Читать книгу For Five Shillings a Day: Personal Histories of World War II - Dr. Campbell-Begg Richard - Страница 11
ОглавлениеThe Italians had invaded Greece from their bases in Albania on 28 October 1940, but were soon being repulsed, and by the end of the year had been driven back into Albania along the whole front. On 6 April 1941 the Germans, in great strength, invaded Greece and Yugoslavia from their bases in Bulgaria. Britain had started landing troops in Greece in early March and had established a line along the Aliakmon River in the north. Yugoslavia surrendered on 17 April, then, with the disintegration of the few Greek divisions on its right, both flanks of the British Army were exposed to the enemy. There was no alternative but to withdraw. Greece surrendered on 24 April and the bulk of the British forces were evacuated on the nights of 24, 25 and 26 April in a variety of naval and merchant ships, which took them to Crete and North Africa.
Major Leonard Thornton had been very much involved in these events. He recalled:
‘The decision was taken, rather reluctantly by the New Zealand Government, to agree to our Division forming part of a small so-called Imperial Force, which was sent to Greece to help the situation. When we look back at it now historically, it was a forlorn hope. There was ourselves, a British and Australian Division, which was to be supplemented with another division, and a British Brigade with rather worn-out tanks. That was the total force, and we were a little concerned to discover, while we were in the process of embarkation, that a planning committee had already been set up in Cairo to work out plans for our evacuation if possible – not a very encouraging sign!
Anyway, we moved up into Greece, Northern Greece, and got ourselves established in a defensive position up there. By this time I had left my role as adjutant in my previous regiment rather to my relief (it was a staff job), and I was now commander of an artillery battery. And so the battle began and it really hardly lasted at all because an overwhelming force of 12 German divisions came in; we fought as well as we could in the Olympic passes on Mount Olympus, and that was where I had my first experience of being under fire in a battle on the Aliakmon River. It was a foregone conclusion; we fell back as rapidly as we could and the battle on the Aliakmon River was really a delaying action, in order to enable the main force to get past us and down to the road back towards Athens. And we fought another battle near Thermopylae where a famous battle had been fought long ago. So round about Hitler’s birthday, which is almost ANZAC Day as far as I can recall, the decision was taken that we should have to evacuate. Jumbo Wilson was the force commander and he, an Englishman who had served with the New Zealanders in the First War, took the decision and it was the right one to take, although it was pretty hard on the Navy. We then made off towards the south as fast as we could, and in three or four days the embarkation was completed.
We had lost, of course, most of our equipment in that evacuation; nothing could be moved in the way of hardware, and it was a very unpleasant campaign to be in because of the fact it was under a totally adverse air situation. We were continuously bombed, strafed from the air throughout the hours of daylight. Mercifully the German Air Force couldn’t do much at night, which meant, at least, that you could get a bit of sleep if you weren’t on the move, but it was very demoralising for the troops not being able to hit back. And I think a lot of men became a little bit jumpy about the business of having to move, having to be out on the roads and so forth. We got ourselves off the beaches; I actually got left behind briefly because I went back to try and souvenir some or get some radio equipment which I thought it was a pity to leave behind, although we had been ordered to do so by the embarkation officer.
However, back on to the beaches, my regiment had already left, which turned out to be a strange stroke of fortune, because most of my regiment, which was now the Fourth Regiment, went on for the defence of Crete, and because I went in a different ship I was moved directly back to Egypt, so I missed the Crete campaign, which was very expensive from a New Zealand point of view.’
Sergeant Richard Kean, Battery NCO of Signals, NZ Artillery, saw it all from a slightly different perspective:
‘We arrived at Piraeus, the port of Athens, disembarked and through Athens to somewhere outside Athens where we stayed under the trees. We stayed there for a while and then moved up through Greece, finally settling in the south of the Olympus Pass, moved on again over the top of the Olympus down the other side, and got in a village just outside Kuphos and camped there. And we dug a fairly good deep hole to house our living quarters and the telephone exchange. Did a bit of scrounging and found stuff, you know, derelict Anderson shelter tops to put over the top of our hut. However, it sufficed when covered with earth, and we got a Greek farmer to plough over the top of it and it couldn’t even be seen.
Richard James Kean
We then moved further on and for some reason, known only to himself, my major decided that he wanted a forward listening post and that was me. Why I don’t know, and when I arrived I could see constant movement, places being bombed and burned, and there was I sitting in the middle of nowhere, just me and the telephone. Then I heard crinkling, crankling rustles coming from the undergrowth. My armament was a .45 revolver, so I drew it and in the prescribed manner, toes and elbows rigid, listening, listening, followed the rustling – and I finally found it, and it was two turtles mating. One of the biggest scares I’ve had in my life!
We were moved up and down all over the place, and finally my battery was detached and sent to the 17th Australian Brigade over on the other coast. I was left on the end of the telephone and wasn’t allowed to close down, although the battery was gone. And I was very worried because the bombers were coming over and there was great holes in the ground there where our guns had been but, finally I got the message to close down. It was dark as hell and all I had was a telephone and a motorbike, and I got back to our HQ and the colonel said, “Oh, sorry, Sergeant, I forgot all about you – your battery went over the hill and if you can find that number three post on the other side they’ll tell you which way they went.” I finally caught up with them and went up through Larisa and up almost to the Albanian border, and there we camped – took me 36 hours on the bike. On the way up we were watching the planes come over and could see tracers and, my God, they’re not going up, they’re coming down. We hit the dirt pretty smartly at the side of the road. However, we got used to that.
And we got into position there and stayed there for a while, and in the evening I got off my bike, about 4 o’clock, and lay down beside it and went to sleep, and shortly after there was cheers and I looked up and saw about 30 planes in the air; Spitfires had arrived, or Hurricanes, and it turned out they were Messerschmitts, and they were coming down not going up. There was an airfield just behind where we were, equipped with Gladiators and Lysanders, and a Lysander got up and two of the Gladiators got up; they managed to bring down two of the Messerschmitts, but later on the German planes came back again and cleaned up the whole of the outfit.
We got down eventually to a fishing place called Volos, quite a good spot actually, because we were in a trench about 10 feet deep, pretty wide and we could move around quite a bit. We dug the exchange into the side of the bank and ran the appropriate lines and were quite happy there for quite a while. The fields behind us had peas and stuff and they were getting near ripe and we kept popping up and picking a few peas and back down into the village when the planes came over – at least we’d got green peas. It got a bit hectic after a while, and the lines were getting shot up.
Then we got word that the Greeks had packed it in and we were evacuated. I smashed my good BSA motorbike up with an axe and pulled the bank down over it. We had to leave our guns; we couldn’t spike them and destroy them because that would have given the enemy a clue that we were perhaps moving. All we had to do was take the breech blocks, and we took as much of the equipment as we could. I closed the exchange and got on the truck and drove down. We finally got down to the water’s edge and after loading put the telephone exchange into the drink. Our packs, our main packs, all went into the drink; it meant that through the three packs we’d discarded, another man could get on the ship. We didn’t have too much: I had binoculars, gas-mask, revolver, compass, technical haversack, a small haversack on my back, greatcoat, and we had to dump our blankets, mess tin, water bottle.
We made it out to whalers that came in, and every time I tried to get on board I missed out. I’d two cartons of cigarettes, tucked in behind my gasmask, and after several attempts to board, a big Navy hand came and grabbed me by the back of the belt of my greatcoat and hauled me in head over heels, and I never saw the cigarettes again. We got out and climbed up the net on to the side of the destroyer, the Kandahar, and I got assigned to the Petty Officers’ Mess. The entrance into the Petty Officers’ Mess was through a hole in the deck, and I got stuck half way down the hole – it was all the stuff that I had on me – and the next thing I know is a big Navy foot on top of my tin hat, gives me a push and I went through pretty quickly. Things soaking wet, everything was wet having to wade out, and the Navy boys there took all my clothes down to the engine room, gave me Navy pants and a skivvy, and they dried all my uniform out down in their engine room and brought it back. It was great to get a good feed with fresh vegetables, which we hadn’t seen for some considerable time.
We were bombed a bit on the way and I was lying on my bunk resting and saw the side of the ship being pushed in and thought that this is no place to be. I tried to climb up the ladder to get through, but the manhole was closed and the Chicago piano – what they call a “Chicago piano” was a pom-pom – kept them busy firing up on the top, so I had to stay down there wondering whether I’d get out of that. However, we finally made it and landed at Suda Bay in Crete.’
George Brown was a Lieutenant in the 20th NZ Infantry Battalion, and recalls his initial enthusiasm for Greece:
‘We landed in Greece at Piraeus Harbour and marched to our bivouac, which was lovely after the heat of the desert. We explored Athens, learnt a little bit more about its history, drank their lovely wine, ate their lovely steaks and eventually entrained to Katerini. After a few days there we went by truck, I think, to Ryakia; from Ryakia at night you could see the lights of Salonika.
We dug in there, and found the people very hospitable. We officers of our company were billeted in a house and the Greeks would bring us some of their food and bring their babies in to see us. Our battalion pioneers put in a pump in the well in the town. The padre had received a few dozen bars of chocolate – well, a few dozen bars of chocolate weren’t much good to a thousand odd men, so the colonel and the padre went down to the local school and I believe the delight that the children showed when given a cake of chocolate was well worth their effort. We took up various defensive positions round Ryakia. Yugoslavia was expected to fall to the Germans and we were to defend Greece.
George Arthur Brown (left)
Late one night we were all called out and we marched and marched to the front line overlooking the Aliakmon River. It was snowing, and we had no shelter; we settled down for the night, cold, unfed and miserable. Eventually we dug in there, did various patrols and had a communion service. During the service, conducted by a Padre Dawson, the Jerries came over in their planes and took pot shots at us, but nobody was hurt. We then went forward as a battalion for a short time, didn’t really have any skirmishes with the German infantry, and eventually we were withdrawn. During the withdrawal the German Air Force had dominance of the skies and we were severely bombed; there were a few casualties and I think we went back as far as Larisa.
One morning we were told that our company were to take up a position on a very high hill – it must have been about 3,000 feet high. We climbed up that hill – there were no paths, it was really beautiful through the bush, squirrels everywhere. We stopped for lunch and Colonel Kippenberger arrived and sat by me, and whilst we were having lunch a runner came up and delivered him a message. He read it and passed it to me. He said, “George, don’t tell the troops until I am well on my way – we are withdrawing.” After having climbed thousands of feet, we went down. We were then told to destroy everything. My friend Jack Baines, who was tenting with me, he and I had an ‘His Master’s Voice’ gramophone, and we each shouldered a pick and broke it up with all the records. It was devastating.
So then the withdrawal started; we were still being bombed and we got through Athens when the German advance party were actually there. This was fairly late at night; we got on to trucks that were directed to a certain area and we were told to destroy everything except our arms. So we set to and pierced the tyres of the trucks and ran the oil out and started the motors. Then the order came that we were to stop that, because we were going on further, still retreating. We went through a village and there B Company of our Battalion had the most casualties from machine-gunning and bombing from the air. I don’t think our company had anything, although we did fire a few shots. The Germans didn’t seem to be taking any action at night-time, so we marched down to the beach. I don’t know how many miles it was, but it was interminable.
We had got to the beach and dropped down to rest when one of my men came round and said, “Sir, give me your water bottle – we’ve found a dump of rum,” and he brought my water bottle full of rum, which I eventually drank. The caiques appeared to take us out to the Navy ships and I got on the caique and the next thing I heard was a voice from this Navy ship, the destroyer Kimberley: “Hurry up there or you’ll get left behind!” I had fallen asleep.’
Rex Thompson, a driver with the NZ Army Service Corps, related that:
‘We supplied the base at Larisa, which was about half way up Greece. The dump there was a big dump and the Germans, being keen on routine, used to bomb every lunch-time, and the personnel on the dump there would bail out as soon as the sirens went and, being inquisitive Kiwis, we used to take a look around. The rum was very popular and that helped out a lot.
Eventually we started the retreat out of Greece and on the south side of the Larisa there was a tremendous convoy and the road was raised, must have been about 12 or 14 foot above the land – it was all flat. And here we were parked almost nose-to-tail and the Germans were bombing and strafing, bombing with anti-personnel bombs and strafing. And once again we decided it was safer just to get under the truck because they were bombing each side of the road for personnel and we realised later that they didn’t want to actually blow the bridges or clean up the transport. While we were waiting here – we were just held up in this particular place – there was a Dornier, I’m pretty sure it was a Dornier, and the top of the telephone poles were just a wee bit higher than the road, and this particular plane ambles along just above the telephone lines. And we were just looking at it – we weren’t allowed to fire at them because this would bring the whole lot of them on us – and this gunner pulls his turret back half way along the plane there and tosses out a couple of rolls of toilet paper for us – that’s the fun they were having. It wasn’t well received verbally, however, at the time, but it was quite humorous afterwards. And we found out later that a couple of Australians were having breakfast further down the road there and that’s what held the convoy up – they weren’t very popular. But all the way down through Greece we were blowing the approaches to the bridges and on again, and the villages where the road went through, and there was only one road, they bombed them. And that went on most of the whole of the way; we continued the withdrawal until eventually we were set for embarkation.
And we went to a beach south of this area of Greece and this particular night we managed to get on a barge to go out to the destroyer. However, they diverted us to Kea Island and we arrived there in the morning. It got too late for us to embark on the destroyer and they put us on this island for the day. We had to cross the island and there must have been about 100 of us, and it was a very bare island and quite hilly and we had to go to the opposite side to be picked up the following night. And it was quite nerve-racking at times with German planes flying over it regularly, and we were all stretched out on virtually bare land and we went to ground every time we saw one. However, apparently the Germans are inclined to be single-minded and so set on a certain job, well, that was all they worried about. So we put the day in hugging the ground and walking and eventually made the other side of the island where we were picked up that night and put on the Kandahar, and we thought we were heading for Egypt, but apparently during the trip they decided they had to make another trip and put us off on Crete for a couple of days.
We had 13 raids on the way over and we got a couple of holes through the back of the destroyer – they were borderline, fortunately – but without doubt the skipper was very, very adept. He used to wait nonchalantly for the plane and he’d hard to port or starboard and the water would come right up over the decks as he turned. But we missed any direct hits. One or two of the convoy got badly hit.’
Bruce McKay Smith, Gunner, 25th NZ Artillery Battery, was there too:
‘Then we moved to the outskirts of a place called Trikala, which, I understand, had been hit by an earthquake some reasonably short time beforehand, but we were put into olive groves and various scrub and stuff and camouflaged ourselves in. And the next morning, at daylight, the Germans mounted a ferocious attack on Trikala itself; they bombed all day, but how or why we’ll never know; they never saw us. I don’t think anybody breathed for the whole of that day, and that night we moved out. The war was getting fairly intense then. The roads were choked with not only refugees but various units, Australian, British Army and New Zealand – surplus vehicles going one way and us trying to go another way – but eventually, through a lot of manoeuvring and toing and froing, we got into defensive positions again and carried on moving every now and again to more secure positions. The guns were firing a vast amount of ammunition because ammunition was plentiful for some reason, which was most unusual, all the guns getting almost red hot with their continuous rate of fire.
From there the whole show started to deteriorate, and then we were told that the place was getting untenable and we’d probably have to evacuate. So this started a bit of kerfuffle and we had to travel on very exposed roads, mostly being bombed and strafed most of the time, but with little effect, by the German planes, but very scary all the same. We still had all our equipment intact at that stage, but then we were told we’d have to put our defensive positions up if we found a position that was suitable and we’d go into action against German tanks and infantry. Their Alpine troops were a pest – they seemed to be able to go anywhere. The tanks were not as big a problem as we thought they would be – our gunners became very good at knocking them out, especially when they were trying to do river crossings.
From there on we carried on going south; the whole thing was getting chaotic by then. Nobody quite knew what was going on. Actually we got to the outskirts – I’m not quite sure how far out from Athens – and were told that we had to destroy our guns and vehicles and hopefully disperse and await transport by sea. The guns were destroyed as best we could, most of the optical equipment taken off them. The vehicles had a pickaxe put through the sump and the engine started up and raced until the engine seized up.
After destroying the vehicles, we went to a position whose name I can’t recall, with a lot of scrub and stunted trees and olives and one thing and another, not far from the sea. We were told to hide in this undergrowth and, hopefully, we’d be picked up that night by a ship. We spent all day in this scrubby area. The German planes came over continuously, but somehow or another they couldn’t have seen us because we had a trouble-free day. As it approached dark, runners were sent round to various groups to tell them to be prepared at anytime to move and to dump any surplus equipment such as rifles and gas-masks and stuff like that. However, very few of our chaps dumped their rifles – they hung on to them.
About the very early hours of the morning, possibly 3 or 4 o’clock, we were told to form up and make our way down to the seaside, and there the Royal Navy had arrived with their lifeboats and we were bundled aboard these lifeboats; any gear the sailors manning the lifeboats considered excess, they’d chuck overboard. We were ferried out to, in our case, HMS Carlisle. We eventually got aboard her and we finished up in the Stokers’ Mess where the off-duty stokers couldn’t do enough for us, making copious mugs of cocoa and bread and buns and whatever they could find to feed us, for we’d had no food during the day. Then we set off, as we found out later, of course, for Crete. However, we were bombed several times, but the Carlisle, being an ack-ack cruiser, put up a terrific display of anti-aircraft fire and we only had about three or four near misses, which was pretty good. Eventually we arrived in Suda Bay just before dusk, I think it was.’
On the retirement and under bombing, the practical common sense of the 20th NZ Infantry Battalion’s Padre was well-remembered by Keith Newth, then a Corporal of Signals:
‘We had slit trenches, dug in we were, and the bombers, German bombers, came over and I can always hear Padre Spence saying, “Well, boys, it’s all very well to believe in the Lord, but it’s better to take action or get down into our holes when this sort of thing is going on,” which we did.’
Sapper Alexander Rodgers, NZ 7th Field Company, recalled the voyage to Greece only too well:
‘We’d only been gone a few hours when the whole convoy turned round and headed back towards Alex. The Italian Fleet were waiting for this convoy to put out, but the British were one jump ahead. We retreated and the whole of the Mediterranean Fleet, the British, took up their positions and they blew every one of the Italian ships out of the water. Fantastic – you could hear the noise in the far distance there, and the next day they told us what had happened. [This must have been the Battle of Matapan when, on 28 March 1941, the Mediterranean Fleet sank three Italian cruisers, two destroyers and damaged at least one battleship, all for the loss of one aircraft.]
Our job was to put through a secondary road to meet up with the Maori Battalion in the Olympus. We would start at daylight and work to dark every day, sleeping underneath the trucks, no tents or anything, only bully beef and hard biscuits, and after a couple of weeks we eventually got the road open. Bridges were built and the bridges and the road mined in case those Jerries came down. That was the officer’s job – they mined them all right, but they didn’t put the leads in the mines and the first ones across the roads and the bridges were the Germans. They came round the Maori Battalion and cut them off and they were the first to use our road.
Alexander Rodgers
It was chaos from there, all the way down through Larisa, all these other places, machine-gunned, bombed all the time. Eventually we embarked on lighters that took us out to catch up with Navy boats that were there. There were destroyers, cruisers, a few big troopships, and we loaded our gear, our rifles and that, thinking, well, we’ll need them. We were going out to the ack-ack light cruiser there on a Greek boat and I was carrying this machine-gun, it was a Lewis Gun, and a sailor on the boat says, “Where’re you going with that?” and I said, “Going on the boat – we might need it,” and he says, “Well, it’s either you or that.” He said, “Give us it.” I gave it to him and he threw it overboard. He said, “There’s no room for that, mate.”
Well we went there and we took off. There must have been a dozen ships and a big troopship in the convoy, and we were halfway to Crete and you could see these planes there, way in the distance. We were on deck, there must have been 200 or 300 of us there, and we said, “By God, we don’t like the look of that.” We’d seen too many of them. Someone said that those were British ones come as our escort. We said, “Like hell they are!” They had big black crosses on them, so we opened up on them. Well, they didn’t hit us but they ripped a hole about 50 foot long alongside just about the water line with a bomb. We made it all right, but there was a troopship there, she got a direct hit and went down, and one or two other ships were hit too.’
Before the Germans struck in Greece, one New Zealander, Kenneth Frater, driver in the NZ Army Service Corps, had an unexpected encounter:
‘Goods were coming from Piraeus by the narrow-gauge railway which ran through Katerini and on to Bulgaria. I was loading stuff at a station near Katerini and I went to the corrugated iron urinal to relieve myself. I heard a train stop at the station and a bloke in a striped suit and a homburg hat rushed in and stood alongside me.
He said, “You are a New Zealander?”
I said, “Yes.”
He extended his hand and said, “Eden.”
I changed hands and said, “Frater,” and that is how and where I took a leak with the British Foreign Minister and a future Prime Minister. He’d been in Bulgaria meeting the Bulgarian Government and said he expected to fly back to the UK the next day.’
Kenneth Frater was one of a small number of drivers who volunteered to drive back north to pick up troops holding Thermopylae Pass for evacuation back towards Athens and the coast:
‘Around 9.30pm on 24 April we drove north to the foot of the mountain pass road. I thought I was fairly cunning by being last out of the forest. I’d presumed that each truck would have to turn round and then I’d be first away. Alas, the best-laid plans! I wasn’t to know that there was a place to turn and I would stay on the end of the column. A bit after 10pm there was the sound of feet tramping on the road, and shortly after the first truck left. At about 11pm, when there was only one truck left in front of me, some more troops came along and boarded the other truck. A sergeant came to me and said, “You’re to wait – Lieutenant Wesney will be here shortly.” Ages later – at least 15 minutes – when I’d been sitting by myself in the middle of nowhere on a dark night and feeling extremely lonely, I felt a movement at the back of the truck. The passenger door opened and a voice said, “Stay where you are – the men are getting in the back. My name is Arthur Wesney.” There was a slap on the cab roof and he said, “Right, get going.”
I said, “Are you the All Black?”
He replied, “Yes, I am. Now I’d like to get some sleep.”
Driving without lights is a tiring business. You can’t see through the windscreen and have to hang your head out the window, which gets very tiring. Some of the other drivers had knocked their windscreens out, but this meant that all of you was cold instead of just your head. Either way, top speed was never more than 10 miles per hour, which caused the engine to overheat. By daylight we’d travelled about 60 miles and had just gone through a cutting on top of a low hill a few miles south of Marathon. When we were down on the flat again I was told to pull into an area of trees and scrub well off the road.
Lieutenant Wesney and his men climbed the hill and spent some time observing the road north for any sign of the enemy. I thought it would be a good time to change my socks and have a feed. When I climbed into the back of the truck I found my tucker box was empty, and they’d also flogged my clean socks and underwear. Of all the ungrateful sods! After about one and a half hours the squad of 20 returned.
I said, “You’re an ungrateful lot of bastards, pinching my food and clothes, and it would have served you right if I’d driven off and left you.”
Arthur Wesney said to them, “Who is responsible – has anyone anything to say?”
Nobody said a word. He said, “Right, let’s get going then.”
When we moved off he said how sorry he was that I’d been treated like that, but they’d been without food for 24 hours. I was very hostile towards the blokes in the back for the four more days I was to have them for passengers.
We drove round a bay with two destroyers standing at anchor. I wondered if we were to be taken off by them, but we kept going and crossed the Corinth just after 10am on 25 April. After finding our way through the town we had just reached the open road when we were stopped by a despatch rider. Parachutists were dropping on the Canal area and we were ordered to go back. Turning round, we headed back to Corinth. Back in the town I was told to pull into a narrow street and wait. My passengers went off and I was left on my own to guard my truck. I got out my rifle and tried to make myself as small as possible. Another truck driven by a chap pulled in behind me, and his passengers went off. It was good to have company. He’d apparently been about 10 miles south of Corinth when he was turned back. The aerial activity was intense and pretty scary. We couldn’t see what was going on but saw plenty of planes passing overhead.
Around midday things quietened down, and shortly after our passengers returned. I then realised that the officer in the other truck was Colonel Rusty Paige (another All Black), CO of the 26th Battalion. We gave the other truck a few minutes’ start and started off again. On two different occasions I saw a plane diving towards us and the road ahead being chipped by bullets. Each time I went to stop to bail out, but Arthur Wesney made me keep going. On both occasions the plane had to pull out of its dive before the bullets reached us. I was beginning to really dislike the Luftwaffe.
Any time we passed over a rise or hill we would stop and the blokes would go out on a recce. At long last the penny dropped. We were “tail-end Charlie”. During one stop, which was in a village, I heard a hen cackle. I hopped over a mud wall and found a nest with three eggs in it. As I hadn’t eaten for nearly 48 hours, I decided to suck the contents, and boy, did they taste good! Moving over the Argos Pass we stopped at sunrise and pulled off the road down a tree-lined track. My passengers did their usual disappearing trick and I was left on my own again. It was a nice sunny morning and, holding my rifle, I went to sleep by the front wheel of my truck. I awoke about midday and filled my water bottle at a small stream nearby, filled the tank with the rest of my reserve petrol and then thought I would do something really rash and have a shave at the stream. When I went to get my small haversack from where I carried it under the driver’s seat, I found somebody had flogged it while I was asleep. Now all I possessed was the truck, which belonged to the Army anyway, my rifle, the clothes I stood up in and the contents of my pockets.
Early afternoon the troops returned and we resumed our journey, travelling over a mountainous area. There were lots of abandoned and burnt-out trucks, but we had a safe journey and went on to take up positions near Tripolis. Whilst I was playing my usual waiting game, I was parked near an aerodrome which had well and truly been done over by enemy planes. Nearby I found an abandoned pick-up in a ditch. I made a search of the vehicle and found a large tin of green peas. I couldn’t believe my luck. Food! I opened the tin with my pocket-knife, drank the liquid and shovelled the peas down my throat. What a marvellous, delicious taste! Fifteen minutes later I had my trousers round my ankles with a stream of green water running from my bowels. It wasn’t nice.
Next morning we moved through Sparta and my passengers went into a holding position until early on the morning of 29 April. We pulled out just after daybreak. The old Bedford was now only firing on five cylinders. My original load had overnight grown from 20 to over 40. Over 4 tons on a 3-ton truck. She still went good downhill, but I was in low gear going uphill. However, this didn’t last for long and we started a steep descent of about 10 miles toward the sea at Momenvasia. I think, for my passengers, this was probably the most hairy part of the entire trip. Being well overloaded, even in third gear it was hard to keep under 50 miles an hour. I must admit I was anxious to get off the road before the strafing started, so perhaps took some unnecessary risks.
The road flattened out and about a mile from the sea I was directed into an olive grove. Arthur Wesney thanked me for a job well done, the rest said nothing. I was still pretty terse with them for pinching my food and gear. I guess if they had known I would be responsible for carrying them safely for over 400 miles and five nights and days to the evacuation beach, they may have acted differently. I hope the act of them leaving without a word was an act of shame.
Parking under an olive tree I looked around the dozen or so trucks dispersed and hidden through the olive grove. This was all that were left of the 30 that started. One of our officers had caught up with us during the day. At sunset we drove our trucks to a cliff edge. There we drained the oil and ran the engines until they seized up, then pushed them over the cliff. When it was fully dark we marched down to the beach and for hours sat there wondering if and when something was going to happen. Finally, about midnight a few row-boats appeared and were quickly loaded. It was about 2am before it was our turn. We got into a row-boat and pushed off, and after a few minutes drew up alongside an old Greek fishing-boat. There were probably over a hundred aboard when the one-cylinder engine was started. I thought, “My God, if we’re going in this old thing we’ll be dead at daylight.”
However, after puffing round for about 10 minutes, there, at anchor, were two beautiful destroyers, HMS Isis and the Hotspur. We were put aboard the Hotspur where a mug of cocoa was put in my hand and, grasping my rifle, my only possession, I went to sleep on the steel deck under a stairwell. This was the last of the organised official evacuation, although I understand the Ajax picked the General up at 4am.
Around mid-morning on 30 April I was awakened by the tannoy telling us to assemble on deck. We were in a bay which someone thought was Canea in Crete. We were just tying up alongside an old freighter called the Thurland Castle and were quickly transhipped to her. There were a number of sunken ships. There was an air raid and bombs dropped near several ships, but we were left alone although the Thurland Castle showed marks of previous strafing. It was suggested by the ASC Officer that we would be returned to our units who were now on Crete. However, Colonel Paige said that we were going to stay under his command until he had orders to the contrary. Hooray for Rusty Paige!
We sailed about midday. There were three troopships with survivors of the 6th Brigade and odds and sods like us aboard. The 6th Brigade had been placed in reserve. The troopships were in line ahead and on either side was a row of warships, probably most of what remained of the Mediterranean Fleet. They stayed with us until we were out of range of the Luftwaffe, and then we were left with only one destroyer for escort. During that 24 hours, though, they were continually attacked by German planes. Fortunately they were after the warships and left us alone. The day we arrived in Port Said was 2 May, exactly one year since sailing from New Zealand. Happy anniversary!’
