by Mike Carlton
Simultaneously, two German armies were on the move. The Second Army, under a field marshal lavishly named Maximilian Maria Joseph Karl Gabriel Lamoral Reichsfreiherr von Weichs zu Glon, would subdue Yugoslavia. The somewhat less baroque Field Marshal Wilhelm List hurled his Twelfth Army, of four armoured divisions and 11 motorised infantry divisions, into Greece on two fronts – one heading for the northern mountains and another striking for the port city of Salonica.
It was a massive exercise in overkill. German intelligence had greatly overestimated the opposition. For all its bravery, the Yugoslav Army was poorly armed and equipped, relying on literally hundreds of thousands of horses, mules and donkeys for its transport. The Greek Army was in little better shape. It had been more than enough to deal with the Italians, but it was no match for the might of the Wehrmacht. The German wave swept on.
The Australians of the 6th Division, and, alongside them, the New Zealand Division, waited in northern Greece beneath the snowy peak of Mount Olympus for that wave to break upon them. Newly arrived from the North African desert, the soldiers from down under stood on what was known as the Vermion– Olympus Line, shivering in the cold of the Balkan nights.
Perth was in Piraeus that day, with Ajax and the anti-aircraft cruiser HMS Calcutta, taking a breather from yet another convoy. The morning began quietly enough. She had berthed near an ammunition ship, the Clan Fraser, but Bowyer-Smyth decided this was a little too close for comfort, and he took the cruiser out to anchor in the Salamis Roads. The BBC radio news that morning reported the beginnings of the German invasion, but the starboard watch was given leave for a run ashore.
They seized the chance. Ray Norris and a mate took a camera and went up to Athens to explore the Acropolis. So did Jock Lawrance. Jim Nelson and his mate Jack Cox dropped in to a favourite haunt, the Kit Kat club in Bucharest Street, near the Hotel Grand Bretagne, just a block from Syntagma Square. ‘Mayfair in Athens,’ it called itself, ‘the latest and smartest dancing bar in the Balkans.’ Lydia and Nadia, the two singers, joined them at their table to share an ouzo. Warwick Bracegirdle and another officer, Lieutenant Terry Power, of Mosman, Sydney, also took a taxi to the Acropolis and then strolled on foot through Athens itself, where, to their amusement, they were saluted by the guard outside the German Embassy. After a few drinks at the George V Hotel in Syntagma Square, they wandered down to the Plaka, the centre of Athens nightlife, and found a pleasant little taverna for dinner. These were civilised interludes they all craved and deserved. They would not last.
As the Australians relaxed ashore, two flights of Luftwaffe bombers lumbered into the air from their base at Gerbini in Sicily and turned eastwards for the 900-kilometre flight to Piraeus. The first flight, of 20 JU88s, from Fliegerkorps X’s III/KG30 group, carried high-explosive 250 kg bombs. The second, of 11 Heinkel He 111s, was armed with mines to block the harbour.
The JU88s were led by Hauptmann Hans Joachim Herrmann, one of the Luftwaffe’s most experienced bomber pilots. Known to his friends as Hajo, Captain Herrmann liked to boast that he had been personally recruited to the Luftwaffe by Goering, who had seen him out riding one day in 1935. He had fought with the German Kondor legion in the Spanish Civil War when Hitler tested his newly acquired air force in support of his fellow fascist Francisco Franco. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he flew in Norway and then in bombing raids over Britain, where, legend had it, he became entangled with a barrage balloon over Portsmouth and freed his aircraft only metres above the harbour.
Herrmann was an ardent Nazi and has remained an admirer of Hitler all his long life.2 His youthful photographs, in Luftwaffe uniform, show a face with the cold glare of the Aryan superman. Later in the war, he would win the much-coveted Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, and, with Goering’s patronage, he attempted towards the end to set up Luftwaffe suicide squadrons similar to the Japanese kamikaze units.
On this April evening in 1941, he was 27 years old, piloting his aircraft and his crew of three through stormy weather that forced some of the Heinkels to jettison their loads and turn back. But the Staffel of JU88s pressed on. As Herrmann crossed the Greek coastline over the Corinth Canal, he dropped flares to mark the route. The air-raid sirens began to sound in Athens and Piraeus at exactly 8.35 pm.
At the Kit Kat, Jim Nelson and Jack Cox rushed the two girls down to a bomb shelter and then stumbled out into the blackout, pushing their way through panic-stricken crowds in the hope of getting some transport back to Piraeus and the ship. Not to be rushed, Bracegirdle and Power finished their coffee at the taverna, paid the bill and found a taxi willing to take them to the docks. Roy Norris and his mate had decided to have another look at the Acropolis by moonlight. They had a grandstand view as the raid began:
The sky was filled with a display of fireworks rivalling any peacetime pyrotechnic display I have ever witnessed, but these lights and flashes in the sky like strings of rubies and emeralds were not for people’s entertainment – they were deadly missiles being hurled at more deadly machines in the sky, by sweating gun crews in defence of lives and property.
…Overhead we could hear the drone of planes and, as they made north, sharp bursts located an occasional dog fight. A lull and they came again – they had found the target area – Piraeus. Flashes filled the sky as sticks of bombs fell, and a hellish glow which continued showed to all too clearly where the deadly loads had been dropped.3
Ray Parkin had stayed on board. With Perth anchored out in the bay, he had more than a grandstand view:
Before anything was dropped, several machines flew low over the ships in Salamis Roads. They were picked up in searchlight beams and fired on heavily by ground defences. They retaliated by machine gunfire right down the searchlight beams in an effort to extinguish them. A machine was picked up leaving the inner harbour to the westwards. Heavy fire. A minute later a great column of pure fire arose from the inner harbour, to between two and three hundred feet. It seemed to grow as it climbed, just solid flame, and hung there, a motionless pillar. Almost at once there was another violent explosion to the east a short distance. This came and went but the pillar of fire still hung eerily. It settled as slow as eiderdown.
Machines kept appearing in the searchlight beams and being fired upon. They fired back. The ghostly screams of our fighters overhead and the faint remote machine gunning of air battle could be heard between the heavier sounds. The air was alive with brilliant tracer from the Bofors and Breda. There was a lull. Then they came in again. Then, just ahead of us, was a terrific explosion.4
A bomb had hit a British freighter, the Cyprian Prince, only a few hundred metres away. With a horrible grinding noise, she broke in half and sank within minutes, the first of many ships to go that night. Perth got a boat away and rescued four of her crew from the water. Fires were burning throughout the dockyard, with the searchlights attempting to pierce a pall of low smoke. Even with Bracegirdle and half the crew ashore, Perth managed to get her 6-inch main armament and her anti-aircraft guns into action, and the ship shook with the blast.
Circling the inner port, Hajo Herrmann levelled off at 3000 metres, struggling with the joystick and the rudder bar as his JU88 was buffeted by the storm of shells exploding about him. Ahead and below, he saw a freighter of perhaps 8000 tons berthed alongside a dock that was already a mass of tumbled masonry. He called the target to his bomb-aimer. Three bombs fell straight and true, plummeting directly onto the ship. Herrmann rammed the throttles forward and pulled the joystick back to climb out of the seething harbour.
He had hit the Clan Fraser, which was loaded with hundreds of tons of ammunition and 250 tons of TNT. Within minutes, she was burning fiercely: red, gold and black, like some obscene tropical flower. More bombs landing nearby set fire to a warehouse and some crates of Hurricane fighters, and the flames from those spread to yet another freighter, the City of Roubaix, which was also carrying explosives.
Picking their way through the carnage, Perth’s liberty men found their way
down to the docks, but their ship was nowhere to be seen. In the midst of the chaos, almost deafened by the noise and dazzled by the glare, Jim Nelson and his mate Jack Cox decided they might as well do something useful:
The raid was in full swing and very intense with bombs raining down all around us, the shipping in the harbour being the main target. We offered our services to a Greek officer who, when learning that we were trained gunnery ratings, immediately accepted.
He took us to the roof top of a tall building on the harbour front which had a Breda gun emplacement that had been hit and was on fire. The crew having been killed, we put out the fire, removed the dead crew and got the Breda into action. I picked up the gunner’s glove and found the gunner’s hand in it.
The strange thing was that the officer’s instructions were to fire at and extinguish the lights on the roofs of surrounding buildings. These were being manned by German Fifth Columnists to guide the attackers in. This we did, and managed to put a couple out. Our position was strafed a couple of times with no damage.5
Bracegirdle and Power also made it to the docks, to be told by an Australian sentry that Perth would not be sending boats to collect the liberty men that night, for fear they might hit mines dropped in the harbour. The officers were to round up as many of Perth’s crewmen as they could and billet them for the night on the British cruisers alongside the docks, Ajax and Calcutta. Not long before midnight, as the raid faded away, Perth’s liberty men straggled on board Calcutta, the Officer of the Watch telling them to get their heads down where they could. Many just stretched out on the upper deck.
But Bracegirdle and Power decided to try to get back to the ship. Right behind the burning Clan Fraser, which was now a furnace, they found a small wooden rowboat with a pair of oars. They eased it into the water and began rowing. It was 3.15 am.
They had gone no more than 200 metres when the Clan Fraser blew up. The explosion was catastrophic. A roaring fireball shot skywards in an enormous mushroom cloud. Searing pressure waves flattened everything in their path, mowing down waterfront cranes and buildings as if they were no more than children’s blocks. The blast shattered windows in Athens ten kilometres away. Secondary fires broke out, and the air was full of flying metal and debris. A day later, the Greeks would find a huge piece of Clan Fraser’s bridge structure, weighing some ten tons, in a park two kilometres away. Pulling away in their small boat, Bracegirdle and Power were hurled into the harbour like rag dolls. Bracegirdle later described the event:
A tidal wave caused by the explosion sucked, dragged and swirled us down, down into the dirty, oily water. On surfacing, my lungs made a noise like blowing up a balloon. I was deaf, blinded by oil fuel; my back was numb but I was alive. Then there were huge splashes all around in the water by the docks. These were pieces of ship wreckage falling after flying hundreds of feet in the air. Davits – fittings – wood – masts. I tried to duck dive to protect my head. Something fell across my back causing more pain. I was on the surface and conscious. The wreckage stopped falling. I heard Terry’s voice croaking my name in the darkness. I replied. He said he had found our boat.
Finding it difficult to swim I put some floating wood under my shirt and paddled towards him. The explosion had separated us by a good 100 yards. He had found the boat and was sitting in it calling my name. The barges had sunk. The ammunition ship had disappeared down to the water line. All around the harbour were fires caused by the explosion. Terry dragged me into the boat – we lay gasping. The boat was leaking. We tried to paddle slowly away from the burning wreck. A second huge explosion rocked Piraeus Port and the ship’s boilers went up in the sky like red balloons. By then we were too shocked and hurt to care, so we crouched and shielded our heads. As we drew away from the wreckage, fires ashore were seen everywhere. Finally our boat began to sink near a Greek trawler. We called for help. They threw Terry a line. I was found clinging to their anchor chain and hauled aboard. They ferried us ashore to a bus. It was full of wounded. Some dead.6
On board Calcutta, Roy Norris had curled up inside a whaler with his cap for a pillow and a tattered oilskin for a blanket. The explosion threw him out of the boat and onto the deck, knocking him briefly unconscious:
I found myself trying to press myself into the steel plates of the ship’s side, with the most ear-splitting detonation ringing in my ears; the sky a lurid mass of flying white-hot metal, dust, smoke, wood and what have you. It was death to move an inch and I saw my one and only cap still in the boat. I rushed out from my safety to get a darned cap! What is more I succeeded, but only just, as the next thing a piece of metal sheared through the ten inches of steel of the foremost davit of the sea boat, taking it in its stride so to speak, deposited it about 200 yards away and left the sea boat dangling very foolishly from the remaining davit. Flames were springing up in all directions – the Calcutta was on fire – the entire harbour seemed a mass of flames which were spreading with incredible rapidity.
…in the fitful murk of burning buildings and ships the Calcutta became a seething mass of figures, for there were a couple of hundred Perth sailors on board as well as her own crew making confusion worse, confounded as they fought the flames on the starboard side.
…They then piped us to fall in on the jetty, as the Calcutta had broken all of her lines to the wharf, and it had been decided to make for Salamis Bay where Perth already lay at anchor. Ajax by this time had slipped and was trying to get out just astern of the wharf. The Officer of the Watch of Calcutta was killed with four other chaps on the wharf.7
The dawn revealed a ghastly panorama, a charnel house on a stunning scale. Hajo Herrmann had quite literally destroyed Piraeus. There was barely a building left standing around the harbour. Smoke and flame curled from blackened ruins. The sun was hidden behind a shroud of grey. Thousands of civilians had been killed. People wandered through the wreckage dazed and weeping, calling for friends or family. The Perth sailors on Calcutta fell in on the dockside and began to plod wearily back towards a usable pier where they could rejoin the ship. And then something magnificent happened. The Greeks began to clap them and to shout encouragement. These people, whose small nation had that terrible night been plunged into war with Nazi Germany, whose homes and lives had been devastated, somehow found it in their hearts to cheer on a ragged band of Australian sailors. Shoulders back, heads high, the Perth men marched on as if all the admirals in the world were watching.
Bracegirdle and Power were taken to a Greek naval hospital, where doctors swabbed the fuel oil from their bodies and a medical orderly plied them with welcome tots of Metaxa brandy. Remarkably, their only injuries were some spectacular bruises. They, too, returned to the ship the next morning, marvelling that they were alive to tell the story. Luck was still with HMAS Perth. The Captain’s decision to take her out into the bay had saved her yet again. No one had been killed or even seriously injured. Ajax and Calcutta had both lost men. The three cruisers sailed for Suda that afternoon.
As the days ticked by, April, which had begun with such promise after Matapan, now saw the war in the Mediterranean and the Middle East turn in Germany’s favour with alarming speed. It was as if white had turned to black, positive to negative. In the Balkans, the Germans swept all before them. Yugoslavia was overrun in a matter of days, as mercilessly as Hitler had demanded. Von Weich’s Second Army then lunged south through Macedonia and down through the Monastir Gap in the mountains that were the gateway to northern Greece.
The Greek armies fought with tenacity. One Greek battalion, poised high above a mountain pass, hurled stones upon the German tanks advancing below. Frightfully brave British public-school chaps with hyphenated surnames and Oxbridge degrees in classical history dashed about, blowing up bridges and railway locomotives and strangling German sentries.
But the inevitable happened. The sledgehammer cracked the nut. Within three days, by 9 April, the German 2nd Panzer Division had captured Salonica, and the Greek 2nd Army had surrendered. The Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler –
a crack division of the Waffen-SS commanded by Josef ‘Sepp’ Dietrich, a former butcher who had been Hitler’s personal bodyguard – swept through the Monastir Gap and pressed south. The hammer would now fall upon the outnumbered Australians and New Zealanders hunkered down in muddy mountain passes in weather that had turned to sleet and snow. On 12 April, General Blamey announced that they would be known, from then on, as the Anzac Corps, united under his command. It was an attempt to ignite the Gallipoli spirit. He said:
The reunion of the Australian and New Zealand Divisions gives all ranks the greatest uplift. The task ahead, though difficult, is not nearly so desperate as that which our fathers faced in April twenty six years ago. We go to it together with stout hearts and certainty of success.8
Blamey had chosen an odd moment to remind his men that Gallipoli had ended in failure. Even as he spoke of ‘success’, the orders went out for withdrawal. The new Anzacs were to pull back or be overrun. Considering his misgivings at the beginning of Operation LUSTRE, Blamey must have recognised that disaster was imminent. It was a bitter retreat through razor-backed mountain passes and across icy, fast-flowing rivers – hungry and exhausted men labouring beneath whatever ammunition and equipment they could carry.