BACK IN FRONT LINE

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXI, Issue 13790, 6 November 1942, Page 6

BACK IN FRONT LINE

GREEK SOLDIERS In Army With New Zealanders Fight Against Axis Greek soldiers are back again in the front line in the war against the Axis. With two brigades ready for stern desert fighting, and other units in training, they are resuming the battle that was suspended when the Germans occupied Athens last year. Hundreds of them have crossed the Mediterranean to Egypt with escaped Australian and New Zealand prisoners of war. Some of the Greeks saw Australian war prisoners working on the roads or being marched through the streets of Athens to impress the populace. The Greek soldiers resumed their war against the Axis at 4.45 a.m. on 14th September, when new guns started to belch shells across no man's land into the midst of the Italians' position. All along the British line guns of all shapes and sizes were doing the same thing.

But here there was a difference. The order that sent these shells screaming their hate across the sky had been barked out in Greek, and the soldiers who had last looked at the enemy from the snow-clad mountains of Albania and their own native land stared now across the flat desert sand as though to cheer the shells on their way> There was something reminiscent of a religious service in this historic moment. Colonel Daskarolos, the commanding officer of the Greek force, who might be Paderekski was there with his officers. The gunners, like a choir, were braced as if they were going to throw themselves, too, with the red-hot steel at their foes; and the fighting men, waiting their turn to resume with rifle and bayonet the fight which had ended sixteen months before, on 21st April, 1941, when Athens was occupied by the Germans, crouched like a congregation at prayer for twenty minutes, while the guns roared and the shells sped overhead. In those twenty minutes the Greeks marked their re-entry into the struggle by lobbing hundreds of shells among the Germans and the Italians. They had waited sixteen months for this moment, but that is probably the least of the sacrifices that the Greeks have made for their liberty.

Colonel Daskarolos, summed up this love for liberty in simple words, as I stood beside him in the dawn light., "We love," he said," not liberty only for ourselves, but for others. When we hear that other peoples have lost their freedom, that hurts us, too." The colonel's long hair, brushed straight back, is greying now. He has been fighting almost continuously since 1916. Some of his officers have been longer on active service. Even the men,, and most of them are in their early twenties, have been under arms since 1938, when the Axis first began to cast its shadow over their heads.

Every one of them, officers and men, if they had chosen to, could have remained in the land that they

loved, with their families and friends. The price was serfdom, and they would not pay that price. So they slipped away in parties of afew up to as many as sixty. Colonel Daskarolos slipped out of Piraeus last February. The Germans had warned him that if he attempted to get away they would "not forget." Since then they have broadcast threats of what they will do unless he returns.

"That's my answer," he said to me as the guns roared.

Escape from Germans

Almost every party that came from Greece. Crete, and other Greek islands brought Australian and New Zealand soldiers with them. Some of them were escaped prisoners of war. "The Austrian guards did not like the Germans, and used to let the Australians go. One day five hundred escaped," Private George Iconomou, from Lamia, in Central Greece, told me.

One of them was Captain John Hindmarsh, who stunned a German motor cyclist, and rode off on his cycle. Eventually he joined Iconomou in the hills. The villagers fed them, and about a dozen others, and finally guided them to the coast, where a boat was waiting.

Lieutenant Alexander Vassos, whose father was the Govenor of Crete, and is now military attache in Cairo, also escaped with a number of Australians who had been sheltered by the Greeks. "We had been living together for so long, and we be came such friends, that we found it impossible to part," he said. "While they were waiting on the coast near Piraeus they saw a British submarine emerge from the water and sink three two-masted luggers loaded with German troops.

"This happened about 1000 yards outside the port. It was wonderful," Vassos said.

Greek admiration and affection for the Australians and New Zealanders is deep and flattering. "The Austra los," exclaimed the brigade commander, when I introduced myself. "For you I will do anything, because you are Australos." On the bare, stony escarpment, with shells occasionally bursting nearby, the officers and men gathered smiling, while he delivered this oration: "All of us who are .from the mainland of Greece know that you fought there, and left your dead there. We are a sentimental people, and never will we forget. We are glad to meet, the Australians again, and to fight beside them again." The colonel said that by the roadsides in Greece he had seen many Australian graves. "The Germans would not allow us to put crosses over them or to mark them in any way, but the peasants kept them covered with flowers."

Road Work for Captured Anzacs

The commander said that all his officers had had experience in Albania or Macedonia. "But 'the experience they are going to have here will be different," he said, grimly.

All the Greeks that I saw were sturdy, muscular, and determined. They were trained for desert fighting in Palestine, and have adapted themselves quickly to the strange terrain. Browned and happy, they looked as if they had been in the desert all their lives, but they do not notice a change.

"Once it was mountains and snow and cold. Here it is heat, holes in

the ground, and flies," one of them said. "There, in Greece and .Albania, were no roads. Here"—he said with a sweep of his arm that embraced the unending- desert ('nine;' —"the whole country is road." I was surprised to find thai tinGreeks' hatred of the Germans was more bitter than their hatred of the Italians. They cannot forgive tinGermans for betraying them to the Fascists. Originally, they say. Hitler persuaded them not to mobilise by giving his word that he would not permit the Italians to attack them. He broke his word. When Hitler threw the full weight of his army into the struggle they yielded on the understanding that the Italians would not be allowed to strut about in the country which unaided they could never have conquered. Again the Germans broke their word. Greeks' Good Equipment The Greek army in the desert r however, wants for nothing. There is plenty o fthick Turkish coffee and plenty of aromatic Turkish cigarettes which every Greek loves. There are big plates of potatoes in rich meat gravy flavoured with cinnamon, tinned fruit, and, occasionally, raisin wine, with its turpentine-like flavour, to wash it down. There are strong well-made uniforms and boots and new 25-pounders—" The best guns we have ever seen," the Greeks say —new Bren carriers, in fact, everything to enable them to light at least on equal terms with the enemy. A cause of deep satisfaction to the Greeks is that they are paying their own way, too. Profits made by their merchant ships foot the bill and leave a lot over to help to prosecute the war in other ways and other places.

T,l ° G «eks, wUh "^ der tralntae. took^j>^J desert fl «»tini on fW V lhem *»■ a lew , **o "ley regard , hat «*»! „ v a f erl^stooa^> ; ;i Kold-mounfc/ l ;:: S Byron had carried^ 10 ' > war for Greek i \ ***** hi I'" l '" Pra >' wtortfcZ**! '<»>'to W, (am,,; "«■ -■•:.■ " s °»«..o re on ,„ ?:. san, and read: "M yd / '' °* brother. '*S a § f ain. You say. thai * away the house has cheerless. One day , m * »> and the house willbech m > twill not be happy, too. then, patience, therefore as oth 1 in Greece who are '**J* patient. We will win fc* 1 that.-Your loving Solland ;;i Spiros."