Invasion of Crete: The First (and Only) Major German Airborne Operation of World War II
Emboldened by previous successes, the Germans launched Operation Mercury, dropping thousands of paratroopers onto the defended island of Crete.
Here s What You Need to Know: The Germans would the triumph at Crete, but their victory was bittersweet.
By May 1941, the German Luftwaffe’s fortunes had risen to great heights and plummeted to equally startling depths in the course of a single year of blitzkrieg warfare in Western Europe. Led by the narcissistic Hermann Göring, a former World War I flying ace, the Luftwaffe had been the perfect complement to the land-based Wehrmacht in the opening months of the war. In Scandinavia and the Low Countries in the spring of 1940, the Luftwaffe’s parachute light infantry, or Fallschirmjäger, had seized key objectives to speed the advance of Germany’s panzer forces, while high-level and dive bombers had hastened the capitulation of stubborn nations w