1941
Savige was travelling at the rear of a convoy of trucks carrying troops of his 17th Brigade when there was a sudden commotion in the front armoured cars. Soldiers were yelling and jumping from the vehicles. A dog could be heard barking.
‘Stukas coming, Brigadier!’ a sergeant said. ‘Run for cover!’
Savige climbed from his car, frowning. He lifted binoculars to scour the skies. He cocked his ear, straining to hear the terrifying whine of the Stukas. He could neither see nor hear them.
‘How do you know?’ he asked the sergeant, who was beckoning him to hurry to a ditch by the roadside. Machine gunners were taking up positions and hastily preparing their weapons. Fifty metres away, Savige could see the small dog in the middle of the road, pirouetting and barking. The animal was approached and grabbed by a motorbike rider, who rushed for cover, the dog in his arms.
‘Stukas, sir!’ Garrett called. ‘Get off the road!’
Savige, calm as ever, lit a cigarette.
‘What’s the panic about?’ Savige.
‘That dog, sir,’ the sergeant said, ‘he can hear the planes more than two minutes before we can.’
Savige finally moved to the ditch and crouched below boulders with the others. Ten seconds later, he could hear a low, familiar whine. It became louder and he recognised the sound, like ‘a thousand screaming banshees’, that he had first heard in Libya.
Savige felt the hairs on his neck stand on end as a Stuka swooped and then dived perpendicularly. It spat bullets either side of the ditch, causing mud to splatter. Savige looked up to see the attacking craft climbing high in a long, lazy circle.
A second Stuka came zooming down with an ear-piercing blast that seemed even louder than the first. There was nowhere to run now.
Then a third German dive bomber careered from out of the sun, much lower than the other two. It seemed almost to skim the road as it aimed at Savige and his little party.
Savige looked up at the three planes as they circled, like huge buzzards taking their time to snare their weakened prey. Down they came again, so low that those on the ground could see the devil’s-head insignia gazing down and adding to the menace of these sky demons.
The three dived once more, not quite in unison, and were met by a strong response of machine-gun fire. The Stukas did not fly as low this time, but climbed in another suggestive wide circle.
Then, instead of returning for another blast, they disappeared into the sun.
Savige was on his feet, accompanied by the sergeant, striding down towards the gunner with his canine early-warning system.
‘I want to thank that dog,’ Savige said. ‘Who’s the digger with him?’
‘Private Moody, sir. He’s a despatcher with our gunner battalion. And the dog’s name is Horrie.’
Savige arrived just as the dog was being given a biscuit ‘reward’ for his histrionics before the Stukas hit. Savige shook hands with Moody, thanked him and made a fuss of Horrie, an Egyptian terrier with oversized ears, who loved the extra attention.
‘How did you teach him that?’ Savige asked.
‘Didn’t, Brigadier,’ Moody replied. ‘He worked out for himself that the sound would soon lead to destruction from the planes above. He just growls and sits in a funny way, and you know the Stukas will be around very shortly. Then he goes crazy barking at the bastards, sir.’
‘Brave little bugger!’
‘Yeah, it took him only one bad experience at Piraeus when we first came in, and then he was OK. He’s acted like a real tough little digger ever since.’
‘You smuggled him from Alexandria?’
Moody hesitated. ‘I couldn’t really say, sir.’
Savige stared for a moment and then smiled.
‘No, I suppose you couldn’t,’ he said. ‘But we are bloody glad you did. Horrie deserves a medal!’
Savige patted the appreciative animal and strode off to inspect the damage to his convoy.1
***
The retreat continued. On 17 April, Savige was ordered by 6th Division Commander Mackay to withdraw 65 kilometres from Kalabaka to Zarkos, 32 kilometres from Larissa. Savige could see the road behind them was packed with fleeing refugees on foot, on mules, on bikes and in every other form of vehicle. An armoured brigade that was meant to cover his withdrawal and that of the refugees had departed.
Savige could do as ordered and bustle his men forward to Zarkos. Or he could do a humane yet possibly disastrous thing and stay to make sure that the suffering Greeks were all ahead of his brigade and therefore temporarily out of danger.
Savige looked at the passing parade of desperate children, woman and men, and their looks touched his heart. He remembered vividly similar expressions in Persia in 1918. He also thought of his wife and daughter. He later wrote to Lilian: ‘I saw your faces in those wonderful, courageous people. They were you. We had to protect their bid to escape.’2
After consultation with all his units, Savige decided to stay put and protect the refugees. In effect, he was disobeying an order, but that was justifiable in most military eyes if the commander on location saw a different situation from his superior some distance away.
Savige sent a written statement to Mackay explaining the reasons for his decision. He would thin his force out and stay in place until 18 to 19 April if possible. Savige later looked back on this as ‘the most momentous occasion in my war service [thus far]. The consequences of this decision, if unsound, would affect not only my own career, but that of my subordinate commanders, and staff too.’
In a nutshell, Savige felt it was a case of ‘Sydney or the bush’, meaning his career would be over one way or the other if the humanitarian decision proved wrong.3
Enemy planes had destroyed a bridge over the Pinios River, which forced two of Savige’s battalions to use improvised ferries to get everyone across. Then they had to make a 35-kilometre detour, fraught with danger from Stukas and enemy forward patrols. Yet Savige thrived under the pressure. He had been pushed and pulled by various commanders from Jumbo Wilson and Blamey to Mackay, but was now on his own. In the midst of threats that could see him and his brigade wiped out, he was in his element. He again saw parallels with his controlled withdrawal against massive odds in Persia.
Heavy rain made the going tough. But it was an answered prayer. The Germans were slowed up or even bogged down.
The skies cleared. Stukas attacked the defenceless streams of people on the roads. Savige’s engineers, by determination, skill and good luck, kept the roads open.
***
The refugees, along with 17th Brigade, reached Zarkos on 18 April. Late that night, Savige was ordered to move 120 kilometres south to Bralos. At dawn the next day the retreating Anzac column was 17 kilometres long. Yet the vehicles were at times nose to tail, and a tempting, even irresistible target for the Luftwaffe, now feasting on defenceless thousands. They hammered, dive-bombed and strafed the column in intermittent bursts that became shorter and shorter, until one two-hour period when they just kept attacking in relays without a break.
It was 17th Brigade’s first sustained experience of the viciousness of the German air force. The soldiers were in packed, covered vehicles and could not see the planes skimming towards the column. They could only hear the terrible screaming Stukas, and feel the ground and the vehicles shake.
At one point when the bombing abated, Savige jumped from the lead vehicle and walked along the side of the road next to the column. He stood within view of the passing troops, his brigadier’s hat with the distinctive red band jammed on tight. This made him a target for the Stukas, but it was just one form of Savige’s defiance. Another was to wave, smile and give the thumbs-up to his soldiers, with disregard for the planes careering in at the column.
In response, the shaken diggers were appreciative.
‘Cor Blimey,’ one was heard to say, ‘look at the old bastard Stan standing there with his old red hat . . .’
He was putting himself in the same danger as his men. It was calming, if not inspiring, for the nervous diggers, who were ready for a fight, but could do nothing against the Luftwaffe.
Savige took a big risk in standing and encouraging his column until the last vehicle had passed.
‘During those days I saw the white, tense faces of silent men jammed under the hoods of fast moving vehicles change to smiles as they waved their hands and yelled responses to their boss,’ he wrote. ‘It provided the opportunity for them to talk. That was even if the subject was the stupidity of the boss [putting himself in danger] . . . or whether he was a fair dinkum old bastard; or just a plain bastard! Getting men to talk in these circumstances relieves and changes their mental outlook . . . it is important to all concerned.’4
***
The column arrived at Bralos on the night of 19 April. Early the next morning, the brigade’s camp came under an air attack that destroyed eight trucks and vehicles.
There were signs of panic among the exhausted troops when Savige ordered his transport into an open field. The Stukas appeared from nowhere for another run at the column.
Savige moved among his men, urging them to stay calm, but he sensed that some might run away from the central concentration of tents and vehicles. He knew that shouting or abusing them would not help.
He told his batman: ‘Get out my shaving kit and fix a mirror to a tree outside the tent.’
The astonished batman did as ordered, just as yet another wave of Stukas struck. Savige lathered up in full view of a group of soldiers who were about to break into a run.
‘Jesus!’ one said. ‘Look at the bloody Brig shaving!’
Then potential ‘bolters’ stopped and went to ground as the Stukas swept over and strafed the lines. When the planes had flown off into the clouds, the men jumped to their feet. Savige had finished his shaving and was wiping his face with a towel.
‘I never saw panic among them again,’ he later commented of his timely ‘performance’.5
Savige was particularly self-possessed in these moments, and always knew what he was doing. He admitted to official historian Gavin Long that he hated the bombing as much as the men did, and that he was just as frightened as they were. He went as far as to grade the dangers, and noted without hesitation that he ‘would rather advance through shellfire [as he had, for instance, at the Second Battle of Bullecourt] than move along a road [in the current Greece pullback] under mass bombing’.6
These were feelings that he kept from his troops, and even his officers. He would never show fear, under any circumstances. He put this down to his Great War experiences, but it was much more than just an act.
Savige preferred to look forward in life, but in moments when reflecting on his escapades – such as standing in the open under attack, or the bravado of the shaving episode – he dwelt again on Psalm 91. Even if he did not make it through this war, he believed those verses had sustained him, well aware in his maturity that he could be deluding himself.
Not all Savige’s charges were as fortunate as he was. In one day of incessant Luftwaffe attacks, 13 men of 2/5th Battalion were killed and 25 wounded, including Savige’s driver, who had his foot broken.