Larrikins in Khaki Page 10

Prime Minister Menzies went to London and joined a meeting of the British War Cabinet on 24 February 1941. At this first meeting Winston Churchill said that they ‘had to reach an important decision, namely whether to open a new theatre of war in Greece’. Churchill dominated this discussion, which ended with unanimous approval for ‘the despatch of military assistance to Greece’ providing Australia and New Zealand agreed to the use of their forces. Menzies was dubious about the plan, but did not push his doubts at the time. Winston Churchill had form for involving Commonwealth troops in risky military ventures as he had in World War I—sending British Empire troops to the Dardanelles, ending in the defeat at Gallipoli with horrendous casualties.

  Menzies remained uneasy about the possibility that Britain’s great wartime leader was again pushing Commonwealth troops into another military fiasco. So was Arthur Fadden, the acting prime minister. The Labor opposition was not informed that Australian troops were committed to Greece until six weeks later, and then only because of an impending press release by the British authorities. Australia had yet again already swung into line on behalf of the Commonwealth. Australian troops had started leaving Alexandria for Greece on 6 March! Earlier, on 18 February, General Sir Archibald Wavell, commander of British forces in the Middle East, had told Blamey of the impending move of Australian and New Zealand troops to Greece. Strangely, Blamey did not express his doubts and warn Canberra about the risk of the proposal until three weeks later. His cablegram was not discussed by the War Cabinet until April, by which time Australia was irrevocably committed.

  At least things began well, when 58,000 Australian, New Zealand and British troops were landed in Greece without a single casualty. Elements of the Sixth Division—including Private Bob ‘Hooker’ Holt’s 2/3rd Battalion—were among the first out of the blocks for Greece, embarking from Alexandria on 18 March. Holt sailed on HMS Gloucester, where troops were ‘packed in like sardines’ below decks.

  They disembarked in Piraeus (the port of Athens) and marched through the cobblestoned streets of the working-class area, as crowds cheered them enthusiastically, to their camp at Daphne 10 miles into the countryside. Bob’s unit camped in tents among trees. ‘After the dust and heat of the Western Desert the green grass and clean air was doubly appreciated.’

  Whenever a move was on, the army issued troops with bully beef and biscuits, and the biscuits invariably shattered. When they reached Daphne the soldiers emptied the broken biscuits from their ration pouches by the side of the road. The next morning they were amazed to see hordes of respectable-looking old women stooping and picking up the broken biscuits that had been thrown away.

  This was the Australians’ first realisation that food of any description was in short supply and that meat was very nearly unprocurable. To make ends meet, quite a few families living around the camp sold homemade wine, the pungent Greek white wine retsina, and a sweet red wine, mavrodaphne, from their homes. The Greeks were suffering under inflation. The drachma had once been worth 5 shillings, but by the time the Australians arrived it was worth about a half-penny. When the war ended the drachma was worthless, with millions to the pound sterling.

  Holt recalled after a visit to the paymaster, they went on a day’s leave to Athens with pockets full of drachma.

  There were very few men on the streets, apart from cripples and war wounded from the front in Albania. Everything was grey and the people appeared to be undernourished. This did not stop the crowds from cheering and clapping a march of boys and girls in the uniform of the National Youth Organisation. The casualty lists were read out from the street corners and it was touching to hear the women crying and screaming.

  We were outside a crowded brothel in Piraeus and there were quite a few harsh words spoken to a young Greek who was importuning AIF men. He came up to us and in broken English asked for something. Thinking he was a tout, we told him to piss off, but then one of us called him back and asked him to speak slowly. It turned out he knew our battalion’s chocolate and green colour patches and he was asking if anyone knew the whereabouts of his brother Peter Tambakis. His family had not heard from Peter for months and he had not arrived home, where there was to be a family reunion. Peter was an ex-10 Platoon man, an officer’s batman, and had been killed in action at Bardia. The young Tambakis was very upset, and this incident left us in the same boat.

  As soldiers do, they had a look at some of the cafes and houses of ill fame in Athens and realised that most of the girls were not really prostitutes (not that that stopped them), but working in the brothels to get enough to eat.

  Signaller Ken Clift and his 16th Brigade also landed at Piraeus.

  It was a beautiful spring day when we disembarked at Piraeus. We were smartly turned out in shirts, shorts, slouch hats, and puttees. Members of the German Legation were at the wharf, no doubt observing our numbers and armaments. We marched through the streets of Port Piraeus besieged by pretty girls who threw flowers and ran alongside the troops offering sweets and small glasses of wine. Everywhere in Greece, ‘The Woodpecker Song’ was very popular. Every man, woman and child knew the words which had become a parody and, when translated, was very derogatory regarding Il Duce (Mussolini) and cast some reflection on his looks and parentage. It wasn’t long before members of the AIF improvised their own ribald ditty in similar vein to compete, and when the Sixteenth Brigade eventually drove north they sang their own version, which began:

  When we meet that Musso guy,

  We’ll piss right in his eye.

  We had rather root him

  Than salute him.

  Bloody old Mussolini.

  Like Private Bob Holt’s 2/3rd Battalion, Clift’s 16th Brigade also camped at Daphne. Holt’s camp was situated in a pine forest with a tiny village only a few hundred yards away. After their evening meal, Tom Brown and Bob strolled down to the village and had a couple of glasses of wine in the sunshine, sitting at tables outside a cafe with chickens chasing in and around their legs. They were still waiting for their equipment, arms and stores to be unloaded before heading north on a reconnaissance. In the meantime they hitched a ride into Athens, and briefly glimpsed the Acropolis and the Parthenon as they made their way to the main square, ‘which has a name similar in pronunciation to “pneumonia”’. From then on the ‘Pneumonia Square’ was used to designate the centre of the city by the Australians.

  We had drawn our pay in Greek drachmas and had large rolls of currency stuffed into our pockets. The populace viewed us much as they would millionaires. We had very little time to enjoy ourselves and made the most of it as though it was to be our last hour! The keg beer served in all the cafes was very good—similar to Aussie draft but it didn’t seem as strong. It was cheap, cold and inviting so we drank and ate our fill in the sunshine and enjoyed the hospitality of our Greek allies and I’m sure this memory will live with us until the end of time.

  They were less complimentary about the average Greek conscript who was clearly poorly trained, equipped, fed and paid, and Holt felt that their military education was lacking. They looked forlorn and abject, ‘a one sandshoe and one galoshes job’. They did not have a chance against the Germans, despite the excellence of some of their units like the Evzones who, smartly dressed in their uniforms and kilts topped with pom-pom berets, proudly did credit to Greece. But the Greek conscripts were friendly and seemed eternally grateful that the Australians had arrived to assist their nation.

  They went to great lengths to show their appreciation although the AIF invariably ended up by shouting the drinks. They were not mean, in fact they were extremely generous when they could be but, let’s face it, they were also extremely poor.

  Later we had plenty of opportunity to observe these simple loyal peasants as we went north. They had a mixture of small arms which must’ve come out of the Ark, a few ancient trucks, a conglomeration of bandoliers, different sized ammunition, some mules—and Christ only knew who fed them. However, they had unbounded faith in Greece and optimism for the future in thei
r ability to drive off the aggressors. God help them, we thought, the poor misguided bastards!

  Greece at the stage was a dictatorship. Although they had no jurisdiction over the British or Australian troops, the Greek government was extremely severe on their own troops, who were suspected of any major military crimes such as desertion or cowardice in the face of the enemy. From Athens to Albania, to the borders of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, a shooting squad operated without benefit of court martial for the miscreants. Whether they were guilty or not, they would hold a public shooting.

  On 6 April, Germany invaded Greece from the north. Hooker Holt and his 2/3rd Battalion, who had only spent a few days in the comparative luxury of the Daphne camp, were put on a train to Larisa in central Greece to the north-west, inland from the Gulf of Salonica that was used as a staging area for Greek troops on their way to the Albanian front.

  At Larisa, early every day the Australians would see drafts of Greek reinforcements marching off to the war. The soldiers were dressed in poor quality drab uniforms with quite a few of them wearing captured Italian helmets and assorted pieces of foreign equipment. In their ranks were boys, still dressed in their blue-and-white Youth Organisation uniform of short pants, shirt and forage cap. Holt recalled, ‘It was pitiful to see these marching men and boys, usually led by Greek officers in flash uniforms riding horses.’

  The Greek police in their well-cut uniforms and ankle-length grey overcoats were armed with swords and rifles, were arrogant and very unpopular. The first the newly arrived Australians knew of a curfew being in force in Larisa was when the police fired at some of them for being on the street after 10 pm. ‘When their shots were returned they took a back seat and didn’t bother us again.’

  Holt’s unit had the enviable task of guard duties at a very substantial army food dump close to their camp. Their procedure for acquiring and on-selling the tins of various goodies was simple and effective. When they emptied one of the wooden crates, they sealed it up again and replaced it in the stack.

  Some remarkable elderly eccentrics had survived the Australian recruitment process as the need for more fighting soldiers became apparent. A 10 Platoon man, Corporal Stan ‘Monty’ Montefiore, was a veteran of the First World War and had fought in the International Brigade on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. He had dined too well at a roadside cafe one evening, and on leaving the premises he happened to encounter General Sir Thomas Blamey and ‘his tribe of shit kickers’ all riding past on horseback. Full of joie de vivre and Greek wine, Monty called out, ‘How are you going Tom, you white-whiskered old bastard?’ This was an unusual greeting to the man who headed Australia’s army. Blamey reined in his horse and told one of his side-kicks ‘to tear the stripes off that man and put him under close arrest’.

  Signaller Ken Clift’s 16th Brigade only had a few days to enjoy the delights of Daphne camp, south of Athens, before they were trucked to the far north of Greece to the Veria Pass near the Yugoslavian border, to hold it against an invading German army. Judging by what he had seen of the poor calibre of the scratch Greek army, Clift knew that if the Germans had entered the war, ‘no matter how valiant the effort by the Greeks, the Huns must prevail for the following reasons’:

  At this time, the Germans, after the fall of France, were not engaged in any form of land fighting and therefore could put unlimited forces in the Balkans or anywhere else in Europe. Their German equipment including armour outmatched ours pro rata by a great number. Russia had not yet come into the war—a pity! Because of the Battle of Britain, the RAF were entirely engaged in guarding its homeland and—oh brother!—the Germans had plenty of planes as we would find out later.

  The few days they’d had in Daphne allowed the Australians to pick up some basic essentials of the Greek language. Soomee was bread, vino was of course wine, aqua as in Italian was water, and as usual the language of love between boy and girl needed no translation. As they had plenty of drachmas, their popularity was unbounded in the little hamlets and villages visited on the trek north, camping in picnic style beside the streams each evening and going to the local inn and shouting the bar in the smoky little adobe village hotels, drinking sweet mavrodaphne wine and conversing in sign language with the local peasants who ‘seemed delighted with this, and of course our undoubted ability to provide cheer for them without any obvious injury to our pockets or theirs’.

  They halted at Veria Pass, pitched tents and decided on some reconnaissance. They noticed seven Wellington bombers of the Royal Air Force, heading north—the first and only British planes they saw in Greece. ‘Later in Crete, we sighted one only! A lone Hurricane.’ This, of course, created some AIF bitterness towards the RAF, generally referred to as ‘Blue Orchids’ by the Aussie troops, who also claimed their initials stood for ‘Rare As Fuck’.

  At Veria we camped beside a river flowing with cold mountain water. We had since discarded our smart shorts and were now garbed in service dress with greatcoats. The weather was bitterly cold but I must proudly assert that Australian troops are easily the most hygienic soldiers, as everyone would bathe in the rivers despite the intense cold. During this period AIF Headquarters, in all solemnity, sent round a rough screed reminding troops of the small wog called ‘Willie Arris’ that would crawl up our rectums if we persisted in bathing in the Greek rivers, but in a very short time we were much more concerned about German tracer bullets invading our scrotums than ‘Willie Arris’s’ activities. We never did find out what these bugs were—something like hookworms, I believe.

  The 16th Brigade wasn’t sure whether it would be sent to Albania to assist the Greek effort there against the Italians, or against Hitler’s threatened moves from the Balkans. ‘Hitler—presumably after a bit of carpet chewing—decided to “bore it up us” and sent his crack troops, plus support, through Yugoslavia to show Musso how to deal with those cheeky colonials—“Churchills Cowboys” as Lord Haw Haw called us.’ There was only token resistance in Yugoslavia by Marshal Tito’s army.

  Records show that Germany had allocated 30 divisions to this campaign, but eventually only used 23. The AIF had two brigades—approximately 1/35th of the German force used against them—plus the British, New Zealand and Greek troops.

  The first real snowfall that Ken Clift and his mates ever experienced was during their deployment in the mountains above the Struma Valley, soft flakes falling on their trucks and tents.

  A small inn tucked away in the mountains, barely a mile away, beckoned and Clift and his mates trudged across the snowcapped hills to quench their thirst and curiosity.

  The inn was full of smoke and villagers garbed in rough sheepskin jackets and woollen hats like people in an old biblical picture. These friendly people welcomed us like brothers and in broken English and sign language assured us that they would give the Huns and Musso’s boys short shrift should they make an appearance. A rough home guard had been formed by the simple peasant folk, the accent being on defence against parachute troops! Their equipment consisted of ancient blunderbusses—a bell-mouthed type of shot gun—pitchforks, wooden clubs and so on. Most of them were illiterate or semi-illiterate so perhaps their optimism would have been shaken had they been able to read a newspaper. However, we weren’t there to be wet blankets so we fished out plenty of drachmas, put them on the rough bench that served as a bar and drank our fill along with some ‘soomee’ [bread] and stuff that looked like popcorn, to act as blotting paper to absorb the plonk we were downing—rough wine with the taint of pine trees.

  Snow had stopped falling the following morning. A white mantel covered the pine forest and surroundings. It was crisp and cold and away in the distance cooking fires could be seen as the troops waited hungrily for the tea, bread and stew that eventually arrived in insulated ‘hot boxes’.

  During the night, Australian patrols contacted some Germans who had crossed the border. A few shots were exchanged but no casualties reported. Later in the morning scouts reported a few small enemy parties in the valley below
their position. Patrols from the battalions went out and a battery of artillery behind them decided to stir up ‘Adolf ’s Boys’ with a few well-placed shots. As Clift recalled: ‘The roar of the shells sounded like express trains passing over our heads, and in the clear crisp air could be seen exploding with a “spang” below the pine forests bordering the valley below, sending up spumes of surf-like spray which echoed and re-echoed throughout the surrounding mountains.’

  German recce planes started to make their appearance and hardly an hour passed during daylight without them. They were immune from air attack as there were no Allied aircraft about.

  ‘From the air, we came to expect and got a nice old “pizzling” almost continuously from this point on. Some of the Hun aircrews must’ve had a sense of humour—Teuton’s aren’t supposed to possess such a trait—because quite often after dropping their bomb loads, they would unroll several packs of toilet paper and let them come floating down like streamers to the enraged and frustrated Diggers below.’

  News of the desert fighting in Africa and the Seventh and Ninth Divisions’ retreat from Benghazi came in, and added to the Australian brigade’s resentment. ‘Little did we know, at this time, just what we were in for.’

  Since arriving in Larisa, Bob Holt’s unit had advanced further north, right to the border of Yugoslavia. They rejoined their assembled battalion, climbed into trucks and moved north into the mountains. They eventually reached their positions and dug in the forward defence location overlooking a small white village in Yugoslavia. It was bitterly cold and uncomfortable. ‘Fetching, carrying, digging and trying to load Bren gun magazines in the dark and freezing weather was no joke.’

  It appeared that the Germans had broken through the Greek army and they were in danger of being cut off. A bundle of mules and donkeys with their wooden pack saddles had been requisitioned from the villages. They loaded company gear onto the animals and had a quick lesson on driving donkeys from a Greek. ‘To make the donkeys move or go faster, you stuck a pick handle up its bum and shouted “hoosta hrrr” and away the donkey went. It worked too, but then I suppose if I had a pick handle stuck up my fundamental orifice every so often, I’d move too.’