ESCAPE FROM BELGRADE

Southland Times, Issue 24426, 5 May 1941, Page 5

ESCAPE FROM BELGRADE

Journalist’s Amazing

Adventure

(Rec. 10.15 p.m.) LONDON, May 4. The Daily Mail’s correspondent, Terence Atherton, has arrived at Alexandria a month after escaping from Belgrade. He is the only British journalist to get out of Yugoslavia. Mr Atherton reveals that from the morning of the German onslaught, when the Belgrade War Office was bombed and destroyed, the Yugoslav General Staff was never in contact with the army it was supposed to be directing. Fifth columnists and Germans destroyed almost the entire Yugoslav telephone and telegraph system, after which General Simovitch’s only means of communication for 10 vital days Was a small portable British-owned radio.

Mr Atherton, accompanied by three American journalists and a Yugoslav sailor, seized a tiny open boat on the Yugoslav coast. It was equipped with a sail and an outboard motor, and in this boat they began an astonishing journey. They succeeded in running the gauntlet of the Italian Navy and Air Force from Montenegro to Corfu. Once they passed through part of the Italian Navy convoying troopships near Durazzo.

The five sailed on southward from Corfu, but an Italian plane machinegunned and sank the boat off Parga. A Greek naval trawler took on the occupants. Later five Stukas dive-bombed the trawler off Patras. The Yugoslav sailor was killed and Mi - Atherton was

wounded in the knee, but landed at Patras and took a train for Corinth. German planes machine-gunned the train, wounding two of the American journalists. The party two nights later reached a tiny port where the navy was embarking troops.