They Mocked His ‘Enemy’ Rifle — Until He Killed 33 Nazi Snipers in 7 Days
At 6:42 a.m. on May 20, 1941, Alfred Clive Hume stood in the punishment compound at Maleme Airfield on the island of Crete, watching the sky fall apart.
German paratroopers poured out of the clouds like black seeds scattered by the wind. Thousands of them. Silk canopies opened, twisted, collapsed. Some men smashed into olive trees and broke their necks. Others hit the ground running, already forming firing lines.
Hume was thirty years old. A provost sergeant. Eight months in uniform. Zero confirmed kills.
And at that moment, he was responsible for twenty-three soldiers the army officially labeled troublemakers—men jailed for fighting, drinking, stealing rations. Soldiers no one trusted.
Within an hour, those men would be the only thing standing between the Germans and the airfield.
Hume didn’t wait for orders.
He broke into the armory, grabbed every rifle he could carry, and shoved them into the prisoners’ hands. No paperwork. No authorization. Just weapons.
“Follow me,” he said.
They did.
By noon, the olive groves around Maleme were full of bodies. German machine guns hammered the ground. Mortars walked shells across the fields. And then the snipers arrived.
You never saw them. You never heard the shot until someone fell. Officers dropped first. Radio operators. Medics. Anyone who stood up.
Standard counter-sniper doctrine was useless. You couldn’t suppress what you couldn’t see.
Hume volunteered to hunt them.
Alone.
For two days he stalked German snipers the conventional way—slow crawls, hours of waiting, careful shots. It barely made a dent. For every sniper he killed, two more appeared.
On May 22, he shot a lone German paratrooper at close range.
The boy couldn’t have been more than nineteen.
Hume knelt beside the body and noticed the camouflage smock—German Fallschirmjäger pattern. Perfectly designed to disappear in Mediterranean terrain. Next to it lay a Karabiner 98k fitted with a Zeiss scope.
The rifle enemy snipers used.
The rifle Allied soldiers mocked as “overrated.”
Hume stared at it for a long moment.
Then he stripped the smock off the dead German. It was still warm.
He put it on.
At dawn on May 23, Sergeant Alfred Hume walked straight into German-held territory wearing enemy camouflage and carrying an enemy rifle.
If discovered, he would be executed on the spot. No trial. No prisoner status. Under the laws of war, he would be a spy.
He didn’t hesitate.
The deception worked immediately.
From two hundred yards away, he looked like just another German sniper moving between positions. He walked openly. Calmly. No crawling. No cover.
The first sniper never questioned him.
At twenty-five yards, Hume raised the rifle and fired once.
The man collapsed without a sound.
Hume searched the body, took the ammunition, and moved on.
By noon, three more German snipers were dead.
The Germans never fired a warning shot. Never challenged him. They saw one of their own—until the moment they died.
New Zealand casualties dropped overnight.
Radio operators survived. Officers stood upright. Patrols moved in daylight again.
Nobody knew why.
On May 24, Hume pushed deeper behind enemy lines, passing within feet of German infantry who nodded as he walked by. Once, a German officer gave him directions toward an attack sector.
Hume followed them.
That night, his kill count reached eleven.
On May 26, a runner handed him a scrap of paper.
His younger brother, Harold, had been killed in action.
Hume folded the message, slipped it into his pocket, and picked up the rifle.
Something in him hardened.
The withdrawal toward Suda Bay began the next morning. German snipers swarmed the ridgelines, trying to collapse the retreat by killing leaders.
Hume positioned himself above the road and began killing them one by one.
He never fired twice from the same spot.
By midday, eight snipers lay dead.
At one hillside, he walked openly toward a group of five German snipers. One waved. Another smiled and spoke to him.
At forty yards, Hume shot the first man in the chest.
The others froze, unable to understand what they were seeing.
Hume killed four before the fifth could fire.
Nineteen snipers died that day.
By May 28, Hume was wounded, bleeding, barely able to use his left arm. He killed a German mortar crew preparing to annihilate the retreat, then shot two more snipers along the ridge.
The thirty-third sniper found him first.
The German shot Hume through the shoulder, shattering bone. Hume fought back with rocks and bare hands, knocking the man unconscious.
He collapsed soon after.
New Zealand soldiers found him miles down the road, soaked in blood.
The official count stood at thirty-three confirmed sniper kills in eight days.
German sniper effectiveness in the sector dropped ninety percent.
Hundreds of Allied soldiers lived because the snipers weren’t there to kill them.
Crete still fell.
The island was lost.
Hume lost his arm, his brother, and his war.
He received the Victoria Cross.
He never spoke about it.
Years later, historians would argue whether his tactics violated international law. Whether what he did should ever be repeated.
Hume never cared.
He had seen an enemy rifle.
He had used it.
And for seven days, on a collapsing Greek island, death wore the wrong uniform.
