CHAPTER ELEVEN

Legacies

Ah how shameless — the way these mortals blame the gods

From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes

But they themselves, with their own reckless ways

compound their pains beyond their proper share

The Odyssey, 1.37–40

At the end of February 1941, Britain and her dominions had in the Middle East the nucleus of a powerful army, composed of ten divisions. German forces were yet to land in North Africa, the British garrison at Malta stood ready to interdict them if they made the attempt, and the Royal Navy ruled the Mediterranean.

Three months later, Malta was besieged, Rommel’s Afrika Korps stood at the gates of Egypt, the Mediterranean Fleet was battered and bruised by horrendous losses, and the army was in disarray: two modern motorised divisions had been smashed in Greece and Crete, along with an armoured brigade; and, in north Africa, an armoured division had been broken and captured by Rommel, leaving another motorised division supplemented by an infantry brigade and tank regiments bottled up in the siege of Tobruk. While a defensive guard held the Libyan–Egyptian border, hurriedly assembled forces were strung out through Palestine and Jordan, to deal with a German-fomented uprising in Iraq and a hostile Vichy French regime in Syria. As Blamey wrote in his report on the campaign in Greece, ‘All our later difficulties in the Middle East are the direct result of this very unfortunate adventure.’1

Churchill was nevertheless pleased with the outcome. He told Wavell at the end of April: ‘We have paid our debt of honour with far less loss than I feared. Feel sure that you are waiting to strike a blow.’2 Ironically, at least one leading Greek thought the British prime minister had made a bad mistake. Papagos wrote of the decision to abandon the drive on Libya, in early February 1941:

Instead of calling a halt to these operations, the best course would seem to be to press them on by all possible means and occupy Tripolitania which then relied for its sole defence on the demoralized remnants of Grazziani’s Italian army, inasmuch as, at that time, not a single German soldier had yet set foot in Africa to reinforce the Italians. The whole of Libya could thus be occupied. This would subsequently render possible a much more extensive British action in the Balkans, provided that such action was adequately prepared and timed. At all events, the abandonment, in one theatre of war, of operations which gave every promise of ultimate success and which would produce substantial results for the whole Allied struggle, in order to embark on another operation in a quite different theatre, with means and under conditions which doomed it to certain failure, would be to commit a strategic error in contradiction with the principles of a sound conduct of the war.3

German strategists agreed with Papagos. Friedrich von Mellenthin, involved in the planning of Operation Marita, observed:

Of all the British enterprises during the war, the expedition to Greece seems to me the most difficult to justify … it seems incredible that the British planners should have thought that four Commonwealth divisions could maintain a prolonged resistance in Greece against the unlimited resources of the Wehrmacht.4

Yet wars are not won on narrow military calculations, but also on the political consequences of battles, and it was around these that Churchill made the fundamental decision to end the offensive against the Italians in Libya in February 1941 and send the available forces to Greece instead. For him, the result in the Balkans did not matter; it was the influence of direct British opposition to Hitler on mainland Europe that counted. Thus, defeat in Greece, and later on Crete, paradoxically enhanced Churchill’s strategic aims, because it gave him the opportunity to beg Roosevelt to do more, or else face the prospect of German victory. On 1 May, in the interlude between the evacuation from Greece and the loss of Crete, Churchill received news that the Americans would for the time being do nothing to intervene directly in the Battle of the Atlantic. He at once cabled Roosevelt, raising the prospect that Britain might be driven entirely from the Middle East, and arguing this was against the American national interest:

I cannot take the view that the loss of Egypt and the Middle East would be a mere preliminary to the successful maintenance of a prolonged oceanic war. If all Europe, the greater part of Asia and Africa, became either by conquest or agreement under duress, a part of the Axis system, a war maintained by the British Isles, United States, Canada and Australasia against this mighty agglomeration would be a hard, long, and bleak proposition … The one decisive counterweight I can see to balance the growing pessimism … would be if United States were immediately to range herself with us as a belligerent Power.5

Roosevelt was not ready for that step, but, on 27 May, as Crete was falling, he did issue an emergency proclamation, mobilising the American people and economy to strengthen the US armed forces ‘to the extreme limit of our national power and authority’.6 He followed up in June by sending American troops to garrison Iceland, thereby advancing US interests thousands of kilometres toward Germany, and bringing a shooting war with Hitler that much closer.

The problem with Churchill’s strategy in Greece was thus not its design, which attained for him the object he sought, but the undemocratic means by which he pursued it. Had the Greek government known that British planners were prepared to blow up the most vital parts of Greece’s economic infrastructure in the event of a German invasion, at the same time as they were negotiating the terms on which Force W would move to Athens, it is difficult to see why they would have agreed to accept Churchill’s help.

The same point can be made in relation to Australian and New Zealand participation in the campaign. None of the important appreciations prepared in London in February and March 1941 were shared with Canberra and Wellington, for the obvious reason that no government in either country could have survived the criticism that would have followed when it was learnt that Anzac troops were being committed to a doomed expedition. The inability of the Greek munitions factories to keep producing ammunition, the ease with which a German army could move through the Balkans, the lack of shipping — in short, the inevitability of defeat — all of this was known in London, and pointedly not provided to Australia and New Zealand.

Diplomatic convenience then went a step closer to downright deceit in the aftermath of the campaign. The New Zealand government had the courage to ask Britain to account for the disaster, in the shape of a questionnaire sent by prime minister Peter Fraser to London. This asked twenty direct and sensible questions, the first of them being, ‘What were the grounds for believing that three Divisions and an Armoured Brigade, plus the Greeks, could hold an unlimited number of German divisions, fully mechanized and armoured — plus the Italians?’7

The British response was artfully selective, pointing to an appreciation by the director of Military Intelligence on 11 February that the Germans would have only five divisions on the Greek border by 12 March, allowing planners to conclude that there was still time to get to Greece. The later appreciation by the deputy director, which found that the Germans would have five divisions over the Greek border and deployed within central Greece, was never mentioned. Nor, of course, were any of the other pieces of British planning that cast obvious doubt on the wisdom of the campaign.

Yet in a world of realpolitik, there is no point in complaining about Churchillian perfidy — he was, after all, looking after British interests. In his calculations, the men and women of Australia and New Zealand were resources to serve his purposes; only misty-eyed romantics like Menzies thought the British Empire of 1941 was a genuine Commonwealth of Nations in which the interests of one were the interests of the whole. The empire was run to protect and enrich Britain, not her ‘children’, and the selective manner in which information was provided to Canberra and Wellington about the Greek campaign was evidence of the fact.

The British parliament knew as much as well. For all Menzies’ manouevring with those like Lloyd George who were prepared to contemplate a compromise peace, Churchill easily accommodated defeat in Greece. On 7 May 1941, his government survived a confidence motion in the House of Commons by a healthy majority of 447 to three.

The same would not be said for Menzies. He returned to Australia on 24 May 1941, with a ‘sick feeling of repugnance and apprehension’, believing his talents were being squandered in an antipodean backwater, while the fate of the empire in which he so truly believed hung in the balance.8 The feeling of apprehension was well-merited, since his high-wire act, of using the Greek campaign to discredit Churchill, while simultaneously facing the same criticism from the Australian people for his own support for the venture, ended in his temporary political demise. On 29 August 1941, under a barrage of public and media complaints about his conduct of the Australian war effort, Menzies resigned as prime minister.

The judgement of the Australian parliament and the people on Menzie was warranted, because the consequences of the debacle in Greece were not confined to the Mediterranean theatre: the losses incurred, and the continuation of the fighting in North Africa, meant that Britain was unable to strengthen her defences in the Far East as the likelihood of Japanese aggression grew in the second half of 1941. In particular, the naval losses in April and May 1941 ensured that Britain’s long-promised fleet for Singapore, on which Australia in particular had placed all its inter-war faith, would arrive in only token form. What might have constituted that fleet lay at the bottom of the eastern Mediterranean: the evacuation from Greece cost the Royal Navy two destroyers, and then around Crete a further three cruisers and six destroyers were sunk. Just as grievous were the number and importance of the ships severely damaged and forced into dock for repairs lasting anything up to 12 months. These included a precious aircraft carrier and two battleships, two cruisers, and two destroyers: it was for want of carrier-borne aircraft that Prince of Wales and the Repulse succumbed to Japanese air attack in December 1941, while HMS Formidable, an aircraft carrier damaged off Crete in May 1941, was still in dockyard hands in the United States.

The failure of Churchill to press on to Tripoli in February 1941 also meant that when Wavell took the offensive to lift the siege of Tobruk the following November, he had to assemble vastly larger forces than O’Connor might have required, which had to be supplied over huge distances from England via the Red Sea, at a prodigious cost in shipping over sea-lanes infested with U-boats. Just a part of these assets would have secured Malaya and Singapore. Operation Crusader, the British plan to drive Rommel from North Africa, opened on the Egyptian frontier on 18 November 1941: into the attack, Wavell sent an armoured division, along with two other independent armoured brigades, with 650 modern tanks, and three infantry divisions, including the rested and re-equipped 2nd New Zealand Division (but not including the sizeable garrison within Tobruk itself). Above this sizeable and well-equipped army flew 544 aircraft, including modern American Kittyhawk fighters.

Meanwhile, in Malaya, the Australian, British, and Indian troops awaiting a Japanese attack had not a single tank to support them, and the torpedo bombers responsible for destroying an invasion force at sea were ancient Vickers Vildebeeste biplanes equipping just two squadrons. This design had first flown in 1928, and boasted a top speed of 156 mph: British hopes that a seaborne invasion of Malaya could be defeated by air attack meant that young aircrew would have to operate this machine against modern Japanese fighters, and when they did on 20 January 1942 they were slaughtered wholesale. The fighter defences in Malaya and Singapore were no better, and amounted to just four squadrons — including two from Australia and one from New Zealand— flying Brewster Buffaloes, a machine so useless that no other role could be found for it. Britain’s treasure had gone in fighting Hitler in Greece and then his Afrika Korps in Egypt, and preparations to meet a Japanese attack got the cast-offs.

Menzies paid a price for his misjudgements, but other proponents of the Greek adventure fared better. Henry Maitland Wilson, unencumbered by any ‘originality or scintillation’, continued to ‘float upwards unimpeded’. He ended the war a field marshal, in Wavell’s old job as British commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean. Typical of the man, having told anyone who would listen that the Germans could be stopped in Greece with the help of the terrain, in his official report on the campaign he explained defeat partly in terms of ‘the surprising ability of (German) armoured fighting vehicles to pass over difficult ground’.9 Wavell’s career, too, was not unduly disrupted by his role in Greece. He would be relieved as commander-in-chief in the Middle East later in 1941 after further defeats at the hands of Erwin Rommel, but even they did not prevent him from taking up further command posts in Asia, or his promotion to field marshal in January 1943.

The man for whom Churchill, Wavell, and Wilson bent themselves double to impress, Roosevelt’s private emissary, William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, also prospered in the months following defeat in Greece and Crete. Returning to the United States, he took on a more formal role, establishing America’s secret service. He was first named the coordinator of Information, then the head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an organisation that would eventually transform itself into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

For the great statesmen of Britain and America, Greece was but a chapter in a long volume, and the same could be said for the leading Germans in the campaign. Their victory would prove fleeting: Greece was the last decisive campaign that Hitler would fight. As Nazi aggression over-extended itself, and eventually collapsed in an ocean of blood, so fell some of its most fanatical adherents. Franz Witt, the victor of Vevi, was killed in 1944 by a naval bombardment at Normandy; and Georg Stumme, his corps commander, having taken over from Rommel at the head of the Afrika Korps, died of heart failure when Montgomery opened his offensive at El Alamein in October 1942.

For some, justice came by way of legal process.

Alexander Löhr, the original inspiration for the invasion of Crete, and the man responsible as the commander of Luftflotte 4 for the blitz against Belgrade, was executed by the Yugoslavs in February 1946.

Hermann Balck, the dynamic commander of 3 Panzer Regiment at Platamon and Pinios Gorge, rose to command an army group, but after the war was jailed for murder, having ordered the summary execution of an officer found drunk on duty in November 1944.

Hajo Hermann, the Luftwaffe pilot who demolished Pireaus, went on to pioneer the desperate use of ill-equipped, single-engined fighters in the night-time defence of Germany in 1943. Right at the end of the war, he even survived a stint in command of Sonderkommando Elbe, a unit formed as a suicide squad to crash fighters into American heavy bombers. He was jailed by the Soviet Union for ten years, but still failed to get the point, and emerged from prison to begin a career as a Holocaust denier.

Sepp Dietrich, commander of the Leibstandarte, was subject to a succession of trials for his crimes. Having risen to command the 6 SS Panzer–Armee, Dietrich was charged with murder in 1946 for the execution of American prisoners captured during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he was released in 1956, only to be arrested again, this time by German authorities for his part in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Convicted again, he was released from prison on health grounds in 1959, and died seven years later: 6000 of his former SS comrades attended the funeral.

Schörner, the commander of the mountain troops at Pinios Gorge and Brallos, passed away in obscurity in 1973, having had the dubious honour of being named by Hitler as the last commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht as Berlin crumbled in May 1945. This was an appointment he gained through a fanatical loyalty to Nazism, in which cause he executed German soldiers for alleged desertion — a practice that earned for him the sobriquet ‘Bloody Ferdinand’. Schörner, too, spent lengthy periods in jail, first in the Soviet Union for crimes against his enemies, and then in West Germany, for atrocities against his own troops.

While Dietrich, Stumme, Witt, and the rest of the Nazi military machine moved east to assault Stalin’s Soviet Union, they left behind a country facing the choice that confronts those under military occupation — collaboration or Resistance. Not surprisingly, General Tsolakoglou opted for the former, crowning his treacherous capitulation at Larisa by accepting a commission from the Nazis to form a Quisling government on 30 April 1941. His henchman in surrender, General Demestichas, also served in this puppet cabinet. The head of the Greek Orthodox Church, Archbishop Crysanthos, refused to swear in the Tsolakoglou administration, and its credibility was completely destroyed when it acquiesced in the Bulgarian annexation of parts of eastern Macedonia and western Thrace, displacing 100,000 Greeks from their homes. During the winter of 1941–42, famine stalked the land, thanks to German rapaciousness, and an estimated 300,000 people starved to death by the end of the war.10 Even amid this horror, Tsolakoglou served the Germans until December 1942. Arrested after the liberation, Tsolakoglou was convicted and sentenced to death, a penalty that was later commuted to life imprisonment. He died of leukaemia in prison in 1948.

While Tsolakoglou and his like did the Nazis’ bidding, others resisted. These patriots included George Tsioukanaras and Dimitris Tsiaousis, humble foot soldiers of the Resistance. After the battlefront passed by his village near Grevena, young Tsioukanaras initially found life went on much as before: he found himself in the Italian zone of occupation, and his village was too small to warrant a garrison. As the local Resistance intensified, so too did Italian counter-measures: Tsioukanaras saw his first Italian when a squad arrived, assisted by a Greek collaborating as an interpreter, to demand the surrender of weapons. The Italian demand was made on pain of torching the village: Tsioukanaras’ brother complied and handed over his army rifle, but young George had to buy a weapon to satisfy the occupiers, and immediately swore an oath of revenge.

Tsioukanaras joined the Resistance on 2 February 1943, and survived nearly two years of bitter fighting in the mountains of central Greece. Incredibly, he found in peacetime not celebration for his service, but persecution. The local Resistance that he joined had been organised by the Greek Communist Party, as it was in many places; then, after the war, the veterans found themselves caught up in Cold War politics as the Greek right, assisted by America and Britain, purged the country of communist influence in a bitter civil war. The Greek army was led in this fighting by Papagos: he had remained in Greece when the government fled in 1941, and was arrested by the Germans in 1943. Re-installed as Greek commander-in-chief, Papagos was merciless in pursuing the communists, resorting to the use of napalm to secure a military victory. Tsioukanaras himself was interned on the notorious island of Makronisos, where the concentration camp is described as having ‘surpassed the medieval horrors of Devil’s Island and [resembling] the Gulags of Siberia’.11 After many years of incarceration, he immigrated to Australia in 1962. It was not until the Papandreou government was elected in 1981 that he received official recognition for his service as a Resistance fighter.

Dimitris Tsiaousis began his Resistance service almost as soon as the conventional fighting passed by. In his district around Mount Olympus, many scattered groups of Anzacs remained at large, and the communist leadership in Katerini took these remnants into the mountains. Tsiaousis’ father was not a communist, but the workers at the local bank were, and they knew he had money that might be put to use. They came to Tsiaousis senior for funds to buy food to sustain the Anzacs, which he provided: young Tsiaousis then served as a courier, delivering supplies to the partisans in the hills. The Germans warned the villages to surrender the Anzacs, or face the consequences. Tsiaousis remembered that one party of 11 ‘English’ soldiers wished to surrender, and the Germans, on arrival in the village to apprehend them, killed one as a lesson to all by tying a noose around his neck and then dragging him around the square behind a jeep. This was the first time that young Dimitris had seen a German, and he had reason to remember the incident: within months, Tsiaousis’ mother was tortured to death, and his father and two uncles were dead, along with 70 other villagers, shot in reprisal for local resistance.

Even amid these atrocities, the Greeks never failed their allies: groups of Anzacs were sustained in the district until 1943, when the Resistance, by then stronger and better organised, smuggled them on to caiques and ferried most of them to Turkey. Dimitris then took up arms, fighting through the dark years of 1943 and 1944, until the Greek Resistance secured the liberation of the country. Tsiaousis was one of many Resistance fighters horrified to find the British, on arrival in 1945, put down the communist wing of the Resistance by force. He had opened a small grocery shop, only to have it confiscated by armed police on the pretext that the funds to start it had been provided by the British during the war. Tsiaousis fled into hiding, pursued by the government’s ‘black berets’. He eventually rejoined the communist army and, with Papagos victorious, went into exile in the Soviet Union, where he trained as an electrical engineer at a tractor factory in Tashkent. His brothers, meanwhile, immigrated to Australia, and he joined them in 1973, courtesy of the family reunion program. Among Tsiaousis’ contributions to his new country were helping to reconstruct Darwin after Cyclone Tracy, and working for 19 years as an electrician in the construction industry for his brother’s sub-contracting business.

When the surviving Anzacs returned to civilian life at home in Australia and New Zealand, some chanced upon Greek immigrants who had shared their wartime experience. Kevin Price, the machine-gunner serving with 2/1st Anti-Tank Regiment at Vevi, was astounded to find that his local fish-and-chip shop in leafy East Malvern, a Melbourne suburb, was run by a Greek from that very village, who remembered as a boy the fighting swirling around him as the Leibstandarte drove south through the mountain pass.

For Price and many others, Greece was but one battle honour in a long war. Price went on to serve in an anti-aircraft regiment that went through the New Guinea campaigns, and got as far north as Lae. This trajectory into the Pacific war was the course followed by the 6th Division veterans; the New Zealand corollary was found in North Africa and Italy, where the NZ Division fought out the rest of the war.

Eric Davies of the 19 Battalion was one such veteran. He got out of Crete in one piece and, once safely delivered to Alexandria, ran into the crew of the Australian destroyer that had carried him away from Crete. This little trans-Tasman collective promptly went on a five-day bender and, in the midst of this spree, the revellers found themselves caught in a big air raid, during which all the windows of the bar were blown in. The Tasman warriors were undeterred, but the bar staff left for the safety of the basement. This was too good an opportunity to miss: one of the Australians rolled a keg of beer onto the trap door, and the party resumed — only, now, free of charge. Davies survived this and later fighting in North Africa, and returned to New Zealand in March 1944, where he went on to a post-war career as a farmer and horse breeder.12

Davies’ mate Malcolm Coughlin went as far as Italy with the 2nd NZ Division, but first his wounds from Crete had to heal. He collapsed on the destroyer that evacuated him from Crete, but he revived in time to stagger into the Alexandria warehouse that was being used as a dressing station. There, the medical staff examined his wounded hand and, when they took the bandage off, Coughlin recalled, ‘The pus squirted out ten yards across the floor, that’s how bad it was.’ Coughlin spent six weeks in hospital, initially in a state of delirium, and then three weeks in convalescence, with a physiotherapist working on his hand. ‘They kept me in because I could still use my trigger finger,’ he said. The long-serving men of the NZ Division were granted a furlough home in the mid-war years, and Coughlin was among the first. According to Coughlin, many soldiers, having ‘done their bit’, refused to return to the Middle East, but not he: ‘My father was very patriotic; I think he would have shot me if I hadn’t gone back.’ Incredibly, having survived the bitter fighting in Crete, Coughlin went unscathed through the vicious campaign around Monte Cassino, Italy, in early 1944.13

Not all of the wounded Anzacs thought as much of their medical treatment as Coughlin did. Phillip Hurst was one of the few men of the 2/7th Battalion to get off Crete. With his shoulder badly wounded by mortar fire, things deteriorated further when he contracted sandfly fever, which in turn led to a kidney abscess. Despite his pleas for intervention, Hurst could elicit no interest in his condition from the Australian doctor treating him, who he went to see every day without result. Such was his distress that, he remembered, it was the nearest he came to ‘killing an Australian’. Hurst eventually decided that the only way he would get treatment was to assault the doctor: he reasoned that, locked up, he might get access to a prison hospital. He resolved to whack the medico at the next visit, but was happily surprised to find another doctor in residence, relieving his incompetent colleague, who had gone on leave. Within minutes, the severity of Hurst’s condition was diagnosed, and he was admitted for surgery. Emerging after seven weeks’ convalescence, he was deemed medically unfit to rejoin the infantry, and he spent the rest of the war in an anti-aircraft regiment.

Still, those fateful days in Greece and Crete haunted him, not least the fate of the kindly Cretan woman who lent his platoon the dixie full of honey. Hurst found his dreams taken over by the experience. On Crete, like many others, he improvised his own personal kit, and scrounged an empty bully beef tin from which to eat his meals. In the confusion of battle, retreat, and injury, Hurst naturally lost this humble piece of gear; but, even so, he remembered that he ‘used to wake up for years worried about the loss’.14

Of course, not all of those wounded on Crete were treated in Egypt and Palestine. For those left behind as prisoners, medical treatment was scanty, and much depended on the hard work of Australian and New Zealand doctors and staff who chose to stay with their patients.

Murray McColl was one of the second Anzacs who survived an epic medical ordeal. With his thigh shattered by a bullet, McColl spent several weeks in June 1941 in the Cretan schoolyard where he was first treated. Hygiene was poor: there were no bed bottles, and all the wounds were soon fly-blown, which at least kept them clean, as the maggots ate the rotting flesh. Medical care amounted to not much more than a jab of morphine at night to help him sleep, but conditions eventually improved for McColl when he was evacuated to Athens in one of the Junkers transports that had so recently been ferrying German paratroopers in the invasion drop. To the last, the Cretans were by his side. He remembered that, ‘[On the] day we left, with the ambulance outside, it had holes in its side from shrapnel, the Cretans were pushing bread through the holes to us’.15

In Athens, McColl was admitted to the hospital run by the 2/5th AGH, and there he got the best medical treatment available, which was not much. His wounded leg was put into a wooden frame as the doctors fought to avoid an amputation; unfortunately, this cut into his backside, but he inherited a better metal frame when another patient died. To keep himself amused, McColl developed a party trick for visitors. He had a big pad on the wound as a dressing, and he recalled: ‘I’d show blokes, and they’d take off like a rocket.’

McColl did make one mistake of his own — accepting some grapes purchased from a stall near the hospital. ‘I should have had them washed, because I got amoebic dysentery,’ he remembered.His condition deteriorated further when a blood transfusion went wrong. Weakened by dysentery and blood poisoning, he recalled, he watched as an Australian doctor named McNamara came through announcing that a Maori boy was ‘having his leg off’. The doctor then declared to McColl, ‘You might be in the same mind.’ So debilitated was McColl, he merely replied, ‘I don’t care if they take it off below the ears.’ Of the surgeon who came round that night, he remembered: ‘[He was a] Dr Brookmore, a really hard-case bloke. He pulled the sheet back, marked the spot, put the sheet over me, never said a word.’ As he waited for the operation, McColl remembered looking down at his own toes and thinking, ‘That’s the last I’ll see of them, that’s the end of football.’ Shifted along the ward in preparation, McColl was given a whiff of chloroform to put him out, but the wound broke open and he was left screaming in pain, with the discharge covering the floor.

Murray McColl’s leg was amputated months after he was first gunned down on Crete. On the night of the operation, the patients in his ward were asked to be quiet, as he was not expected to live. McColl came to and, through the delirium, looked down to where his leg had been to find a ‘weightless thing sitting on a pillow’. Despite a move to the filthy and notorious former Turkish barracks in Salonika, he began to recuperate: ‘Strange as it may seem, I started to turn the corner after a month or so and gradually got stronger, so I could lift my head off the pillow and turn on my side,’ he remembered.

Transported to Germany, McColl was eligible for repatriation as an amputee unfit for further military service. He duly passed the medical panel, made up of two Swiss and two German doctors, and went home at the end of 1943, through Marseille to Barcelona, then Alexandria. McColl arrived in New Zealand just before Christmas 1943 to find nephews he had never met. Despite his injury, McColl married and went onto a successful career in electrical engineering and retailing. After the war, he served on the committee of the Auckland branch of the War Amputees Association: the four committee members could boast of having just three legs between them. One of McColl’s committee members also made do without an arm, and Murray used to joke to him that it ‘goes to show you shouldn’t chew your fingernails’.16

One of the Australian medical staff who cared for McColl at the 2/5th AGH in Athens was Vince Egan, the St John Ambulance enthusiast from Sydney. He passed into captivity ‘numb’ at the prospect, one of the 164 personnel from the 2/5th AGH who had been left behind to tend to the existing patients. These were soon joined by a stream of horrific battle casualties from Crete, flown in like McColl by the Germans: among those cared for by Egan was a British officer who had to have both eyes removed. Egan was soon the only nursing support for a 50-bed surgical ward, administering everything from morphine to aspirin. In all, the 2/5th AGH dealt with 2800 patients from April to December 1941, when the Germans closed down the hospital and shipped the medical staff to Germany; only 70 deaths were recorded among this torrent of broken bodies. Egan was justifiably proud of his contribution, especially his administration of medication, for which he was not trained. ‘I decided the dosage and administered it, and I never had a patient die from an overdose,’ he recalled.

Their noble work done, the medical staff went into the German Stalags, like everyone else, for the rest of the war. Carried in cattle trucks in dreadful sanitary conditions, Egan’s party took a fortnight to reach Poland. For two years, he worked as an orderly in a Stalag hospital, housed in a nineteenth-century fort at Torun. With the approach of the Red Army in 1945, the Germans marched their prisoners to the west, knee-deep in snow. The prisoners were already in poor physical condition: Egan pushed his English friend, who was unable to walk, in a cart. Driven aimlessly through Germany, the prison column was eventually overrun by an American unit and, in time, Egan was flown out to England. After a period of leave, Egan was shipped back to Australia, where he resumed his pre-war career with the Australian Gas Light company. Asked to reflect on his wartime experience, Egan thought he bore some scars, but he believes, ‘It’s hard to say.’ 17

Other guests of the Germans were less equivocal about the effect of captivity on their health. Young Max Rice surrendered on Campbell’s orders at Retimo; back home, along with thousands of others in similar circumstances, his family and friends suffered the trauma of reading in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph on 24 June 1941 that he was missing in action. Rice had his 21st birthday as a prisoner of war, and at least enjoyed the kindness of a German girl who baked him a cake, delivered with the aid of sympathetic guards. Rice was increasingly traumatised as the Allied bombing of Germany grew worse, and the memories of being denied shelter while out on work details during raids would later haunt him. After the war, he lived near the railway marshalling yards at White Bay, in Sydney’s inner city. There, the sound of the shunting locomotives sounded just like bombs to him. ‘I went walking at night with my mate Bluey, with a bottle of scotch. In Germany, you weren’t allowed into the bomb shelters, I couldn’t think straight, I was a nervous wreck,’ he recalled.18

Rice had good cause to fear air attacks in the last months of the war. John Crooks, taken prisoner in the evacuation debacle at Kalamata, survived four long years in a prisoner-of-war camp, only to narrowly avoid death when his prison column was strafed by American P47 fighters in the last days of the war. The diary he kept in his tunic pocket was clipped by a bullet. Eighteen of his comrades were not so lucky, though — they were killed in the raid.19

For a handful, incarceration opened doors to alternative careers. Some, like Malcolm Webster, managed to escape, and others like Ken Johnson made prison life more tolerable by turning their hands to racketeering.

That Malcolm Webster went on to an extraordinary career as an escapee and Resistance fighter was all the more remarkable for his having survived the sinking of the Hereward off Crete in the first place. As a prisoner of the Italians, Webster was moved from Scarpanto, where he was initially put ashore, to Bari in southern Italy, via Rhodes and Leros, another island in the Dodecanese. He survived a period in a camp near Udine on the Yugoslav border, run by a Sicilian major who Webster remembered as a ‘dyed-in-the-wool fascist’. There, Webster got blood poisoning from a cut on his foot, and beri-beri from a lack of Vitamin B. Half blind from the disease, he saved his own life by volunteering to join a work gang, with the sole objective of getting out of the prison camp, the conditions in which were so poor that Webster was convinced he would die if he remained. Transferred on Anzac Day 1943, Webster was so weak that he couldn’t carry his gear, but he joined a crew working in the rice fields of the Lombardy plains. There, he remembered, he was ‘taught how to bludge’ by Carlo, an Italian Marxist imprisoned by Mussolini, and a radical so committed to his doctrine that he declared he wanted the Vatican bombed. When the Italian armistice ushered in a period of chaos before the Germans occupied northern Italy, Webster took the opportunity to abscond into the countryside. Joining up with communist partisans, Webster (codenamed ‘Sydney’) joined a band of 36 men who, he recalled, were initially armed with ‘one shot gun, with no cartridges, one carbine, and one revolver’. British air drops improved their equipment, and Webster finished the war by helping to liberate the town of Vercelli. Webster’s band took over the fascist headquarters, where he arrested the Italian commander and souvenired the general’s medals. He then acted as an interpreter for the arriving American Fifth Army, helping to secure the surrender of 30,000 Germans in the district.20

Ken Johnson’s experiences after capture were more entrepreneurial in nature. While recovering from the wounds he’d received outside Perivolia, he struck up a contractual arrangement with ‘Sparks’, a Greek electrician helping to maintaining the former polytechnic college that housed the 2/5th AGH where Johnson was treated. Sparks got about under German noses by carrying with him at all times a lead with a globe attached. Johnson described how he’d slip him some money, and Sparks would bring him back ‘some cigarettes, fried figs,’ as well as ‘a razor, and brush, and sandshoes’.

While hospitalised, Johnson struck up a friendship with Roy Farran, the British tank officer who had fought at Maleme and Galatas. Farran invited him to join an escape party, but Johnson had to decline on medical advice: with an open wound still on his ankle, his prospects were poor from the start. Farran did manage to get away, and returned to Alexandria.

Johnson then survived one of the nightmare railway journeys to camps in Germany that were endured by most of the prisoners taken in Greece and Crete. Johnson’s cattle truck was reserved for officers and was less crowded on that account, but the sanitary arrangements were no better — they consisted of tins emptied out the barred window. He and his comrades narrowly escaped reprisals when the spray from their excrement covered the German guards riding behind: a German-speaking doctor had to pacify a pistol-waiving German NCO who was demanding retribution.

On arrival in Germany, Johnson, clothed only in khaki shorts and sandshoes, was deposited in Stalag 8B, near the Czech–Polish border, just in time for the coldest winter in 40 years. A sympathetic padre had two pairs of long pants, and kindly gave one pair to Johnson. However, such generosity was scarce. Johnson found the camp ‘run on rackets’, and he thought the answer was to join the system. As ever, cigarettes provided a universal currency, and Johnson soon had a lucrative career: he remembered that he would crawl ‘under the wire from compound to compound, do the trade, my take 10 per cent’. Another less ecclesiastically minded padre sought to join the business, but Johnson was firm. ‘It cost me to buy in, it can cost you, too,’ he told him.

The other scheme that Johnson found helped ease the privations of camp life involved comfort parcels. From family back in Australia, POWs could expect only one clothing parcel every three months, but Johnson quickly cottoned on to a more frequent arrangement. ‘The lurk was to nominate the paymaster in [the] UK as your next of kin, and get him to debit your pay book and send you extra parcels,’ he recalled. Johnson passed through the ‘lousy camp’ at Offlag (near Warmburg, in the Ruhr) before returning home after VE Day. His wartime experiences were no deterrent to a further military career: he joined the post-war reserve.21

Many of the prisoners struggled to come to terms with their wartime ordeals. Reg Werry, the field engineer who helped blow the demolitions at Vevi and Pinios Gorge, only to be taken prisoner at Sfakia, came home and developed a dependency on prescription tranquillisers. He was tortured by a recurring nightmare in which men threw themselves on an electrified, barbed-wire fence. The repatriation hospital dealt with this by prescribing him medication: ‘[They loaded] me up with pills, six a day. I was a zombie. By force of will, I put them down the toilet,’ he remembered. Werry found salvation in God, turning to the church as a way to find meaning in his life.22

Others sought to understand what had happened to them in Greece and Crete by studying the campaign in detail. Bob Slocombe took this avenue to its most complete conclusion by completing a university degree in history, and acquired through his study of Menzies and Churchill a deep suspicion of conservative politics. Others, like Jack Burke, gained a distinctly republican outlook: ‘The big idea then was Mother England was in trouble. Now, Mother England can go to buggery as far as I’m concerned — we’re a separate nation.’23 However, that sentiment was not universal. For others, the war was an affirmation of a ‘British’ Australia (or New Zealand). One such believer was the remarkable Mollie Edwards, who went on to nursing stints in field hospitals in New Guinea and Morotai after her time in Greece. Asked to describe her wartime service, she simply declared: ‘I honoured my god, served my king, and saluted my flag, and I’m still a monarchist!’24

The enthusiasm of the veterans interviewed for this book was one of the most noticeable features of the research phase; it demonstrated their palpable desire to have the story of Greece told and brought to a wider public. Partly, this was an understandable impulse: it grated on many that the campaign in Greece had never received any recognition, in the shape of a campaign medal, and that there had been a delay in providing monetary compensation for captivity, which had been conferred years earlier on the prisoners of the Japanese. Among others, Don Stephenson, another captive of the Germans, was indignant at this treatment. ‘What counselling did we get? Sent out to Wantirna [a Melbourne surburb] for a medical, [and then] “here are — there’s your discharge papers.” Other POWs getting payments — what were we on? A holiday?’ he asked.25

In the absence of official recognition, veterans took matters into their own hands. For some, this was a simple matter of chance meetings with men who they had encountered at some critical point in the campaign; others took post-war opportunities to establish more formal and physical expressions of remembrance. Edwin Madigan, the footballer and lifesaver who survived Pinios Gorge and then the long march through central Crete to Sfakia, was having a quiet drink at his local hotel at Harbord, on Sydney’s northern beaches. Madigan repeatedly went to the bar; but each time he offered to pay the barmaid, she insisted that the drink had been paid for. When quizzed, she explained that the ‘fella in the brown coat’ was standing Madigan his beers, and Madigan naturally went over to ask why. ‘That’s nothing, you saved my life. Do you remember, in Crete, I was one of the blokes [in the cave above Sfakia]? … Your food got me out.’ Madigan had forgotten just who had shared his pilfered rations, but for those weakened and distressed, in a life-defining moment, those little scraps of nourishment sustained them.

Many of the veterans returned to Greece and Crete after the war to visit the civilians who had helped them, and to remember fallen comrades. John Anderson, the artillery officer who led the two gun crews in their lone rearguard action on the forward slopes of Brallos Pass, went back to the site 60 years later and found nothing there to indicate the sacrifice of the seven Australians killed in the battle. He promptly ordered a brass plaque made and, with the help of the Greek army and the Australian embassy, installed it on a marble top, just at the foot of the mountain. This would be Anderson’s last trip to the battlefields of his youth, and he ended his journey knowing that he had, for his fallen comrades, done his ‘little bit’.26 Indeed he had, along with all the other second, forgotten Anzacs.