CHAPTER EIGHT

Of Rearguards and Treachery

On this the dream

withdrew into the night, and left the man,

to envision, rapt, all that was not to be.

The Iliad, ii. 41–3

In 480 B.C., a massive Persian army led by King Xerxes approached the pass of Thermopylae, hoping to move south to Athens and complete the conquest of Greece. The local army opposing Xerxes initially numbered 5000 men from different Greek city-states. This force, using the narrow pass as its strongest defence, held up the Persians for two days, inflicting massive casualties as Xerxes sent his men crashing against the Greek phalanx. The Greek position was only turned when a local shepherd betrayed his countrymen, guiding a Persian force through another pass to outflank the defenders. Realising his army was doomed, Leonidas, the Spartan king and commander of the Greeks, released most of his army from further service, save the 300 Spartan professionals he had brought with him to the battlefield. A contingent from Thebes also elected to remain for the last stand. When Xerxes demanded on the final day that Leonidas lay down his arms, he gave the immortal reply: ‘Come take them.’ The Persians duly did, pushing back the Greeks to a small hill within the pass itself, where the Thebans surrendered. Not so the Spartans, who fought on, some with their bare hands, until the survivors were cut down by volleys of arrows, the Persians preferring to avoid any further loss in close-quarter fighting. Enraged by their massive casualties, the Persians mutilated the corpse of Leonidas.

As an English aristocrat, Winston Churchill was well versed in the history of antiquity. When Churchill grew up in the late nineteenth century, the classics were the staple of a gentleman’s education, and he was quick to draw parallels between the deeds of the Spartans and the task now facing the Anzacs. As he pondered his maps, the ‘intervening ages fell away’ and he mused, ‘why not one more undying feat of arms?’1 Unfortunately, while Churchill’s powerful imagination could wipe away the hand of time, his rhetorical flourishes had little impact on the hard realities of modern warfare. For one thing, Xerxes had no air force to blast the Spartans out of their mountain fastness; and before the Anzacs could repeat his last stand, they first had to get back to Thermopylae, a movement that the Luftwaffe was out to prevent.

While keen on the historical parallels, Churchill failed to push them as far as he might. Leonidas and the Spartans were betrayed by Ephialtes, the local shepherd now immortalised — his name in modern Greek means ‘nightmare’.2 Casting about for a contemporary incarnation of Ephialtes, Churchill might have opted for the Greek officers who surrendered their army units to the Germans without authority, thereby exposing the left flank of the Anzacs to calamity. But he also might have considered his own candidacy because, in the middle of the fighting, Churchill authorised his Mediterranean commanders to abandon the Anzacs to their fate. The Australian prime minister, John Curtin, would later claim in 1942 that the half-hearted defence of Singapore constituted the ‘great betrayal’, but that phrase would have had an earlier application had Churchill’s authority been activated and the second Anzac Corps been sacrificed according to the geo-strategic interests of the British prime minister.

As we have seen, Wilson and Blamey set in train the retreat to Thermopylae on 15 April, using rearguards to cover the movement — the 1st Armoured Brigade along the Grevena–Kalabaka road, Savige Force further south at Kalabaka, the 6 NZ Brigade around Elasson, and the 19 Australian Brigade at Domokos. The 16 Brigade, originally destined for Zarkos, instead went to Pinios Gorge as Allen Force; with this roadblock in place, Anzac Corps could move back to Thermopylae in an orderly manner, and there prepare a position for extended defence. The next day, Wilson met Papagos at Lamia and told the Greek general of his plans. Evidence was mounting now that despair was beginning to infect the Greek camp. The influential bishop of Ioannina visited prime minister Koryzis on 16 April and advised him to surrender but, for the time being, the Greek leadership held firm.

While the bishop was seeing Koryzis, the forces deployed to screen the retreat attempted to fulfill their tasks. On the left flank, Savige arrived at Kalabaka on 15 April and spent the day deploying his troops, which were initially to include four infantry battalions, later reduced to just two: the 2/5th and 2/11th battalions. Civilian morale was low, and law and order was breaking down with looting underway. The Australians in turn were nervous: lights shining from the monasteries on the cliffs above the town were taken to be the work of fifth columnists, and they were ‘extinguished by Bren gun fire’.3

Australian–Greek relations did not improve the following day when Savige conferred with General Tsolakoglou, then commanding the Greek Western Macedonian army, at the latter’s headquarters in a stone house just north of Kalabaka. Savige was accompanied by the British liaison officer serving with Tsolakoglou’s staff, Lieutenant Colonel A. R. Barter, who spoke fluent Greek. From Barter, Savige heard the rumour that Tsolakoglou had deserted his unit during the Balkan War of 1912, but had been protected from this disgrace by the connections of his wealthy family. Rumour or not, Savige was distinctly unimpressed by Tsolakoglou who, with one leg resting on a table, spent the conference eating a large supply of boiled eggs. When Savige complained that Greek stragglers were holding up the preparation of the Australian defence line, Tsolakoglou airily authorised Savige to machine-gun them as deserters — advice that the Australian brigadier declined to follow. Savige and Barter had more success when they told Tsolakoglou that the German attack was imminent. Within hours, Savige saw the Greek general in one of the leading cars of a convoy heading south; when the two officers exchanged glances, Tsolakolgou leant out the window and waved farewell to Savige ‘with a broad smile on his face’.4

If Savige’s preparations at Kalabaka were not much assisted by his Greek counterpart, his own higher command was equally unhelpful. While stationed there, Savige received a stream of contradictory orders. Just as he had in Libya earlier in the year, Wilson was telling battlefield commanders one thing, while the corps commander — in this case, Blamey — was telling them another. Wilson directed the 1st Armoured Brigade to go back straight to Thermopylae; but, from Blamey, Savige received orders to move back himself while the British armour covered him.5

Savige at least had the good sense to sort the mess out for himself. With the roads behind him clogged with traffic, including columns of the 1st Armoured Brigade that were pulling out as directed by Wilson, Savige judged that Kalabaka had to remain covered for the time being, and he stayed there on 17 April, writing to his divisional commander, Mackay, explaining why. This took some nerve, not least because on the same day engineers behind him managed to accidentally blow up a bridge needed for the retreat of Savige Force — not sure of the properties of commercial gelignite, the engineers elected to experiment on what they thought was a redundant beam on the bridge over the Pinios east of Zarkos. In the event, what seemed superfluous had architectural significance — a full span of the bridge went into the river, leaving Savige Force to find alternative routes back.

Elsewhere on 17 April, the forces north of Olympus made to get out. That day, and for once, the Anzacs had some luck — the weather descended in what Freyberg called, in his campaign report, the ‘miracle of the mists’, temporarily taking the Luftwaffe out of the battle. Freyberg had considerably less luck with the state of the roads. He had been allocated the Larisa–Volos road, while Mackay’s 6th Division took the Larisa–Lamia route. But what was marked as a road on the map proved to be nothing more than an earth track, which quickly turned to mud in the wet conditions. With his trucks bogged and the withdrawal floundering, Freyberg wrote to Blamey and told him he was moving onto ‘Mackay’s’ road.

While Freyberg was making his typically forthright decisions about the organisation of the retreat, further north, Brigadier Puttick set about getting his 4 NZ Brigade and the attached Australian units out of the front line at Servia Pass. Eric Davies, now a veteran after the fighting against the 9th Panzer Division, wrote a vivid account in his diary of the withdrawal, and the stresses of modern warfare:

Thursday 17th April: … out of the front line now thank God. Reached position at 5am, lay down in the mud and tried to sleep. All day we rested and cleaned our gear. Shells landed all around us and hell it’s crook — I shake all over, will never forget this. Numerous jobs to do. Day is cold wet and misty. At 8pm we pulled out and did we march. Miles and miles of hills and mud and shells everywhere. What a night! Eventually reached our trucks. My God it is tough work. By 2am we were on the way out and over the pass — onwards!

Friday 18th April: Travelled until 11. Thousands of trucks of every shape and form on the road, smashed and wrecked by fire. Many bombs dropped on convoy — hell my nerves are a mess — have never felt so rotten. Bombing too intense so parked up for a few hrs. Hellish number of Nazi planes and not a single RAF. Oh well, why worry, although by God it would help. Set off at 9 and travelled all night … Hells’ bells I’m a wreck.6

With the withdrawal in motion, the Anzac leaders prepared rearguards along the major lines of retreat — one at Elasson where Brigadier H. E. Barrowclough was deployed with his 6 NZ Brigade, and one south of Larisa at Domokos, assembled from a variety of units by Brigadier E. A. Lee, seconded from Anzac Corps staff for the purpose. Two of the battalions available to Lee got to Domokos via a series of adventures on the Greek railways. Originally intended for Kalabaka, but diverted in case the crisis at Pinios worsened, the 2/6th Battalion de-trained on 16 April, but the 2/7th Battalion had gone as far as Larisa and been forced to make its own way back. Unable to find a Greek locomotive crew, a number of ex-railwaymen among the Australians led by Corporal ‘Jock’ Taylor fired up an engine and assembled a train to get the battalion back to Domokos (thereafter the battalion would be known as the ‘Larisa Whippets’). Lee was joined there by the tired 2/4th and 2/8th battalions — the latter now 500 strong, a number of stragglers from Vevi having rejoined, together with the newly arrived 2/1st Field Regiment. Forward of Domokos guarding the Larisa airfield was the 2/1st Battalion, orphaned from the rest of the 16 Brigade, which had gone to Pinios as the basis of Allen Force.

The respite from air attack ended on 18 April, the crucial day at Pinios Gorge. While Allen Force was fighting and dying, Mackay and Freyberg were directing the long columns of trucks, and both made deliberate shows of indifference to Luftwaffe attacks in displays designed to steady the nerves of their men. Freyberg, for example, was seen standing ‘nonchalantly and alone’ in the open while German aircraft strafed the road about him.7 Apart from the casualties and vehicle losses inflicted on the Anzacs by these raids, the Germans scored one decisive hit during the day — an ammunition truck approaching a bridge on the Enipeus River, north of Pharsala, was struck by a bomb, and blew up with such force that the embankment was left with a hole eight metres wide and five metres deep, forcing the Anzac column to make a painfully slow detour around it.

While the Germans used their control of the air to impede the withdrawal behind the front lines, they also bore down on the Anzac rearguards. The 6 NZ Brigade was under pressure at Elasson throughout 18 April, where Barrowclough and his men had to wait while the final elements of the force from Servia passed through. The last of these was the rearguard from the pass itself, led by Lieutenant Colonel Howard Kippenburger and his 20 NZ Battalion. He was under orders to be clear of Servia by 3.00 a.m. on 18 April, but the last demolitions were delayed until six o’clock that morning.

Kippenberger then moved back as quickly as the muddy roads and German strafing attacks allowed, aiming to regain safety at a road junction north of Elasson. Roadblocks had been established there by a company of the NZ Divisional Cavalry near Elevtherohorion, supported by P Troop, 34 Anti-Tank Battery, while on the Katerini road a troop of armoured cars from C Squadron and three guns of O troop, 34 Anti-Tank Battery stood guard. Just as Kippenberger and his men were approaching these units, they were engaged by 5 Company, III/3 Panzer Regiment. Kippenberger had finished briefing some of his drivers as they approached the crossroads when, walking back to his car, he saw that everyone had stopped again, and that a truck a half a mile ahead had burst into flames. ‘Another truck blazed up an instant later,’ he said. Two German tanks then came driving along the road toward the rest of the New Zealand convoy, while the forward-most anti-tank gun mounted a rapid fire. The German tanks next accounted for a carrier which attempted to charge through: it ‘suddenly slewed into the ditch and capsized’, said Kippenberger. The panzers were quickly joined by lorry-loads of infantry, in which, according to Kippenberger, the German soldiers were ‘all sitting upright like tin soldiers’. The New Zealand colonel quickly counted seven such vehicles, with more in the distance and, said Kippenberger, he ‘rightly or wrongly decided that the odds were too heavy and we must run’.8

Those holding the line south of this action were in the dark as to Kippenberger’s whereabouts, and the remaining anti-tank crews kept up their fire for an hour waiting for him and his convoy. At length they could wait no longer; the demolitions they were protecting were blown, and the rearguards pulled out.9 Kippenberger meanwhile was fleeing across the hills with those men who had survived the German onslaught: ‘[On stumbling into a] lovely little glade, ideal for a picnic, … I decided to stop, rest count our resources and consider a plan,’ he said. He ordered all the arms dumped, bar his own pistol, to accelerate their march south. The New Zealanders had no food, no map, and no greatcoats to keep them warm. Nevertheless, guided by the sound of Barrowclough’s guns to the south, Kippenberger got his men to safety, eventually hitching a ride with trucks of the 26 Battalion, rejoining his own unit two days later.10

Forewarned by these losses, Brigadier Barrowclough readied the 6 NZ Brigade south of Elasson. Barrowclough deployed his units around another road junction, this time where two roads diverged to make their separate ways south to Larisa. He put the 24 Battalion on the eastern road, and the 25 Battalion on the western route, with the 26 Battalion in reserve. Barrowclough’s infantry at least had powerful artillery support, including the 2/3rd Field Regiment back from its good work at Vevi, the 5 NZ Regiment, and a troop of medium guns of the British 64th Medium Regiment. The allied artillery fired on the German columns north of Elasson all day — the 2/3rd ‘covered itself with glory’, firing over 6000 rounds in the action — but even this barrage was insufficient to prevent the Germans from deploying for a coordinated attack on the evening of 18 April.11

Doug Morrison led C Company of the 24 Battalion at this action, and he remembered the position as a piece of high ground with flat country in front. When a section of two-pound guns arrived unexpectedly to support him, his confidence in the defence he could offer increased. Inexplicably, though, the anti-tank guns disappeared as quickly as they had appeared, leaving Morrison and his men with only rifles and machine-guns to face the 30 German tanks deploying below him in the evening light.12 These came forward at dusk ‘supported by colourful tracer fire curving over from all angles’.13

Fortunately, by then Barrowclough had completed his work, and Morrison and the rest of the New Zealand infantry were able to get away under the cover of the continuing artillery barrage, which stayed in action until 11.30 p.m. The infantry battalions of the 6 Brigade completed their movement through Larisa by 3.00 a.m. on 19 April. Barrowclough sent his 24 and 25 Battalions back by road through Volos. Concerned at the lack of motor transport, the brigade quartermaster, Major A. B. Ross, hit upon the idea of sending the 26 Battalion back by train.

Peter Preston was on that train with his 15 Platoon. The New Zealanders persuaded an ancient Greek railwayman to drive it, and so the battalion set out, crammed into carriages still marked for First World War service with ‘30 hommes, 8 cheval’ (30 men, eight horses). Preston and his men quickly concluded the horses would have been better off than they were. The New Zealanders sustained themselves with a meal of ‘M and V’; they needed the nourishment, given the madcap adventure they were about to endure.

The overworked engine was soon found to be too under-powered to pull the weight required, so the Kiwis uncoupled some carriages and crowded even more men into the remainder. Worse still, as the journey went on, the New Zealanders and their Greek driver found the brakes inoperable. They had to improvise an alternative, using a boxcar at the rear with a wheel brake on top to slow the train as required — one toot from the locomotive’s whistle released the brake, and two toots was the signal to brake hard. This ramshackle arrangement sufficed until the train began running down a particularly steep incline in a tunnel, when its speed built up at an alarming rate — Preston remembered a ‘deathly hush’ as the chatter of the men gave way to exclamations of ‘Shit, we’re going off the rails’. The train shot out of the tunnel amid a shower of sparks and screeching metal — the Kiwi engineers helping the Greek driver had thrown the locomotive into reverse as the only means of bringing it to a halt, however dangerous such an expedient might have been. Brought under control in this desperate way, the train chugged on slowly to the next stop for water, where Preston and his men were happy to get off and lie on the grass to recompose their nerves. The respite proved illusory, as a pair of marauding Junkers 88 bombers found the train, and hit it with a bomb right amidships, killing two Australian stragglers who had declined to disembark. This was enough for the Greek driver — the elderly railwayman decamped, even with New Zealand officers waving pistols at him to enforce his continued service.

Like the Australians at Larisa, the 26 Battalion had no alternative but to carry on themselves. The train was uncoupled at the bomb crater, the rear half left behind, and on they went with the remaining carriages. By this means, Preston and his comrades got as far as Lamia. There, ordered to camp in some bushes next to the railway line, they could only watch the next morning as a dozen more Junkers 88s put in another attack, completely destroying what was left of the train.14

While the 26 Battalion got away from Larisa in this nail-biting manner, the Australians on the west flank were engaged in their own difficult withdrawal. Savige calmly held on at Kalabaka while those above him in the chain of command dithered, and he then succeeded in getting back despite a lengthy list of obstacles. Apart from having to deal with the bridge accidentally demolished in the engineering experiment, Savige’s transport staff had to improvise further roundabout routes to avoid another bridge over the Pinios being destroyed by the Luftwaffe — in this case, the German air attack set off the charges already installed, ready for the demolition order. This loss prompted long detours through Tirnavos. As a result, the last element of Savige Force, the 2/11th Battalion, did not clear Larisa until 4.00 a.m. on 19 April.

The West Australians by this time had done a lot of marching and digging, but little fighting. Even so, the young subaltern Ken Johnson, who had equipped himself before leaving Egypt with the best personal kit that money could buy, found his creature comforts diminished one by one. First, having left behind in the kit store at Pireaus a good leather suitcase, together with dress uniforms and even his football shorts, Johnson got news that the whole lot had been lost when the port was obliterated in the Luftwaffe attack that opened the campaign. Johnson then went forward to Kalabaka with his field kit, including a new valise and an exquisitely padded sleeping bag. He spent several days at Kalabaka digging weapons pits, watching the Greeks withdrawing, many of them barefoot, while his men feasted on a stray cow, which they happily slaughtered and barbequed. When Savige judged his work was done at Kalabaka, the scramble to get out was such that, in the confusion, Johnson then lost his new valise and sleeping bag, left on a slope above the town, as the battalion was pulled out without regard to the gear left behind.

In these various ways, the dark hours of 18 and 19 April passed for the Anzacs in the front line. Allen Force was being dismembered at Pinios, Barrowcough was under pressure at Elasson, and Savige Force was scampering back through Larisa. Worse still was the geo-political situation. On 18 April, Wilson conferred with the Greek king, and with the prime minister, Koryzis. Appalled by the fate of his country, Koryzis committed suicide that afternoon. The despair of the man speaks for itself. Arriving home:

[H]e greeted his wife and daughters with the usual kiss and a smile so cheerful that the wife commented that the news must be better. ‘Yes’ he responded, ‘it is better’. But when she urged him to hurry to his lunch as it was very late, he bade them proceed because he had to telephone, then went to his room and locked the door. There he evidently opened a bag which had been packed for the departure of the government, took out his gun, laid down on the bed and shot himself … 15

The disintegration of the Greek political leadership was one thing; but, unknown to them, the Anzacs were also being abandoned by the British leaders who had sent them to the Balkans in the first place. Before the campaign, as a means of securing their support, Churchill had assured the Australian and New Zealand governments that if evacuation were to become necessary, the Anzac troops would have the full support of the Royal Navy. Australia’s deputy prime minister, Arthur Fadden, cabled London from Canberra on 18 April, noting earlier assurances about evacuation and asking that they now be honoured.16 Wellington sent a similar cable of concern, and Churchill replied that the ‘safe withdrawal of the men will have precedence over any other consideration except that of honour …’17 This was mere pap to keep the colonials quiet: Churchill had other priorities. While the Anzac Corps was being hammered in Greece, the British army in Libya was being swept aside by Rommel’s counterattack in the desert. To meet this threat, Churchill directed his chiefs of staff in London to tell the British commanders in the Mediterranean that, if a choice had to be made, Libya should be held and the Anzacs in Greece left to their fate:

You must divide between protecting evacuation [of the Anzacs] and sustaining battle in Libya. But if these clash, which may be avoidable, emphasis must be given to victory in Libya … victory in Libya counts first, evacuation of troops from Greece second.18

Menzies, still in London and privy to War Cabinet decisions, failed to explain to his own cabinet that the Anzacs might be left to their fate if it suited British interests in north Africa. Churchill reiterated his schedule of priorities on 21 April, but all that Menzies communicated to Canberra was a message that all available air cover not essential to the defence of Egypt would be available to cover the evacuation of the Anzacs — hardly an accurate representation of Churchill’s intentions.19

While the politicians in London looked to avoid the consequences of the looming debacle, Wavell went back to Athens on 19 April for conferences that day and the next with the fragmenting Greek government. Only now did King George II attempt to build a government of national unity, which might more properly have been established at the time of the Italian invasion, or after Metaxas’ death in January. To join himself and Papagos in conference with Wavell and Wilson, the king invited the Venizelist Republican leader, General Mazarakis. Faced with oncoming calamity, the Greek and British leaders concluded that the time had come for the Anzac Corps to leave Greece; and to protect the evacuation, the king and Papagos undertook to keep the Greek Epirus Army in the field. With the decision made, Wavell then went on to meet Blamey at Anzac Corps headquarters at 2.00 a.m. on 21 April, and told him to begin the evacuation as soon as possible.

With military strategy at least agreed, the political decision-making of the Anglo–Greek leaders was much less satisfactory. Mazarakis accepted the king’s invitation to replace Koryzis as prime minister, provided that the minister for internal security, M. Maniadakis, was excluded from the cabinet. To the Greek republican mind, Maniadakis personified the repressive apparatus of the Metaxas regime and was accordingly unacceptable as a member of a national unity government. George II referred this pre-condition to Wilson. But, not wishing to see the Athens police force destabilised at a critical juncture, the British commander rejected Mazarakis’ ultimatum. As the Australian official historian observed of Wilson’s position:

It was ironical that, as a result of a British decision, the followers of the great Greek liberal [Venizelos] who had been a devoted ally of Britain and France in the first world war should thus have been excluded from the Greek government in this crisis.20

Instead of Mazarkis, George II turned to Tsouderos, the former governor of the Bank of Greece, and regular conspirator against Metaxas. He accepted the king’s commission as prime minister and, to pacify Wilson, retained Maniadakis in the cabinet. In her hour of need, Greece now found herself governed by a man who sat in cabinet alongside the minister for internal security who was responsible for having driven him into exile.

The scheming bishop of Ionnina, Spyridon, took advantage of the leadership turmoil and this surreal political arrangement to pursue his own agenda of defeatism. At a meeting on 20 April, he met with like-minded Greek generals in Epirus. With the support of the bishop, General Tsolakoglou — whose self-indulgent command of the Greek forces at Kalabaka had so infuriated the Anzac commanders — committed himself to capitulation. Then, with the help of fellow corps commanders Lieutenant General Panagiotis Demestichas and Lieutenant General Georgios Bakos, Tsolakoglou deposed General Pitsikas, the leader of the Epirus Army. Having affected this coup, Tsolakoglou opened surrender negotiations with the Germans. This treachery took place on 21 April at Larisa, where Tsolakoglou signed the instrument of surrender with Sepp Dietrich, commander of the Leibstandarte. To his credit, Papagos intervened in an attempt to restore the situation, ordering Pitsikas to remove Tsolakoglou, but by then the damage had been done and the Greek armies in central Greece folded.

The unseemly performance on the Greek side was matched by the Italian display of pique in the ranks of the Axis: embarrassed by having the Germans accomplish what he could not, Mussolini demanded a re-enactment of the surrender ceremony, which miserable sop to fascist vanity was performed in Salonika on 23 April. Tsolakoglou completed his disgrace by briefing the Germans on tensions within the Allied camp, and freely admitted that he and many of his officers were ‘still sympathetic to the German side’.21

While the bishop of Ioannina was engaged in his dastardly work, the Anzacs variously motored and trudged slowly south. Their columns stretched for kilometres and provided the Luftwaffe with an opportunity for unopposed mischief. What remained of the RAF in Greece was pinned down in a last-ditch defence of Athens — on 20 April, 15 British Hurricanes took off to oppose a raid on the Greek capital by hundreds of German aircraft. At the end of the combat, three of their pilots were dead, including the leading ‘ace’ of the campaign, South African Squadron Leader M. T. StJ Pattle of 33 Squadron, and ‘Timber’ Woods, the pilot who had been rescued by the 2/4th Battalion at Vevi the previous week. Three other pilots were wounded, and the fighter defence of Athens was effectively no more.22

The emasculation of the RAF also meant that what little cover could be provided over the battlefield itself was completely eliminated. There have been efforts over the intervening years to downplay the effectiveness of the German air raids on the retreating Anzac columns; in these accounts, much is made of the inability of the Luftwaffe to completely halt the retreat.23 The Anzac troops may well have persevered long enough to deny the German airmen total victory, but the experience was harrowing enough for most.

On Sunday 20 April, Murray McColl was part of a convoy still on the Volos road, carrying his company of the 27 MG Battalion south. He had his back to the direction in which his truck was travelling, taking the opportunity to look north through the mists as Larisa was bombed, yet again. Suddenly,

[S]omebody said, ‘For Chrissake, look out!’ I turned around and there were three fighter planes, right down low. You could see flames coming out of the wings. We jumped out, and I got one right through the rim of my tin hat, and it hit me between the shoulder blades. I missed being a paraplegic by that much …

McColl was not the only one wounded by the strafing Messerschmitts: one of his comrades was hit in the arm, and another in the leg. Further on in the convoy, McColl’s older brother Alan had a remarkable escape — driving a three-cwt truck, the elder man had lines of German bullets burst down either side of the vehicle. Taken to an advanced dressing station, Murray had his shirt cut open and the wound dressed. Thus repaired, the wound was tolerable and he rejoined his unit.24

The German fighters strafing the roads naturally paid no respect to the rank of their targets. Lieutenant Colonel T. S. Louch, commander of the 2/11th Battalion, was caught by a Messerschmitt in his car near Domokos: Louch’s driver, Ken Hockridge, was killed instantly, and the colonel was so badly shaken that the regimental medical officer admitted him to hospital. Command of the West Australian infantry then devolved to the second-in-command, Major Ray Sandover, who took the battalion through the rest of the fighting and then on to Crete.25

Some of the German air attacks were deadly; some were simply terrifying, but miraculous in their effects. Ken Johnson endured the drive across the plain of Lamia, strafed and bombed throughout a long day: ‘The drivers knew when to scream to a halt, you jumped out and ran left or right, but on one occasion, I lost a complete section of men. One corporal, the best you could find of him was a piece of his spine that would fit in one hand.’26 John Crooks, a young lieutenant with the 1 Australian Corps Signals, was stopped by the side of the road cooking porridge for breakfast with his men, when the meal was disrupted by the arrival of a 250-kilogram (551-pound) bomb. This landed directly on the cooking fire, barely five metres from the ditch in which Crooks sought shelter. As clods of earth rained down upon him, so did the large metal dixie in which the porridge had been cooking: this bounced back to terra firma ‘without a single dint or scratch … sporting a high polish, inside and out — giving it a brand new look — but with no porridge in it’.27

The unrelenting German air attacks caused many of the Anzacs to question the organisation of the Allied effort. Captain K. E. Olephant wrote of this disillusionment:

Day after day the German Air Force bomb and machine-gun us — a terrific experience. Where is the R.A.F? Surely there has been no mismanagement. Our confidence is shaken as we suffer every morning and every evening these temporary raids. We reach the stage where we long for night and quietness. All day is a nightmare and the hours of daylight are so long. No British planes are in the sky. What has gone wrong?28

What had gone wrong was that the Anzacs were beholden to British air doctrine, thanks to the decision in 1939 to reduce the Australian and New Zealand air forces to the status of training wings for the Royal Air Force. True, the overwhelming numerical dominance of the Luftwaffe meant that there could only be one outcome in the air war over Greece, but this inevitable result was also compounded by failures of coordination between air units and the army. This failure arose from dogma being passed off as the science of war — the Royal Air Force, established as a separate military service in 1918, justified its existence with a belief in the supremacy of independent air operations as a determining factor in war. The RAF’s preferred system of army cooperation was therefore a matter of liaison, not of the subordination of air operations to the needs of the land battle. Blamey did himself no credit as a battlefield commander in Greece, but he was an expert staff officer, and his appreciation of the weakness of army–air cooperation in the campaign is evidence of the fact. He wrote in his report:

Liaison with air is not an effective means. As an example, although I was in command of the operations during the retreat from the Aliakmon position to the Thermopylae position, I did not see, nor have any communication of any kind from any Air Force officer during the whole period.29

Blamey had no capacity to influence these arrangements, partly because there were no Australian or New Zealand air units in the Mediterranean, bar a single Australian fighter squadron still in North Africa. The decision by Canberra and Wellington in 1939 to abandon the national organisation of their air units in favour of participation in the Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS) meant that they lost the option of integrating indigenous air units with their expeditionary land forces. Rather than having the Allied air force fight its own war, Blamey was advocating combined air–land operations in a unified command structure. Australia might have retained that option if the RAAF’s pre-war plans to dispatch a six-squadron air expeditionary force under national command had not been swept aside by the EATS. With Australian and New Zealand air crew scattered through the RAF, Anzac commanders in the Mediterranean were hostages to British doctrine, with all its weaknesses.

Despite the attacks on McColl, Johnson, Crooks, and thousands of others, Anzac Corps successfully got through the Larisa funnel and down the road to Lamia and safety. The achievement was partly a testament to the stamina of the troops and the strength of character of senior commanders, who willed their men on regardless of the Luftwaffe’s firepower.

Those commanders ensured that Anzac Corps was steady under air attack, and also capable of checking the German spearheads through the use of roadblocks and demolitions. The force at Domokos included the 2/6th and 2/7th Battalions, and the 2/2nd Field Regiment. Don Stephenson of the 2/6th Battalion remembered spending three days on the bare hills, where the defensive positions amounted to no more than stone sangars hurriedly put together on top of the bedrock. The sentry work of the 2/6th was enlivened by a case of friendly fire as the 2/2nd Field Regiment engaged a suspicious party below a demolished section of road. The hostile party turned out to be an English tank-recovery crew.

While waiting at Domokos for events to unfold, the men of the 2/7th Battalion had a further opportunity to indulge their newfound passion for steam engines. The battalion CO, Lieutenant Colonel T. G. Walker, a bank clerk from Hampton, Victoria, came across an ammunition train on a siding north of the main Australian position and, perhaps motivated by the thrift of his peacetime career, decided it was too valuable to be left to the Germans. Corporal Taylor, the NCO who led the impromptu engine crew that got the battalion out of Larisa in the first place, now gladly took up this latest challenge, and set off to recover Walker’s prize. No sooner had Taylor and his crew brought up steam on their latest iron charger than it was attacked by German aircraft, attracted by the telltale plume of white vapour. With such a combustible cargo, the result was inevitable — the explosion was felt more than three kilometres away by the onlooking Australian force. The unflappable Taylor emerged from the smoke, flames, and dust, his hair singed and face blackened, but otherwise unhurt.

Walker and Taylor had the time to pursue their transport interests because the Germans further north were delayed by demolitions and their own logistical problems. Lee thereby accomplished his role at Domokos without the need for a fight. As he brought back the 17 Brigade, he left a smaller rearguard 4.8 kilometres south of the village of Xinia, and gave command of it to Major H. G. Guinn, a commercial traveller from East Malvern, Victoria, destined to be the battalion commander through the hard days of the New Guinea campaigns. This force comprised a company of the 2/7th Battalion, including Phillip Hurst, astride and to the right of the road, and a company of the 2/6th on the left. The infantry were supported by D Company, 2/1st MG Battalion, which placed three platoons of Vickers guns across the front. On one of the few occasions on which the Australians got to fight alongside British armour in Greece, five of the surviving cruiser tanks of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment were also allocated to support this little contingent, and these took up position in a small wood a mile forward of the Australian infantry. After the earlier debacles in the handling of the 1st Armoured Brigade, the results of joint action between infantry and tanks at Xinia would prove instructive, but they were something of an accident: Guinn reported that the British tank commander had no intention of complying with his directions, despite being the ranking officer.30

Even with the precious tanks, Guinn’s rearguard action started badly. Down below the Australians, a German troop plane landed, effectively in no-mans land, in a field outside Xinia at about 11.00 a.m. Inexplicably, Lieutenant J. I. Morris of the 2/7th Battalion, a Sydney accountant, led a small party forward hoping to capture the Germans and their aeroplane. His men pulled back when confronted by the enemy, but Morris pressed on alone and did not return, having been taken prisoner himself. Phillip Hurst was puzzled by the bravado, recalling that he just ‘couldn’t understand the thinking’. Guinn reported later that Morris’ fate was ‘entirely his own fault’.31

With the misadventure of the young lieutenant over, the Australian infantry continued to lie in wait, hoping to spring an ambush of their own. They were rewarded at about 2.00 p.m., when three motorcycles with sidecars came within two kilometres of the Anzac lines. One of these turned back north, but the remaining two outfits came right into its lines:

There were three men on each machine, they halted and dismounted, were fired on by [by 2/6 and 2/7 Battalion]. One man ran back to a M/cycle and obtained a L.M.G. [light machine-gun] from it, while another mounted and endeavoured to escape. This man travelled approx 150 yards but was only 50 yards clear of 2/7 Bn forward troops when the M. M. G’s [Vickers] registered a direct hit with two guns. Ten to twenty minutes later a solo M/C came along the road at approx 30 m.p.h., but when about 70 yards from the overturned M/C outfit, the rider saw this and doing a very neat broadside about turned and although fired on by L. M.G’s Rifles and M.M.G this cyclist escaped.32

The Germans responded to this impertinence by sending armoured vehicles forward: first, an armoured car, which the British tanks engaged and destroyed; then a tank, which was fired upon until it withdrew. These further successes for the defence were followed by a torrential rainstorm that lasted half an hour, before a group of three panzers approached to renew the attack, this time supported by four light guns. Philip Hurst, in position behind a log hidden in the bracken, recalled that he ‘could have been home in Gippsland’. The undergrowth was such that the German tanks could not be sure of their aim until the Australian Vickers guns became so hot with the constant firing that the sodden bracken began to steam, revealing the presence of the gun pits.

‘Things looked dicey,’ remembered Hurst, until the 2/7th men got the order to pull out. A corporal near Hurst was in no mood to see the withdrawal become a rout, and shouted to those around, ‘I’ll shoot the first man that runs.’ Coming around the next corner in the road, Hurst and his comrades were mortified to find that the trucks that had been promised to lift them out were nowhere to be seen, but a party of engineers getting ready to blow a culvert certainly was. When that demolition went up, the 2/7th men had to make their way further down the road — the ‘longest mile in my life’, as Hurst remembered it. The promised transport did eventuate below the next culvert, and Guinn’s force completed its retirement, but not without some anxiety: D Company, 2/1st MG Battalion reported that its truck drivers had to use physical force to keep possession of their vehicles.33 Not seen by Hurst were the remaining British tanks — these held the road against the attacking Germans while the infantry got away, in a significant example of what might have been possible had armour–infantry cooperation been better organised in Greece.

‘I could have been home in Gippsland’
The rearguard south of Domokos, 20 April 1941

Next stop for the Anzacs was the fabled Thermopylae Line. The use of historical analogy was more for theatrics than for geographic accuracy — in the 2000 years since Leonidas had held up the Persians, the topography had changed considerably, principally because silt deposits had significantly expanded the land area toward the sea. The Anzac line actually comprised two quite widely separated passes: one at Brallos in the south-west, to be held by the Australians, and the other at Molos in the north-east, allocated to the New Zealanders.

Once again, the most effective element in the fighting at Brallos–Molos came from the Anzac field gunners, who had the capacity to hit the Germans before they could bring their advantage in tanks to bear. At Brallos, the ability of even a few well-handled guns to hold up the Germans for many hours was demonstrated in one of the most heroic and determined small-unit combats of the campaign.

To conduct the rearguard at Brallos, Blamey allocated George Vasey’s 19 Brigade, now having regained its breath after the fighting at Vevi and the withdrawal from Servia. Vasey’s men began taking up position on 19 April. That night, Vasey finally got back the 2/11th Battalion, which now joined its parent brigade for the first time in the campaign after its temporary attachment to Savige Force. Along with his own depleted 2/4th and 2/8th battalions, Vasey was lent a number of other units, including the 2/1st Battalion from 16 Brigade, and the 2/5th, although the latter unit reverted to 17 Brigade on 21 April before the battle commenced.

Across the pass, Vasey placed from left to right the 2/4th, 2/1st, and 2/11th battalions, using the 2/8th as a local reserve behind this front line. As he had to good effect at Vevi, Vasey stationed the carrier platoons available to him as a mobile response force, well behind his infantry, on this occasion north of Brallos. His artillery comprised the 2/2nd Field Regiment, commanded by Cremor, the officer invited in Jerusalem to train his men by having them fight the Black Watch.34

The 2/2nd Field Regiment had been part of the withdrawal across the plain of Lamia, and its soldiers suffered their share of wrong turns and detours along the way. Phillip Worthem and his gun crew lost contact with the main body of the regiment, forcing the sergeant in command to go back and retrace his steps. Coming to a bridge near a road junction, with a big house on the hill, the Australian gunners got some directions from a British officer. Before accepting this navigational advice, Worthem and his comrades, hungry and tired, elected to explore the house on the hill above them. This proved to be a recently vacated headquarters of a British unit, complete with a larder of whisky, chocolates, and other luxuries that the ravenous Australians had not enjoyed for weeks. They quickly loaded up their truck, complete with a recently slaughtered pig and, catching up with the rest of the regiment, were hailed as conquering heroes as they handed out bottles of George IV whisky, packets of Players cigarettes, and Cadbury chocolates.35

While Worthem enjoyed his booty, Vasey was preparing his line of defence. On the way up the pass, the Australian brigadier asked Cremor to leave behind two guns on a forward slope, where they could overlook and disrupt German efforts to get across the Spherkios River, the bridge over which the Anzac engineers had destroyed.

Cremor gave this hazardous job to Lieutenant John Anderson, the militiaman who had left the CMF in 1938 after six years to pursue accountancy studies and his choral career with the church choir. Anderson had 17 men with him from A Troop, 3rd Battery to crew two 25-pound guns, together with a number of signallers. The only spot that could be found to take them was nothing but a ledge on the side of the mountain beside the pass.

Thus exposed, Anderson and his men went into action at 6.00 p.m. on the evening of 21 April, when German vehicles left Lamia and made toward the pass. The Australian guns opened up, and Anderson was initially unimpressed. He remembered thinking the Germans ‘a bit chicken’, and that the Australians would ‘fire a few rounds and they’d go off again’.36 Having announced his presence, Anderson kept up a harassing fire through the night, discharging one gun every ten seconds on a pre-determined pattern through the night. In battle, needs must — the Australians lit their lamps with kerosene, and used the empty tins for toilets, and Anderson laid his guns using the flurorescent markings on his compass as the roughest of guides.

The lonely vigil of the artillerymen grew hotter the next day as the full weight of the German attack bore down upon them. On the morning of 22 April, the Germans established a battery of four 150-millimetre guns in a small wood south-east of Lamia. These were probably from the I/116 Artillery Regiment, operating in support of the 8 Panzer Aufklarungsabteilung from the 5th Panzer Division. The German medium artillery far outranged Anderson’s 25-pounders, and the young lieutenant opted for a dangerous expedient in an effort to reply. The 25-pound gun was fired with a combination of three charges, depending on the range required: over short distances, only charge one was used; for longer ranges, charges two and three were added. Anderson, ‘against all artillery tradition and practice’, got another 500 yards range from his guns by taking out charge two and replacing it with a second and more powerful charge three, thereby risking a burst gun barrel — and the hideous consequences to himself and his crews that went with it.37

Even with this desperate act of bravery, Anderson found his rounds still falling short of the German battery, and his position quickly became critical as the medium guns found their range: ‘… one gun was soon put out of action, the gun tractors were blown to bits, and one trailer loaded with ammunition — it all went off.’ Anderson was caught unaware at around 1.00 p.m. when the Germans succeeded in getting some infantry across — 20 trucks appeared at the base of the escarpment to his left. Anderson reacted swiftly to meet the peril: ‘I wheeled the gun round and depressed the barrel, used charge one and reduced the “oomph” and did the firing myself … we fired 50 or 60 rounds [and] didn’t have any more trouble with them.’38

Anderson’s treatment of their infantry colleagues infuriated the German gunners, who re-doubled their bombardment, and they reported the destruction of an ‘enemy battery in the pass’.39 Even so, Anderson was not yet done. He temporarily withdrew his men, but returned at around 4.00 p.m. in an effort to get the remaining gun back into action. One of Anderson’s men was soon killed, and another lost his arm at the elbow — Anderson performed the first aid, and congratulated himself on his handiwork after the war when he saw the man again, on the grounds that his wounded comrade still had the same amount of arm. It was not only the first aid that kept the Australian gunner alive, but also his evacuation under fire — Anderson got him onto a stretcher and up the hill to safety, helped by his batman, Gunner E. S. Brown, a tram conductor from Kew. Leaving their comrade in safer hands, Anderson and Brown returned yet again to the guns, only to find that more casualties had been inflicted by the German shelling. In all, of Anderson’s team of 17 men, seven were killed and three wounded. The accompanying signallers fared better physically, but suffered the strains of battle alike. Anderson recalled one particular signaller: ‘… he was buried under shell fire. He was alright physically, but his hearing and nerves were shot. He got a disability pension after the war when I confirmed it in writing.’

The sadness of the losses on that mountain ledge haunted the regiment, which published its own history after the war with modest tributes to the men killed: Bombardier Orm Tulloch, a ‘talented musician, quiet and reserved’; Bombardier Lionel Caldwell, the battery artificer, whose job required him to go back to the guns in an effort to return them to action, and in doing so ‘shared their fate’; Sergeant Len Ingram, who died while his brother, also a member of the regiment, waited further up the pass; Gunner John Drake, the youngest son of a large family whose eldest boy had died in the First World War; Gunner Frank O’Brien, who never saw his father, also killed while serving in the first AIF; and Bombardier Fred Kerr, the ‘only son of a very brave set of parents, and a brilliant athlete’.40

With no guns left to fire, and his men mostly dead or wounded, Anderson took the gun sights and buried the breach blocks as the best that could be done to permanently disable the 25-pounders. Anderson and his men had been in action for 31 hours, and under fire for much of that time. He reported this as a ‘pretty solid experience’, which left him ‘a bit tired afterwards’.41 Justice flows to soldiers no more regularly than it does to anybody else, but Anderson received some measure of it — he was awarded the Military Cross for his exploits at Brallos Pass, and Brown received the Military Medal, the equivalent award for non-commissioned ranks.

The heroism of Anderson and his men served the 19 Brigade well, allowing it to withdraw to a new position at Brallos on 23 April. With the rearguard doing well on the main Thermopylae Line, Wilson and Blamey took further steps that day to prevent its flank being turned through Patras and the Delphi Pass. Papagos was still in the fight, for the time being. To Patras, he sent the college battalion of his officer’s school, three artillery batteries, and two anti-tank platoons — virtually the last remnants of a valiant army — and, having made these deployments, he resigned as Greek commander-in-chief.42 The Patras Force was joined by what remained of the 4th Hussars from the 1st Armoured Brigade, sent on by Wilson, while Blamey had Australian engineers demolish road culverts through Delphi, and established a covering force based around the 2/5th Battalion further back at Levadia.

These flank guards were necessary, but went untested because the Germans opted to push through the main Anzac positions. On 24 April, two battalions of the 141st Regiment from the 6th Gebirgs Division and the 55 Motor Regiment from the 5th Panzer Division caught up with the Australians at Brallos. One of the advantages the Germans enjoyed from their numerical superiority was the capacity to rotate their units as the campaign developed, allowing them to feed in fresh troops as the Anzacs tired. Thus, the 5th Panzer Division replaced the 2nd Panzer Division as the armoured element in the final drive to Athens; and, likewise, within the 6th Gebirgs Division, Schörner relieved his 143rd Regiment after its work at Pinios Gorge, and allocated the 141st Regiment to the support role for the panzers.

This brought another hardened soldier into action against the Anzacs: at the head of the 141st Regiment was Oberst Maximilian Jais. An unprepossessing man by appearance, with a pinched, triangular face, prominent ears, and receding hairline, Jais was nevertheless a dedicated Nazi and a fearsome combat soldier. Having served his kaiser in the First World War, Jais was one of those sturmtruppen who refused to accept the verdict of 1918. Instead, he joined the Freikorps von Epp in 1919, hoping to create, by force on the streets, the Germany of his imagination. It was Jais and his hardline right-wing comrades who put down the Red Republic in Munich in April and May 1920. Hundreds of Spartacist and communist revolutionaries were killed in the street fighting, and many others were dispatched in summary executions after the Freikorps took control of the city. The ranks of the Epp brigade read like a ‘Who’s Who’ of the later Nazi movement — in addition to Jais, its members included Ernst Röhm, shortly to head the SA, and Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s chief lieutenant.

Against the fanatical Jais, Vasey deployed the 2/11th Battalion astride the main road near the village of Skamnos, supported by the 8 Platoon, 2/1st MG Battalion, with detachments from the 2/1st Battalion covering either flank at Gravia and Kalothronion. Early on 24 April, Jais sent his mountain infantrymen forward, in two columns: one, comprising the I/141 Regiment and 55 Motor Cycle Battalion on his left, down the line of the railway against 2/11th Battalion; and the other formed around II/141 Regiment on the German right, a wide-flanking movement through Apostrolias toward the detachment of the 2/1st Battalion at Gravia. These moves were supported by the standard dive-bombing attack: one Vickers gun of the 2/1st MG Battalion was ‘put out of action by a splinter through the breech casing’.43 The rest of the Vickers’ crews stood by their guns, and engaged the Germans in a firefight. The defence held until the Germans brought heavy mortars into action , which quickly inflicted growing casualties on the left-flank company of the 2/11th. The new CO of the Western Australian battalion, Ray Sandover, then withdrew his forward companies and brought up his reserve company to help stabilise the line.

Vasey was concerned at this stage that the Germans might break through the 2/11th and, having learnt from his experience at Vevi, accelerated the departure of the rest of the 19 Brigade. Unfortunately for the 2/2nd Field Regiment, the movement of the 2/11th exposed its guns to the oncoming German infantry. Cremor, in command of the Australian artillery, which included a troop of the 2/1st Field Regiment, took drastic measures, and ordered his guns to fire on the vacated positions of the 2/11th, even though no-one could be sure that all of the Australian infantry had pulled out. When Major Jaboor of the 3rd Battery queried the order on these grounds, ‘he was bluntly told to do as he was ordered and to bring down fire.’ Similarly, a staff officer had to be despatched by motor cycle to the troop of the 2/1st Regiment, which was likewise reticent to fire on ground recently held by friendly infantry.44 When it finally came, the barrage succeeded in preventing the Germans from crossing the fire-swept ground.

Philip Worthem was with his gun crew at this action — his 25-pounder looked straight down onto the railway tunnel, through which the German infantry were moving. He remembered, ‘[This was an] artillery man’s dream, firing through open sights, the high point of my career … it was kill or be killed, don’t worry about your own safety.’45 As the gun-layer in his crew, Worthem trained the field gun by direct line of sight, and ‘poured … rounds into the entrance to [the] tunnel’. The attacking troops were from 7 Company, 141 Regiment, which reported that it ‘made very slow progress at first, as it had to attack over country very visible to the enemy, and therefore came under heavy observed shellfire’.46 In general, the Germans were much impressed by the defence put up by Vasey and his men. Even the rearward leaps by defending units, although a source of confusion for the Australians, succeeded in delaying the Germans, who praised the skill of the defence: ‘… progress was extremely slow against clever, mobile defence by the enemy, who had prepared numerous alternative positions, which he used skilfully to avoid the fire of our heavy weapons.’47

At 8.30 p.m., the guns were withdrawn by tractors. Vasey had succeeded in breaking contact with the Germans, who now faced many miles of road demolitions before they could hope to catch the Australian rearguard. For the gunners of the 2/2nd Field, Brallos was the pinnacle of their regiment’s war: ‘This was probably the brightest day in the whole history of the regiment, as never before or afterwards had it such excellent opportunities of doing its job. The guns continued firing, ultimately over open sights, until they were finally hooked on to their tractors.’48 Sixty-two years later, Worthem declared simply, ‘We were proud of ourselves, what we did that day.’49

‘Why not one more undying feat of arms?’
Thermopylae, 1941. The defence of Brallos Pass and Molos, 24 April 1941

Across the peninsula on 24 April, the 6 NZ Brigade was also in action, this time against a strong force of German tanks trying to burst through the Molos Line. Barrowclough had deployed his battalions to tactical advantage, placing the 24 Battalion on the right, the 25 Battalion on the left, and the 26 Battalion in reserve. The ground occupied by the 25 Battalion provided the decisive feature, allowing the New Zealand infantry to take up positions on high ground running east–west, parallel to and above the road along which the German panzers had to come. With little fighting left to do in the campaign, Freyberg could lavish on Barrowclough what artillery remained, and this provided a powerful addition to the defence, comprising four field regiments (three New Zealand and one Royal Horse Artillery), the remaining medium guns of the British 64th Medium Regiment, two anti-tank regiments, and a light anti-aircraft battery. If the Germans approached this force without proper reconnaissance, the New Zealanders might yet land one last painful blow.

Under orders to hurry forward, the 5th Panzer Division pushed its tanks on, hoping to achieve a decisive breakthrough — the honour of being the first Nazi to climb the Acropolis was now tantalising the German units. Unsupported by infantry or artillery, and unsure of what faced them, the panzers paid the price that armour always risks when it comes up against a strong gun line. The German tank column lost two of its number around 2.00 p.m. to the New Zealand field guns; and when it attempted to push through in force an hour later, the ground below the 25 Battalion quickly became a mechanical graveyard.

The German unit attempting to storm the pass was the 1 Company from the 1/31 Panzer Regiment, led by another Prussian aristocrat, Hauptmann Prince von Schönburg. As they had at Servia, Platamon, and Pinios Gorge, the Germans put a premium on maintaining the momentum of the advance, in preference to thorough reconnaissance and painstaking preparation. At Molos, the result was heavy tank losses, for the only time in the campaign, as Schönburg led his men — deliberately — into a maelstrom of New Zealand and British fire:

With Leutnant Wetstein’s platoon leading, 19 tanks in file charge along the yellowish country road. The sun shone down hot on the steel. We had long ago taken off our coats. Our shirt sleeves were rolled up high and our shirts stuck to our backs. The whole battle area was tense. Terrifically tense … .at the next curve, all hell broke loose. Shells burst on all sides, and several machine-guns chattered. A few Tommies ran across the road and disappeared in the thick scrub. A heavy tank was hit direct. Enemy anti-tank guns! A flash of flame shot from the petrol tank, and in a few seconds the tank was ablaze. Thank God the crew jumped out and made for the nearest cover. A few yards farther on a light tank had run into the hillside. Nothing moved around it. Its abandoned machine-guns stuck straight up. In its hull was a hole the size of a plate and its tracks hung in shreds from the driving sprocket. In the middle of the road sat three other tanks, all on fire … the Company was completely annihilated.50

Despite his losses, Schönburg kept the surviving tanks fighting, until — according to the Germans — the New Zealanders were dislodged by the arrival of self-propelled guns. The Anzacs had a different account, and firmly maintain that they held their ground until nightfall. Doug Morrison, leading C Company of the 24 Battalion, was an eyewitness to the slaughter of the panzers. He delighted in the spectacle, having himself barely escaped meeting German armour without artillery support earlier at Tirnavos. Morrison’s position formed the roadblock at the end of the long approach march forced on the Germans, most of it under fire from the 25 Battalion to the south of the road. The panzers that survived the artillery barrage then came upon Morrison’s men astride the road, buttressed by British-manned two-pound guns. As the German tanks emerged from a bend in the road in front of Morrison, they were smothered by a renewed British and New Zealand bombardment. Morrison and his men ‘could hear the clang, clang as artillery rounds struck the tanks, which veered off into tea tree scrub’.51 This scrub was high enough to obscure the tanks — Morrison dispatched a patrol into the undergrowth later to recover the wounded German tank crews.

The New Zealanders reported 15 tanks destroyed, including eight by a single crew of 5 NZ Field Regiment, whose 25-pounder was laid by Bombardier Santi, a tinsmith from Wellington. Santi was part of E Troop, located behind 25 Battalion and positioned so that it could enfilade the flank of the German line of advance, which did the greatest damage to the panzers.52 The Germans reported 12 panzers lost in total, with seven men killed, and 22 wounded.

Apart from the excellence of the field artillery, Morrison was equally impressed by the work of a troop of British two-pound anti-tank gunners who were deployed in full view, right out on the road itself: ‘Every time a tank came round the corner, they were at it, not a thought for themselves.’ Morrison deeply admired the bravery of these British soldiers, who did a ‘100 per cent job’. The ease with which the German attack was held allowed Morrison to bask in what he knew to be false glory — when his battalion commander asked him to hold on longer than planned while some missing transport was found, Morrison happily obliged. ‘Cheekiest thing I ever said was, “Sure, we’ll hang on all night if you want us to,” knowing full well Jerry never fought at night anyway,’ he recollected, six decades later.53

Inconsistencies in the German diaries confirm Morrison’s account. After the battle, a petty squabble broke out in the German chain of command when Hauptmann Baake, an infantry commander at the head of an advance guard of 72 Infantrie Division, claimed to have taken Molos. The 5th Panzer Division indignantly defended Schönburg and recommended him for the Knight’s Cross, maintaining that it was the tanks that had driven out the New Zealanders, and that the German infantry had then merely occupied ground already vacated.54 All this confirms that the panzers had indeed been stopped in their tracks, and that when the German infantry came up, they found the New Zealand positions empty, as the withdrawal of the 6 NZ Brigade had been completed without further difficulty.

The ability of the New Zealand field artillery and the British anti-tank guns to put up a wall of fire that the panzers could not cross is further confirmed by the failure of the Germans to pull in the reserves of the 6 NZ Brigade, which would surely have occurred if Barrowclough was under genuine pressure. The bulk of that reserve at Molos was provided by the 26 Battalion, and Peter Preston was relaxed enough to take the opportunity to widen his military experience. His platoon was guarding the gun pits of the British 64th Medium Regiment, firing its mighty six-inch guns in support of the 25 Battalion along the road. ‘Can I fire at it?’ Preston asked the nearest gun crew. They gave their approval, and he pulled the string: ‘Whoosh — away she goes,’ he remembered. The frivolity ended with a Stuka attack, obviously aimed at destroying the artillery that was doing the Germans such damage. ‘[The dive-bombers] plastered the hell out of us,’ Preston said. A despatch rider coming along the nearest road on his motorcycle failed to see the escorting German fighters diving down to complete the raid with strafing attacks, and Preston could only watch as the Messerschmitt ‘blew him off the road’.55 With their work done, the British gunners spiked their artillery pieces; they, and Preston’s platoon, boarded trucks on the evening of 24 April, and pulled out.

After their valiant work at Brallos and Molos, what remained for the Anzacs was a race to the beaches of southern Greece, where with luck — and Churchill’s grace — the Royal Navy might be waiting under a welter of German air attacks to carry them to safety. As they made their way down the dark Greek roads, with headlights dimmed, bone-weary and hungry, it was this hope of evacuation that sustained them on the eve of Anzac Day 1941.