ANZAC DAY A YEAR AGO

Franklin Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 46, 24 April 1942, Page 4

ANZAC DAY A YEAR AGO

HOW THE M.Z.E.F. HELD UP THE HUN

(By Robin T. Miller)

This vividly-phrased story by Robin T. Miller, Official Correspondent with the N.Z.E.F., now convalescing in Auckland, tells how the new Anzacs made history in Greece a year ago. If is of Anzac Day, toil. when the sons of Anzacs made a name for themselves comparable only with that earned by their fathers 2G years ago.

J can see the red blooms of wild poppies sprinkled through a green cornfield when r think of that day a year ago. And the red of blood—that was poppy-red, too —showing through die while dressing on a gunner's arm. “Hell!” he said, “it's Atizac Day.” “So it is,” said T. “Queer.” LI was a nice day. as 1 remember it. Quiter than most.

There were times when you could hear the birds singing for an hour or so at a stretch. (It was wonderful the

way the birds took it. though later, in

' Crete, the sky was so black with i planes somebody declared he saw j sparrows limping sorefooted back aj long Ihe made ! Bui this was Greece, and il was

tough enough. The sky was clear and

blue when I woke at sunrise that day and looked up at il through the

branches of a stunted fir that had served me for a roof. There was some-

thing pretty and springlike even in

the look of the first flights of Dormers and Messerschmil Is, gold in the early sunshine, as they soared over us towards the embarkation routes and beaches.

The gunner rubbed a stubbly chin

with his good arm

“Fascinating blankety things, at .this distance.” he said.

1 think we may as well cherish April 2 b as a day of remembrance of the new as well as the old Anzacs. Nothing exceptional happened to us in Greece last year on the day itself: but the smoke of powder and fire had hardly cleared from the font of the cliffs at Thermopylae and the German army. 1 suppose, was burying its dead and linking its wounds—more dead, maybe, and deeper wounds than it had suffered in any battle since the w ir began.

How the Game Stood

Then. too. we knew pretty well how the game stood. If its aim had been

to hold the Germans out of this corner

of Europe the expedition had failed. If it had been meant as a gesture of admiration for the Greeks, a sign of

j good faith towards a friend and ally. , a sign to the world that free men could | stand unafraid in the face of tremeni dous odds, then it had been gloriously ! successful. ; Now it was drawing to an end. You ; could say that technically it had ended ! days before —tin* moment when if had i been decided to evacuate the British forces. Vet for the New Zealand Division ' that was mil the end. It was rather the beginning. Evacuation of the ; R.E.F. was going to be difficult. The enemy would do everything in his power to lire veil I us from getting away. Willi his air force lie would try io block our roads, smash our ports, sink our ships, lie would push his army hard and last in an effort to overtake and rut us off. Somebody had to slow him up —to slay up there between him and the ports and benches, punch him hard and often as lie pressed down the highways. make him slop for breath. Every day lie was delayed thousands more men would he gelling a.way in comparative safety. This was a rearguard ,jub for a force with plenty of spirit, skill and morale. After seeing the rest of the expedition safely away. j| would have to see !!- : self off. brigade by brigade, and then !hal la lion by ha Ila 1 ion. until the lasi company Mf the lasi battalion slipped i mil from under Nazi noses and got ; away —if it could. | The three brigade groups of Hie : New Zealand division were the mainj slay of the rearguard. Hardly had the | enemy made contact with us in Hie i mountain passes beside Olympus Ilian I withdrawal orders flashed over Hie army wires—puzzling and disappointing io men who had just thrown their ’first punch, at Nazi troops and found il a killer. Withdrawal was no fault of limbs. Orders were orders. From Ilia I moment on. at strategic points all the way from the Olympus line to the Oorinth Gann!, our brigades fought delaying and covering actions whose success saved men and lives by the thousand.

Fighting for Time

They toil, ghl like the full-blooded men they are in passes and valleys and plains drenched with ldood of ancient conquerors and defenders.

They wen' lorn, hut never broken, by Ihe bomb blest,s and bullet sprays of the Luftwaffe, growing in. strength as British air power diminished.

They fought near the beaches, with their backs to the sea.fighting for time but coolly, until night should come and bring with it the ships of I lie navy.

They are well worth remembering, these men and those days. And it's easy to remember.

# *• # # The young Austrian infantryman looked at me gravely. I had asked him. as he came trudging up the winding pass road with (tie remnants of a Nazi battalion shattered by Wellington men near Servia. on the Olympus line, what the Hermans thought of their prospects in the (iroere campaign. “We shall be in Alliens in one week'.” lie said. i had to laugh. “That will be the day." I told him. Technically, he lost the point. If was just under a fortnight before I he swastika Hew on the Acropolis. But on the day we talked—April lb—l thought he was crazy. If he had said “one month" f would still have laughed. Things were going reasonably well. We had crown user! to being divebombed and shelled —at one and the same time, on occasions—and the ene-

ray's shock troops had been rudely taken aback in their first sorties against the Olympus line. Before the chattering Vickers guns of our mach-ine-gun battalion the crack Adolf Hitler Regiment had Jeff many dead tying in the spring slush beside the road from Yugoslavia a few days earlier. Our cavalry and artillery, with delaying hit-and-run tactics, had hampered and damaged another German force feeling its way down the coastal route from Salonika.

Now, with an encouraging measure of success, we were holding the mountain passes against a triple thrustone behind the little town of Servia, another in the shadow of hallowed Olympus itself, the third along- the railway line that ran between I hi*. great peak and the sea.

With the suddenness of all bad news word came that the left flank of the line, held by valiant but war-weary Greeks, had been turned. Our rear was threatened. The passes must he evacuated. On a wet, dreary night the leap-frogging backward movement began.

Sound Effects

The echoing crack and red Hashes of field guns covering our departure, the squelch of sodden hoofs on sodden tracks, the rumble of endless blackedout columns of transport, the boom of gelignite as sappers blasted bridges sky-high behind us—these were the sound effects. It was dangerous, dramatic, often violent. The real' parly of the brigade I was will) was cut off by Nazi tanks before it bad cleared the mountains. A lone Auckland battalion, overrun in lije storied Vale of Tempo, bad to fight ils way rdear. Gunnel's battled in the open, often at poinl-blank range. There were hair-breadth escapes. And when sunrise Hooded the plains with light the black bombers came over looking for us.

Progress had been painfully slow since we groped our way through the smouldering, shattered ruins of Larissa. Then two Australian trucks started the worst traffic jam of the lot.

When the column stopped, they stayed stopped—for breakfast. We went up and told them to gel moving, or gel out of the way. or we’d “roll lire hlankety things into the ditch.” But it was 100 tale. Somebody tried to cut past the block, and within minutes the road was jammed tight with a double line of vehicles. “Jerry will he over and spot us for a moral.” We swung our car off the road into an open field.

We were lucky. There was only one bomber. The pilot look tiis time. II must have looked funny to him. the sight of those ant-like figures scrambling for dear life away from both sides of the road. He turned and laid his eggs along the jam. The black earlli showered upwards in noisy geysers. There was only one hit. and a truck look fire with a dull explosion.

Every Tenth Minute

Our umpteenth stop that day was ordered by a sapper. “Off Ibe road, and disperse.” lie shouted. “Bridge gone —Jerry smacked it properly, and we've got a truck load of 'jelly" somewhere in the mess." We turned into a Held. At least it looked like a field, but il was a marsh, and the ear sank up to ils axles. We called a truck over lo tow us out. and the truck sank:. Soon we were three. II hmk iis an hour In gel out. Lvery lentil minute two black bombers lazed over and back, bombing each way. The soft ground shook like blancmange. We heaved and sweated and swore.

“Hell's i ’.orner" was ;i hut spol. lon. II was an easy ;md rurrent largei— a sharp bend on a hilltop. We Ihmigh: we mighl get ai'iiimd il belween Imiiib-

Bul we Wi re dead on il when Hie Ira flic slopned mice mere. After a while somebody said: “iion'l innk new. those nasty airmen are here again." We shrank into <nir fin hats. The first slick of bombs rocked the ear but missed the mad. As the planes turned for a second run. we began to move again. Move? We crawled. A second was a minule. and the bombers were coming back. They roared low. machine-gunning now. Ini) Iheir explosive bullets only peppered the roadside.

We were jusl 100 late that afternoon If) go up in smoke and rubble and dust with a pretty little town called Phnrsala. The dive bombers dropped on it like vultures. It wasn't the first or Ihe last lime I have seen a non-slrat-egir town smashed that way. I still fail lo undersland why they do it. If you can't visualise the effect, ask a Napier earthquake survivor. We Were Hitting Back.

This kind of IJijnir was happening lo us all day and every day: P,ut we were hilling hark. On the eve of Anzac May. 10 iI. Hie smoke clouds of bailie gathered over Thermopylae as we hit back again for 12 solid hours. And maybe tin? ghost of Leonidas, who fought there centuries ago in very similar circumstances, looked dawn and smiled on us.

Some call il Hie Baltic of .Molos. and this name locales il more accurately. But il look place .just in front of Thermopylae. I he narrow pass bid ween the cliffs and waters of Lamia Hull', where ancient ft reeks held out to Ihe last, man under a sky darkened by the shafts of I hi 1 Persians. Leonidas would surely have smiled, tils ears would have been filled not with the whistle of arrows but with the screech of high-explosive shells streaming across the tussocky plain. He would have looked down on gunners bending their sweating, grimy, bared backs lo Ihe business of killing: on infantrymen lying in their shallow weapon pits, lying in wail for the first infillering enemy parlies: on machinegunners slashing al transport concentrations and grey troop masses with long-range volleys of lead: on screaming Slukns and barking Messersclunifls angrily bent on silencing and destroying. II was an artillery show above all else. Al'lerwards we figured that we must have had at least 100 guns in action, ranging in size from our antitank two-pounders In British 00pounders. Probably .‘>o.ooo rounds of

ammunition were flung from their hot muzzles between eight in the morning and eight at night. Artillerymen have an expression,

“gunfire” which means “ramming ’em home and letting ’em go” just as fast as the gun crews can do it. I doubt whether if has ever meant as much as it did on that afternoon at Moios. The guns were tiring for the last time—they were to be destroyed after the action —and so there was literally ammunition to burn.

Enjoying It All!

“Gunfire tilt you’re told to stop.” Gan you picture the scene ’ Gun crews toiling under their screens of netting and branches, stripped to the waist, heads singing, eyes reddened, throats dry—hut enjoying it all.

The crack, crack, crack, and the searing blast of shell after shell.

The hot sunshine gleaming on the ever widening litter of yellow shell eases. Troop officers joining in the never-ending job of passing fresh ammunition. ... A colonel bellow-

ing across the valley through his cupped hands when his telephone wire goes dead. . . The frustrated, angry planes roaring overhead in droves, and the guns growing quiet for a moment, only to crash intb action again as soon as the pilots’ backs are turned.

And up there where the road takes a triple bend, three more ‘ib-pounders get their reward for a day of patient waiting. Three black beetles —German medium tanks—come scurrying down the dusty road. . . Let ’em come, tel ’em come. Rumbling into

the first; gun’s sights. . . . Now. The bag here is an even dozen before the day is out —some set on fire, others blown off the road. One Nazi crew climbs out arfiT comes at our gunners with Tommy guns blazing. A Bren in the sergeant-major’s hands lays them low. 'The smoky dusk closes over Thermopylae. shielding the spiking of our guns, the withdrawal of our troops, the movement of transport along the roar] fo Athens.

# -X- -X* * When the sun rose again it was Anzac Day. There was a red poppy in a buttonhole here and there. Some of our men were already on the water hound for Crete. Olliers were driving south across tlio Corinth Canal to embarkation beaches in the Pelepponesus. 1 stayed to see the last rearguard action north of Alliens.

Into the Navy’s Hands

But it would take as long as this again to tell the rest. How we lay doggo in another pass, waiting for the Germans (mightily cautious now) to catch up with us again: bow we named it “Twenty-four-hour Pass” when parachute troops landed behind us and made us stay another day: how we sped through the silent, darkened Athens a few hours before the Nazi occupation: and the slnrv of the last daylight hours on the coast, when our last guns scattered a German column for the last time, and of the quiet hours of darkness, when we handl'd ourselves into the navy’s good keeping

Like sprinkled blond on a green billin'd faille. Hie poppies are blooming a train in the fields of Greece. The noble people we came to low will 'nave laid wiio dowers on the year-old graves of the sons we cherish. Lei us remember them.