PROBLEMS OF LIBERATION

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 99, 28 April 1945, Page 11

PROBLEMS OF LIBERATION

ITALY, FRANCE, AND GREECE

"Looking backward is salutary if it serves to strengthen resolve and clear the vision for the future. Reviewed in that,spirit, the experiences of campaigning in three countries—ltaly, France,' and Greece-—during 1944 are a profitable study," writes L. Marsland Gander, a London "Daily Telegraph" special correspondent. "In each case, threading through the multitude of incidents, great and small, the main story is one: the sterry of long, careful planning and preparation, of close attention to detail/of knowledge, painfully acquired; applied with admirable timing. It is a story of success so sudden and overwhelming that it seemed conclusive; success that dazzled, then led to disappointment and anti-climax.

"In each country as it was liberated the people gave themselves to transports of. enthusiasm; theh, as time cooled their sense of relief and joy, they began to think of old political feuds, to ponder sourly upon the continuing hardships of war, anxious to blame somebody for them.

"bLn Italy and the south of France-r----my campaigning on the Western Front has been done with General Patch's Seventh . Army—the enemy was flung into headlong flight; our forces were (rushing forward against a minimum df resistance. Then, in each case, we outstripped supplies, the ■ enemy rallied, and we were checked—by water or mountains, steel and concrete, as much as by the ingrained will to resist which still persists in the German army.

HAPPENINGS IN GREECE. "bin Greece, where the enemy was already carrying out a hasty evacuation when we first landed, the course of military events was somewhat different but the disappointment perhaps greater.

"To me Greece's tragedy is particularly poignant, since the exuberance of our first welcome from all parties— including the EAM and ELAS—is still very fresh in my memory. The ELAS guerrillas strove ..to provide us with guides and to make museum wrecks of motor-cars function again to take us on from stage to stage. "Many people, some of whom must now be numbered among the opponents of our troops called on to .restore order in Athens, lavished positively embarrassing hospitality upon us. They dragged us into their houses, made us eat.their food, and tried to insist upon giving up their own beds for the night. At one cottage I recall near Patras, where we had a typical reception, the last stocks of oil were used to provide a fitful glimmer of light while we partook of a meal of rabbit and macaroni. If only I'd known you fellows were coming three hours earlier I'd have got a chicken,' said Theodore, our host, regretfully. He, like so many of those who invited us to their houses, had been a restaurant keeper in America. His olive-skinned children accepted our presents of sweets round-eyed. They had not.seen 'candies,' Theodore told us, for four years. "He did hot tell us what his politics were. We had come in an ELAS car with an ELAS guide, but at that time all that mattered was that we were British and that, better still, the three of our party, represented respectively England, Australia, and South Africa. "The neighbours came in one by one to marvel at the visitors. A diminutive boy entered slowly with a bunch of marigolds he had gathered and, with much prompting from his elders, presented it to me. We all thought that /the timely arrival of the British had averted civil war. That coincident with the departure of the invaders, was double cause for re30icing to the Greek people.

PAMPHLET OF HOPE. "I have before me one of the numerous pamphlets that were showered upon us which reflects the popular emotion as well as anything It begins with Byron:— The sword, the banner, and the field Glory and Greece around me see! The Spartan borne upon his shield Was not more free. Xt "Passionate words of welcome to the Allied Forces follow. 'We meet you with flowers and tears, with joy and enthusiasm,' it declares 'We promise to continue this great struggle J 1" tll e £ complete destruction of the HitleriE^i and Bulgarian hordes.' This particular pamphlet was issued by the National Unionist Youth of Greece, but their is no doubt that it expressed the feelings of the vast majority. We who were in the vanguard of .the liberating forces had

high hopes. We realised that politics was a national obsession in that country, that rivalries and feuds, inequality and want existed. We knew also that many turbulent, undisciplined elements had been roused, armed and. equipped to fight the Germans. But we had been immensely encouraged by the success of individual British officers who, entrusted with the task of. averting bloodshed between the guerrillas and the Ger-man-.organised Security Police, had succeeded in practically every instance. '"

"In Patras and Athens the surrender of the Security Police was effected quietly, without a shot being fired, after the tension had been eased by the arrival of small British parties. In Corinth, which was surrounded by several thousand ELAS guerrillas thirsting to wreak vengeance on the Security Police, a solitary British captain kept the peace and persuaded 240 guerrillas to hold their fire until the Security Police had been marched off into protective custody. When the peasants talked with us the topic was hatred of the Germans and Italians, not hatred of other political groups. They told us how the Germans and Italians had killed their bees, eaten their cats, donkeys, and mules. In some districts they told us the horrible stories of reprisal massacre.

"It was in Athens where the un- ' controllable hysteria of welcome | reached its highest peaks. Swollen by wartime migration to 2,000,000, the population flung itself into an orgy of i processions, the rival political groups vying to produce the noisiest and the longest. Here, plainly, was a situa-1 tion in which reckless shots might l have the most serious and far-reach-1 ing consequences. They were fired on October 15 when an EDES was I passing an ELAS procession. By whom they were fired is not clear. It is even possible that the shooting was the work of German agents. Six corpses lay in the gutter covered with the flags of the opposing parties, gri-m harbingers of the future. | THE ADVANCE IN ITALY. , "To claim that all three campaigns carry a common lesson for us in a, warning against over-confidence is probably too great a simplification, and it is not easy to point to this or that instance where definite = relaxation of effort occurred. Yet the story is a warning against pinning hope too high, and a call to greater concentration on the war effort. "When Kesselring's columns were fleeing in disorder from Rome, leaving his wrecked and burnt-out transport upon mile after mile of road, the Americans had lost contact with the enemy rearguards. We thought the war in Italy was over—that we should be on the Po in a couple af months. Today, seven months later, after blasting through yet another line—the Gothic Line, more formidable than either the Gustav or the Hitler —our armies, are bogged down in country where the mules sink up to their bellies in mud and we still nave to cross the Po before attacking the new and yet undefined Venetian Line.

VThe Southern France campaign merges into the bigger picture of the Western Front. Suffice it to recall how overjoyed and surprised we were when General Patch's armoured columns raced, with practically no opposition, first through to the Swiss border, then on to Lyons and Besancon. On a stretch of the straight, metalled Besancon road, which I had traversed seven or eight times with impunity, I-was quite-aggrieved to find that a German battery located somewhere in our rear had. although nominally overrun, had the audacity to open fire on our car. I thought of the song, 'He's dead but he won't lie down'; and that, on an infinitely bigger scale, is a reflection which might aptly be applied to Germany today."