Only two factors, I felt, had enabled me to remain out of trouble for so long. Firstly that as I had spent so many months with the battalion in the Western Desert no one dreamed of now questioning my presence with them. Secondly although I had been officially posted from Benghazi to the Prisoners of War Control Staff in Alex in the latter part of February, I had done only two days’ duty there. After that I had been arrested, and I had served for such a little time in that command that even if anyone there knew that I ought to have reported back on the 12th of March, but had failed to do so, it was quite on the cards that they had forgotten all about me.
On the other hand, sooner or later the fact that I should be there but was not would emerge in the returns of strength sent into the A.G.’s Department in Alex, even if Cozelli did not trouble to check up on me and find out that I had disappeared.
That I should get into exceedingly hot water before very long seemed an absolute certainty, but I was much too worried about Daphnis to care about myself. Old Diamopholus had promised to use his considerable influence with the British authorities to get a priority telegram through to me should he receive any news of her, and as I had not heard from him I felt certain that it was because he had no fresh news to send.
I thought of her constantly, but since she was in enemy territory there was nothing—absolutely nothing—I could do to trace her. She might still be in Bulgaria or possibly by now she had followed Mondragora’s trail into Hungary, Italy, or Germany. The awful haunting knowledge that wherever she might be she now went in peril of her life made me so wretched that I began to lose weight; but as an additional officer on the Battalion H.Q. staff I was able to make myself useful in all sorts of ways to ‘Long Willie’; so once more to tire my mind and secure sleep through bodily fatigue I took on every sort of job that offered.
During those days when we were preparing our positions opposite Janitsa the news was far from good. While the Navy had been occupied in performing another miracle and escorting the whole of the Imperial Expeditionary Force from Egypt to Greece without the loss of a single man or gun, the Germans had taken the opportunity to pump stuff across the Sicilian Channel for all they were worth in ships which, with the connivance of the treacherous French, then ran down the territorial waters off Tunisia to Libya. By means of their extraordinary determination and organising ability the Nazis had succeeded in landing a really formidable force, consisting of Hitler’s personal friend, General Eric Rommel, and the African Korps, which was fully mechanised and comprised panzer units specially trained and equipped for fighting in hot countries.
On March the 26th El Agila, on the Gulf of Sirte, the furthest point to which the British had penetrated in Libya, was taken. A withdrawal was immediately ordered, but the Germans surprised us both with the speed of their advance and their strength. Benghazi, with its valuable airfields, had to be evacuated on April the 3rd, and soon afterwards 2,000 of our men, including three very able Generals, were taken captive by the enemy.
This calamity, arising from the overstraining of our Navy and the weakening of our Libyan Army and Air Force, was the direct result of our sending an Expeditionary Force to Greece. It was the first fruits of placing chivalry before strategy in Total War, and many of us wondered how much more it was going to cost us without anything equivalent to show in the weeks to come.
Of course the apologists in Whitehall would say afterwards that we had gone into Greece in order to induce the Yugoslavs to fight; conveniently forgetting that the Yugoslavs had refused even to have staff talks with us, and that their Government had actually signed a pact with the Nazis after the British had landed in Greece. And if the Yugoslavs did fight, as it now seemed likely that they would, what then? For how long did our stainless knights imagine that the poor fellows would be able to stand up against the Nazis’ Luftwaffe and panzer divisions? Every enemy we could make for Hitler was something to the good, but if the French Army was not powerful enough to prevent our limited forces being driven out of Belgium, the Yugoslav Army was certainly not strong enough to prevent our being driven out of Greece.
Another nasty smack was the revolt, on April the 3rd, of Sayid Rashid Ali, a dirty little Iraqi lawyer, who had been a former Premier of Iraq and a source of trouble to the British for years. Quite obviously he had been got at by the Nazis and was a Quisling of the first water. After a day or two there was talk of the Nazis landing specialists by ’plane via Syria to assist Rashid Ali against the British, and it seemed quite clear that most of the Iraqi Army had gone over to him. I then remembered that when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem had been kicked out of Palestine he had sought refuge in Iraq, which some wiseacre in the Foreign Office had considered quite fitted for self-government, although our vital pipeline, by which the Mediterranean Fleet was supplied at Haifa, ran through the country. Putting two and two together I came to the conclusion that it had been a revolt assisted by German air-borne troops in Iraq and not Egypt which had been under discussion that night when I had so nearly lost my life in Mondragora’s flat.
Another ominous item was the death, soon after admitted to be suicide, of Count Teleki, the Prime Minister of Hungary. Germany had been putting pressure on Hungary to make war on Yugoslavia in spite of the friendship pact which existed between the two countries, and there could be little doubt from the fine record of this upright statesman that, at the last, he had preferred to take his life rather than be a party to such a betrayal.
By April the 4th seven German divisions were reported on the Bulgarian frontier in the neighbourhood of the Struma Valley. It was a foregone conclusion that certain of them would drive down through Thrace, cutting the whole of Eastern Greece off from the main body of the country; but the general opinion was that the Yugoslavs would be able to hold the Germans in the mountains to the west of the Struma.
Personally I doubted that. It was no particular prescience on my part but common sense applied to knowledge that had already become history. In the Norwegian campaign the Germans had amazed everybody by doing the apparently impossible when they had crossed the great mountain range which separates the Osterdal from the Gudbrandsdal Valley to descend upon the all-important railway junction of Dombas, where the British were taken entirely by surprise and completely routed. Those Norwegian mountain roads, still covered in ice and snow at the end of April, had appeared absolutely impassable to tanks, but nevertheless the Nazis, with their incredible determination and endurance, had thrown their panzer divisions across them to our complete discomfiture, and I saw no reason whatsoever why, if the Germans could do that sort of thing in Norway, they should not do the same in Yugoslavia.
It seemed obvious that unless the miserable Italians were to be entirely squeezed out of Albania and the whole country have to be reconquered later by the Axis Forces, the Germans must direct their main stroke to joining up with their Allies in the neighbourhood of Lake Ochrida, at the south-eastern corner of Albania. Such a thrust would also separate the Greeks from the Yugoslavs and was thus of such enormous value that it was inconceivable that the German General Staff should neglect to undertake it, whatever the cost in men and materials. However, it seemed from the very little that I as a second lieutenant could gather that the Allied Command was banking on the Serbs, who had neither tanks nor war ’planes in any quantity, to hold their mountains against the most powerful military striking force which had ever been created in all history.
On April the 5th all Yugoslav frontiers except that with Greece were closed, and we were given the order to stand to for all emergencies. On Sunday, April the 6th, the open town of Belgrade was blasted and reduced to flaming ruins by the blond beasts of Goering’s Air Force. With that news the tidings reached us that at dawn that morning the Germans advance units had crossed the Bulgarian frontier into Thrace. We had sown the wind, and now must real the whirlwind. The Battle for Greece was on.
Chapter XX
The Hurricane Breaks
With growing tenseness we waited hour by hour until we should
be called upon to face the tidal wave of steel and flame which we now knew to be advancing inexorably upon us; but that was not to be for some days yet.
At first, as always seems to be the case when the Germans start a new blitzkrieg, the news was better than we had expected. During that fateful Sunday and Monday the Greeks fought with indomitable spirit, and a terrible toll was taken of the Nazi shock troops all along the Bulgarian border; but by the Tuesday it had been forced in at least four places. After that any hope there had been of holding Thrace was gone.
On Wednesday morning the Germans reached the sea at Maritzan on the Turkish frontier, cutting the Greeks off from their potential Allies, and that night they also entered Salonika; but that was by no means the worst of the picture. At last news was beginning to come through from Yugoslavia, and it was exceedingly perturbing. The most weighty of all the German thrusts had been delivered against the Yugoslavs’ southern army, almost before it had taken up its positions. The panzer divisions had gone through the much-talked-of Serbian mountains like butter, and were already at Skoplje, which was two-thirds of the way to the Albanian border.
The destruction of the Yugoslavs in the south had left the Greek flank uncovered, so they were now forced to abandon Eastern Macedonia and make fresh dispositions. It was then that we blessed Generals Wavell and Wilson, who must have insisted that the Imperial Forces should not be exposed to the possibility of complete annihilation by being sent up to the Bulgarian border, but had arranged for them to hold a zone to the north of Mount Olympus. For us there was no question of having to change front at the last moment, and we knew that we would at least have the benefit of fighting on ground deliberately chosen for us by Generals who had already proved themselves to be great commanders.
On Thursday the 10th the Germans broke the Metaxas line and occupied Xanthe, which virtually put an end to all organised resistance in Thrace. By this, the first day of the battle, they had also penetrated into Southern Yugoslavia in sufficient numbers to divide into two spearheads, one of which was racing forward to join the Italians in Albania, while the other had turned southeast to come crashing down the Valley of the Varda. Meanwhile dozens more German divisions, with Hungarians as auxiliaries, had overrun the Banat and all the low-lying country to the northeast of Belgrade, so that about a third of Yugoslavia was already in German hands and the armies of our new ally thrown into the utmost confusion.
On the sixth day Zagreb, the Croatian capital, fell in the north, and the Nazis reached Monastir in the south, thereby cutting the last communications by road or rail between Greece and Yugoslavia. On that day, too, we saw the first signs of the fighting.
Salonika is only twenty miles along the coast from the mouth of the Aliakamon, and our sappers had done great work in the big port by dynamiting harbour facilities and war plants before the Germans got there. They had also helped to evacuate considerable numbers of the civil population. In the meantime our modern cavalry, the tanks, had been ranging the low-lying campana in front of us through which ran the several rivers’ mouths forming the delta of the Varda. On the Friday dusty Greek troops with many wounded began to retire through our lines from the north and north-east to re-form under the shelter of the mountains, and during the afternoon our tank units were in contact with the enemy. By evening the town of Janitza, which lay to the north of us, was burning and a great pall of reddish smoke hung above us.
That night we had our first clashes with the enemy, and by the light of a full moon, which was from time to time obscured by dark scudding clouds, we participated in a dozen different engagements; but none of the separate actions took place after midnight. Having felt out the position and ascertained that it was held in force, the Germans withdrew to wait until daylight. Our chaps had destroyed three enemy tanks, and we felt very pleased with ourselves that we had not given an inch of ground anywhere, but we then had little conception of what we should be called on to face in a few hours time.
Soon after dawn there came a distant hum, which almost instantly increased to a terrific roar. The sky to the north-east seemed to be speckled all over with German ’planes. Every antiaircraft gun we had went into action. Here and there a Nazi ’plane was hit and spiralled down with smoke streaming from it; but the remainder never swerved from their course, and flight after flight of them dived straight down at us.
I shall never forget the twenty minutes that followed. We were all crouching in specially-prepared pits, but whenever we raised our heads to get a quick glimpse of the ground ahead, the whole earth seemed to be going up in spurts of smoke and flame. The noise was so terrific and so continuous that one could not make oneself heard, and it was only by pointing that one could draw the men’s attention to something one wished them to do or see. In that short time the Germans must have rained down at least a thousand bombs on us, but considering the weight of the attack the damage done was amazingly slight. We lost only one officer and twelve men killed and wounded, and half of those were the result of one bomb which made a direct hit on an anti-aircraft gun’s crew.
The moment the dive-bombers had ceased, the tanks, which had crept up in the meantime, came at us; but our anti-tank weapons had been well placed and our artillery immediately opened fire from the far side of the river, so between us we gave the first wave of German tanks an exceedingly hot reception. Seven of them were knocked out, and a number of others seemed to be in difficulties, as the bulk of them withdrew.
They had hardly retired when fresh flights of dive-bombers took up the game, and once more the earth shuddered as the bombs rained down. Immediately they ceased, the tanks returned to the attack. We laid out more of them, but they took their toll of us, and so the game continued hour after hour during the whole of the morning. The Germans never let up for a single moment, and one by one our positions were either destroyed by bombs or by tanks when they managed to penetrate deep enough into our defensive zone to enfilade them.
Later in the day we got some respite. Several flights of R.A.F. fighters, which had doubtless been operating on some other sector during the morning, came up and sailed into the Jerries. Dive-bombers are easy game for fighter aircraft, and the Germans had to call the attack off until they could rectify the air situation. There were a lot of dog-fights between Hurricanes and Messer-schmitts, in which our men seemed to be keeping up their extraordinary average, and every time a German was shot down we cheered like hell. But the time that a fighter can stay in the air is extremely limited, and again and again our people had to break off the battle and return to refuel, whereas it seemed that the Nazis had so many squadrons that these could relieve each other in an endless chain. Nevertheless, the R.A.F. protected us from the worst during the greater part of the afternoon.
At last darkness came, bringing us relief from the dive-bombers and the chance to move our wounded without being machine-gunned from the air. During the night there was sporadic fighting, but it was a picnic to the daytime, and as soon as the light was good enough on the Sunday morning the dive-bombers came at us again.
That Sunday was sheer hell, and how we managed to hang on to our positions I have no idea. The R.A.F. gave us what little cover they could, but they were hopelessly outnumbered. The sky was never free of droning aircraft, and nine-tenths of them were Nazis. The tanks, too, were much more numerous than they had been on the preceding day, and the earth all about us had been churned into a pitted sea of mould from the thousands of explosions. By the late afternoon our ghastly plight was made even worse as the Germans had had time to bring up considerable quantities of artillery with which they now opened a heavy bombardment. To us, caked with the dirt and sweat and blood of battle, it seemed that twilight would never come, but come at last it did, and with it the order to retire.
I never thought that I would be glad to participate in one of those famous ‘withdrawals to fresh positions’ which in this war we have read of so often, but I honestly don’t believe that any troops ever born could have stuck it out for another day now that the d
ive-bombers and artillery were both getting to know every detail of our positions and systematically blasting point after point.
Our withdrawal during the night was to a zone facing east, where our backs were to the Agosto Mountains. The retreat was successfully accomplished without the Nazis tumbling to what was on, so on the Monday they spent quite a time dive-bombing and bombarding our old positions before, in a great tank attack, they found that we had already left them. By this time we had at least succeeded in instilling into the enemy a wholesome respect for us, so when his tanks came on they nosed their way towards our new positions with considerable caution. Being further into the mountains the ground was much rougher here, so more difficult for tanks and better cover for our anti-tank guns. The fighting was stiff all day, but not as bad as it had been on the Sunday. Yet that night we had to withdraw again.
This time the retreat was not caused by the impossibility of hanging on any longer, but by the fact that the Nazis had swung round the northern end of the short Agosto range and were now advancing towards Florina, which was immediately behind us, through the Monastir Gap. We were outflanked and liable to be surrounded during the night. In consequence we crossed the Aliakamon near Velvendo and this time faced almost due north with our backs to Mount Olympus.
The river took a sharp bend in front of us, and from the sides of the wide valley we could see it wind away for some distance. The Germans were now advancing down both sides of it, but another battalion of Imperial troops had the nasty job of holding the right bank, whereas we had the comparatively easy task of preventing them crossing the bend immediately in front of it and enfilading them if they endeavoured to thrust down the far bank. As things had gone so far Tuesday was an easy day for us, but some of the Home regiments further to the west had the devil’s own pasting, and that night a further withdrawal was ordered.
The Sword of Fate Page 29