On April 25, 1941, a 20-year-old corporal from Manilla and an even younger private from Boggabri were among the 27,000 exhausted Australian and New Zealand soldiers who started to land in Suda Bay on the Mediterranean island of Crete.
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They were Noel Park, later to become Colonel Noel Park OAM, DSO, ED and our member of State Parliament for almost twenty years.
The young private was Charles Chapman, one of three Boggabri brothers who served in WW2.
Both were members of the 2/2 Battalion of the Australian sixth Division who joined up in 1939 as boys and returned home seven years later in 1946 aged beyond their years.
The three hundred kilometre trip across the Aegean Sea from Greece had been horrific.
They came in Royal Navy ships including HMAS Perth, fishing boats, commandeered yachts, anything that would float.
Some had hidden during daylight in the many islands on the route to try and escape the Stukas.
The cost to the Royal Navy was grim - two destroyers, HMS Wryneck and HMS Diamond were sunk with the loss of 700 sailors.
They had been in Greece for only four weeks before being overwhelmed by the Germans.
So why were they there? Britain had a treaty with Greece that if either was attacked, the other would come to their aid.
Mussolini had wanted to become an imperial power so he invaded Greece through Albania.
The under-resourced Greek Army drove the Italians back, which forced Hitler to come to their rescue.
Winston Churchill wanted to honour the treaty so told General Wavell, his commander in North Africa to send troops from Egypt.
Wavell was reluctant as Rommel's Afrika Korps had just landed in Libya.
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He leaned on Australian General Blamey and New Zealand's Major-General Freyberg, and the two governments unwisely agreed to allow the sixth Australian Division and the NZ Division to join mixed British units in an Expeditionary Force to Greece.
This was nowhere near the strength required for the task, and was doomed from the start.
In the four weeks we lost 2000 dead or wounded, 14000 were taken prisoners, and a disastrous loss of materials, including 209 aircraft at a time when Briton was desperate.
The bulk of the troops were evacuated directly to Egypt. Almost all those who landed in Crete were Australian and New Zealanders, who joined a small British garrison already on the island.
So the defence of Crete was an ANZAC operation, probably the first since Gallipoli. Churchill then put the New Zealander Major-General Freyberg in charge.
This proved to be a disastrous choice. Freyberg was the great First World War warrior.
He swam ashore at Gallipoli to lay flares, won a Victoria Cross on the Western Front, and ended the war with four DSO's and many wounds.
He was personally brave, took great care of his men, but his delayed and poor decisions probably cost us Crete.
Freyberg was convinced that while the initial attack would come from paratroops, the real threat was from the sea, so his limited artillery was almost all pointed to the beaches, and he held back his reserve units to defend the beaches.
The Germans too made some bad decisions. At that early stage of the war they had been invincible, rolling through France, Holland, Poland, Norway and Greece, and were driving the British forces back at lightening speed in North Africa.
They had little need for gathering Intelligence. Their intelligence reports suggested that there were only about 5000 stragglers on Crete, and the Dorniers that flew over every day failed to detect the thousands of troops camouflaged in the olive groves.
The British too had deduced the only way to invade Crete was from the air, and identified the same three airfields the Germans had selected.
Over-confidence caused the German General Karl Student to invade all three airfields simultaneously, expecting to take them in a couple of hours.
On May 20 the invasion came. Three weeks of rest and good food had revived our young soldiers and they were ready.
500 Junkers 52 transport planes plus gliders, the largest transport fleet ever assembled at that time took off to arrive at breakfast time.
They were capable of delivering 3000 paratroopers in a day, almost operating a shuttle service over the 300kms from the Greek airfields. The young paras jumped full of confidence.
The first wave were slaughtered by the Anzacs, who just lay on their backs picking them off like a duck shoot at home, or cutting them down before they could reach their weapon canisters.
Several German formations suffered 100 per cent casualties. On that first day they had 1856 killed. Their worst day of the war at the time.
But Freyberg held back his reserves, and the Anzacs had problems with communications having lost most of their radios in Greece.
Inevitably enough Germans were landing alive, and with typical efficiency were landing and unloading every 70 seconds.
Historians agree had all the reserves been thrown into the defence of the airfields, the German casualty rate would have been so high, that Hitler would have sacked General Student and decided Crete was not worth any more resources.
He was already furious at the loss of transport planes that he needed in Russia. Over the next ten days there was a series of scattered engagements along the coast and into the high country.
Bavarian Mountain Troops landed to take over the bulk of the fighting from the battered paratroops.
The Germans had total control of the skies and strafed and bombed us unrelentingly. So began the retreat across the mountain passes of Crete to the only evacuation beaches.
Our seriously wounded were left behind in stretchers with doctors and medical orderlies who had volunteered to stay behind with them.
The German medical officers took over their care, and for a while Australian and New Zealand medical staff looked after German wounded.
The tired, hungry Anzacs with their boots worn out, were harried by the ME109s and Stukas, and the German units following them. The rearguard protection was the responsibility of a recently arrived British Commando unit, but the most effective fighters were the Maori Battalion, who kept the Germans at bay with hakas and bayonet charges.
The evacuation by the navy could only take place at night and they had to depart by 2.25am to get out of the range of the Dorniers and Stukas from Greece before daylight. The Navy started the evacuation on the night of May 28.
During daylight the waiting troops had to endure strafing from the air, while they tried to hide. They all knew that many would be left behind, but in the main, the Commonwealth troops' discipline held.
5000 soldiers were left behind, and many others lost their lives when several of the Royal Navy ships taking them to Egypt were sunk.
Most were taken prisoner, including Charles Chapman and Noel Park, but quite a number hid in the mountains with the villagers.
Three months later, a British naval officer came ashore, rounded up 130 soldiers and squeezed then all into a submarine. Others stole small boats and crossed the Mediterranean back to Egypt
The heavy casualties inflicted on the Germans in Crete were their first setback of the war. And it was Australians and New Zealanders who showed Hitler's armies were not invincible.
In truth we should not have been there. Churchill's romantic idea of supporting an ally in Greece was against the advice of his military advisers and was hopeless from the start. More than one Australian or New Zealand officer wondered why they were two thirds of the forces landed in Greece.
Noel Park and Charles Chapman, both still really just boys, were among those left behind and captured by the Germans.
Two weeks after their capture Park managed to escape from a temporary holding compounds.
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With courage, ingenuity, with help from the villagers of Crete and a lot of luck, he eluded the Germans for a number of weeks, then escaped with others by stealing a small boat and sailing 600 kilometres to Egypt, avoiding the Luftwaffe on the way. They arrived four months later.
Unfortunately Charles became one of the thousands of Commonwealth soldiers who became prisoners of war on Crete. The prisoners from Greece and Crete were prisoners for four full years.
After a horror train journey back to Germany, they were put to work in factories, farms and Polish coal mines, enduring the coldest winter of the 20th century. Charles Chapman became part of a railway work gang in Bavaria.
So this Anzac Day, spare a thought for the hundreds of ANZACs buried in the Commonwealth Cemetery at Suda Bay in Crete.
LEST WE FORGET.
