Weller's War

by George Weller

  Olive trees make ideal cover for the convoy that breaks into a wide circle, resembling pioneer covered wagon trains defending themselves against Indians.

  During a recent fourteen-hour bombing and machine-gunning in a dozen places behind the front, your correspondent experienced what has been the daily dose of exposed British and Greek troops. Camped in a stone barn below Parnassus, he had just emerged from a sleeping bag and was picking haystraws from his ears when a cry arose: “Here he comes!” He always means Jerry, who is an early riser.

  I ran across the meadow, half slipped and fell against a stone wall. The Heinkel came down leisurely from the morning sun and sprayed the barn tiles with bullets from about 2000 feet. No bomb fell; the two small trucks seemed probably unworthy game. The spurts of fire, which sounded like members of a motorcycle club starting their engines, abruptly ceased.

  One could almost feel the searching eyes of the pilot. He fired three sustained bursts. Then, humming contentedly to itself, the plane disappeared over the shoulder of the Parnassus foothill. Absolute silence ensued.

  I noticed for the first time that the meadows were filled with red poppies. From behind the hill a machine gun thrice chewed into the silence. Not far away was the village where I had bought big round loaves of bread, lettuce and olives the night before. Suddenly the earth rocked and the pumping noise filled the air. A bomb had fallen in the village. Machine guns spoke again faintly, like a far-off typewriter, with a motor's soft sounds dying away. Silence again.

  After a few minutes, heads appeared above the ditches and walls. It was too soon for shouts, because those lying in ditches always converse in whispers, like people in city shelters. A few figures emerged from the grass, brushing off dirt.

  Another motor was heard, this time from the direction of Athens. We hoped it was a British Hurricane but its pulsating engines showed that it was a big Junkers. The psychological effect of being approached from the rear was calculated to give us the impression of being surrounded. While the Junkers bombed the village, I left my stone wall and ran across the meadow to the river and jumped into the shelter of the overhanging bank. A thin, transparent cloud hung at about 3000 feet and the Nazi pilot, though unmolested by any ack-ack, entered the veil, churning his way through and leaving a wake like a ferryboat.

  He passed over without even firing but before he was out of sight another Messerschmitt appeared from a third direction, coming fast and low. At the same time over the mountain pass toward Lamia appeared three Nazi bombers. Along the railroad the earth gushed upward in six places while the ground rocked. Overhead the Messerschmitt began machine-gunning.

  When a faint, screaming wail began behind the riverbank I knew a bomb was coming. How near, how far? A giant bomb went through the earth behind me and the river's water leapt in a dozen places. Two more planes appeared from the direction of Salonika and began bombing the railroad line. A machine gun atop a freight car replied to the bombs which missed the track by several yards.

  For a quarter-hour the valley was filled with buzzing motors and bursting bombs, machine-gun fire dusting all the treetops near the highway. The attack was the antithesis of bombardment by armadas flying in echelons; it was like a circus with too much going on for comprehension, single planes attacking whatever they wished and unmistakably enjoying the sport of diving from all angles, showering machine-gun bullets at will. The effect of seeing such an attack upon encamped troops, with the only reply cautious, intermittent machine-gun fire from the ground, was bewildering and unsettling. The effect of lying absolutely still, while death went squeaking through the grass and bombs rocked the earth beneath you, was a feeling of rage then, as the punishment continued, of degradation and defilement. It was like being asked to remain immobile while being beaten from head to foot.

  The bombing and machine-gunning went on at least a dozen times more during the day. I found a rock crevice on the mountainside giving protection against the thinly singing machine-gun bullets. From here I saw a Nazi bomber, disdaining even to dive upon its target, drop two bombs from at least 4000 feet, hitting a road less than twenty feet wide. Bombs could be seen falling slantwise, like quotation marks sliding down the face of the blue sky. But when these hit, nothing happened.

  “Duds,” muttered another American correspondent. Then, with a roar, the road flew into the air. The dive-bombs had been timed for delay to allow the plane to make an upward sweep. A New Zealand truck driver, a few feet away, who had emerged from cover, was blown from his feet and shaken up, the only ascertainable casualty of the day except three or four trucks whose spotters were already lying in the grass. But many useful hours had been lost.

  BRITISH STRIVING TO HOLD OFF NAZIS

  AT THERMOPYLAE

  Handful of Troops Fighting Stout Delaying Action

  in ‘Forlorn Cause’

  Athens, Greece—April 24, 1941

  Fighting a stout delaying action in what is admittedly a forlorn cause—the defense of Greece's sacred city against the Germans—a handful of British Imperial troops are trying to hold the mountain defenses above Thermopylae, and the pass itself, against German attacks from Lamia, the ravaged city on the opposite side of the marshy plain. There, between mountain foothills and the sea, three hundred Spartans died under a shower of Persian javelins, and today calm, stubborn men whom your correspondent saw digging in two days ago are meeting the combined attacks of German dive bombers, tanks and infantry.

  The sea now is shrunken, widening the passable area along the European Gulf to about 300 yards. Toward this slender line scores of trucks filled with men moved past for hours Monday morning while the stars paled. Few men spoke. Their mission was to hold the line as long as possible—with little or no aviation to help.

  Last week, when there was still hope that the line north of Larissa would hold, the writer slept in a deserted farmhouse beside the warm sulfur springs which emerge from the mountain. At that time it was thought the Germans would be stopped at the mountain stronghold of Domokos, but aviation protection was unavailable.

  Your correspondent's car, passing down the mountain on Sunday, was almost the last to traverse its hairpin zigzags because British demolition experts blew up the culverts the same afternoon. The serpentine road is garnished with vehicles that lost their footing during the retreat and now offer shelter for battle snipers. But even should the British fight their way forward into the Lamian plain, they could not hold it long because the line of communications from the highway downward is cut off.

  Thus the troops are literal successors of their Spartan heritage, fighting along the seaside corridor in order to protect their comrades far behind them at Thebes, Athens and in southern Greece. Their action is twice as important because it also permits King George1* to establish his government safely on Crete while German planes dominate every highway in northern Greece, except the actual boulevards of downtown Athens, which remain unbombed.

  During this terrific travail of Greek-British friendship, even neutral observers are deeply moved at the trust and esteem with which this sad stage of collaboration is closing. Contrary to German claims, the attachment of the two countries remains unshaken, and the British are defending Greece as though it were England.

  German planes caused the same alerts today as yesterday, but Piraeus was left untouched, the attackers concentrating on air fields where British planes were based.

  Only two members of the British-American newspaper colony now remain in Athens, this writer and the Associated Press correspondent, Wesley Gallagher.

  BRAVE ATHENIANS DEFEND SKIES

  Athens, Greece—April 24, 1941

  This capital continues to defend itself against aerial attack with a valor worthy of the warrior goddess whose name it bears. Dorniers, Messerschmitts and Junkers must fly high over Athens, for the spears of its antiaircraft guns still are pointing upward in an encircling ring.

  In their repeated attacks upon Athens' port of Piraeus, only a subway ride distance from the Acropolis, an
d their morning, noon and evening bombardments on the airdromes surrounding the capital, the Germans still avoid the puffs of black and white smoke the “ack-ack” (anti-air defense) sends up around each marauder.

  Respecting Athenian gunners as much as the city's status as a shrine of antiquity, they attack by coming in from the sea or stealing over the backbone of Mount Parnes or Hymettos for a quick blow and a quicker getaway. A single siren begins the warning moan, then others take up the sound from a dozen roofs. The Parthenon's tawny marble columns stand serene above the scurrying streets, unmoved, untouched and eternal. The guns crack and white puffs appear in the sky.

  People, fully aware that only a narrow line of British troops at Thermopylae is protecting the city they love, linger at the entrances to kataphygion (raid shelters), unwilling to miss vicarious participation in this testimony of the unbroken Greek spirit. Only a single German bomb has fallen in a suburb since the war began.

  Every trail of white vapor means for them that a German has been shot down, though oftener it is simply a stiff dive through atmosphere. The authorities, once extremely strict about shooing people into shelters, have relaxed. Photographs taken in daylight by German reconnoitering planes after their moonlight raids probably show hundreds of upturned Greek faces and upward-pointing fingers.

  Although the stars over Athens hang low and bright they are not enough for raiding these days. Should the British hold the mechanized German attack along the Euboean Gulf a week longer, the unforgettable spectacle of night raids will begin anew. No one who has ever seen one can forget it. The sky is like one vast black photographer's plate, illuminated by the moon's immeasurable luminescence.

  Before the first German motor is audible in the sounding board of the surrounding hills, the siren sends the cautious to the cellars and the curious to the roofs. One searchlight goes on, then another. From the seacoast, from the hills, others take the hint and point their fingers in the same direction. “There he is!”

  With difficulty one makes out a tiny flying creature, so intensely bathed in searchlight that it resembles one of those gnats with transparent wings and organs. Rarely does he dodge or twist, though he sometimes goes into a dive to escape.

  Upon the night's huge moon-saturated face everything appears to happen so slowly and leisurely it seems incredible that it is the performance of the fastest instruments known to man. The ack-ack, like a chain of solemn glowworms, mounts the searchlight's beam. When the German is somewhere outside the beam, four glowworms usually seem enough to handle him, but as soon as he is pinned in the light a whole host of lightning bugs come from all directions. At the same time, powerful aerial bombs burst around him with an eardrum-cracking concussion, despite the great height.

  The interplay of searchlights is fascinating. Sometimes they seem to make a bag of lights around where he is heard, slowly tightening until the German's attempt to break through reveals his position.

  Planes seem only rarely to fall in flames. The spectator on the crowded roof is usually cheated of the ultimate spectacle because the pilot is killed, rather than the gas tank ignited, and the plane plunges in the darkness, too fast for the searchlights to follow, and lands where the wreckage cannot be illuminated. But since raids are usually made by individual planes, cessation of the engine tells its own story.

  Perhaps the most fascinating sight is when a cornered pilot, perhaps half-blinded by the searchlight's rays, orders his gunner to return fire, not against the guns, but against the searchlights. Then, single file, the Nazi glowworms, usually yellow, begin crawling down the beam as though walking upon it. It would seem impossible to miss the target which continuously offers a trajectory, but actually, as far as is ascertainable, not a single searchlight has yet been darkened.

  When the flier flees across the clouds like an insect crossing the frosted glass of a skylight, sometimes a searchlight winks out after the plane sends fire down against it. Invariably it merely passes its prey to another on the opposite side of the city. As soon as the next Nazi comes over, all the polyp-like fingers of Athens again go feeling for him and the searchlight just fired upon is as busy as ever.

  ROLE OF ATHENS: A STOPOVER

  ON NAZI DRANG NACH OSTEN

  (Editor's note: This is the first dispatch to be received from the Daily News correspondent in Greece in more than a month.)

  Athens, Greece—May 24, 1941 (By Mail to Berlin)

  Still dazed by its month-old defeat, Athens is waking slowly to the fact that, although a city under German control, it is not yet a German city.

  Big military road signs in German remind Athenians that their city is now only the metropolitan capital of Hitler's drive to the Middle East. Athena, spear-bearing goddess of the Greeks, who has been pushed aside by flying Valkyrie with tommy guns, still hardly grasps what has happened.

  On the burning, dusty sidewalks wander hundreds of returned soldiers, bearded, hatless in the sun, their shoes broken from three weeks of hiking from Albania, with castoff jackets over their army breeches to give them a civilian status. Sometimes they buy garlic, lemons and peanuts, virtually the only grown foods easily obtainable from truck gardeners, and peddle them. Oftener they supplement the Tsolakoglou2* cabinet's bread allowance by begging.

  Both the German and Greek governments are attempting to evolve a labor plan but with capital still timid, flown, or uncertain of its own worth and southern Greece still a war zone, reconstruction will be slow. Thrice weekly the Deutsche Nachtrichten [the German News Agency's troop newspaper] suggests an analogy between food conditions and what Germany suffered after the last war. Exhorting the public to “work for unity,” the paper affirms that this recipe saved Germany and Greeks must sacrifice their individualism. “The Germans are not to blame,” avers the editorial.

  An official of the American relief organization, which has helped Greece for 25 years, said that food needs still outstrip supplies. In the industrial quarter of Piraeus 5000 persons appeared for family handouts of 320 portions, consisting of bread the size of grapefruit and a cupful of olives. In another suburb, where there are 160 portions, 3000 persons appeared. Like postwar Vienna, Athens is undergoing the hunger pangs of an overgrown metropolitanism and a shrunken hinterland.

  German army and air force members are quartered in requisitioned private homes and public buildings at fixed rates of about 35 cents daily for an officer's single room to one cent for an infantryman, payable by the municipality. For them, many filled with the traditional Sehnsucht nach Sueden, or “southern longing,” the emotional partner in the German soul of the sterner Drang nach Osten [“drive to the east”], Athens has not much more to offer than antiquities and sunlight.

  Even while the sky over Hymettos booms with troop-carrying planes bound for Crete, other Germans are marching up the sacred steps of the Acropolis, unarmed except for cameras. Scores have been purchased with the ubiquitous Reichskreditkassenscheine (credit scrips used by Germans in conquered territories).

  The Germans eat more and drink less than the British and, like their predecessors, are forbidden to dance in the cabarets or to have more than desultory acquaintance with Greek girls.

  As for the Greek himself, he is conforming with German plans for him within the bounds of his temperament which is fundamentally critical. He is reading frequent new ordinances in the press, picking his way through streets buzzing with an enormous variety of German military vehicles, and growing accustomed to seeing German traffic officers in trench helmets at key streets or guarding hotels.

  Two Greeks have been executed on order of the German court martial for looting but the shock of defeat has dulled the impulse to plunder. A German order expressly threatens anyone cutting telephone wires, but sabotage, if any, has occurred on a scale so small as to be unnoticed.

  The Greeks are intensely curious about the wonders of Nazi mechanized warfare. Whenever a motorcycle column stops the Greeks stand by gazing in wonder at scores of implements, useful or deadly, that the Germans are able to
produce from its sidecar.

  It is unforgettable to see one of the approximately 30,000 Cretan veterans of the Italian war, while the island is being infested by parachutists, standing in the gutter humbly counting the letters on a road sign reading Wehrmachtzahnarztselle. There is no one to tell him, although an astounding number of German officers speak perfect modern Greek, that the formidable word means simply “army dental clinic.” He reads amid the humming of hundreds of propellers and to him it is one more incomprehensible manifestation of this bewildering war.

  WELLER RELATES HIS EXPULSION

  BY GESTAPO AGENTS

  ‘Escorted’ from Athens to Berlin, Then Put Out of German Territory

  Somewhere in non-German Europe—July 9, 1941

  After a nine-week quarantine in Greece, two American newspapermen and a woman radio announcer have been sent out of the country under military surveillance, by order of the German Foreign Office authorities, and banned from further reporting or traveling in any Balkan country whether neutral or involved in conflict. After being flown by the Lufthansa to Belgrade then by military plane to Vienna, the Americans were held incommunicado by the Gestapo for 21 hours at a police hotel in the Danube along with interned Russians, and later taken to Berlin under Gestapo guard. No charges of any kind were expressed or implied by these actions.

  Wes Gallagher of the AP, Betty Wason of the Columbia Broadcasting System and this reporter were those expelled from Greece. Nila Cram Cook, an occasional writer for Liberty magazine who was ushered out of India by the British several years ago—after an episode involving Mohandas Gandhi—and her son became members of the ejection party, but outwitted the Germans. Despite a warning to ready herself for the special plane northward, from which the Americans were specifically forbidden to alight in Sofia, Belgrade or Budapest, Miss Cook disappeared, to the discomfiture of the German legation and the distress of the Americans.