WITH GREEK GUERRILLAS

Evening Star, Issue 25324, 4 November 1944, Page 11

WITH GREEK GUERRILLAS

NEW ZEAIAHOERS' REMARKABLE EXPERIENCES (N.Z.E.F. Official News Service.) LONDON, November 2. _ As mile alter mile of Greek territory is liberated, names may now be revealed and extraordinary adventures described of several New Zealanders who played distinguished parts in liaison activities and organising guerrilla warfare behind the German lines. Nearly all have been decorated for, their work, and they are now widely' scattered. Two New Zealand engineers, Colonels C. E Barnes, D. 5.0., M.C., Wellington, and A. Edmunds, M.C., Taikapuna, belonged to the first British party to land in Greece. Colonel Barnes is regarded as jpne of the most versatile saboteurs the war has produced. He was in charge of the party that blew up the ' Gorgopotamos 'bridge on the main Salonika-Athens railway. The purpose and effect of this successful job was to disrupt the flow of vital supplies to ltonnnel in North Africa.

When the name of Captain D. Stott, of Auckland, appeared in a New Zealand honours list with the award of double D.S.O. few people, even his closest friends, had the slightest idea how he had won them. Stott was another member of this remarkable force and a leading figure in some of its most extraordinary exploits. One of them in which he took a prominent part was among the most daring of the war the destruction of the iEsopos railway viaduct \ while the Germans were actually at work repairing it. This venture looked so hazardous that a strong band of guerrillas declared it was impossible. Stott's party, however, decided to attack with stealth rather than force. By night they let themselves down ropes into a gorge near the bridge, and Stott laid charges on it as the Germans worked only a few yards away. To climb into the girders, in fact, he used the very scaffolding they had erected for the repairs they were carrying out. Then Stott's party, which consisted of only four officers and two sergeants, blew both the bridge and the German repair gang sky high. How Stott became part of the British mission in Greece is a story in itself. As a sergeant in a New Zealand unit he was wounded in Crete and flown by the Germans to a hospital in Athens. There he met another wounded New Zealander, Rohert Morton, of Helensville, who helped to nurse Stotft back to health. They were both transferred to the same prisoner-of-war camp, and from there they made what is beieved to be the first daylight escape _ ever carried out in Greece. They simply cleared a barbed-wire fence with a running jump, and, though fired at by sentries, got away and eventually reached Alexandria in a. caique. Stott and Morton felt so indebted to the Greeks for helping them to get away that they determined to go back. That is how they came to join this specfal force. Morton was commissioned while in Greece, and won the D.C.M. Other New Zealand soldiers who evaded the Germans in Greece became attached to the British mission there, including Sergeant Lou Northover, Wanganui, who was trained by the mission in sabotage work.