AN EPIC JOURNEY

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 61, Issue 282, 10 September 1941, Page 3

AN EPIC JOURNEY

SOLDIERS DRIVE GREEK TRAIN.

TROOPS IN CATTLE TRUCKS

A passenger on the famous ?>OO-milo train-ride in Greece during the evacuation after the fine stand the New Zealanders made at Mount Olympus was a New Zealand dißpatch rider, who collided with a British convoy on a road in Greece and has been in hospital ever since. In fact, he has been in three hospitals, and is surprisingly cheerful about it all, in spite of the fact that he is still a stretcher case. That train journey through desolated countryside and villages smashed to pieces by ruthless bombings has become historic. It took 3G hours to do the 300 miles, but the resource of a New Zealander and an Australian saved hundreds of troops who had no way of getting to the coast. “We travelled in cattle trucks and we were bombed pretty well all the time by the enemy,” said the former dispatch rider. “I wasn’t feeling too good, as I had just come out of hospital after being fed on morphia for a fortnight, but we made.it all right.” He explained that the train had been left by the Greek train crew, and there was no one to drive it. “«.n Aussie and a New Zealander had a look at the engine—the both had seen one before, but only from the outside —and in they jumped,’ he said. “We all loaded into it, and off we went. It was a slow journey, and I’ve got an idea the Greek traffic signals caused the driver and his firemen a little bother.”

Ships Bombed.

This soldier was on a ship that was headed for Crete to pick up the wounded, but an air attack prevented it from doing so. The ship was bombed along with other ships in the vicinity and a barge alongside it was shattered and sunk by a bomb. On the journey by cattle truck in Greece he had as a companion a German prisoner of war, who was a StormTrooper and a member of Hitler’s picked bodyguard. He was a big man, more than six feet in height, and he wore an arm-band with the name “Adolf Hitler” on it.

“He was a talkative sort of chap on the train,” he said, “and was all the time telling us when Hitler was going to win the war and when he was going to get home. He was wounded in the thigh, and when they eventually took him into hospital he refused to say anything. He must have been thinking things over.”