Prologue

Every school child in Australia and New Zealand is brought up on the legend of the Anzacs, but how many know the story of another Anzac force that fought not at Gallipoli, but in Greece a generation later? The term ‘Anzac’ is a much-used one on both sides of the Tasman, but it actually refers to a particular kind of military formation — an army corps of two or more divisions. Used in this way, an Anzac corps has been established only twice — at Gallipoli and, less famously, in Greece.

The Australians and New Zealanders initially went to Greece under their own national banners, and it was on the eve of battle that the second Anzac Corps was hurriedly created by the simple expedient of re-naming an Australian corps and transferring to it a New Zealand division. On 12 April 1941, General Thomas Blamey, commander of the new Anzac Corps, issued the necessary order of the day. Australian and New Zealand troops were then fighting their first actions against an invading German army, which was everywhere triumphant. With the very existence of his force in the balance, Blamey invoked the spirit of Gallipoli to inspire his troops, highlighting the footsteps in which they followed:

As from 1800 hours 12 April I Aust Corps will be designated ANZAC CORPS. In making this announcement the General Officer Commanding ANZAC CORPS desires to say that the reunion of the Australian and New Zealand Divisions gives all ranks the greatest uplift. The task ahead though difficult is not nearly so desperate as that which our fathers faced in April twenty-six years ago. We go to it together with stout hearts and certainty of success.1

Bernard Freyberg, commander of the New Zealand division that comprised the other half of the new formation, understood the significance of the moment, and cabled back to Blamey:

To ANZAC Corps
From NZ Div
All ranks NZ Div welcome reunion of Australian and New Zealand Divisions with greatest satisfaction. Will you please send this message to our comrades 6th Division.
Freyberg cmd NZEF 13th April2

While the generals drew on the well of antipodean military tradition to motivate their men, those on the receiving end of Blamey’s order had more pressing concerns — like dodging the endless German air raids that blighted the Allied campaign in Greece from start to finish. Bob Slocombe of the 2/8th Battalion, who was fighting the Waffen–SS, Hitler’s dreaded Nazi elite, later remembered that, at the very moment Blamey issued his order, he was ‘too bloody busy’ to think much of the general’s call to arms.3 With Aussie and Kiwi units taking turns to cover each other’s retreat, Bill Jenkins of the 2/3rd Battalion was also unimpressed, at least at the time — a withdrawing New Zealand unit had just gone through his lines when he heard of the order, so the fabled Anzac spirit didn’t seem to be doing his battalion ‘much good’.4 One of the Kiwi soldiers was Eric Davies, who served with the 19 NZ Battalion. He was much more impressed with Blamey’s announcement — indeed, Davies remembers being overjoyed at the news, but then his enthusiasm for trans-Tasman solidarity was partly fuelled by a convivial journey he took in the back of an Australian truck during the long retreat through central Greece. The two Aussies who shared the truck with Davies and his mate had liberated a couple of whiskey bottles from a shattered stores depot, and happily shared the booty with their New Zealand cousins, ensuring the whole-hearted commitment of all on board to the spirit of Anzac.5

If it was of little practical use to the front-line troops, Blamey’s use of the Gallipoli legend was at least apposite. Just as the disastrous Gallipoli landings had been inspired by the strategic enthusiasms of Winston Churchill in 1915, so the Greek campaign was a product of the British prime minister’s overly fertile military imagination. Keen to build a ‘Balkan Front’ to impress neutral American public opinion by bringing into the war Greece, Yugoslavia and, hopefully, the Turks against the Axis powers, Churchill despatched the only troops readily available — most of whom happened to be, as in 1915, the expeditionary armies of Australia and New Zealand. And just as Gallipoli provided military academies the world over with lessons in how not to conduct a complex feat of arms, Churchill’s Greek adventure was to reinforce fundamental lessons in modern warfare: heavy tanks could not be stopped by men armed with rifles, and Stuka dive-bombers would not be deflected by promises of air support from London that were never honoured.

At Gallipoli, the price for official ineptitude was paid for by the heroism and sacrifice of ordinary soldiers. So, too, in Greece, where Australian and New Zealand troops attempted to halt the progress of the mightiest military force the world had ever seen, without air cover, tanks, or effective anti-tank guns. Yet their rearguard actions on the Greek mainland were fought with grim determination and great courage, and allowed the great bulk of the Anzac force to evacuate. A good proportion of the evacuees ended up on the island of Crete. There, Hitler followed up his conquest of Greece with an invasion by paratroop forces, but the second Anzacs and the British troops inflicted such losses on the Nazis that the German dictator never again used airborne troops on a large scale.

Viewed from the first years of the twenty-first century, we can also see a wider social and cultural significance in the campaign. Many Australians and New Zealanders had their first encounters with the people of Greece in 1941, and would be forever grateful for the hospitality they were afforded. These hurried and stressful introductions were a prelude to post-war migration. Indeed, Greek emigration to Australia was on such a large scale that Melbourne was transformed into one of the largest ‘Greek’ cities in the world.

As it happened, the phenomenon of post-war migration put together, in chance and curious circumstances, people who had gone through the experience of 1941. Kevin Price, a young Victorian who fought at the first battle between the Anzacs and the Nazis at the town of Vevi on the northern border of Greece, came home and found in later years his local fish-and-chip shop being owned by a Greek immigrant from that very town, who as a child had been a witness to the fighting. And then there was Dimitris Tsiaousis, a Greek Resistance fighter, who provided food and shelter to Australians and New Zealanders left behind the German lines around his village on the slopes of Mount Olympus. He survived the guerrilla war against the Nazis, and the civil war in Greece in the late 1940s, and arrived in Australia in time to help re-build Darwin after it was destroyed by Cyclone Tracy in 1974.

Price and Tsiaousis were but some of the veterans of a neglected campaign. Hundreds of Australian and New Zealand troops died in Greece and Crete, and thousands more were taken prisoner, to spend four long years in trying conditions in the German stalags.

On the 75th anniversary of the campaign, the second, forgotten Anzacs deserve better recognition.