Weller's War

by George Weller

  The British simply must do something about this soon. The suspense is not only terrible; it is getting a little ridiculous.

  NAZIS MARCH WHILE BRITONS DALLY IN SOFIA

  Belgrade, Yugoslavia—March 7, 1941

  The presence in Bulgaria of forty Britons—plus about fifty Dutch, Belgian and Polish diplomats who have lost their status—became today a military advantage greater than five divisions in the Nazi attack on Greece racing south for the border.

  Until the diplomats of the three governments and the English are evacuated on Sunday and Monday the British bombers waiting in the Greek air fields cannot check the heavy German columns now passing down the Struma Valley road. Nor can they, for fear of having their nationals held as hostages, blast the pontoon bridges over the Danube, across which the Nazi troops are following their Luftwaffe predecessors.

  Thus while the Britons (many of whom insisted until the last that the Bulgarians would not let in the Germans) are getting health certificates for dogs, automobile cachets and German military permissions to drive to the Turkish border, the Germans are formally taking over the anti-aircraft posts, listening stations and air fields upon which they have been working for the last several months with the collaboration of the Bulgarian general staff and the government.

  For the British and their allies Bulgaria has been a second home that they are saying farewell to in the measured English fashion. Meantime the Germans speedily are converting it into a fortress and base to strike the English in Greece.

  How many of the approximately 25 divisions and 1500 airplanes in Rumania have crossed the Danube into Bulgaria is uncertain because the sudden step has caused exaggerated figures. Judging from the strength of the general staff in Sofia, under Field Marshal General von List, the number probably does not exceed six divisions, and possibly a single division of the Luftwaffe.

  Since correspondents are not allowed to leave Sofia, besides having their communications severed for the past three days, it is impossible to say how many soldiers have been routed around the city and how many sent through the Shipka Pass. The German technique has been to strive for air mastery south of the Balkan Mountains first. Nearly all the trucks in campaign cars passing from Sofia bear the license W. L., meaning Wehrmacht Luftwaffe.

  In a column of about 120 armored cars, trucks and officers' cars passing the palace of King Boris3* Wednesday noon, the writer counted 22 of the type of German anti-tank guns which is also used for anti-aircraft defense. Evidently the Germans recognize that, in the mountainous terrain along the Struma, the single narrow road with its small bridges and small-gauge railroad are easy marks for British bombers unless they first gain air mastery here.

  The writer saw a single sign of humor in the entire phlegmatic invasion: a big army truck, caked with mud, bearing the words, scrawled by a soldier's finger, Grand Balkan Express.

  On the boulevards the Bulgarians stand around the formidable German field cars as Americans on Michigan Avenue when a new model runabout appears. Many trucks bear nets and green cloth screens on top for camouflage against bombing. Kitchen trucks and mobile mechanical shops accompany each column.

  Thanks to the British still being here, the Germans are able to break every rule for military communications, long columns of trucks being seen without any defense whatever. Since no fuel trucks are in evidence, it is believed that the Bulgarians have opened their roadside military depots for these very heavy vehicles.

  Special posts have been built on several Sofia routes for soldier lookouts to watch for British or Greek planes. The Germans are quoted as having pledged to destroy Athens if a single bomb is dropped upon Sofia. Not having been there, the writer is unable to say whether Athens is technically an open city under the military definition. Sofia has at least three anti-aircraft cannon believed of British make, mounted on the roof of the national bank in the heart of the city.

  For 72 hours, up to last night, telephone communications have been interfered with or severed by the authorities, apparently under German influence. When the writer left the city on Thursday, the director of the foreign press was reported in conference with three German officers, presumably arranging the details of the formal censorship to replace the present irregular one.

  1*Carol II, the “playboy king” who ruled from 1930 to 1940, enjoyed diverse wives and mistresses across Europe. His son Michael, for whom he abdicated, spurned him thereafter.

  2†Carol II's son (b. 1921), powerless for most of the war under pro-German prime minister Ion Antonescu, against whom he led a 1944 coup—resulting in occupation by the Soviets. Decorated by both Truman and Stalin, he had to abdicate in 1947.

  3*Boris III (b. 1894), who ruled from 1918 until his death in 1943 amid a succession of Balkan upheavals. An uneasy and powerless ally of the Nazis, he is alternately reviled for the assistance he gave to Hitler and admired for all he refused to give.

  II

  The Fall of Greece

  George Weller radios that what makes his experiences at the Greek front “almost unbearably terrible and at the same time sublime … is the patient belief of good, ordinary human beings that freedom, like a big, benevolent stork sitting upon his nest above each village square, will return to his vacant home.”

  —Chicago Daily News

  Greece mentored Weller as a history-minded reporter. Saturated in the classical world, he had known the country well since the early 1930s. He'd lived in Athens for years as a Balkans correspondent for the New York Times, and written a book about Greek politics. Thus, at age thirty-three, when he returned from April to July 1941 to witness its fall to the Germans, he had a special perspective on its struggles—a deep grasp of both languages, both peoples, and a strong dose of political realism. (A good friend, the brilliant young reporter Spyros Vlachos, had committed suicide two years earlier after being tormented by the Metaxas dictatorship, which Weller termed “a four-year police state of extremist Fascist nature.”)

  The four months Weller witnessed are among the most momentous of Greece's century. Late in life, he had no more ardent wish than to visit, one last time, the islands he had known seventy years earlier.

  In October 1940, Mussolini—without telling Hitler—gave an ultimatum of invasion to Prime Minister Metaxas, who defied him. The Greek army, deployed throughout their familiar mountains, defeated the Italian forces and pushed them back into Albania, where they had to wait out the winter for reinforcements. This delay is now considered the first Allied land victory of World War II.

  For the Axis, Greece held enormous strategic importance. Without it, they could not hope to seize the British-held Middle East, nor protect their easy gains in the Balkans, nor control the eastern Mediterranean.

  Hitler, eager to break his nonaggression pact with Stalin and attack Russia yet unable to leave his southeastern flank unconquered and vulnerable, took over the Greek invasion from the Italians with a Nazi blitzkrieg in April 1941. (Metaxas had died in January.) Winston Churchill sent British troops from Libya and Egypt to try to prolong the defense, but by May, Greece was occupied by Axis forces. Some historians believe that the delay of the Nazi assault on Russia—enough to put that army at the mercy of the Moscow winter—can be credited to the doomed Greek resistance.

  Once Athens was overrun at the end of April, Weller was forced to stay and fell silent for a month. “Quarantined” by the Gestapo for nine weeks, he was unable to communicate with his editors. His early dispatches about the invasion, sent by official German mail to his Chicago Daily News colleague in Berlin, David Nichol, got through. With the help of third parties he was able to smuggle out only a single later dispatch, also published here. None can have pleased his captors, who gave him a protracted, convoluted departure.

  The tragedy, human and military, of Greece matured Weller rapidly as a reporter. From his narrow escape in Salonika (present-day Thessaloniki), to enduring his first air raids in the countryside, to his portraits of a besieged but uncowed Athens, to his weeks under the Nazi burea
ucratic thumb, the author of these dispatches is a changed man and a stylistically leaner writer from the rather elaborate Balkans observer of a few months earlier. He is now a war correspondent.

  A TALE OF TWO CITIES—ROME SHORN OF GLORY,

  ATHENS A CITY OF HONOR

  Athens, Greece—April 3, 1941

  Today's picture of Rome and Athens:

  Two worldly-wise cities lie blacked out under the brilliant Mediterranean starlight tonight, contemplating the same destiny that has reversed their ancient cousinship. Imperial Rome is in the descendance, the Germans have come again into the Forum, but this time Greece, once conquered by the Roman legions, holds the advantage.

  How are the two peoples, fundamentally different by lineage but related through Mediterranean culture, adapting themselves to the fortunes of war? How are ordinary Italians and Greeks affected by the incredible reversal that has filled even the enemies of Italy, including the Greeks, with pity for those who, following Mussolini's dictum, have believed, obeyed, fought—and died?

  Because the writer is the only American newspaperman who has visited both Rome and Athens in this fateful new year, he undertakes to hazard a description of the changes war has wrought in the psychology of the peoples of the two countries.

  A visit to Rome was made in January, when the Italian situation was more hopeful. Mussolini had not yet tried for a personal victory in Albania and failed. The battle of Cape Matapan—“No battle at all,” a captive sailor in a Greek naval prison told the writer this morning, “because we never fired a shot”—was unfought. Yugoslavia was quivering with uncertainty, instead of bristling with confidence.

  All these brutal blows to fascism were still to come and there was hope of a spring Albanian campaign and stopping the British at Bardia and holding Eritrea and Ethiopia. Yet it was hard to imagine a more dangerously subdued city than Rome in midwinter. The air was electric with suffering and unspoken resentment.

  Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the Adriatic, even while Hitler's Trojan Horse was leading the German divisions along their zigzag way from Vienna to the Black Sea and across Bulgaria toward the Greek border, a resignation to die if necessary was giving the Greeks fortitude.

  There was resignation in Rome, too, but it was acceptance of death itself. Something that had been real and even idealistic was dying; it was unmistakable and could almost be smelled in the tense Roman air. A whole political philosophy was lying upon its bier, breathing as steadily as it could, trying to conceal from the worried faces at the bedside that it would never rise again, as death is unmentioned when the malady is hopeless and the slow illness final.

  Then one has walked through both the Roman Forum and the Athenian Temple of Zeus by moonlight. One has touched Italian as well as Greek sandbags and heard overhead Greek as well as Italian planes. One has groped through Italian as well as Greek blackouts along the slippery walls of streets where not only Metaxas and Mussolini but also Aristotle and Cicero have walked. And one can say without the wish to favor either people's pride, but merely to report the truth, that Greece has had an advantage of spirit more than of arms.

  Greece has suffered deeply in the war, she has lost many sons in saving her honor, but honor is still left. In Italy there is an inexpressible feeling that it is honor rather than victory that is slipping away, as the arms that seized Albania and attacked Greece never invented any moral justification except a superficial one and disclaimed needing even that. The Fascist blow has been force, and with its failure there is a sense of emptiness in the Roman streets.

  The battle of Cape Matapan has brought evidence directly to Greece's shores. Italian sailors who spent twenty-three hours swimming in the water amid mangled comrades, who knew only that they had been roused from sleep to find their ship pinned in the glare of British searchlights and were blown instantly into the sea, were very clear and emphatic when they were asked today why they were fighting.

  “When we left Taranto and were told we were going to meet the British we were happy,” they said. “We wanted to prove that we were brave. We had no Germans with us, either. We wanted to revenge ourselves on the offense of the Treaty of Versailles.”

  One of the handful of officers who survived was asked by the writer whether he still believed in an Axis victory. “As long as the Germans continue every day to sink 100,000 tons of ships carrying American food,” he said.

  When told that such figures were fantastic, the officer stared steadily at the twinkling Bay of Salamis, where the Greeks once repelled the Persian galleys.

  “I don't know,” he replied, standing there pathetically in prisoner's dungarees. “A hundred thousand tons a day was what we were told in Rome.”

  LOVE OF COUNTRY DRAWS WEALTHY TO BATTLE LINE

  An Italian Prince and a Greek Millionaire Both Do Their Share

  Athens, Greece—April 4, 1941

  In Greece and Italy the attitude of the wealthy toward the war is sharply different from the public psychology.

  Rome, in midwinter, when the writer passed through, was overshadowed by the death of the 23-year-old son of one of the two oldest Italian families, Prince Camillo Caetani. He was the last of his line and a 700-year-old family died out with him. He met Greek fire in Albania's mountains, and because it took too long to get him to a dressing station, because of half-prepared Italian support, he bled to death.

  Prince Caetani left one witticism that may be remembered after the war is over. In the first days, before German anti-aircraft gunners arrived, the Italians placed all their guns around the edge of the Sacred City. When the first practice alarm was sounded, and the guns began firing, something went wrong. The barrage formed an umbrella and shells began dropping in the boulevards. The Forum was peppered, the Coliseum chipped, and shrapnel fell even in the Piazza Venezia.

  “What is this, anyway?” asked Prince Caetani, “the Italo-Italian war?”

  What has war meant to Greeks of the same class as Prince Caetani?

  In an aristocratic club of Athens, a sleepy retreat with red-leather lounges full of brooding gentlemen, the writer met yesterday a Greek merchant of Paris. He was a member of a clique of men between fifty and sixty who regularly discuss politics.

  A millionaire, fat and as fond of life's good things as Prince Caetani, but twice his age, the Greek displayed himself to his friends. He was dressed in the khaki of a private of the lowest grade, wearing the rolled leggings and forage cap.

  “How do I look?” he asked his friends, extending his huge hobnailed marching boots above the waxed floor. “Isn't this a handsome jacket they gave me? The designs I'm wearing show everybody that I'm in the signal corps.” He turned around slowly so they could admire him rear and front. “My captain says I'm very fit for a man of my age, and if we go to the front I'll handle myself very well. I may not be good enough to get a medal but I ought to be able to grab a few Italians.”

  A retired Greek general, looking like an old fox, watched the rookie over the heads of his fellow members with a tinge of envy. The millionaire private, to whom everyone listened respectfully because of his uniform, began giving a lecture.

  “I don't believe in giving the poor everything they want,” he said categorically. “Our poor people seem to think they can have this war all to themselves, but they can't. I have just as much right to get in it as my chauffeur. I got a little soft sitting around this club with you so long, but I guess my figure is as good as Mussolini's. Want me to show you again the way I salute my captain?”

  GREEK SALONIKA RETREAT TOLD BY EYEWITNESS:

  SAGA OF HEROIC GREEKS

  Correspondent of Daily News Reveals Feat

  Athens, Greece—April 14–15, 1941

  The only truthful and complete eyewitness account of the fall of Salonika could be written by Greek officers who were forced to abandon the second city of the nation, and by the population, which has now become merely a pawn in Adolf Hitler's plans for empire. But since these voices cannot speak and their stories can only be pie
ced together by historians, your correspondent offers herewith the single, authentic, first-hand story of the passing of Salonika.

  As fortune would have it, the Chicago Daily News was the only foreign newspaper or agency with its own correspondent in Salonika during the two days preceding the German capture. The present story—composed after a three-day passage aboard a tiny fishing boat, upon which this writer had to sleep on deck and exist upon a diet of black bread and army oranges—may stand temporarily, despite its unavoidable incompleteness due to the fact that the writer had to flee from the Macedonian capital with the last boat full of refugees.

  The Greek retreat by sea from Macedonia and Thrace, one of the least known but most extraordinary strategic feats of the war, is coming to a successful close.

  Most of the Greek army holding the northern frontier against the Germans was able to withdraw from around Salonika Bay, blowing up bridges as they went and preparing a line of steel that now awaits the Germans—the rules of the game prevent saying where—between the sea and Albania.

  But in order to save the heavy equipment, artillery, materiel and the invaluable technical heads of the general staff of the eastern campaign—and to accomplish thoroughly the work of sabotage—relatively small Greek forces had to hold the breach during the withdrawal. When surrender was imminent, these men, having loyally done their job as a stopgap, were given the choice of yielding or making their way to the sea, where vessels of all sizes and shapes awaited them.