TROOPS' BRAVERY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 101, 1 May 1941, Page 9

TROOPS' BRAVERY

DURING RETIREMENT

EYE-WITNESS ACCOUNT

HARASSED FROM AIR

LONDON, April 30,

A dispatch received from an agencycorrespondent who has just returned to Cairo from the Greek battle-front gives an eye-witness account of the dive-bombing and machine-gunning by German aircraft of the British communications across the Plain of Thessaly,. The casualties caused by these attacks were very few, says the correspondent, but the road running across the plain was pock-marked every few hundred yards with bomb craters. The British artillery commanded the mountain passes, but, says the correspondent, that availed nothing once ammunition and even rations began to fall short owing to ,the disruption of, communications by air attack. According to this correspondent, there was very little transport to get the British troops back from the Olympus line to the shorter line from Thermopylae and Corinth, and many of them had to fight their way back to the new line on foot.

The correspondent, describes the bravery of the British and Anzac troops during the withdrawal. He says he saw a German plane drop a string of bombs on the centre of a road. They buried-a dispatch rider and his motor-cycle, but in half an hour he had been dug out and was continuing his journey.