frenchmen mysteriously disappeared without a trace, leaving their colleagues and higher headquarters in England guessing as to their fate. Although their bodies were eventually found after the war, the exact circumstances of what happened on the beach that night, and the precise nature of their mission, remained covered in shrouds for many decades after the war, being only lifted in the mid-1980s. Even then, exactly how the men came to die is still uncertain. The tragic story is told by Karel Margry. Justice Meted out After Liberation — Jean Paul Pallud tells us how court-martials were set up right after the liberation of France to deal with the judicial process for redressing acts of collaboration, and in Grenoble a court-martial was convened on September 2, 1944. Ten members of the Milice, the paramilitary force raised by the Vichy Government that aided the Germans in the repression of the Resistance, were put on trial. It was fortunate that John Osborne, editor on the staff of Time magazine, was present in Grenoble on September 2 with photographer Carl Mydans to report on the execution of the six Miliciens judged guilty.