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Chapter 13
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A great risk in a good cause
Australia and Greece 1941
gallery
 Australian and New Zealand troops arriving at Alexandria after their evacuation from Crete, June 1941.
[AWM 007742/28]
Australia was not likely to refuse to take a great risk in a good cause. [Menzies, quoted in Long, Greece, Crete and Syria, p.17] After the evacuation of Crete, the Greek government established itself in London and called on all free Greeks to continue the struggle against the enemies of their country. The survivors of the Greek armed services regrouped in Egypt where they fought on with the Army of the Nile, the British Mediterranean Fleet and the RAF against the Germans and Italians. A Greek brigade was part of that large international army, including the Australian 9th Division, which gained such a complete victory over Germany’s Afrika Korps under General Erwin Rommel at El Alamein in October and November 1942. But when the British and Dominion forces finally left Greece in late May 1941, the ordinary people of Greece faced the challenge of occupation, a challenge dramatically described by that great English champion of Greece, Compton Mackenzie: When darkness fell upon May 31st 1941, and mercifully hid from the German bombers the ships bearing the last soldiers that the Royal Navy could evacuate from Crete, the Hellenic people entered that dark night of the soul which for nations and individuals alike is the Divine test of their spiritual life. [Mackenzie, Wind of Freedom, p.243] The Nazis saw Greece as simply another country to plunder for their war effort and they diverted Greek industrial and agricultural production to this end. As a result, it is estimated that in four years of occupation over 450 000 Greeks died from malnutrition. A further 25 000 were executed for guerilla activities or during reprisals for partisan activities. Of Greece’s pre-war 80 000 Jews, only 10 000 survived the war.4 Greeks also remember the harshness of the Bulgarian occupation of Thrace during those years. For the British and Allied force which had come to the aid of Greece in April and May 1941 the campaign was a disaster. In the fighting in Greece and Crete, 2535 servicemen lost their lives and 25 328 were taken prisoner. Most of these served out the rest of the war in POW camps in Germany and Italy. A further 3475 were wounded, some of them severely. In total, these figures come to just over half of all the servicemen and women the British sent to Greece between November 1940 and May 1941. The Australian losses in Greece and Crete were virtually all from the ranks of the 6th Division, AIF. Of the 594 who were killed, 320 died in Greece and 274 in Crete. The largest single number of dead, as might be expected, were from the nine infantry battalions of the 16th, 17th and 19th Brigades — 332, around 55 per cent. Other units, however, also suffered, in particular the artillery regiments. The Australian wounded amounted to 1001. However, what temporarily destroyed the 6th Division as a fighting force, apart from the loss of most of its equipment, was the staggering number of prisoners-of-war — 2030 in Greece and 3102 in Crete, a total of 5132. Again, a high proportion of these POWs were from the infantry battalions — 2779, approximately 54 per cent. Of the 6203 Australians taken prisoner by the Germans and Italians in World War II, 83 per cent fell into enemy hands in Greece and Crete. Taken together, the figures for the Australian dead, wounded and POWs amounted to 6727, virtually 39 per cent of the 17 125 Australians estimated to have been in Greece when the campaign opened on 6 April 1941.5 The British and Dominion dead of 1941 lie buried in either the Phaleron War Cemetery in Athens or the Suda Bay War Cemetery on Crete. After the war it was decided to bring the bodies of all British and Dominion servicemen killed in 1941 into these two cemeteries from smaller burial grounds all over Greece and Crete. On the Greek mainland, British units were assisted in this task by the 21st and 22nd Australian Graves Registration Units. The Australians themselves undertook the work on Crete. Those whose bodies were never recovered, or who were unidentifiable at burial, are commemorated on the Athens Memorial to the missing at Phaleron. There are 331 Australian names on this memorial representing 56 per cent of the Australian dead of the Greek campaign. Above the north entrance to the memorial in English and above the south entrance in Ancient Greek, are these words attributed to the ancient Greek poet, Simonedes: WE, WHO TO CLOTHE HELLAS IN FREEDOM FOUGHT, LIE HERE AT REST IN PRAISE THAT FADETH NOT. Should the British force and its Australian contingent have been sent to Greece to face the German Army at the height of its power during World War II? Many of the soldiers who fought there felt some bitterness towards those who they saw as responsible for the decision and for the failure to adequately equip the force, especially in relation to armour and air power. Against the pitifully few RAF squadrons, amounting to just 80 serviceable aircraft, the German and Italian air forces combined were able to put into the air over 1100 planes. The commander of the British 1st Armoured Brigade in Greece, Brigadier H V S Charrington, wrote upon his return to Egypt: There will I fear be a lot of muck dragged up over the whole expedition … the Australians (with some justice) demand a full enquiry as to why the promised air support they had insisted upon before allowing their troops to participate was not forth-coming … I don’t know whether they could have spared more aeroplanes but the Australians are terribly bitter about it. [Charrington, quoted in Horner, High Command, p.97] The whole question of Australian participation, at least from the view of Prime Minister Menzies, centred on the proposition that the force had a ‘reasonable fighting chance’. Such an expectation could only come from the military assessment, to which Menzies was privy, that this ‘chance’ existed. The Royal Navy were less optimistic and always felt that early evacuation would be the outcome in Greece. Lieutenant General Blamey’s detailed opinion, which stated that the expedition was ‘extremely hazardous’, was made late in the day — 10 March — and by that time convoys taking the soldiers to Greece were already under way. Both men, however, have been criticised — Blamey for failing to put his considered position to his government when he first heard of the expedition in February 1941, and Menzies for not having pushed his deep concerns about the expedition much harder in London. But much blame has also been heaped on the shoulders of Churchill. His determination to send the force to Greece has been described in The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History as ‘the worst piece of Churchillian strategy of the war’. From a purely military point of view, however, there was one positive outcome of the defeat in Greece. The XI Fliegerkorps, Hitler’s elite parachute unit, was virtually destroyed in Crete. Of the 3,986 Germans killed or missing in the campaign, more than 3000 were paratroopers killed before or soon after landing by a defence force that was largely ready for them. Taken together, the German dead and wounded amounted to 6580, nearly one third of all the German force employed in the operation.6 To that extent, Crete lived up to Churchill’s hope that the defence of the island would provide a ‘fine opportunity for killing the parachute troops’. As a result of Crete, a proposed parachute landing on Cyprus was abandoned. The paratroopers were later used by Hitler as ground forces in his ultimately disastrous Russian campaign where, as a German veteran of Crete concludes, ‘there bled to death the greater part of those who survived the Battle of Crete’. Despite the defeat, many in Greece still remember that Britain, its Empire and Dominions, did not desert them in one of the darkest periods of modern Greek history. In 1975 at Stavremenos, near Rethymno, on Crete, where Australian and local Greek forces held back the German paratroopers in May 1941, the local community erected a memorial to commemorate that event. A plaque on the memorial records, with attendant colour patches, every major Australian unit that fought the Germans at Stavromenos, at Perivolia and in the Rethymno area in general. In 1977, the Australian Government presented the Stavromenos memorial with two anti-aircraft Bofors guns, the type used by Australian anti-aircraft gunners in action against the Luftwaffe in May 1941. The guns were brought from Australia by the flagship of the RAN — HMAS Melbourne — while on a visit to Suda Bay. Other memorials tell of the help by the Greeks to Australian escapers. After the evacuation of the Greek mainland and the surrender on Crete, hundreds of British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers took to the hills and the countryside to avoid captivity. A report to the Australian government in late 1941 estimated that there were between 4000 and 5500 allied soldiers still at large in Greece. Of these approximately 500 were in Crete. Another 1400 men were calculated to have either escaped from captivity or been evacuated to Egypt.7 There are dozens of amazing stories involving service with Greek and Yugoslav partisans, long distance treks through Greece, journeys by boat through the Greek islands, single handed feats of navigation across the Mediterranean to North Africa and, for some, eventual return to Egypt and Palestine. Above all, there was the vital help — food, clothing and shelter — given to the escapers by the Greek people. In doing so they risked their lives and one remembers that tragic figure of 25 000 Greeks shot by the occupying forces. On 24 May 1985, the Australian Ambassador to Greece unveiled a memorial recognising the debt the escapers in the Prevali area of southern Crete owed to the local people. On the memorial are these words: This tablet commemorates the deep gratitude of British, New Zealand and Australian servicemen befriended by the monks of Prevali Monastery and Cretans from surrounding villages, who, at great personal risk, helped them to escape by British submarines, HMS Thresher and Torbay, in July and August 1941. Perhaps the attitude of the Greeks to the thousands of allied POWs who were kept among them until they could be transported to Germany is captured in this story from Compton Mackenzie: On one occasion a squad of British prisoners … was being marched through the streets of Athens. The Athenians cheered them, and the prisoners answered the sympathy of the crowd with the gesture of ‘thumbs up’. The German officer commanding the guard disliked this expression of popular feeling and drawing his pistol he fired it into the air. The crowd cheered more loudly. The German sent a shot over the heads of the bystanders; but nobody paid any attention. Then a little loustros (shoeblack) stepped up to the German officer and pulling open his shirt presented his bare breast. ‘If you want to shoot, shoot here’, he challenged. It is an agreeable novelty to be able to conclude this story by relating that the German officer put his pistol back into the holster and shook hands with the boy. [Mackenzie, Wind of Freedom, pp.248–249] Today thousands of Australians visit Greece. Many are Greek emigrants or their children returning to visit relatives in the land of their ancestors. Others are simply tourists drawn, no doubt, by the lure of Greece’s extraordinary history and the country’s magnificent mainland and island scenery. Hardly any of them miss the Parthenon before hurrying off to island playgrounds such as Mikanos or the dramatic land and seascapes of Naxos or Santorini. How many, one wonders, visit Phaleron or Suda Bay war cemeteries and wander among the headstones with inscriptions recording the presence here of men from the 2/11th Battalion or the 2/3rd Field Regiment, men from the 6th Australian Division who fought and died for Greece and Australia? If they read the cemetery register with its brief outline of the campaigns in Greece and Crete they will encounter placenames such as Vevi, Aliakmos, Tembe Gorge, Thermopylae, Hania, Rethymno and Heraklio, placenames recalled by many Australian families in the years after World War II. They might also ponder this passage from the diary of Lieutenant John Learmonth, 2/3rd Field Regiment, written as his troopship approached Pireaus on 29 April 1941: It is only a quarter of a century since the Australians of the first A.I.F. made history here, yet this was the cradle of history before the Australians, or even the British, had come into being. I wonder shall we in our turn add fresh deeds to the story of mankind, deeds that will go down from generation to generation for thousands of years to come; and I wonder also what new races will rise up and fight their wars here, when we are as long-distant and forgotten as the Ancient Greeks … now seem to us. [Learmonth diary, 29 April 1941] Learmonth’s question is one that those who contemplate Australia’s graves and monuments in Greece and Crete must answer for themselves. They might also ponder whether it was correct in 1941 to send Australian troops to Greece when Australia’s senior commander thought that the expedition could end in disaster. Or whether, to use Menzies’ phrase, Australia was right, whatever the odds, in taking ‘a great risk in a good cause’. |
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