THE FIGHTING IN GREECE

Press, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23353, 12 June 1941, Page 3

THE FIGHTING IN GREECE

IMPRESSIONS OF THE CAMPAIGN NEW ZEALANDERS PROVE THEMSELVES [From the Official War Correspondent with the N.Z.E.F.I CAIRO, June 10. Out of all the lessons so bitterly learned in the Balkan campaigns emerges the shining fact of the worth of our fighting men. ■ Even before Crete, New Zealand had shown that she had given the British cause in this war a force the proved and potential capabilities of which were nowhere surpassed. Then a clear week of fierce fighting in Crete, without talk of evacuation, set the New Zealanders their full and final test, through which they passed with flying colours. A more difficult or more hazardous military operation than that carried out by the New Zealanders in covering the withdrawal through Greece could not at that time be imagined. 1 believe they gained a victory no less than if they had been ordered to advance instead of to withdraw. As much a distinct military task as a counter-attack was the role they were given of delaying an enemy force several limes larger at fixed points along most of the 500 mile evacuation route, while the remaining British troops fell back on the beaches and embarked. Not only did they fulfil the part to the letter, but in addition they inflicted casualties which made our own seem negligible, and at the same time escaped as a force still intact, ready to fight again. That series of covering operations, carried out coolly and systematically under ceaseless pressure all the time, and before the gathering weight of the enemy forces, may well be regarded in the light of a New Zealand victory. Only in a few sidelights did the New Zealand operations in Greece hpld anything of the aura of spectacular unorthodoxy with which the name Anzac is apt to be associated by people who do not know these men. The main thread of the story of the campaign as I saw it was a sequence of tense hours and days in which coolness, endurance, discipline, and high morale combined to form a barrier which enemy. violence and weight of numbers could not break. German Expectations I remember an Austrian prisoner, one of 150 taken by Wellington infantrymen, telling me that they expected to walk with comparative ease through the opposing line after the Luftwaffe had paved the way with intensive bombing and strafing, designed for moral as well as physical damage. There was no need to tell him that method would not wash there. The promise of splendid things to come lay in the fact that from the nightmarish withdrawal journeys through Greece, our brigades emerged unbroken, and able to turn and fight again and again, until the last stand was made with backs to the sea. Significant, too, was the mastery the New Zealanders showed over enemy troops on the early occasions when they met them without the preoccupation of withdrawal operations; also the courage and initiative displayed by parties and individual soldiers who had to find their own way out of Greece. But now the Crete campaign* overshadows Greece as the sternest testing ground for human endurance that history has ever known. There our men on the ground foughi not only the enemy on the ground; but also the enemy in the air. While Britain saw a lull In the air war which may have been significant, the sky over Crete was filled from dawn to dark with the black crosses of the Luftwaffe insignia. German aeroplanes hammered the anti-air-craft defences until few were left, and then to all intents and purposes the sky was theirs. With numbers and violence that grew, rather than diminished, they dropped down to the roads, villages and groves in endless low-flying swarms, always within a few minutes call of their ground forces, and constantly seeking to immobilise and unnerve their opposition. Our men had to fight them, and not with guns but with sheer stoical enduranceValue of Bayonet What I thought most remarkable about the battle for Crete was the extreme contrast it presented between the ultra-modern, almost supernatural, methods the Germans employed to gain a footing there, and the old style hand to hand fighting with which the New Zealanders so successfully engaged them. Armchair tacticians who in the last few years have done their best to bury the bayonet as an outdated infantry weapon would have been amazed at the continual use of bare steel. The Germans showed time after time that they simply could not face it, although it was often noticed that they were quick to reform and renew heavy automatic fire after being scattered by bayonet charges. The psychological effect was undeniable, and more than that, many casualties were inflicted by steel. The second noteworthy feature was the fine conduct of troops, untrained as infantrymen, but plunged into battles no less fierce than those of regular riflemen. Clerks, signallers, drivers, technicians, all the rest of those specialists who, in normal warfare, may never fire a shot, lay out in forward posts, took part in patrol work, even bayonet charges—some of them without bayonets. Mostly they had been formed into rifle companies before the invasion began; but many afterwards turned riflemen voluntarily, or through necessity. No praise, however, is too high tor the regular infantrymen, Maori arid pakeha alike. All in Crete shared the strain of constant air attacks; but on top of that our fighting men carried a tremendous burden of fatigue, accumulated after sleepless nights, extreme physical exertion, and irregular meals. It was a miracle that gave them the strength and willpower for the last fighting withdrawal on foot across the island. The miracle was inside them—the stuff they are made of.