Weller's War

by George Weller

  The Greeks, knowing the role that lend-lease and American aircraft played in liberating the Balkans, imagine that we remain interested in defending freedoms here. Until someone tells them that the United States is already politically on the retreat in Europe, the Greeks will probably continue in this irrational 1941 manner to expect Washington to send troops to back up its guarantees. Academy Street, a leading boulevard, became Roosevelt Road even before the Germans walked into Greece. The Nazis let the signs remain as a kind of political irony. Now they gleam with meaning again. The question is if they will turn ironical a second time. This will depend on whether Roosevelt infuses into his passive Balkan policy the vigor he subtracted during the American electoral campaign.

  Athens is getting food now, but mountain villages are still starving. “People back home must be fed up with hunger stories,” an American parachutist saboteur told me. He was one of the “Cloak-and-Dagger boys” who worked for months behind the Nazi lines. “If I read in my own newspaper all I've seen in these mountains the last few months,” he added, “I wouldn't believe it myself.”

  In the region between Distomo and Karpenisi we went through one blackened village after another. People huddled between roofless walls, squatting possessively in most un-communist fashion on the last bit of private property they owned. Each rain-soaked, wind-visited and bedless stone house was soured ashen with the stain of that magnesium grenade the SS uses to demolish homes.

  It is curious that while the communist bugaboo in Italy has already separated the American government from extra amounts of hush money—in the form of relief—no such corrective impulse is felt here. Some Greeks think Italy is doing better because though it was a fascist, enemy brigand state, there were millions of Italian-influenced votes in the presidential campaign—but only a few thousand Greeks.

  Generous amounts of food and clothing dropped from American transport aircraft could still save lives in the snowbound, shelterless mountain villages. The idea has been proposed, but nothing done. Blown bridges block mountain roads, so the villagers simply wait and starve. Dogs, however, in villages where the SS has killed most heavily, are fat and glossy. There was a German rule that bodies of hostages must be allowed to lie where they fell for several weeks, pour encourager les autres. Only dogs dared ignore the regulation against approaching corpses.

  The U.S. is providing, according to official figures, about three-fourths of the food and garments being unloaded at Piraeus and Salonika. The shipments are being distributed by Military Liaison, a relief organization which is nine-tenths British in personnel. Jim Landis having failed in his campaign to get lend-lease in the Middle East labelled as American, Greeks generally believe everything they get is British. The uniform of the donor counts more than the label on the can.

  Europe recognizes that food distribution is a political weapon in the peace. France, Belgium and Yugoslavia have said frankly that they want the food etc., but insist on handing it out their own way. Greece is almost unique in giving uninhibited permission to UNRRA.* But UNRRA won't supersede Military Liaison until April, and meantime the predicament of need transcends all political reservations.

  One incredible element has disappeared: the inflation, which topped all others known to history. A hostess at a tea party given for a member of the royal family told me that she had suffered a new kind of servant trouble. Her maids, with tearful petulance, would tear up before her face the money she paid them, in a spirit like that of the nauseated Keats flinging his uneatable supper out the window.

  Historians may someday be interested in the fact that on the last day of the “old” money Hitler's drachmas were worth ten trillion to the dollar. I went to the National Bank a few days before the new drachmas, backed by American and British guarantees, were issued. An underfed clerk in seamy shoes and patched grey pre-war suit gave me a full collection of all denominations out of his own salary. He refused repayment, saying the total was too insignificant. The quisling drachmas were in fact worth less on closing day than the paper they were printed on.

  The buoyancy of the Greek spirit, after four years of royalist fascism under George and Metaxas, and nearly four more years of German occupation under Hitler and the monocled ex-royalist John Rhallis [Ioannis Rallis], is hardly to be believed. It is one reason why newspapers which send correspondents from Rome to Athens find it difficult to get them back to Italy again. In Athens is none of that vacant malaise and surly recalcitrance that has been fascism's heritage to Italy. The vacuum has been filled. The Greek spirit is as full of bounce as though Hellas were being liberated every hour on the hour. Given the tools, the Greeks will certainly finish the job.

  With a UNRRA scout I arrived by jeep in Lamia, a partially destroyed town in central Greece. A few minutes later a committee for children's welfare knocked at the door of the smashed house where we slept. They did not want money, food, clothing or tools, not yet: they wanted to show us the program of relief they had drawn up for themselves. One thing that impressed the UNRRA man, who had been a social worker in Denver, was that it included recreation. This professional touch, which amateur up-lifters never dare include, reassured him very much. According to him, the whole thing was a good program. He accepted it on the spot, then began thinking up arguments to sell it to Military Liaison, back in Athens.

  SOVEREIGNS, PARACHUTES, MULES

  Delphi, Greece—December 4, 1944

  More than a century ago, in the ruins of ancient Tiryns, a young American doctor crouched and held his breath while the hoofbeats of Turkish cavalry thudded by. When the enemies of the newborn republic had passed, the doctor slipped back to the wounded guerrillas in his secret mountain hospital. The doctor of Greek freedom was Boston's Samuel Gridley Howe, America's most famous 19th century physician.

  Howe's tradition is on the march. Again in this war Americans have fought to expel democracy's enemies from “sacred soil.” Behind Nazi and Italian lines, beside British philhellenes, dozens of Americans and Greek-Americans have joined the Andartes, or guerrillas. Wryly known among themselves as Cloak-and-Dagger boys, these joint Anglo-American teams have been prodding Hitler to evacuate the Balkans in general and Greece in particular.

  Cloakless but well-daggered, they have dived from the wind-blown doors of C-47 troop-carrier transports into starlit Greek nights. They have landed from rubber boats amid whispers at their secret rendezvous on Aegean-Ionian headlands, while Nazi sentries fired wildly into the ominous darkness. They know how to use every weapon, from automatic rifles to diplomacy. They never shoot unless pressed; shooting gives away position. They know how to slap a handful of plastic explosive on the joint of a railroad culvert, ensuring that it will be dropped misshapenly at the bottom of a mountain gulch a few minutes later. Their best weapon is brains, yet they're all touched with a similar screwballism. Perhaps it's due to the danger, or to their peculiar tools: parachutes, mules, and gold sovereigns worth $20 and bearing the placid countenances of Queen Victoria and King George the Fifth.

  At first it was the British—including Australians, New Zealanders, and other restless spirits—who started annoying Hitler in the Balkans in October, 1942. Their aim was to cut the secondary Axis supply line for Africa, which ran from Vienna to Athens to Crete and Libya.

  A tiny spatter of moonlit parachutes floated unnoticed into a Hellas that was held by two Italian and five German divisions. But sabotage cannot start overnight; patriot and collaborationist bands were just getting recruited. There were Greek traitors as well as Greek patriots, and each group was subdivided from within.

  The patriots were divided into liberals and conservatives. The former had a core of communists, the latter of royalists, but both gave lip service to democracy. Half the Cloak-and-Daggers' energies were spent keeping patriots engaged against Germans rather than trying to settle the future government. (An ex-N.Y.U. track captain quieted several clashes by chiding both parties in fluent Greek.)

  This double-entry of arms worked because most weapons were also
followed into battle by British or American officers. Borne by parachutes, the lend-lease succeeded largely due to an indivisible pair—a U.S. major and an English colonel.

  The Major is a slight, tough, Texas newspaper editorialist who served with the field artillery in France in World War I. Barred by age from joining the cannons again, at fifty he became both the first and oldest American to leap from a transport plane into the Greek sky. From being a provost marshal in Cairo, the Major turned into the first American diplomat in Greece.

  Howe's modern counterpart is the Doctor—a small, twenty-four-year-old Iowa dentist with earnest spectacles and a whiplash tongue. A captain, he jumped at about the same time last winter into the guerrillas' mountain stronghold. There he founded four secret hospitals for guerrillas, mostly near the birthplace of Greece's democratic parliament, at a village near Karpenisi.

  The Germans searched long but failed to catch him. They burned and blew up all but a few of Karpenisi's seven hundred homes.

  After being dropped in the late autumn of 1943, the Major and the Colonel traveled more than 400 miles afoot and on horseback, from one guerrilla conference to the next. When taking paratroop training in the Middle East, the Major's knees had been sprung, and the Doctor taped them to enable him to finish the required jumps. The strain of a mountain winter soon affected the Major with a double inguinal hernia. As his medical superior, the Doctor ordered him to leave Greece; instead the Major rigged himself a truss from a mule harness and kept traveling.

  Arriving in the valley where the guerrillas were squabbling over the former monarchy's fascist record, the Major would interview both sides and relay his views for the British Colonel to decide what the Allied mission's attitude would be.

  At Neokhori, where the Cloak-and-Daggers had a secret landing field nicknamed “Featherbed,” the Major and the Colonel laid plans for the extraordinary Greece-wide explosions begun by saboteurs on August 2 [1944], which throttled the enemy route to the Mediterranean.

  At a three-weeks-long talk amid the cliffs of lofty Metsovo, delegates lived in one flea-ridden cabin. When the cook sickened, the Major dished up the beans and cornmeal. (“Were it not for Major Yeary's sense of humor we might have given up right then,” the Colonel said.) Placating, cajoling, revealing the misstatements of both parties, the Major and the Colonel toiled to bring leaders of the anti-fascist and anti-communist guerrillas together. A final truce was achieved this summer and led to a conference where both generals finally buried the hatchet.

  The Anglo-American military missions also served with each side separately. Near the Albanian border a captain from Duluth who had dropped among the EDES immediately began building secret air fields and sowing soverengas near the German 22nd Corps Headquarters. The present writer reached the border only after this captain had been replaced as mission head by another, a freckled ex-University of Arizona fullback.

  This Captain—snub-nosed, clean-shaven and energetic Andy Rogers—had dropped with another outfit of Greek-Americans in the middle of Peloponnesus in summer. After the dandelion puffs of parachutes scattered across the mountain, he found he had seventy mule-loads of food, arms, and explosives. Crossing the German-held route everywhere, his cavalcade traveled north until it reached Patras on the Corinth road, paralleling the blue gulf that is Greece's girdle. Exactly where the road's steepness earns the name Kaka Scala, or Dirty Grade, he deftly blew out a mile of beetling highway. Correspondents who said that the Germans blew up the road were wrong; Andy and his gang did it. Thereafter any Nazi crossing Greece by the gulf route had to take a boat or walk. (Andy thinks he might try a spell with the Chinese guerrillas next.)

  Poking through cloud-obscured mountains by night, groaning transports were often unable to find a mission's landing flares. At least three crashed, costing the lives of all aboard. The Germans, unable to trap a mission in the mountains, would illumine false flares, sending transport crews into blind canyons. Unless guerrillas were on hand to aid in recovery, the parties starved.

  Greek mountaineers were liable to consider the parachutes as heavenly manna. Avid shepherds, either food-hungry or money-hungry would sometimes dash down the mountains and strip the chutes before the thinning, half-fed Allied officers could reach their supplies. Once a confused pilot “scattered stuff over half of Greece,” and only 70 of 130 loads were recovered.

  Though gossip between the radios of scattered missions was dangerous, word got around by a kind of underground telegraph. For example, when an Army-Navy team—a Captain and a Lieutenant j.g.—began plugging railroad bridges on the Evros River in the remotest corner of Greece, officers huddled in snow-swept huts three weeks' trek south somehow got word.

  The Evros River meanders south from Bulgaria's mountains, where Turkey, Bulgaria, and Greece meet. The Army-Navy team caused so many headaches on the Pithion-Svilengrad stretch of railroad that the Germans gave up the line in disgust. For going in under Nazi fire, the Captain got the Legion of Merit and the Lieutenant a Silver Star.

  The Captain, a pistol-toting cavalryman from Waco, held the liaison post at the village of Lidoriki, within sight of Amphissa's famous olive orchards. This Captain's craft was blowing bridges. Thanks to him, the serpentine road around the slopes of Parnassus to Delphi has several teeth missing.

  He once had a duel of wits with the Communist leader whose party name is Ares, and who has reputedly killed more pro-German Greeks than any Andarte leader. The U.S. Army Colt which the Captain had lent a Greek translator had been purloined by someone, and efforts at recovery seemed less than energetic. Ares told him jovially, “Greece needs that revolver more than the U.S. Army, anyhow.”

  The Captain laid hands on the two guns on his hips and said, “I suppose you'd take these if you felt Greece needed them.” Ares, from behind his black beard, allowed genially as how he had once been obliged to disarm a British officer and might be forced to do the same to the American. When Ares, still smiling angelically, took an exploratory step toward him, the Texan tilted both guns and put holes in the ceiling above the guerrilla's right and left shoulders. Ares, unruffled, departed, recovered the Colt, and sent it to the Captain. They dined together and have been on terms of mutual respect ever since.

  How many Nazis have been tied up by the Cloak-and-Daggers? A square-built Gaelic Major, who persecuted a stretch of Greece's dorsal railroad, obliged the Germans to deploy a thousand sentries along only forty curved, single-tracked miles between Lamia in Sperchelus Valley and Domokos in the mountains.

  The soft-spoken Major led the most pretentious attack against a rail spur leading to a chrome mine at Dherli, one of Hitler's most valuable possessions. In the words of the dentist Doctor who went along to succor the wounded, “We did some damage, but got hell kicked out of us.”

  The Allied mission overreached by calling a general mobilization of guerrillas. The Germans sniffed an attack when shepherds who ordinarily grazed flocks in adjacent fields disappeared. The lonely station at Dherli was surrounded with barbed wire. Two reinforced pillboxes surveyed flat, coverless country in every direction; a searchlight constantly swept the tracks. The Andartes, gallantly led by officers of the Greek army, made the mistake of trying to climb over the barbs rather than creep under them, and fifteen paid with their lives.

  Worse came when, at 7:33, two minutes after the raid's zero hour, a Nazi armored train, spitting fire from every slit, came roaring in. The raid abruptly changed into a German ambush. While the Doctor collected his wounded from a bullet-swept gully, the Major raced in alone through the wire, reached the station, and slipped through the door. The Irishman's touch on a tommy gun is famous among the Cloak-and-Daggers. He saw five Germans and two Greeks cowering against a wall. In a single sweep his gun managed to kill all the Germans, yet his sensitive trigger finger left the Greeks unharmed though swooning with fright.

  Soon thereafter a 44-year-old, silver-haired American colonel, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, forsook his Middle East swivel chair to jump with the Arizona ful
lback Captain into northwestern Greece. Peering down into the black mountains from the transport door, he failed to see that the green light above his head was blinking: the signal pilot was telling him to jump. The Captain, with gusto, booted his superior officer through the door.

  In midsummer this Colonel joined the Major's mountaineers. The night of August 19th, he led an all-American bazooka attack against a train which derailed both locomotives. Armed with only a carbine and followed by two Greek-American G.I.s, he moved in on the Nazi survivors. When he was finished, “All fire from the train had ceased.”

  It got so everybody put tacks under the Nazi transports. Who should drop on the “Featherbed” but a huddle of Russian officers? Their territory was actually Yugoslavia, but they stayed to watch the fun. “The Russians never attempted any political activity and had only formal contact as Allies with the Greek communists,” according to mission members. Sometimes they borrowed the Anglo-American mission's radio to call Moscow from the Greek mountains. Relations between the missions were warmly cooperative.

  Americans learned by working with rare Englishmen like one particular major, a stoop-shouldered guards officer who insisted in raids on wearing a formal tunic instead of practical battle dress. He set himself a quota of one train a week; his average was one and five-eighths. In the attack on the chrome mine station, just when the armored train rolled up and began sweeping the fields with Spandau fire, he remarked to the sweating Doctor, “Well, guess I ought to load my Luger now.” He carried a shepherd's crook with which he gently tapped the heads of Andartes, like a schoolmaster, when they whispered during an attack.

  A burly, genial ex-pharmacist sergeant, of Union, N.J., started having things happen to him during the summer when he was sent as medical corpsman to near Agrinion. “I enjoyed watching the Nazi trains get cut from fifteen trains daily to two,” he told the writer. “It's a magnificent sight to see a locomotive blow up, and eight following cars plunge.” The Nazis used a two-car buffer and often a cageful of live prisoners pushed ahead by a locomotive. The British major timed this explosion so the hostages passed but the locomotive was lifted. He is proud that his mission always had beer bought through a Greek fixer from a German canteen at Agrinion.