Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  By then, on 22 April, Colonel A. Rogers, a haggard-looking intelligence officer, would tell Slessor and the other journalists, about sixteen kilometres east of Athens, ‘Gentlemen, I have a statement for you. The AIF is to leave Greece . . . the fact of the matter is that we seem to have been left with a job which is too big for us.’ Slessor knew the men of the 16th and 19th brigades were still engaged with the enemy.

  Blamey had in the meantime impressed his staff by his capacity for work and clear thought. He was getting by on perhaps four hours’ broken sleep a night, in an unsuccessful attempt to stop defeat becoming a rout. Contrary to later press reports, he was in some personal peril while in Greece. He and his staff officer N.D. Carlyon were close to a tree hit by a bomb while five or six New Zealand gunners were sheltering beneath it. All the New Zealanders were obliterated.

  Damien Parer had travelled to Greece for the campaign and had fallen in love with the place. On a hill above a town named Elasson, he filmed a raid by the Luftwaffe. Ron Williams and Parer both later said they were frightened, but Williams admitted he could not hold Parer down, and characteristically, as he would do on other battlefields, he prayed for the victims while he went on filming. Much of the footage of that campaign, of refugees and beaten Greek soldiers, is still used to illustrate the sadness of it all. Parer’s film is part of the stock of war footage for every campaign he would participate in. Once, under attack, he was forced to leave his beloved camera gear in a truck, but could not tolerate the separation and ran onto the road, bracketed by bullets from Stuka dive bombers, to retrieve it.

  Parer and Williams filmed the evacuation before escaping on a tiny trawler carrying three hundred German POWs. They returned to Alexandria, Parer grief-stricken over Greece, reviving from depression only when he went with the 7th Division, at that stage novices, into Syria on 8 June. He was the only cameraman covering that campaign. He sailed in a destroyer that was shelling the coast, he shot footage of the RAF bombing the headquarters of the collaborating Vichy French in Beirut, he was with Australian gunners and engineers at work, and advanced with infantry attacks. At one stage his film was ruined by shrapnel from a Vichy French mortar bomb at Merdjayoun. He had dashed ahead of the company assigned to capture the old fort at Khiam. Some of the men were angered to be lagging behind a civilian, and so Parer unwittingly increased the pace at which the attacking soldiers now moved.

  Back in the desert he flew in RAF bombers because there was no room for a cameraman in single-seater fighters, but he was already working on the idea of how he might manage to film in the cramped space of a fighter cockpit by placing his camera on his head. During the siege of Tobruk he ran the gauntlet of ‘Bomb Alley’, sailing in a destroyer between Alexandria and Tobruk, and filmed Stuka raids on Tobruk. But the narrative gets ahead of itself.

  More than seventeen thousand Australians had marched up to northern Greece, along with New Zealanders and Britons, to face the Germans, and the total Australian casualties there were about three thousand men, of whom over two thousand were captured. One victim of failed policy and foredoomed military gesture, Barney Roberts, a Tasmanian bank clerk who suffered from asthma, had been cut off with other members of his unit and was without transport, ammunition and food. He had been bypassed by the German advance in the Brallos Pass area. Such men could do little by day but lie under the leaves of olive trees for protection from sun and aircraft, and wait for night so that they could go and get water. Ultimately they surrendered to a German officer who spoke English with an American drawl. By the time Roberts was captured, on 27 April, Blamey was three days gone from Greece—on the orders of his superior, General Heny ‘Jumbo’ Wilson. Notoriously, he took Tom Blamey, his son, a major in intelligence, aboard his plane.

  Blamey, on the way to Alexandria, was able to read the British newspapers, which gave a glowing account of resistance in Greece. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘we’ve been to the wrong war.’ Blamey wrote in his report: ‘The outstanding lesson of the Greek campaign is that no reasons whatever should outweigh military considerations when it is proposed to embark on a campaign.’

  ESCAPES, VARIOUS

  In the flight from Greece, the British commandeered a large number of Greek caiques—fishing and trading schooners—manned them with army sappers and armed them with machine guns. These were used to ferry men out to the rescue ships. Once the ferrying job was over, the caiques were to make a dash for Egypt themselves.

  On the night of 18 April, most of the 2nd Australian Battalion, trying to hold the Tempe Gorge, a position on the coast of Thessaly in eastern Greece just below Mount Olympus and due north of Athens, were driven into the hills. In the foothills of Mount Ossa the next day, Major P.A. Cullen, a Sydney accountant, collected 152 men, including some New Zealanders, and led them to the coast near Karitsa, hoping to be picked up. There was no ship in sight, so after two days, Cullen broke his force into groups to hide in small Greek villages. The Greeks usually refused payment for food even though the Anzacs had plenty of money from the regimental funds Cullen had distributed to officers.

  On 25 April, most of these men were taken aboard Greek boats to the island of Skiathos, and thence by caiques across the Aegean to Chios, an island just off the Turkish coast. Here the Greeks were hospitable again, arranging a meal in the public school. Many of the Australians ultimately joined the complement of a ship that was taking four hundred Greek soldiers from Chios to Crete. It sailed on 29 April, gusted along by the cheers of Greek civilians at dockside.

  On 1 May, the Greek ship with Cullen and his Australians aboard encountered another steamer carrying a party led by a Captain D.R. Jackson, who had been captured by the Germans but then escaped and seized a steamer at gunpoint. Jackson was using the ship he had taken over to evacuate 280 men, including one hundred Australians, one hundred Greek soldiers, and some Greek and Jewish–Greek citizens. The two ships reached Heraklion on Crete on 5 May. Cullen would in turn escape Crete and command a battalion in New Guinea, and so would the indomitable Captain Jackson.

  For lack of space, some Australians had had to be left on Chios under Captain E.H. King; 133 men accumulated there. No caique had enough fuel to take them to Crete, so they sailed to Cesme on the Turkish coast opposite Chios. At Cesme they avoided internment through the good fortune of being met by an Australian officer, Colonel C.E. Hughes, a Tasmanian World War I veteran who had been working in Turkey on World War I graves for the Commonwealth Graves Commission. With his help they found a Greek yacht capable of a long voyage, sailed right through the Italian-held Dodecanese island group, and landed on Allied-held Cyprus on 7 May.

  Back in Greece, Colonel Fred Chilton, commander of the 2nd Battalion, his command now scattered and eroded by heavy fighting, was moving south with his remaining men, mostly at night, being joined by other stranded soldiers. Some were former railwaymen who had by night fired up a locomotive and left its fire door open so that German aircraft would attack it, while they escaped in another engine on a parallel track. On 8 May, this railway group found a boat and sailed to Skyros. There they met a further sixteen men who had been dropped off by a Greek ship on 7 May. The Greeks treated them with tenderness and generosity—the tenderness being recorded by Sergeant Pierce of the 3rd Battalion: ‘We arrived at Zagori amidst much weeping by the fairer sex and were then taken to a house where we were more or less put on exhibition. Most of the people who visited us left something for us to eat.’ By the time they left Skyros they knew that the nearby islands of Chios and Mytilene had now been captured, so they headed for the Turkish coast near Izmir (the former Smyrna). There, Colonel Hughes once more intervened and the Turks showed little interest in enforcing the rules of neutrality to intern the Australian, New Zealanders and British. The men were put in civilian clothes and, as supposed civilian engineers, were taken by train to Iskenderun and put on a Norwegian tanker for Port Said. By these convoluted means, they rejoined the great conflict as combatants.

  THE CRETAN FARCE

  Slesso
r and his fellow press corps men would be bombed by ‘big Dornier [German] bombers’ during the retreat down the length of northern Greece. Like the retreating soldiers themselves, he and his colleagues sheltered from aircraft in small ditches by vineyards and olive groves. Every three kilometres or so, squadrons of German planes would pass over, bombing and machine-gunning with utter impunity.

  Reaching the port of Piraeus, Slessor and fleeing civilians and soldiers coalesced on the chaotic Tromba wharf. They survived a bombing attack by five Junkers. At the dock was a ship named Elsie, and a crowd of people desperate to flee the German troops. Slessor’s diary places us there, on that fragile margin between freedom and capture, in that crowd of frightened and impelled souls, soldiers, civilians, refugees, men, women and children pushing, running and weeping. Between air raids, as babies sat on baggage howling with shock, women appealed to officers to find lost suitcases for them. A number of the German legation—officials and typists and so on—were being loaded aboard by soldiers to be sent to internment, and so were 160 captured German soldiers, still jaunty and confident of their chances of being liberated by the unstoppable advance of the German army. Private Murray, Slessor’s batman, wanted to stay ashore and look after the Chevrolet car in which they had retreated from near the northern borderlands. Slessor ordered him aboard. Murray delayed long enough to get a Bren gun and two thousand rounds from an abandoned British army workshop for use in case of air attack.

  As the Elsie pulled out, Slessor found below deck ‘a curious mixture of haughty British matrons, complaining icily about the discomfort, and Greek families eating on the floor’. It seemed nearly a generation of gifted Australian journalists and writers were on the Elsie—as well as Slessor, there was Gavin Long, who would become an official war historian; Chester Wilmot, broadcaster now renowned in the English-speaking world; and the dangerously brave cinematographer Parer. On the two-day journey to Crete, Slessor and the other correspondents did duty creating a roster so that families below could come up on deck for a period to get some fresh air. At about 4 p.m. on 23 April, five German bombers appeared, and men with Bren guns and rifles lay down on the deck shooting as they passed over, while the civilians below screamed and children howled. As the ship put into Suda Bay on Crete the next afternoon, the Greek sailors heard that their government had now independently surrendered, and—fearful of the Germans—had to be persuaded to work the ship any more.

  Slessor and his fellow pressmen did get ashore, and rested overnight in a field along the road to Canea, the town adjoining Suda village, where ‘we spread out under groves of fruit trees, in a field almost knee high with white daisies, lit a fire for tea, ate mutton and veal stew, and slept’. In the morning they were ordered to leave the island. The troops strung out to defend the north coast of Crete—the remaining Australian, New Zealand and British—were damned to a repeat of the uneven battle for Greece, of campaigning beneath a sky owned by the enemy’s air force. Before the journalists left, Gavin Long arranged an Anzac Day meal of chicken and roast potatoes at a local farmhouse, and then they went back to the port and prepared to leave by ship.

  Private Murray was missing, however. Murray had at some stage offered to marry a Greek girl and make her a British subject and thus enable her to escape to Egypt with him. Murray had mentioned something of this plan while on the Elsie, on which the girl also travelled. Murray had in fact now married the girl, and been arrested in his marriage bed that Anzac night for being absent without leave. He was taken with his new wife and Slessor and others aboard ship to Alexandria. He left a doomed force commanded not by Blamey but by the New Zealand General Freyberg.

  The remains of the 19th Brigade under Vasey, part of an Australian remnant force of a little over seven thousand men in two brigades, and field and artillery regiments, had meanwhile arrived at Suda Bay and were marched to a refreshment camp where they were given tea, chocolate, fruit and cigarettes. Then they were put in place near the coast and around the crucial airfield of Retimo to resist what would turn out to be an enemy parachute drop designed to capture the airport. They were part of a force made up of fourteen thousand British and nearly seven thousand New Zealanders, strung out along the north coast of the island, protecting airfields and coastline suitable for landings.

  At Retimo, Vasey divided his men into an anchor battalion whose job was to ‘directly protect the vital area’—the port and the nearby landing strip—and counter-attack battalions that would remain hidden. Weapon pits were to be dug by the anchor battalion on a ridge above the port and airfield, and the counter-attack battalions dug slit trenches. As Vasey’s orders read, ‘Concealment of those [counter-attack] battalions was of paramount importance.’ As they waited for the assault, Vasey’s men operated by code. The code attack was ‘Greta’, that for falling back was ‘Margaret’, that for the appearance of fighters was ‘Jean’, and ‘Gwen’ equalled parachutists. Margaret, Greta, Jean and Gwen would figure highly in cables. Because of reported infiltration by enemy wearing New Zealand battle dress, all ranks of the brigade were ordered not to wear battle dress jackets until further orders: ‘Troops wearing battle dress jackets after 1600 hours will be treated as hostile.’

  One battalion report on the day German paratroopers appeared in the sky above Retimo airfield claimed 102 planes were involved in the drop, all with little to fear from Allied aircraft. Elsewhere along the coast other planeloads were dropped. The orders were that the parachutists be fired on while still in the air, and a number were killed while still descending. But they were followed, once the airfields fell, by troops flown in or else landed in the ports.

  After the German assault, there were some local successes along the coast—one pencil-written intelligence communiqué based on questioning of German prisoners reads, in code, ‘Gong reports enemy paratroopers landed Casteli about 15 miles WEST BATH on 20 May all captured or killed by JEBB. Much material captured. Prisoners state sole intention to take Crete. Bombing raids over Germany worrying people.’ But gradually airfields and ports fell and new German troops were shipped in in unanswerable quantities. The uncertainty and desperation of the defence of Crete seems captured by a message to 19th Brigade headquarters from a major whose signature is indecipherable: ‘Approx. 200 Germans in village. Some coming down the road and some down the valley just east of the village. Second and third demolitions completed at 1130 hours. Have moved back behind second demolition and will hold on as long as possible. Have seen no further movement round the flanks.’

  At Retimo airport, one of Vasey’s battalions, made up of Western Australians, and another of New South Welshmen (the 2/1st) were cut off and captured. Yet they and the counter-attack battalions hung on until surrounded. On Crete, of the Australian units assaulted by understandably aggrieved German paratroopers and their infantry and artillery comrades who followed, the Australians lost nearly four thousand men, just over three thousand of them captured. The New Zealand toll was as high. The casualties were thus nearly 40 per cent of those committed to the entire Greek campaign, and this had all happened in merely a few weeks. The Anzac corps that was formed in Greece had lasted less than a fortnight and had now been fatally diminished. Yet the German reports mention hand-to-hand fighting nearly everywhere.

  A number of men who had been taken prisoner on Crete were marching in a column under guard to the port at Suda Bay when attacked by German aircraft. During the ordeal of this march, an Australian sergeant-major stepped out of the column, pulled an Italian Beretta from under his tunic and shot himself in the head. On the march, about sixty men died, collapsing on the side of the road with dysentery, or falling off the mountainous track. There were no huts in the compound where they were put, and dysentery was rife. Eventually the men were put on ships bound for Germany.

  With the other forces, General Vasey’s men, on General Freyberg’s orders, withdrew through mountain defiles towards the port of Skiathos on the south coast of Crete. Near the beach the tracks were clogged by unarmed men so exhauste
d that officers had to harangue them to continue the trek to the beach as an alternative to imprisonment. In the dark, the beach was chaotic, but loading went ahead, Vasey himself at last boarding. Over five nights, the Royal Navy and Royal Australian Navy had evacuated fifty thousand men from Greek or Cretan ports. As at Gallipoli, the Allies had to be impressed not by victory but by the success of withdrawal. A number of ships were sunk in the process and the Australian cruiser Perth was heavily attacked while transporting troops back to Egypt.

  There were also unlikely and informal escapes by small groups from Crete. An Australian, Private H. Buchecker, with two New Zealand companions, found an eighteen-foot (five-metre) dinghy in very bad condition. They knew nothing about boats but lashed oars together to make a mast and fashioned a sail out of blankets. To their astonishment they met with a stiff north-easter that gusted them along over 645 kilometres in ninety hours to Sidi Barrani on the Egyptian coast west of Alexandria. As soldiers stationed there came down to the beach to haul in the boat, it fell apart.

  On his way back to Egypt from his Greek and Cretan adventure, Slessor had written, ‘At present I feel that a mere summary of the news and facts of the [Greek] campaign would be ridiculously beside the main and vital point, which is that either the British or Australian government or both was prepared callously and cynically to sacrifice a comparatively small force of Australian fighting men for the sake of a political gesture—that is, to gamble with Australian lives on a wild chance, wilder than Gallipoli.’ He was determined to get the story back to Australia and expressed his opinions when he met Blamey in Egypt on 30 April. ‘Blamey said that he deplored any adverse criticism of the campaign, since it would assist the German propaganda effort to drive a wedge between Britain and Australia.’ The general frankly told Slessor he would not get the story past the censor, and thus the general felt free to give information he might never otherwise have done. Blamey declared, ‘We went in with our eyes open, and the 6th Division was thoroughly well equipped. The guarantees were between Governments. We were told that the landing was tied with the Lease and Lend Act in the US—if we didn’t come to the aid of Greece, the Act [which empowered the US government to supply the British with ships, planes and other equipment] would not be passed.’ And indeed, in the middle of the offensive, Churchill had received a fillip to his hope, a very positive response from Roosevelt. ‘Having sent all men and equipment to Greece you could possibly spare,’ wrote Roosevelt, ‘you have fought a wholly justified delaying action.’ It was to attract such sentiments that the 6th Division were sacrificed in Greece and Crete.