For Five Shillings a Day: Personal Histories of World War II. Dr. Campbell-Begg Richard

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СКАЧАТЬ the attack, the offensive any longer. And we fought a particularly painful final operation with two borrowed British infantry brigades because our brigades were now so fought out, and eventually the line settled down.

      In the meantime the brigade in which I had served as a brigade major had been severely mauled and the entire brigade headquarters had been lost, had been taken prisoner, including the brigadier, and some of course were killed. And so I was then called back from my enjoyable role as a battery commander. It’s much nicer being a line officer; of course, you don’t have to work nearly so hard and it’s more interesting; you have better contact with the men and so forth. Anyway, I was pulled away from that job as battery commander and I was pulled in to go back and reconstitute the brigade headquarters and retrain a new brigade headquarters in the middle of this rather desultory period.

      The battalions were right down in strength, the weather was extraordinarily hot, we were afflicted with mosquitoes and flies and dreadful things called desert sores because the diet and living conditions were very poor. There was not enough water for washing and that kind of thing. People became afflicted; any kind of scratch would become a suppurating sore and people would be covered with these terrible sores. I don’t know how I managed to escape them – it was just good luck I guess. So it was a very difficult period – something like 11 weeks we were in the line under these very unpleasant conditions. There wasn’t a great deal of enemy action. On our side we felt we had to dominate the battlefield, so we did a lot of patrolling and raids went on. Again it was very hard to sustain the troops’ morale, which I thought was getting a bit low. I actually ran a daily newspaper for a long time because I realised the chaps were getting rather depressed, so I ran a sort of paper to try and give them some information about what was happening, and before long it was pretty widely circulated among the British units as well as our own, I might say. I think that was probably because an enterprising editor, who was my sergeant clerk, managed to dream up rather an unwholesome joke, which he added to the end of every issue, so that was much sought after.’

CHAPTER 5

       Greece

       The Italians had invaded Greece from their bases in Albania on 28 October 1940, but were soon being repulsed, and by the end of the year had been driven back into Albania along the whole front. On 6 April 1941 the Germans, in great strength, invaded Greece and Yugoslavia from their bases in Bulgaria. Britain had started landing troops in Greece in early March and had established a line along the Aliakmon River in the north. Yugoslavia surrendered on 17 April, then, with the disintegration of the few Greek divisions on its right, both flanks of the British Army were exposed to the enemy. There was no alternative but to withdraw. Greece surrendered on 24 April and the bulk of the British forces were evacuated on the nights of 24, 25 and 26 April in a variety of naval and merchant ships, which took them to Crete and North Africa.

      Major Leonard Thornton had been very much involved in these events. He recalled:

      ‘The decision was taken, rather reluctantly by the New Zealand Government, to agree to our Division forming part of a small so-called Imperial Force, which was sent to Greece to help the situation. When we look back at it now historically, it was a forlorn hope. There was ourselves, a British and Australian Division, which was to be supplemented with another division, and a British Brigade with rather worn-out tanks. That was the total force, and we were a little concerned to discover, while we were in the process of embarkation, that a planning committee had already been set up in Cairo to work out plans for our evacuation if possible – not a very encouraging sign!

      Anyway, we moved up into Greece, Northern Greece, and got ourselves established in a defensive position up there. By this time I had left my role as adjutant in my previous regiment rather to my relief (it was a staff job), and I was now commander of an artillery battery. And so the battle began and it really hardly lasted at all because an overwhelming force of 12 German divisions came in; we fought as well as we could in the Olympic passes on Mount Olympus, and that was where I had my first experience of being under fire in a battle on the Aliakmon River. It was a foregone conclusion; we fell back as rapidly as we could and the battle on the Aliakmon River was really a delaying action, in order to enable the main force to get past us and down to the road back towards Athens. And we fought another battle near Thermopylae where a famous battle had been fought long ago. So round about Hitler’s birthday, which is almost ANZAC Day as far as I can recall, the decision was taken that we should have to evacuate. Jumbo Wilson was the force commander and he, an Englishman who had served with the New Zealanders in the First War, took the decision and it was the right one to take, although it was pretty hard on the Navy. We then made off towards the south as fast as we could, and in three or four days the embarkation was completed.

      We had lost, of course, most of our equipment in that evacuation; nothing could be moved in the way of hardware, and it was a very unpleasant campaign to be in because of the fact it was under a totally adverse air situation. We were continuously bombed, strafed from the air throughout the hours of daylight. Mercifully the German Air Force couldn’t do much at night, which meant, at least, that you could get a bit of sleep if you weren’t on the move, but it was very demoralising for the troops not being able to hit back. And I think a lot of men became a little bit jumpy about the business of having to move, having to be out on the roads and so forth. We got ourselves off the beaches; I actually got left behind briefly because I went back to try and souvenir some or get some radio equipment which I thought it was a pity to leave behind, although we had been ordered to do so by the embarkation officer.

      However, back on to the beaches, my regiment had already left, which turned out to be a strange stroke of fortune, because most of my regiment, which was now the Fourth Regiment, went on for the defence of Crete, and because I went in a different ship I was moved directly back to Egypt, so I missed the Crete campaign, which was very expensive from a New Zealand point of view.’

      Sergeant Richard Kean, Battery NCO of Signals, NZ Artillery, saw it all from a slightly different perspective:

      ‘We arrived at Piraeus, the port of Athens, disembarked and through Athens to somewhere outside Athens where we stayed under the trees. We stayed there for a while and then moved up through Greece, finally settling in the south of the Olympus Pass, moved on again over the top of the Olympus down the other side, and got in a village just outside Kuphos and camped there. And we dug a fairly good deep hole to house our living quarters and the telephone exchange. Did a bit of scrounging and found stuff, you know, derelict Anderson shelter tops to put over the top of our hut. However, it sufficed when covered with earth, and we got a Greek farmer to plough over the top of it and it couldn’t even be seen.

       Richard James Kean

      We then moved further on and for some reason, known only to himself, my major decided that he wanted a forward listening post and that was me. Why I don’t know, and when I arrived I could see constant movement, places being bombed and burned, and there was I sitting in the middle of nowhere, just me and the telephone. Then I heard crinkling, crankling rustles coming from the undergrowth. My armament was a .45 revolver, so I drew it and in the prescribed manner, toes and elbows rigid, listening, listening, followed the rustling – and I finally found it, and it was two turtles mating. One of the biggest scares I’ve had in my life!

      We were moved up and down all over the place, and finally my battery was detached and sent to the 17th Australian Brigade over on the other coast. I was left on the end of the telephone and wasn’t allowed to close down, although the battery was gone. And I was very worried because the bombers were coming over and there was great holes in the ground there where our guns had been but, finally I got the message to close down. It was dark as hell СКАЧАТЬ