AN EPIC JOURNEY

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 76, 10 September 1941, Page 7

AN EPIC JOURNEY

SOLDIERS DRIVE A TRAIN TROOPS IN CATTLE TRUCKS | A passenger on the famous 300mile train-ride in Greece during the evacuation after the fine stand the New Zealanders made at Mount Olympus was a New Zealand dispatch rider, who collided with a British convoy on a road in Greece i and has been in hospital ever since. • In fac.t he has been in three hosi I pital.s, and is surprisingly cheerful . ! about it all, in spite of the fact that . j he is still a stretcher case. , | That train journey through a dcso- [ lrted countryside and villages smashed ' to pieces by ruthless bombings has be- • j come historic. It took 36 hours to do ! the 300 miles, but the resource of a • j New Zealander and an Australian . saved hundreds of troops who had no I way of getting to the coast. ! “We travelled in cattle trucks and we - | were bombed pretty well all the time ii by the enemy,” said the former disj patch rider. "I wasn’t feeling too good, las I had just come out of hospital after I being fed on morphia for a fortnight, ' but we made it all right.” ] He explained that the train had been j left by the Greek train crew, and there ) was no one to drive it. “An Aussie and a New Zealander had a look at the engine—they both had seen one boI fore, but only from the outside—and in ! they jumped,” he said. ‘‘We all loaded Jinto it, and off we went. It was a slow e j journey, and I’ve got an idea the Greek ■ I traffic signals caused the driver and his _ | fireman a little bother.” e! SHIPS BOMBED , This soldier was on a ship that was [{ headed for Crete to pick up the e wounded, but an air attack prevented _ it from doing so. The ship was bombed . along with other ships in the vicinity, J and a barge alongside it was shattered (1 and sunk by a bomb. lt On the journey by cattle truck in r Greece he had as a companion a Gef- ’ man prisoner of war, who was a Storm Trooper and a member of Hitler’s r picked bodyguard. He was a big man, more than six feet in height, and he wore an arm-band with the name „ “Adolf Hitler” on it. )f “lie was a talkative sort of chap on Lt train,” he said, “and was all the time telling us when Hitler was going to win the war and when he was going 0 to get home. He was woundeu in the thigh, and when they eventually took him into hospital he refused to say anything. He must have beer, thinking " thing, over.”