Searching for Sofia, page 22
‘But does it matter to Hitler, if the British have a base in Greece?’ Shorty asked.
‘Well, in fact, yes, it does. It’s all about resources,’ Harold said, seamlessly shifting the conversation from battlefronts to politics and then to economics with authority. ‘Oil, to be exact. If the Allies get a foothold in Greece, it puts us in range of the Romanian oil fields: the oil supply that Germany depends on. So, as annoyed as Hitler may be, he has no choice. He has to send troops in to finish what Mussolini started. And that is where we come in, laddies! We are going to kick Hitler’s sorry arse all the way back over the Rhodope mountains and into Albania!’
Jack considered his options and was determined that he would be numbered amongst those advancing to Greece; it was surely a step closer to Paris or Spain than Palestine was. There was every possibility that after they’d finished with the Germans, he might be able to get leave. Perhaps he could get across to Italy, and from there, to France, where he could make inquiries about Sofia’s whereabouts.
* * *
Days later, Jack was glad to be on the troopship travelling to Piraeus, a port city on the outskirts of Athens. The mood of the 2/5th was euphoric. After weeks of rest, they had finally become bored with the cricket, two-up and gin rummy and were eager for their next campaign. More importantly, they were finally getting a chance to quell the Germans, and they couldn’t wait. Although the word was that the Germans had already achieved what the Italians had failed to do—force their way across the mountains and towards Athens—this news did not phase the 2/5th at all. Hitler hadn’t met with Australians yet, and his soldiers were in for a hiding the likes of which they’d never encountered!
Nightly, they gathered in the ship’s dining room, where Brigadier Savige went over the maps of Greece, reiterating the proposed plan of attack. Preparation was everything, he insisted, emphasising that they were meeting an advancing enemy head-on, a formidable enemy, the power of whom shouldn’t be underestimated. Each time Savige warned them of the might of the German army, the troops reacted with a show of bravado—no German army was going to defeat them—and Jack suspected that their brigade leader feared that his unit had become overly confident following their successes at Bardia and Tobruk. Nonetheless, the proposed strategy seemed simple enough—following an air attack from the RAF, the 17th Brigade would approach from the south, and push them back over the mountains. All being well, they’d have the Germans retreating within the week.
* * *
Arriving at Piraeus, all they could do was gaze longingly at the turquoise of the Mediterranean Sea lapping the shore, beckoning them to throw their sand-infused bodies into its sweet waters. But there was no time to waste. Immediately on disembarking they were hustled into lines and marched through the town to the cheering and clapping of the locals. Accepting the flowers handed to them by young women, the glasses of water and small bags of food that children ran forwards to offer, they found it hard not to feel inspired. That night, they stayed in a nearby village, Daphnis, and the following morning they marched with the confidence of an already victorious army—eight miles to the railway, where they boarded creaking carriages and commenced a journey through some of the most beautiful countryside Jack had ever seen.
Flowers lined the roadside and filled the fields. Every few miles they passed through tiny hamlets, where farmers paused from their work to raise their hands in greeting.
Bound for Larissa, some two hundred miles north, they settled in for the journey. Between dozing and gazing at the scenery, the time passed uneventfully until the train drew to a halt. The sound of yelling drew Jack to the window. Numerous soldiers, their uniforms in tatters, their faces desperate, were trying to board the train. Greeks?
‘By golly, they are trying to take the train! They want to turn us around,’ said the man beside him.
Jack listened to the raised voices.
‘Flee, flee! The Germans, we cannot defeat them!’
Jack jostled for position with hundreds of men, who leaned out of the windows, watching as a sergeant stepped forth and shouted at the men to move, angered by the obstruction to their journey.
‘Cowards,’ said the man beside him, and he nodded in agreement. What sort of soldier fled before the enemy? he wondered, although since his own role had changed from Private Tomlinson, 2/5th Infantry to Captain Tomlinson, Official War Artist, he was self-conscious of his own non-combative role.
All around him, the men expressed disdain for the Greeks who’d abandoned their post. The Australians had only just arrived to the battle and were in no mind to give up without so much as bloodying a bayonet! When shots rang out, Macka, who was watching at the window, gasped.
‘We fired at them! Not at them directly, but a warning message! The CO has just given the order: if the Greeks don’t step back from the train, they will be shot! Heaven forbid, I think he’s serious. Here we are in Greece, protecting the Greeks, and the first shots we’ve fired are at them!’
The threat seemed to work, for within minutes, the train continued its journey, and two hours later, they arrived at their destination, Larissa.
* * *
When barely an hour later they’d disembarked from the train at a small station nestled under the shadow of Mount Olympus, and watched as eighteen Messerschmitts tore across the sky toward them—their rapid gunfire destroying anything in their path—the bravado of the men was dampened. Their bullets had just missed one of the lorries that the Australians were about to board, commissioned to take them to the east of the advancing Germans.
Jack glanced at Macka and Shorty, then gazed northward, where plumes of smoke rose amid deafening explosions. Their long-awaited opportunity to take on the Germans was upon them. However, judging by the thundering barrage ahead and the vision of dozens of airplanes—not the RAF’s Vickers Wellingtons—but instead, the Luftwaffe’s Junkers and Messerschmitts, it was clear that this was not going to be the pushover they’d anticipated. Inhaling the cool evening air, heavy with moisture and filled with the acrid smell of gunfire, it occurred to Jack that in Bardia and Tobruk the Allies had the benefit of well positioned surprise attacks on sleeping villages. Here, as Savige had warned, they faced an enemy in full throttle that was advancing toward them, mercilessly.
The men were quiet as they approached the positions that had been planned from the comfort of the ship’s dining room. In the broad light of day, nothing about the cataclysmic conditions that they’d entered related to the clear pathway to victory that had been laid out on the sergeant’s large blackboard in the preceding week.
Jack didn’t have to think; he knew that this was no moment to be a war artist. Instead, he checked his .303 and joined Shorty and Snowy, jogging towards an outcrop of jagged rocks to their left.
As the Germans came within firing distance, he shot round after round from his rifle before grabbing a machine gun that had been relinquished by the blood-splattered body of one of his own unit, lying barely a dozen yards away.
This time, Jack had no opportunity to ponder the tragedy of war and the grief of families as he’d done at Bardia. Instead he grasped the Bren, determined to continue where the young soldier had left off, releasing hundreds of rounds as quickly as he could load them into the magazine. He was thankful for the diminishing light that sent the armies to bed, allowing time for troops on both sides to tend to wounds, reconsider their positions and rest their weary bones. Jack wondered if the German soldiers found the same relief in the silence of the night as he did.
For four days Jack and his unit pushed forward—their determination firm—matching machine gun fire blaze for blaze, setting their rifles’ sights on anything that moved, but making little ground.
More than anything, they waited for the air support, forever scanning the sky, desperate for sight of the British torpedo bombers; but all that they could see was Goering’s air force, the Luftwaffe. If it wasn’t his Messershcmitts, it was his Stukas, and if it wasn’t his Stukas it was the Heinkels. Twice the infantry units had to retreat as the German guns closed in.
On the fifth day, the order came for the Allies to withdraw. They were to retreat to Kalamata immediately—ships had already been dispatched from Palestine and were now on their way to perform an evacuation. Greece was being forsaken to the Germans!
While none of the men mentioned the Greek soldiers they’d ridiculed for fleeing the Germans a week earlier, Jack felt terrible for them. To think of how those lads had been fighting for months—fending off first the Italian army and then the Germans, of how they’d endured the worst of a freezing winter to protect their country in a war that they’d never wanted, and been exhausted and starving. How harsh the Australians had been with their scathing criticism! Their unfounded confidence had filled them with a bravado that was disproportionate to the might of the German army. Their threats to shoot those young men who’d fought so bravely for their country had been abominable. They should have cheered them and given them some rations to see them through. More than anything, Jack hoped that somehow the lads had made it home to their families safely.
Chapter 22
Arriving at the small coastal town of Kalamata eighteen hours later, Jack looked around the beach, now crowded with thousands of men waiting to board the ships that would carry them back to Alexandria. The ringing of axes belting against motors filled the air as the lorries which had transported them from the battlefields were being destroyed. The Germans already had enough resources at their disposal—the Australians didn’t need to be adding to their strength with salvageable vehicles. He looked at the hundreds of troops who’d gathered on the beach, some in groups quietly chatting, others alone, taking deep drags from their cigarettes, attempting to steady their nerves and make sense of the last week. He felt their shock. That the Allies might be defeated by the Germans had never been considered. Worse, that they’d actually turn on their heels and flee in the face of the enemy, had been unimaginable.
Jack, Shorty and Macka gathered together, along with Green and Doc; and a few troops of the 2/7th joined them. Shorty was worried about Snowy; he hadn’t seen his brother since they got separated at Larissa but Green felt certain that he’d seen him on the beach, barely an hour earlier. They made a tally of who’d seen whom, and worried for a couple of the men who were unaccounted for. So far the men of the Bat Cave had been lucky, surviving Bardia and Tobruk with only minor injuries.
As they revisited the events of Larissa, the men grasped to restore their sense of pride—insisting that the Allies had done everything anyone could possibly have done to push the Germans back. However, as Shorty said, they’d been like ants trying to turn a boulder; the strength of the German army had been totally underestimated by the Allied command. Across the beach rang voices that were bitter in their criticism of the London Office, who was responsible for providing intelligence about the German Army.
‘And, where were the RAF when we needed them?’ Macka added as he wrapped a bandage around his shin, where mercifully flying shrapnel had caused only a minor flesh wound.
Everyone had their own ideas of how the Australians could have pulled off a victory with proper planning and a dash of luck on their side.
Even now the fighting was not over, and Jack wasn’t sure if it was echoes of the last five days or the actual thud of gunfire in the distance that rang in his ears. He knew that rear-guard men—the 2/19th and the New Zealanders— had stayed behind to provide cover to the allies as they’d retreated. Jack thought about the young men who’d volunteered for what could only be a suicide mission, for it would take a miracle for them to escape their posts. Again, he listened to the rat-tat-tat of gunfire—louder than ever. He was sure it was them, with their Bren and Vickers machine guns. At least the rattle was evidence that it was not over for them yet, and miracles were not unheard of.
Restless, Jack searched for a quiet spot, thinking he’d ease his mind by adding to the bundle of sketches he’d accumulated in Tobruk. A soldier in the distance hugged a dog close to his chest: a good subject, he thought. Was it Jim and Horrie? Jim Moody had found Horrie in the desert, and the little pup became a mascot among the men, accompanying them through all their battles, and was even credited with warning them of attacks from approaching aircraft. Jack had wanted to sketch him for a while. That the dog remained with Jim despite the smoke-filled air, the roar of engines and the thundering of bombs was remarkable—the horror of it all was enough to have anyone with two legs running, let alone four.
Moving amongst the soldiers on the beach were Greek civilians: ladies with baskets, distributing food to the troops; men asking questions about the front, begging for weapons with which to defend their families when the Germans arrived. Jack thought how different this scene was from that a week earlier, when the troops had arrived in Greece to cheering and clapping and flowers. It felt terrible to have let them down.
The beach was eventually cloaked in darkness, and soon after, pinpricks of light approached—the destroyers, arriving to collect them. Within an hour the convoy of ships rested offshore. Maintaining order, the troops lined in groups of three and prepared to board. Jack searched for Shorty, Macka and Snowy but could not see them. He found a small group of others from the 2/5th and sloshed through the cool waters to board a destroyer that transported them out to a Dutch ship resting further out—the SS Costa Rica, which was already heavily loaded with men of the 2/6th and 2/7th.
* * *
‘Up you come, now.’ The accent was distinctly Irish. ‘You may as well join us and be bombed here as on dry land out there. I always think a sea burial is better than bones scorching in the sun.’
‘Danny, put a sock in it, will you?’ The words came from an older man who emitted the aura of a commanding officer.
‘Yes, sir. Up you come, lads, we’ve got you now. Not to say that you’ll be any safer with us. In fact, you may have stepped out of the frying pan and into the fire.’
‘Danny!’
‘Yes sir, sorry, sir... but you must acknowledge, there is truth in it.’
Jack learned that there was certainly truth in Danny’s comments, for over the past forty-eight hours, their rescuers had endured two attacks as they’d travelled from Alexandria to Kalamata for the evacuation. The first came from a couple of Italian bombers, who had been easily deflected when Danny and his unit fired their personal weapons into the sky. Danny was sure they’d tipped the wings of at least one of the low-flying planes and sent it to a watery grave. The second attack had been even more thrilling and not without irony.
‘Here we were,’ Danny explained, ‘tuned in to Westminster’s Anzac service, our voices lifted in praise to the Lord.’ Danny’s voice burst into tune. ‘“For those that peril on the sea...” What we didn’t know was that we, along with all of those kindly souls in London gathered at the abbey, were in fact singing a blessing to our own sweet selves, for out of the blue, the screaming tones of Italian Stukas joined the choir. Utterly out of tune, they were, and directly above us—seven of them—and they weren’t praying for our souls, that’s for sure!’
‘Don’t worry lads, we’re here now—you’ll be right!’ The comment came from Jim, and Jack was glad to see the moist black tip of Horrie’s nose peering from behind his legs. He reached out and patted the dog, who whimpered. Perhaps Horrie’d had enough adventures, Jack thought. He certainly had.
‘They be strong words from someone who has just run from the Germans and needed to be evacuated, but full marks for bravado, because we aren’t home yet!’ Danny laughed at Jim, then glanced between his legs. ‘And what’s that you’ve got there? A wee dog! Well, I’ll be. Here, champ... would you like a bit of jerky to tide you over?’
Danny was a character, Jack decided, as he settled against the side of the deck, using his pack for a pillow and the stars for a blanket. Within minutes he fell into the heaviest sleep. By the time he awoke, the scorching sun fell onto the deck, and he sat up to rummage through his pack for some biscuits and a swig of water.
‘Want a mouthful,’ Jim must have noticed Jack had come up empty-handed from his search into his pack, for he held out a glass bottle toward him.
‘Thanks mate... mouth’s dry as a sheet of sandpaper.’ He accepted the bottle and sipped the aniseed flavoured liquid.
‘Raki?’ he asked Jim in surprise.
‘No, Ouzo... Not bad, is it? Not quite as refreshing as a Fosters, but then you can’t even get a decent beer over here. Spirits will have to do us, I’m afraid!’
Jack smiled and watched as Horrie wriggled from behind Jim, and walked across the deck to where a sleeping soldier lay, lifting his leg to pee against the man’s pack. Jack held his breath as he watched the man stir from his sleep and mumble, before sinking back into oblivion.
‘Horrie! Show some manners, will you!’ Jim chided, as the pup returned and snuggled against his leg. Jack laughed and laid his head down again before raising it and shaking his finger at the dog.
‘Don’t you go peeing on me, you cheeky little bugger,’ he said, and then exhausted after the week in the Greek mountains fighting an unwinnable battle, he slept, lulled by the lapping water and the hum of motors as the flotilla commenced its retreat from Kalamata.
* * *
Jack woke with a start to the sounds of yelling and the sight of men leaping to their feet and scrabbling for weapons. A shriek from above revealed two Italian planes swooping and diving in the sky above them. He joined with the other men to support the ship’s gunners by spraying ammunition skyward from anything they could find—rifles, pistols and Tommy Guns. Their barrage forced the attackers higher and higher, until finally they became defeated black specks retreating to the north.
The cheers from the Costa Rica were echoed by those of the other ships who’d joined the return fire, as they continued their zigzagging journey across the Mediterranean. Yet they remained on high alert, and responded with the same frenzied defence to each of no less than seven attacks that followed.
