On the way to Egypt from England in the Franconia, Slessor pleaded with the 9th Division troops aboard, who had been training in England and whom he was invited to address, in these terms: ‘Please don’t give me all the blame if you see one of my despatches that you don’t like. I have to work through layers of censors, cable operators, sub editors and printers—and so far I’ve had to struggle only with small beer.’ He concluded, ‘As for warfare in general, I am infuriated by the knowledge that for no reason or motive of any kind, except at the command of blind authority, working to satisfy the glandular cravings of an invisible oligarch, a Keats or Beethoven or Pasteur can be dismissed from existence by the mere motion of a man pressing a piece of iron which releases 2000 volumes of gas, which drives another piece of iron 3000 yards which perforates the abdominal cavity of an utter stranger between the fourth and fifth ribs.’
In the Middle East from March 1941, Slessor would write with similar disdain of ‘sleek young subalterns with shiny hair and shiny Sam Brownes skipping in and out of bars, squiring lovelies, hailing each other in BBC voices—perhaps it’s all part of the war effort’. He was highly outraged when in a Cairo hotel lounge he heard ‘two pompous old goats of English colonels talking in loud voices about disreputable doings by Australian and “colonial” troops . . . Good God, no wonder the English of a certain type are detested by Americans, Australians, South Africans and New Zealanders.’ However, he disapproved of some Australian soldiers’ ruthless and loutish souveniring of goods, and their ‘reckless mixing of liquor’. His dislike of Blamey was enhanced when he saw him in a Cairo cabaret ‘jazzing fatuously with a blowsy Egyptian girl’. Wives were not permitted to go to the Middle East but Olga Blamey went as part of the staff of the Australian Red Cross. Ordered to send her home, Blamey declared she was a free citizen travelling on an Australian passport and that he lacked the power. This created further the idea that Blamey operated by different rules.
Sergeant Roland Hoffman, a former Sydney journalist who had written an excellent brigade diary on the voyage to the Middle East, had already been put in charge of producing an Australian soldiers’ newspaper in Egypt, the AIF News. Poor gentle-faced Hoffman was a good soldier who would be captured by the Germans in the calamitous campaign for Greece, and who would take his own life soon after his prison camp was liberated by the Allies in 1945.
The ABC also sent a unit made up of Charles Myer, with Chester Wilmot as his chief assistant. The latter, a young Victorian, was soon to be recognised as one of the best broadcasters in the English-speaking world; his reports aired on both the ABC and the BBC. Before going to the Middle East he had already clapped eyes on the enemy, having seen a Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg. On the North African battlefields, he would broadcast with temporarily assembled equipment and with the sounds of the guns in the background.
General Wynter, commander of the 9th Division, whose health was bad and who did not have long to live, attracted Slessor’s approbation: ‘He is admired and respected by all officers and men here.’ Again, General Blamey was another matter. He profoundly disliked war correspondents unless he was able to control them. His dislike had begun in World War I with the turbulent journalist Keith Murdoch, and Murdoch’s intrusion in 1918 into the question of who should command the Australian Corps. Blamey feared a repeat of such behaviour, and spotted wayward opinions in some of the correspondents now joining him in the Middle East—not least in Slessor’s fellow feeling for the Digger. Indeed, on the ground in Egypt, Slessor led deputations of journalists to both General Blamey and his chief-of-staff Brigadier Rowell on the lack of information correspondents received during the North African campaigns. But the general had a special reason for disliking Smith’s Weekly. In 1925, the year Blamey became police commissioner in Victoria, news got out that police had raided a brothel and found there a man in possession of Blamey’s police badge. Blamey denied it was his and claimed that it had been stolen from him or, in one version, lent by him to a friend. The Weekly had inflicted a great deal of suffering on Blamey over it.
For his part, Slessor suffered agonies over what befell his copy. He avoided reading his despatches in print because of ‘the inevitable mutilations, manglings, misreading and idiocies which accompany their publication’. The Sydney Morning Herald ‘vilely sub-edited’ him and did not mention his name. A master of grammar, he was particularly upset at the fact that the Melbourne Herald had quoted him as saying that Christmas hampers may eventuate for the troops—‘As if a hamper can eventuate!’
TO CLASSIC LANDS
In early April 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was still dreaming of a great alliance between Britain, Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey, which would altogether put up seventy divisions against the Axis. The technological shortcomings of all the equipment involved on the Allied side was one aspect that made the concept a fantasy—even if the Yugoslav front had not collapsed, and even if Turkey had consented to join. The Italians attempting to invade Greece from the direction of Serbia and Macedonia in October 1940 had been driven off by the Greek army, but on 5 April 1941 the Germans entered Greece, and now the Anzac Corps—the 6th Australian Division and the New Zealanders, commanded by Blamey—together with a number of British units, were to be committed to an operation that was hopeless, not least because they would have hardly any air cover.
There were certain undertakings the British had made to Greece, in spite of the fact that its prime minister Iannos Metaxas, had been a dictator until his death in late January 1941, but these promises were not Churchill’s total motivation. He wished by intervention in Greece to impress Roosevelt with a compelling, if doomed, British resistance, and brave and perhaps inevitable defeat, which would prove how desperately the Allies needed America to involve itself in the conflict. The soldiers shared the lack of faith in the operation—the Australian Charlie Robinson said that ordinary soldiers spoke of the futility of the coming campaign. For Churchill was weakening the garrison in North Africa, including Australian and New Zealand components, to put men in the way of assured harm in Greece.
Churchill had worked hard on Menzies since February 1941, when intelligence said the Germans would soon invade, to persuade him to allow Australian participation in a Greek campaign. On the last weekend of the month, Menzies, visiting Britain to confer with the War Cabinet and pursue his ambition of belonging in it, was invited to Chequers, the prime ministerial country residence. He did not think that Churchill was a good listener, but he mentioned ‘momentous discussion later with PM about defence of Greece, largely with Australian and New Zealand troops’. Churchill depicted the proposed Greek campaign ‘as a rather hypothetical matter’, as if it mightn’t happen. Menzies did not know that the decision for Greece had already been made two days before.
When it occurred, the Greek campaign would take place against a background of continuing Australian obsession with Singapore, with offhand British assurances that, if necessary, the Mediterranean would be abandoned by the Royal Navy to protect Singapore, but with the refusal of Britain to send modern Hurricane fighters to that fortress. Where would the abandonment of the Mediterranean put the Australian troops in North Africa? Menzies reasonably enough asked. Nonetheless, in early May, two days before he left London to go home, he was even persuaded to approve a (successful) request to the United States government to move elements of its Pacific fleet to the Atlantic Ocean. Menzies assured his Cabinet in Canberra that America’s increasing belligerence would in any case probably deter Japan from beginning a war in the Pacific. So Greece went ahead, and Menzies hoped it would really shake the American tree. Some historians believe that had Blamey and Menzies both objected strongly enough, the calamity could have been avoided.
The Anzac Corps then, along with some British units, was nonetheless committed to the saving of Greece. When the 19th Brigade AIF, having landed at Piraeus, later moved up beyond Thermopylae, where in 480 BC the three hundred Spartans under Leonidas had stood against the Persians, ensuring by th
eir valour the ultimate defeat of the invader, the Australians intended to emulate them. The only problem was that, unlike the Spartans, the Allies would face superior (and more numerous) German aircraft that exercised utter dominance in the air and over the souls of the defenders.
Kenneth Slessor, who came to Greece to write despatches, was inevitably impressed to be in classic lands and under the shadow of the Acropolis. However, German propaganda was telling Greeks in the front line that the Australians were back in Athens dancing with their wives, and so all dancing in Athens was banned to the Australians. As sceptical as anyone about the hopes of the campaign, Slessor interviewed Blamey in that city. Blamey had arrived in Greece even before the German invasion, to inspect the terrain and the narrow passes the Australians would have to defend and, he was sure, retreat through. Lieutenant-Colonel Wells, commanding the Australian advance party, told Slessor he had been up to visit the northern defence line and saw little hope of holding it.
General Robertson, until recently the commander of the 19th Brigade, had been hospitalised in Alexandria for vein problems. When an officer from Australian Corps headquarters visited him and told him he had better get well to command his brigade in Greece, Robertson is rumoured to have said, ‘I am a successful commander, and Greece is going to be a disaster. I’m not going to Greece.’ The source for the story is the war journalist John Hetherington. If true, Robertson’s was a choice the ordinary private soldier was not in a position to make. Blamey is said to have heard the story and it is true that Robertson did not achieve a combat command of any importance until April 1945.
In the meantime, the Greeks were consoled by the presence of the Australians, New Zealanders and British into believing that their country would be saved. But Blamey—and Slessor—knew there were no grounds for the slightest confidence of that, for the experience of going off to the front told another tale. Slessor found ‘roads full of refugees streaming down from the mountains . . . It was pitiful to see Greek soldiers, lame and tired, plodding painfully back a long road—no transport or food for them’. It was fondly hoped by the Australians and New Zealanders that the line could be held from Larisa in the central north of Greece to Thermopylae, and Slessor and other journalists were told that the Larisa line would be virtually impassable, the 17th Brigade protecting the left flank, the 19th the right.
It is interesting to get a sense of the campaign from a unit diary, in this case that of the 19th Brigade. The diary keeper found as the brigade passed north through villages that the attitude of the Greek people was most amiable and grateful: ‘Flowers were thrown into vehicles.’ The 19th Brigade met up with the Greeks they were relieving and its general, George Vasey, and his staff inspected the portion of the line they were going to occupy. By 7.30 on the evening of 8 April, the Divisional Command told Vasey that he was to occupy a delaying position at Thermopylae to allow time for the Serbia Pass—one of the three passes through the northern mountains—to be garrisoned. The Australians took their position in front of the pass, on either side of the road, and their engineers blew up the bridges over which the Germans would have come. The only Allied plane they saw in the next two days was a Hurricane that crashed in front of their lines and whose pilot they rescued. They heard from their men posted forward that forty German tanks were now approaching, but the attack was beaten back by Australian artillery and small arms fire, and the German infantry and artillery began digging in as snow began to fall. In a raid over the snowy ground the Australians snatched two Germans from their trench, but one was wounded in the exchange and died at the dressing station. From them Vasey realised that he was up against the 1st SS Der Führer Regiment, the Praetorian Guards, part of Das Reich Division.
The British armoured brigade fighting with the 19th had been hard hit from the start with mechanical breakdowns and battle losses, and was soon as good as non-existent, and six of the British anti-tank regiments’ guns had been knocked out. The under-equipped Greek divisions were perforce giving way in their thin uniforms and disintegrating boots.
Orders were received from divisional headquarters for the 19th Brigade to withdraw to a position on the Aliakmon River. The enemy, having broken through the Serbia Pass, bloodily infiltrated the forward artillery observation posts. The British Rangers and the Australian 8th Battalion on their right were given a line to defend until that evening. At 5.30 on the gloomy afternoon of 12 April the First Batallion Rangers’ front broke. As the Rangers moved back in disorder, in that terrible fear of the bewildered front-line soldier, the Germans got in behind one of Vasey’s battalions and cut it off. The rest of the brigade was ordered to withdraw further. And so it went on.
Vasey would later write that though the 8th Battalion escaped the Germans it was utterly disorganised. The commanding officer was completely exhausted and ‘a large percentage of the men had thrown away their weapons’. The combination of severe terrain and cold surely provides some justification for such a move.
At first light on 13 April at the Aliakmon River, ‘a lively machine gun and small arms battle took place for three hours, involving the Australian 2nd/4th Battalion, the British Rangers and armour’. The line was joined by New Zealanders of the New Zealand 26th Battalion who had come back across the Aliakmon River by ferry. On about 18 April, when Vasey took up his Thermopylae command, he uttered sentiments that were in their way similar to those of the Spartan commander, Leonidas, in 480 BC: ‘Here you bloody well are and here you bloody well stay. And if any bloody German gets between your post and the next, turn your bloody Bren around and shoot him up the arse.’ To the west of the pass Vasey could see the Germans massing in the Brallos Valley, and it was while he held that position that, ingloriously, he heard that Greece was to be evacuated, and that to cover the evacuation, the brigade was to hold this position until dark on 24 April.
The Greeks to the west, caught in a salient, were engaged in a fiercely fought withdrawal of which Blamey and General MacKay, commanding the 6th Division, had heard possibly exaggerated reports—that some of the Greek divisions were in utter disarray. Indeed, Australian troops encountered fleeing Greeks without weapons. With this uncertainty, and Germans probing the Australian line by way of the Olympus Pass as well as more frontally, and with enemy aircraft dominant in the skies and strafing and bombing them, the Australians of both the 16th and 19th Brigades concluded they might be forced to retreat sooner than 24 April. In fact, on the evening of 15 April and on through the night, the orders reached the troops either side of the Aliakmon, and they began to move out in their overcoats, carrying on their backs the one-blanket-per-man that was their chief but inadequate protection against the high altitude air.
By that time most of the small forces of British tanks had been destroyed or were in imminent danger. The German armour dominated along the entire line. ‘At one stage a group of fifteen to twenty men were round a tank firing rifles and L.M.Gs [light machine guns] to no apparent effect. This tank crushed two men, Privates Cameron [of Condobolin, NSW] and Dunn [of Murwillumbah, NSW]. The feeling of helplessness against the tanks overcame the troops and they began to move back in small parties.’
Tubby Allen, the forthright, thickset commander of the 16th Brigade, posted further west of the Anzac Corps line on swampy ground near Larisa, with his men spread thin and watchful about being flanked and surrounded, wrote of the attempt to hold the line and provide a rear guard to the last moment possible. ‘It was a fantastic battle. Everybody was on top (no time to dig in) and all in the front line, including artillery. Bren carriers, infantry and various unit headquarters. If you saw it at the cinema you would say the author had never seen a battle. We held this position till after dark [on 18 April].’ Then they retreated to join the rest of their corps in the Thermopylae line.
From 18 April, the Anzac Corps began a retreat southwards in good order over five days. The passes they went south through held deep beds of snow and were impassable to trucks. So they were ‘using donkeys as at Gallipoli’. They fought reargua
rd actions against highly mobile and better-equipped German troops in the countryside south of the Aliakmon River. The Australians had been harassed day and night, and were completely defenceless, as no RAF planes appeared above them. The Luftwaffe over Greece had at first outnumbered British aircraft ten to one, and the number of British planes quickly destroyed had made things more uneven still. ‘All along the road, at almost every mile,’ wrote Australian Colonel Klein, there were ‘scores of trucks and cars lying smashed or with wheels up at roadside’. ‘Fenton convinced that we are to have another Dunkirk,’ wrote Slessor of his former fellow journalist and now press censor, Major George Fenton. As the Australians retreated, Slessor saw posters deriding Hitler and Mussolini being covered up by Greeks who wanted, understandably enough, to survive the coming occupation. The villages did not want troops to stay for fear of attracting the Luftwaffe. Every movement along the road by daytime was subject to air attack.
Vasey argued that the choking up of the roads south deteriorated due to the officers’ lack of involvement in controlling the traffic, and the fact that vehicles did not pull off the road at stops. His 19th Brigade was engaged in a delaying action at Vevi, holding a front of thirteen to fifteen kilometres bounded on the east by difficult mountains and two large lakes, and on the west by further mountains. For lack of men and armaments, there could not be any ‘defence in depth’. On 24 April the enemy began to move down the south slope of the Thermopylae position about which Vasey had made his piquant speech. Vasey guessed that they were battalions of the German mountain troops. Though the brigade’s guns heavily shelled the enemy when they came within range, the brigade had been given a front of twenty kilometres to hold. It was doomed to cave in. Because of the mountainous country, the heavier artillery was restricted to a range of just under three kilometres wide. Motor transport was unable to deal with mud and steep grades, and the troops had been issued with the wrong type of clothing and equipment. ‘Had it been possible for us to take the offensive,’ said Vasey, ‘we would have found great difficulty because we had nothing similar to the mountain regiments of the German army capable of attacking in this type of country.’ And last of all, the telling sentence: ‘The Army was sent to GREECE well equipped to fight in LIBYA.’ At last Vasey’s brigade reached the olive groves of Megara, near Athens, and rested.