The road to 42nd Street started in Albania. Italy invaded Greece in October 1940 and was driven back by a Greek army that had no business winning. Britain sent more than 60,000 Commonwealth troops to help. When Germany struck through Yugoslavia in April 1941, the mainland fell in three weeks. The Royal Navy evacuated 50,000 Allied troops, mostly to Crete. Many had no equipment beyond their personal weapons. Major-General Bernard Freyberg, a New Zealand-born Victoria Cross holder, was given command of the island on April 30 and read the Ultra decrypts: Germany would airdrop a parachute army onto Crete, and the airfields would be the targets. He had thirty-two thousand Commonwealth troops and ten thousand Greek soldiers to defend an island a hundred and sixty miles long with three airfields and seven hundred miles of coastline. He had no real air cover after May 19. He had to choose where to lose first.

The German plan was code-named Unternehmen Merkur and was personally signed off by Hitler on April 25. Generaloberst Kurt Student commanded twenty-two thousand paratroopers and mountain infantry, supported by 570 aircraft of the VIII Fliegerkorps and more than five hundred Junkers Ju 52 transports. The first wave dropped at Maleme on the morning of May 20 and was nearly annihilated - the German 7th Air Division took horrific casualties on the first day, with parachute battalions losing more than half their strength before lunch. But Maleme airfield slowly fell anyway, German reinforcements landed by Ju 52 directly onto the runway despite the ongoing fight, and from there the campaign tipped. By May 26, Freyberg had ordered evacuation south across the White Mountains to Sphakia. The 42nd Street position was a delaying line: a creek bed and a track a few kilometers southeast of Chania, just inland from Souda Bay.

The 1st Battalion of the German 141st Gebirgsjäger Regiment, commanded by Major Hans Forster, advanced toward 42nd Street through olive groves on the morning of May 27. They were Bavarian mountain troops, fresh, disciplined, well-equipped. The Anzacs in front of them were the opposite. According to accounts gathered after the war, the Anzac officers - Lieutenant Colonel Theo Walker of the 2/7th, the New Zealand battalion commanders, and Captain Charles Upham of the 20th - decided that if they were going to be overrun they would not be overrun standing still. When the Germans were close enough, the Anzacs rose out of the orchards and attacked across the open ground. It was hand-to-hand fighting in olive groves and over irrigation ditches, the kind of close action soldiers remember for the rest of their lives. Reg Saunders, who would later become the first Aboriginal officer in the Australian Army, called it 'a short range very bloody action,' and said: 'Certainly skulls were broken and men stabbed... it was hand-to-hand combat, and that's what happens.'

When the Germans recovered the ground, they counted 121 of their own dead from the 1st Battalion, 141st Gebirgsjäger - many killed by bayonet, many with crushed skulls. The Allied dead left on the field numbered around 20, and only 3 wounded German prisoners were taken. The German command later accused the Anzacs of war crimes. After the war, Australian official historian Gavin Long denied that surrendering Germans had been killed deliberately, while accepting that men had been clubbed and bayoneted in the chaos of close combat. The truth probably sits somewhere in the imperfect middle: a battalion of mountain troops surprised in the open by men who had been retreating for a week, fighting at hand range with weapons that were never designed to take prisoners cleanly. What the dead on both sides shared was that they had been put into the olive groves outside Chania by decisions made hundreds of miles away, and most of them were no older than twenty-five.

Tactically, 42nd Street was a brief Allied success. The German advance halted for the rest of the day. The 1st Battalion of the 141st Gebirgsjäger was effectively broken; reinforcements had to be brought up. The Anzac line withdrew that evening, having bought the retreating column on the Sphakia road a day's grace. Twelve thousand Allied troops were eventually evacuated from the south coast, taken off open beaches by Royal Navy destroyers under heavy air attack. Another twelve thousand were left on Crete and went into German captivity. Walker, the 2/7th's commander, surrendered his battalion at Sphakia after running out of food and ammunition. The Battle of Crete cost Germany so heavily that Hitler never used his airborne troops in another large-scale parachute drop. Among the dead at 42nd Street were men whose names are on a memorial in Chania today, where the road still runs past olive trees and locals still occasionally find a rusted helmet in a field.