FRICTION IN GREECE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXII, Issue 77, 27 September 1941, Page 9

FRICTION IN GREECE

OCCUPYING ARMIES

POPULATION RESISTS

(Rec. 11.30 a.m.) RUGBY, Sept. 26,

The outstanding features of the situation in Greece, said M. Tsouderos, the Greek Prime Minister, in London today, are, first, the ruins of the bombed cities, 19 of which were completely

destroyed; second, widespread hungex! because the. enemy carried off foodstuffs, including even the children's milk; thirdly, the fierce resistance of the whole country by all (available means against aggression; and, fourthly, the unprecedented violence, brutality, and ferocity of the methods employed by the enemy to suppress national sentiment and any feeling of human pride.

The Prime Minister revealed that Italian troops occupying all central and southern Greece numbered 14 divisions, and that friction between them and the Germans was so great that separate feeding arrangements had been made necessary.

POORLY EQUIPPED.

When the Germans arrived in Greece they were poorly equipped with clothing, and even resorted to the seizure of women's underclothing to supply- their needs. Their acts of indiscipline, also, indicated a poor state of morale.

Almost the entire personnel of the Greek air force, including the ground staff, had escaped to Allied territory in the Middle East, and some had taken part in the Syrian fighting. Aircraft previously ordered from the United States was now being delivered to them, but they needed more. Three-quarters of the navy and half of the merchant marine also got away, the rest being sunk. M. Tsouderos described Bulgaria as the "firebrand of the Balkans during the last twenty years." At least 60,000 Greek peasants had been dispossessed in Western Thrace and Eastern Macedonia, and the familiar process of "Bulgarisation" was in full swing.

FOR BETTER RELATIONS

Light was shed on the efforts of Greece to improve ■ relations by M. Tsouderos's revelation that during his visit to Sofia in 1938 he made an offer that Greece would finance a railway linking the Bulgarian system with Salonika where Bulgaria might have a free port, but this generous effort failed.

The Greek Prime Minister, paying a warm tribute of respect and admiration to the gallant British, Australian, and New Zealand troops who fought with unparalleled heroism side by side with their Greek comrades in the battle of Greece on the mainland and in Crete, declared that their splendid courage had more than anything else cemented the ties of undying .friendship which bind the two peoples.—B.O.W.