The Cloak-and-Dagger principle was always to attack with guerrilla support. Thus the countryside was kept united behind both forces. Once both Greek factions cooperated on the same mission, an artistic blow on a big bridge at Grigor Potamos near Lamia. EDES Andartes hit one bridgehead and ELAS Andartes the other, while British engineers crawled through the icy water and affixed their charges.
Thanks to peasant support, the missions were rarely surprised but learned to take warnings with salt. Once an officer was camped in the caves of Parnassus with explosive unloaded from his mules. A shepherd lookout came running down the mountain, crying, “Germans coming! Less than fifteen minutes from here.” As the officer said: “Boy, what a flop! Took us three hours to get the explosive saddled and leave. We heard that the Jerries reached our dead campfires two weeks later.”
A studious corporal who specialized in the classics at Princeton even went into the lumber business with ELAS guerrillas above Karpenisi while the SS was scouring the mountains for Americans. Money being nonexistent, the guerrillas got hold of wheat. When it reached the mountains, the corporal paid the guerrillas the price for a cubic meter of cut lumber. (In burned villages, two meters would build the interior of a house, another the roof.) Thus Greece was being rebuilt by the Cloak-and-Daggers even while being destroyed by the Germans.
In this tiny state of Rumelia, smaller than Rhode Island, 3252 patriots were executed or killed, 241 villages wholly or partly destroyed—including 78 schools and 60 churches—and 16,538 homes wiped out.
The Cloak-and-Daggers needed women to complete their work, and found plenty among the Greek patriots. They still talk of pretty Pat, who scratched and bit an SS officer in a taxi in Athens and shrieked she was being attacked when he caught her with guerrilla papers. A Greek traitor betrayed Pat, and the Nazis sentenced her to death. It cost 100 sovereigns—the expense of maintaining a mountain clinic for one month—to bribe a Nazi to let Pat escape.
There was Olga, who spread her skirts on grapes which concealed machine guns on an Athens-bound fruit truck. The Germans riding the truck kept nibbling the grapes until the machine gun cases showed, but never asked to have them opened. And there was lovely Persa Metaxas, daughter of a Greek naval attaché in London, who nursed guerrillas at secret hospitals and spent an embarrassed night between two G.I.s on a windswept air field when the mission owned only four blankets.
There were plenty of sad times. A lieutenant deftly derailed a troop train at Dhoxara, tallying 150 German casualties. The Nazis took seventeen innocent Greek hostages to the scene and hanged them. And when the Major put sixteen cars of a chrome train into the ditch at Sinia, the SS took twelve hostages from jail to the piled-up cars, shot them and placarded the names throughout the valley.
But even among the pendent bodies and burning villages, what guerrillas now remember best is the work of the Doctor, that slightly profane dentist from Iowa. There was a night when a lieutenant, of Chicago, laid a plant for a train near Pharsala and was counter-ambushed. A sergeant fell, and the lieutenant went to rescue the body. A German's grenade blew off both his shoes and left him with 57 wounds in his back. With his rectal cavity gravely perforated, he crawled up a 5000-foot mountain to the village of Phthari. Peasants carried him to a secret hospital. From September 9th to the 18th he lay on an earthen floor fighting for his life; then he was carried directly through the German lines to Featherbed Field.
The Doctor did another operation on him en route. The lieutenant lay at the field through one rainy night after another. Repeatedly, transports from Italy tried but failed to pierce the storm-held mountains. Finally a lone British Lysander cleaved the cloudbanks and came down at Neokhori, then took him off while nine fretful Spitfires waited above the clouds. The Doctor sent an invaluable corpsman out with the bleeding officer. All the way across the Adriatic he crouched under the lieutenant's stretcher stanching fresh hemorrhages. … The lieutenant lived.
A tall sergeant from a little tulip-growing town in Iowa jumped into Greece in midsummer, and ever since he has been close at the Doctor's side. He was with him the day when the Doctor—who had never done any surgery—did eight major operations in a row, with an open book beside him, then collapsed. When the writer last saw the sergeant by the steaming greenish springs of Thermopylae he had no time to talk about himself. But without him and others, the Doctor would never have been able to run a hospital like that at lofty Muzelou, which took 2000 patients in a single month of war, and another 1700 while Athens was toppling in early October.
“When you're not a doctor, but only a dentist, it's tough to make these decisions,” said the Doctor. “I used to walk along the aisles of the dirty little churches which were my hospitals. I'd tell the sergeant, ‘This guy looks too far gone for me. Give him a shot of morphine and let him die.’ But if the next guerrilla looked more possible, I'd say, ‘Get out that book again.
Let's try to operate on this one.’ I don't know how we ever got along as well as we did.”
HUNGER, COLD HELP BRITISH GAIN
IN BATTLE FOR ATHENS
U.S. Stand Is Puzzle to Greeks
Athens, Greece—December 22, 1944
Republican fortunes in the Greek civil war have declined, not only because Lieutenant General Ronald Scobie has opened his promised aerial offensive but because of hunger and cold. From quarters of Athens beyond the barricades a stream of foodless refugees are coming, bundles in hand, fear on every face. The air is sharp and snow is visible on nearby Mount Parnes; Athens is totally heatless.
As this is written the air is shivering with a terrible sound of volleys of rockets, fired by diving planes. The sound is like that made by a man in armor sliding down a tin roof. At the end comes a solid thump as the rockets hit home. Windows tremble. No war is so terrible as one between former allies.
A full-scale street battle is going on in the Chizi quarter, where Sherman tanks are clearing the streets and pushing down houses containing ELAS snipers. Spitfires are strafing the suburb. But improvement in the British position in the city center is evident; for two days the headquarters area has been almost undisturbed by shelling. Many Greeks outside that part of Athens are puzzled as to why, when America has declared itself neutral in this civil strife, does it not stay neutral?
America is not neutral in the eyes of the ELAS soldier who sees a huge Sherman tank, armed with a 75-mm gun, bumping along the street looking for him. The Sherman is an American tool, paid for by American taxpayers. It belongs to the American government. The Greek wonders how this tank got here. His scouts, watching unloadings at Piraeus, have the answer. It came in one of the magnificent, ingenious landing craft made familiar by newsphotos of Pacific landings. If the Americans are neutral, what is it doing so far from the Pacific or Italian shores?
The Greeks are thinking that maybe they should've revolted earlier. Then they would be dealing separately with the United States—the power which pays, provides, and calls itself neutral, and (with Britain) the power which has taken upon itself to “be responsible” for this part of the Balkans.
As observers watch Greek government forces use Connecticut-made tommy guns against ELAS troops also using Connecticut-made tommy guns, they scratch their heads and wonder: Is this what lend-lease was for? Weren't the Greeks and British friends? The natural impulse of anyone, knowing his property is being used for purposes of mutual assassination—even with laudable dialectics on both sides—is to go onto the street in frontier-marshal fashion and take the guns away from both.
The American comes to the conclusion that maybe lend-lease has a few flaws here and there. With many billions shipped everywhere in Europe and no custodians appointed to stay with the stuff until it has been used in the Allied cause or returned to its owners, maybe something like this was bound to happen. Maybe there are better ways to maintain freedom, peace and liberty across the world than turning arms over to allies and inviting them to shoot out their difficulties. Maybe someone else neglected his responsibility in the Medite
rranean. Maybe it was the American.
TERROR, DEATH ONLY YULE FOR KIDS IN ATHENS
Bewildered, They Sit in Tatters with Void Stomachs
Athens, Greece—December 24, 1944
The Athenian child today is a bewildered, wide-eyed creature sitting in a corner watching, on an empty stomach, a world in which parents and relatives are jerked in and out of rooms as though by rubber bands.
What the child hears is whisperings of terror at best, at worst the terrible biting concussion of a low-flying aircraft machine-gunning rooftops. His world is rocked with mortars and rent with flashing artillery.
Yet not all is motion. When death touches parents, this frenzy halts. Between the intervals of firing, the child may peep through closed blinds and see things once bright with familiar motion now stilled.
Why, the child may ask, does yonder green trolley car never leave its stop forty feet down the street? Suddenly a pachydermous tank swings round the corner; fire leaps from the streetcar's windows and is answered with a twist of the tank's turret cannon.
At point-blank range a shell rips through the trolley's body. Something like a doll falls from the empty motorman's vestibule, lies on the steps, then rolls into the street leaking its life into the gutter.
An hour later a man in a helmet comes and binds the wrecked trolley car in a rusty web of barbed wire which he stealthily unspins across the deserted street.
Greek children are poorest in two things, food and shoes. Though a parent with both hands raised may run full speed between the fireswept lines in the free hours between 12 and 2, hoping no sniper on the Republican or British side will make the family poorer by yet another death, what he brings home is almost nothing.
This disorderly world might be ideal from the child's view in some ways if he were less hungry. Parents are so busy either hunting food, or talking about hunting it, that the child has privacy. There are no baths, because there is no water except for drinking. But the winter cold penetrates the smashed windows. Blankets and sometimes beds have been sold. The child sleeps cold as well as fearful.
But not all the children. There are those half-dozen lucky offspring who live with their parents in the shadow of the fading Papandreou cabinet in the Hotel Grande Bretagne, girt about with red-capped British and Greek police. At the insistence of the Mae West-like British matron, the little aristocrats clear and carry dishes from the servantless kitchen themselves. Occasionally the roof is shaken by the fall of a mortar, looped over by the Republicans hardly six blocks away. But the great, bare hostelry is theirs for endless hide-and-seek games when they grow bored listening to their parents forever muttering the same names: Scobie, Macmillan, Leeper, Papandreou, Saraphis, Plastiras, Sophoulis. And they are warm and safe, fed all that is fed to the American lend-lease and British forces.
Beyond the barricades another kind of child plays a different kind of game. The ELAS Republicans have drafted boys and girls as young as seven to carry munitions. A children's committee has been formed, each member being given a sack in order to visit houses and ask everyone to contribute a few beans or a fistful of flour for the army's needs.
Love, that most essential food for all children, is not yet banished from this world. It was love for the famished children which made that father try to cross the lines, only to crumple before a machine gun. It was love that made a captured Republican woman who passed under my window, flanked by police armed with tommy guns, fill her arms with her baby and insist on keeping it.
As for the children's Christmas, that will not be possible this year. The Greeks and British are busy killing each other.
GUN BARRELS POINT WAY TO HISTORY ON ACROPOLIS
At the Acropolis, Athens, Greece—Christmas Day, 1944
The wind whips up the staircase of marble. The pillars of the Propylaea Gate stand white against blue skies. And as you ascend—hurriedly, because Republican snipers can still crack at your back—a British machine gun looks down on you.
Christmas on the Acropolis means a red-bereted paratrooper from Glasgow warming himself and his scrapwood fire in a niche near the Erechtheion. It means Beaufighters sweeping over the city before they plunge on the ELAS with machine guns open. It means blue smoke, swept by a bitter wind through the pillars, from burning houses on the street a pistol shot away.
The mountains are white with winter. The sky beyond the pillars is blue only in snatches. For the most part, it is gun-barrel grey.
“We consider such a prominent place unsuitable for use of mortars,” says one soldier. “Mortars should be in hollows, not on prominent features. We have located observation points here for mortar and artillery, but if the ELAS claims that we have put heavy guns here, they are simply not telling the truth.”
Being Christmas, the firing is slight. At our feet lies the Temple of Theseus, where Athenians once watched for Persians. They now peer through field glasses out over starving Athens. Even their glasses are covered with brown wool jerkins.
By tacit consent both parties fire as little as possible across the pure Doric pediments, 2400 years old, testifying to the exploits of a warrior god. In almost every hollow temple foundation are empty cartridge cases.
At the walls of Themistocles you recline, the Porch of the Virgins at your back, and listen to an artillery duel on the other side of the city. Here, one once heard a huckster's cries mounting from the marketplace. All is silent except for the vengeful ripping of machine guns. Ducking quickly through the Porch of the Caryatides, you notice a Republican bullet has marred a perfect pillar. There is a little head of lead from a glancing blow and a black fan-smudge beyond.
Buried away in the museum you have Christmas dinner prepared by a private from Oldham and a sergeant from London. It is Canadian salmon, California pears, pancakes with fruit sauce, cigarettes and chocolate. You contribute chewing gum given you by Santa Claus Richard Mowrer, a fellow Daily News correspondent. From the museum room, where ancient figures now wear paratrooper helmets, hustles a dapper little Edinburgh padre with a book of holiday hymns under his arm.
You meet the commanding officer of the world's most precious strong-point, young Captain David Cruden of Aberdeen, who wears silver spectacles and has made seventeen parachute jumps but never expected to land on the Acropolis.
“ELAS has hit the Acropolis with about six mortar shells since December 7,” he says. “We've had one man killed, but the damage to the temples is insignificant. It's the cold wind that hits us harder than anything else.”
The wintry sun of Greece's saddest Christmas is bending down the greying sky as you walk along beside the Parthenon. It is still white, still fair, still pure.
GREEKS ON BOMB-CAR INSURE GERMAN TRAIN
Sparta, Greece—January 4, 1945
A handsome young man at Megalopolis told this correspondent of the fiendish German method of making trains run on time. The young man's right leg was off at the knee, and he was using makeshift crutches.
A few months before the Nazis departed, Athanassios, our informant, completed one of the shortest railroading careers ever known—two weeks. He spent this in a klemma. This cage, which he shared with 24 other Greeks, was built on a flatcar. In the center was a two-foot silvery box of explosives.
The car was pushed ahead of a Nazi train. A car full of sand came next, a buffer against explosion. Then came a car with a Nazi sergeant sitting at an electric switch connected with the explosive. His orders were that if the train were attacked by guerrillas, he was to blow up the cage car with the twenty-five “Communists.”
This system was invented because the guerrillas, aided by the Allied missions, were blowing up trains. The cage cars, in the lead, were at first used to take the explosion of the Allied mines. But when the guerrillas turned to timing their explosions, letting the car full of hostages pass, the Nazis wanted to make sure the hostages paid the price anyway, and paid it instantly. Hence the wired car.
There were six such combinations of cage cars and sand cars running out of Corinth
on the three lines to the Patras, Athens and Tripolis.
Athanassios was taken prisoner as an ELAS guerrilla in a May battle. His captors, the Nazi-supported Greek security battalions, turned him over to the Germans as a Communist, which he denies ever being.
“Every morning we would leave Corinth about 7:30,” he said, “hoping the Andartes guerrillas would not attack our train. We would get to Tripolis about 2:30 and be put into jail. Then the next morning we would come back. We got food only from the Red Cross, though sometimes in Corinth women and children would push things through the bars of the cage.”
When taken out of the cage car, the twenty-five were marched past the sergeant's car and shown the red-handled switch.
The attacks on the trains stopped. There was no need for the SS sergeant to blow up the cage car. Then came the morning of July 1. The cage car was on the siding at Corinth, waiting to leave for Tripolis. Because women and children were not allowed at the station that day, Athanassios thinks it was a deliberate experiment by a captain of the SS Grenadiers, who had thought of the cage car.
However it was, the car blew up. Sixteen “Communists” were killed outright. Eight were wounded. One escaped. A Greek doctor took off Athanassios' leg; the Germans paid no attention.
The captain, however, made some changes in the cage car. He seems to have been puzzled why nine Greeks lived. So he fitted the other cage cars with triple explosives, a slug at each end as well as one in the middle.
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