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

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      Eventually we started the retreat out of Greece and on the south side of the Larisa there was a tremendous convoy and the road was raised, must have been about 12 or 14 foot above the land – it was all flat. And here we were parked almost nose-to-tail and the Germans were bombing and strafing, bombing with anti-personnel bombs and strafing. And once again we decided it was safer just to get under the truck because they were bombing each side of the road for personnel and we realised later that they didn’t want to actually blow the bridges or clean up the transport. While we were waiting here – we were just held up in this particular place – there was a Dornier, I’m pretty sure it was a Dornier, and the top of the telephone poles were just a wee bit higher than the road, and this particular plane ambles along just above the telephone lines. And we were just looking at it – we weren’t allowed to fire at them because this would bring the whole lot of them on us – and this gunner pulls his turret back half way along the plane there and tosses out a couple of rolls of toilet paper for us – that’s the fun they were having. It wasn’t well received verbally, however, at the time, but it was quite humorous afterwards. And we found out later that a couple of Australians were having breakfast further down the road there and that’s what held the convoy up – they weren’t very popular. But all the way down through Greece we were blowing the approaches to the bridges and on again, and the villages where the road went through, and there was only one road, they bombed them. And that went on most of the whole of the way; we continued the withdrawal until eventually we were set for embarkation.

      And we went to a beach south of this area of Greece and this particular night we managed to get on a barge to go out to the destroyer. However, they diverted us to Kea Island and we arrived there in the morning. It got too late for us to embark on the destroyer and they put us on this island for the day. We had to cross the island and there must have been about 100 of us, and it was a very bare island and quite hilly and we had to go to the opposite side to be picked up the following night. And it was quite nerve-racking at times with German planes flying over it regularly, and we were all stretched out on virtually bare land and we went to ground every time we saw one. However, apparently the Germans are inclined to be single-minded and so set on a certain job, well, that was all they worried about. So we put the day in hugging the ground and walking and eventually made the other side of the island where we were picked up that night and put on the Kandahar, and we thought we were heading for Egypt, but apparently during the trip they decided they had to make another trip and put us off on Crete for a couple of days.

      We had 13 raids on the way over and we got a couple of holes through the back of the destroyer – they were borderline, fortunately – but without doubt the skipper was very, very adept. He used to wait nonchalantly for the plane and he’d hard to port or starboard and the water would come right up over the decks as he turned. But we missed any direct hits. One or two of the convoy got badly hit.’

      Bruce McKay Smith, Gunner, 25th NZ Artillery Battery, was there too:

      ‘Then we moved to the outskirts of a place called Trikala, which, I understand, had been hit by an earthquake some reasonably short time beforehand, but we were put into olive groves and various scrub and stuff and camouflaged ourselves in. And the next morning, at daylight, the Germans mounted a ferocious attack on Trikala itself; they bombed all day, but how or why we’ll never know; they never saw us. I don’t think anybody breathed for the whole of that day, and that night we moved out. The war was getting fairly intense then. The roads were choked with not only refugees but various units, Australian, British Army and New Zealand – surplus vehicles going one way and us trying to go another way – but eventually, through a lot of manoeuvring and toing and froing, we got into defensive positions again and carried on moving every now and again to more secure positions. The guns were firing a vast amount of ammunition because ammunition was plentiful for some reason, which was most unusual, all the guns getting almost red hot with their continuous rate of fire.

      From there the whole show started to deteriorate, and then we were told that the place was getting untenable and we’d probably have to evacuate. So this started a bit of kerfuffle and we had to travel on very exposed roads, mostly being bombed and strafed most of the time, but with little effect, by the German planes, but very scary all the same. We still had all our equipment intact at that stage, but then we were told we’d have to put our defensive positions up if we found a position that was suitable and we’d go into action against German tanks and infantry. Their Alpine troops were a pest – they seemed to be able to go anywhere. The tanks were not as big a problem as we thought they would be – our gunners became very good at knocking them out, especially when they were trying to do river crossings.

      From there on we carried on going south; the whole thing was getting chaotic by then. Nobody quite knew what was going on. Actually we got to the outskirts – I’m not quite sure how far out from Athens – and were told that we had to destroy our guns and vehicles and hopefully disperse and await transport by sea. The guns were destroyed as best we could, most of the optical equipment taken off them. The vehicles had a pickaxe put through the sump and the engine started up and raced until the engine seized up.

      After destroying the vehicles, we went to a position whose name I can’t recall, with a lot of scrub and stunted trees and olives and one thing and another, not far from the sea. We were told to hide in this undergrowth and, hopefully, we’d be picked up that night by a ship. We spent all day in this scrubby area. The German planes came over continuously, but somehow or another they couldn’t have seen us because we had a trouble-free day. As it approached dark, runners were sent round to various groups to tell them to be prepared at anytime to move and to dump any surplus equipment such as rifles and gas-masks and stuff like that. However, very few of our chaps dumped their rifles – they hung on to them.

      About the very early hours of the morning, possibly 3 or 4 o’clock, we were told to form up and make our way down to the seaside, and there the Royal Navy had arrived with their lifeboats and we were bundled aboard these lifeboats; any gear the sailors manning the lifeboats considered excess, they’d chuck overboard. We were ferried out to, in our case, HMS Carlisle. We eventually got aboard her and we finished up in the Stokers’ Mess where the off-duty stokers couldn’t do enough for us, making copious mugs of cocoa and bread and buns and whatever they could find to feed us, for we’d had no food during the day. Then we set off, as we found out later, of course, for Crete. However, we were bombed several times, but the Carlisle, being an ack-ack cruiser, put up a terrific display of anti-aircraft fire and we only had about three or four near misses, which was pretty good. Eventually we arrived in Suda Bay just before dusk, I think it was.’

      On the retirement and under bombing, the practical common sense of the 20th NZ Infantry Battalion’s Padre was well-remembered by Keith Newth, then a Corporal of Signals:

      ‘We had slit trenches, dug in we were, and the bombers, German bombers, came over and I can always hear Padre Spence saying, “Well, boys, it’s all very well to believe in the Lord, but it’s better to take action or get down into our holes when this sort of thing is going on,” which we did.’

      Sapper Alexander Rodgers, NZ 7th Field Company, recalled the voyage to Greece only too well:

      ‘We’d only been gone a few hours when the whole convoy turned round and headed back towards Alex. The Italian Fleet were waiting for this convoy to put out, but the British were one jump ahead. We retreated and the whole of the Mediterranean Fleet, the British, took up their positions and they blew every one of the Italian ships out of the water. Fantastic – you could hear the noise in the far distance there, and the next day they told us what had happened. [This must have been the Battle of Matapan when, on 28 March 1941, the Mediterranean Fleet sank three Italian cruisers, two destroyers and damaged at least one battleship, all for the loss of one aircraft.]

      Our job was to put through a secondary road to meet up with the Maori Battalion in the Olympus. We would start at daylight and work to dark every day, sleeping underneath СКАЧАТЬ