For Five Shillings a Day: Personal Histories of World War II

‘We dispersed our trucks singly at about 75-yard intervals. The cook started up the burner to cook a meal. There were four planes stooging slowly round with wing lights on, so we naturally assumed they were ours. People were drifting towards the radio truck to listen to the 9pm news. The driver from next to us arrived at our truck and my No 2 and I were just starting off with him to hear the news when bombs started screaming down. We saw the radio truck hit and threw ourselves to the ground. The last bomb in the string exploded alongside us, luckily in soft sand. The other driver took most of the damage as he was nearest to the bomb with me alongside him and my No 2 further away. I was deaf in my right ear and couldn’t hear much out of the other, my neck hurt, and when I stood up I was lame, but couldn’t find anything wrong. I later discovered the heel had been sliced off my right boot. I guess it took a minute or two to recover our senses, then we discovered the bloke nearest the bomb had taken the full impact and was quite badly wounded. We carried him to the HQ truck and found quite a number of wounded already there. Ambulances started to arrive so we got out of the way. We learnt that there had been about 20 men at the radio truck when it sustained a direct hit, killing 12 and wounding the rest.

Several trucks were on fire, so the area was well lit up. Most of the drivers elected to move further away from the burning trucks, but when we got back to our truck we found that a lump of shrapnel had flattened one tyre, so decided to stay put until daylight. That same night, those with the Division at Minqar Qaim had a worse time. The infantry cut their way through the German lines with bayonets, with the transport vehicles following behind. Two of my friends who were carting explosives for the engineers received a direct hit and were literally blown to kingdom come.

After several days we were all sorted out and back with our own units. I still couldn’t hear with my right ear and my neck was pretty sore. I reported sick and was sent to Field Hospital. There I was told I had a burst eardrum and a whiplash. I was told that my problems would heal themselves and was sent back to my unit. My ear has never healed properly.’

Apart from the dangers of battle, there were other real problems in the desert. Kenneth Frater again:

‘From my point of view, my worst enemy was the Egyptian fly. With German and British troops combined there were 3-400,000 troops in an area 50 miles long and probably 8 miles wide. On the battlefield dead bodies often lay unburied for days. The only hygiene was to be like a cat. Scratch a hole in the sand and cover it up. The flies during the heat of summer moved in dense swarms. Having a meal was a real conjuring trick. You had to keep your food covered and then try and get a spoonful in your mouth with as few flies as possible. I contracted dysentery. I was taken to Field Hospital, but I continued to get worse. There was talk of evacuating me to Base Hospital. I didn’t want that, as when you returned from Base, you were liable to be drafted into the infantry. Fortunately an orderly, an angel in disguise, brought me a tin of Highlander condensed milk and said, “Get that into you – it’ll stop anything.” Within 4 hours my contractions had stopped and I was thinking perhaps I could manage some food. I had a couple of days on mashed potatoes and gravy and was then sent back to my unit. Our Medical Officer apparently didn’t like the look of me so recommended that I have convalescent leave. I had five days in Cairo. I wondered who the strange guy was when I saw myself in a full-length mirror. I had lost just on 3 stone.’

New Zealand Gunner Officer and Battery Commander, Leonard Thornton, had clear memories of the alarm caused by Rommel’s advance towards Alexandria:

‘The NZ Division was in Syria when Rommel began his push in the Western Desert again, and Tobruk fell and we were hurtled back into the battle. And we made what was really, for a division, a lightning move. It took us only about, I suppose, five or six days, to move all those hundreds and hundreds of kilometres back into the Western Desert. And as we went up into the desert from Alexandria and went up that narrow and well-known desert road towards the west, the Eighth Army and the Air Force were coming pell-mell back down the road and it was, shall we say, not exactly riotous, but it was certainly a very disorganised retreat. And morale had fallen to pieces, so it was quite a challenge. The Kiwis rather liked the idea that they were going to save the situation, so we went in the most orderly way we could. Up alongside the road, mostly against the stream of traffic coming back from the disordered battles that had occurred further to the west. And we were ordered to take up a fixed position as they prepared defensive positions at Matruh. General Freyberg, who was our redoubtable commander, made one of the best decisions of his life when he said, “I command a mobile division and I am not going to have them shut up in old-fashioned silted-up defences protected by rusty and not very effective wire. I must fight the battle in a mobile way.” And because of his insistence we were allowed to get out on a flank and fight the battle at a place called Minqar Qaim.

Freyberg was an unusual man and he was in a unique position really, because he was the overall force commander as well as being a fighting commander, and as the Divisional Commander, so he had wide responsibilities, wider than an ordinary major-general commanding an ordinary old infantry division. However, secondly he was directly responsible to the New Zealand Government for the safety and, indeed, the employment of the New Zealand Force. The New Zealand Force was a pretty large and mobile force. We had, at that stage, three infantry brigades and the usual bits and pieces, so if really necessary, if he thought it was necessary, he could at any time refer to the New Zealand Government to say, I have been asked to do, perform such and such a task here, and I think it’s either appropriate or I think it’s not appropriate, and I’d like you to say whether I am to conform. I don’t think that, in this case, he found it necessary to refer the matter back, although after the debacle in Greece to which New Zealand troops had been committed, he was a little wary. We then fought the battle at Minqar Qaim and, of course, in the nature of things, as the battle flowed towards us and then round us, the Division was surrounded. You had to accept that as a normal situation in a mobile operation, but it’s not a very comfortable one.

Leonard Whitmore Thornton

I had, in the meantime, been detached from my regiment, which was, as you might say, in the bag at Minqar Qaim, because I had been sent off with an infantry battalion, the 21st Battalion. I was now commanding a field battery to defend another small outpost area to the south of the main divisional position. We were quite detached so we fought our own operation down in this lonely part of the desert while the Division defended itself in its locality at Minqar Qaim. The Division, having defended itself through something like two days and nights of defensive fighting, realised that the situation was rather threatening and they would have to break out. And at that critical moment General Freyberg, making a reconnaissance of the front-line areas towards Cairo, that’s to say on the eastern side, was wounded by some stray shelling and quite badly wounded in the neck, so that was just the wrong moment to lose your commander.

However, the reserve commander took over and that night the whole Division did an extraordinary operation, just charging through the night, a silent attack, and broke through the German lines and the entire force escaped with very, very low casualties really. An extraordinary operation – my own regiment came out on the Saturday and broke their way out separately and they all moved off towards a defensive position, which had been prepared further towards the east. In the meantime, of course, I didn’t know what had happened; communications in those days were very chancy indeed. You seemed to think that in the field everyone would be in touch; we had no idea really what had happened to the Division. And so I had a rather uncomfortable day being pursued by a few tanks and armoured cars and that sort of thing and trying to support the battalion. The battalion itself got scattered and, anyway, the long and short of it was that after a very uncomfortable night in the middle of the desert and not knowing quite what was happening, we moved off back and got the buzz, really from a chance encounter with an engineer officer, a lone figure travelling across the desert. We then fell back on to the main position.

So we reorganised ourselves back on what was eventually to become the Alamein Line. And there was fought a series of battles, and these were very untidy battles indeed with very poor co-ordination. I look back on it now, I realise how poor the co-ordination was between the arms. We had lost a large number as prisoners at that time, which is always a sign of poor control and c-ordination. There was a total lack of understanding between the British armour and the infantry – I don’t mean only ourselves, but the armour and infantry generally were not working well together. We had no armour at that time, no tanks in other words at that time, apart from some light tanks. So it was a very, very unhappy period and our losses were very high, including, I can’t remember the figure now, but we must have lost something over 2-3,000, probably prisoners. So we were in a very depleted state when that phase of the battle came to an end. It came to an end really because Rommel had outrun his supplies and couldn’t maintain the attack, the offensive any longer. And we fought a particularly painful final operation with two borrowed British infantry brigades because our brigades were now so fought out, and eventually the line settled down.

In the meantime the brigade in which I had served as a brigade major had been severely mauled and the entire brigade headquarters had been lost, had been taken prisoner, including the brigadier, and some of course were killed. And so I was then called back from my enjoyable role as a battery commander. It’s much nicer being a line officer; of course, you don’t have to work nearly so hard and it’s more interesting; you have better contact with the men and so forth. Anyway, I was pulled away from that job as battery commander and I was pulled in to go back and reconstitute the brigade headquarters and retrain a new brigade headquarters in the middle of this rather desultory period.

The battalions were right down in strength, the weather was extraordinarily hot, we were afflicted with mosquitoes and flies and dreadful things called desert sores because the diet and living conditions were very poor. There was not enough water for washing and that kind of thing. People became afflicted; any kind of scratch would become a suppurating sore and people would be covered with these terrible sores. I don’t know how I managed to escape them – it was just good luck I guess. So it was a very difficult period – something like 11 weeks we were in the line under these very unpleasant conditions. There wasn’t a great deal of enemy action. On our side we felt we had to dominate the battlefield, so we did a lot of patrolling and raids went on. Again it was very hard to sustain the troops’ morale, which I thought was getting a bit low. I actually ran a daily newspaper for a long time because I realised the chaps were getting rather depressed, so I ran a sort of paper to try and give them some information about what was happening, and before long it was pretty widely circulated among the British units as well as our own, I might say. I think that was probably because an enterprising editor, who was my sergeant clerk, managed to dream up rather an unwholesome joke, which he added to the end of every issue, so that was much sought after.’

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_fa0f7c55-5ebd-5b56-9862-a5db90420a72)

Greece (#ulink_fa0f7c55-5ebd-5b56-9862-a5db90420a72)

The Italians had invaded Greece from their bases in Albania on 28 October 1940, but were soon being repulsed, and by the end of the year had been driven back into Albania along the whole front. On 6 April 1941 the Germans, in great strength, invaded Greece and Yugoslavia from their bases in Bulgaria. Britain had started landing troops in Greece in early March and had established a line along the Aliakmon River in the north. Yugoslavia surrendered on 17 April, then, with the disintegration of the few Greek divisions on its right, both flanks of the British Army were exposed to the enemy. There was no alternative but to withdraw. Greece surrendered on 24 April and the bulk of the British forces were evacuated on the nights of 24, 25 and 26 April in a variety of naval and merchant ships, which took them to Crete and North Africa.

Major Leonard Thornton had been very much involved in these events. He recalled:

‘The decision was taken, rather reluctantly by the New Zealand Government, to agree to our Division forming part of a small so-called Imperial Force, which was sent to Greece to help the situation. When we look back at it now historically, it was a forlorn hope. There was ourselves, a British and Australian Division, which was to be supplemented with another division, and a British Brigade with rather worn-out tanks. That was the total force, and we were a little concerned to discover, while we were in the process of embarkation, that a planning committee had already been set up in Cairo to work out plans for our evacuation if possible – not a very encouraging sign!

Anyway, we moved up into Greece, Northern Greece, and got ourselves established in a defensive position up there. By this time I had left my role as adjutant in my previous regiment rather to my relief (it was a staff job), and I was now commander of an artillery battery. And so the battle began and it really hardly lasted at all because an overwhelming force of 12 German divisions came in; we fought as well as we could in the Olympic passes on Mount Olympus, and that was where I had my first experience of being under fire in a battle on the Aliakmon River. It was a foregone conclusion; we fell back as rapidly as we could and the battle on the Aliakmon River was really a delaying action, in order to enable the main force to get past us and down to the road back towards Athens. And we fought another battle near Thermopylae where a famous battle had been fought long ago. So round about Hitler’s birthday, which is almost ANZAC Day as far as I can recall, the decision was taken that we should have to evacuate. Jumbo Wilson was the force commander and he, an Englishman who had served with the New Zealanders in the First War, took the decision and it was the right one to take, although it was pretty hard on the Navy. We then made off towards the south as fast as we could, and in three or four days the embarkation was completed.

We had lost, of course, most of our equipment in that evacuation; nothing could be moved in the way of hardware, and it was a very unpleasant campaign to be in because of the fact it was under a totally adverse air situation. We were continuously bombed, strafed from the air throughout the hours of daylight. Mercifully the German Air Force couldn’t do much at night, which meant, at least, that you could get a bit of sleep if you weren’t on the move, but it was very demoralising for the troops not being able to hit back. And I think a lot of men became a little bit jumpy about the business of having to move, having to be out on the roads and so forth. We got ourselves off the beaches; I actually got left behind briefly because I went back to try and souvenir some or get some radio equipment which I thought it was a pity to leave behind, although we had been ordered to do so by the embarkation officer.

However, back on to the beaches, my regiment had already left, which turned out to be a strange stroke of fortune, because most of my regiment, which was now the Fourth Regiment, went on for the defence of Crete, and because I went in a different ship I was moved directly back to Egypt, so I missed the Crete campaign, which was very expensive from a New Zealand point of view.’

Sergeant Richard Kean, Battery NCO of Signals, NZ Artillery, saw it all from a slightly different perspective:

‘We arrived at Piraeus, the port of Athens, disembarked and through Athens to somewhere outside Athens where we stayed under the trees. We stayed there for a while and then moved up through Greece, finally settling in the south of the Olympus Pass, moved on again over the top of the Olympus down the other side, and got in a village just outside Kuphos and camped there. And we dug a fairly good deep hole to house our living quarters and the telephone exchange. Did a bit of scrounging and found stuff, you know, derelict Anderson shelter tops to put over the top of our hut. However, it sufficed when covered with earth, and we got a Greek farmer to plough over the top of it and it couldn’t even be seen.

Richard James Kean

We then moved further on and for some reason, known only to himself, my major decided that he wanted a forward listening post and that was me. Why I don’t know, and when I arrived I could see constant movement, places being bombed and burned, and there was I sitting in the middle of nowhere, just me and the telephone. Then I heard crinkling, crankling rustles coming from the undergrowth. My armament was a .45 revolver, so I drew it and in the prescribed manner, toes and elbows rigid, listening, listening, followed the rustling – and I finally found it, and it was two turtles mating. One of the biggest scares I’ve had in my life!

We were moved up and down all over the place, and finally my battery was detached and sent to the 17th Australian Brigade over on the other coast. I was left on the end of the telephone and wasn’t allowed to close down, although the battery was gone. And I was very worried because the bombers were coming over and there was great holes in the ground there where our guns had been but, finally I got the message to close down. It was dark as hell and all I had was a telephone and a motorbike, and I got back to our HQ and the colonel said, “Oh, sorry, Sergeant, I forgot all about you – your battery went over the hill and if you can find that number three post on the other side they’ll tell you which way they went.” I finally caught up with them and went up through Larisa and up almost to the Albanian border, and there we camped – took me 36 hours on the bike. On the way up we were watching the planes come over and could see tracers and, my God, they’re not going up, they’re coming down. We hit the dirt pretty smartly at the side of the road. However, we got used to that.

And we got into position there and stayed there for a while, and in the evening I got off my bike, about 4 o’clock, and lay down beside it and went to sleep, and shortly after there was cheers and I looked up and saw about 30 planes in the air; Spitfires had arrived, or Hurricanes, and it turned out they were Messerschmitts, and they were coming down not going up. There was an airfield just behind where we were, equipped with Gladiators and Lysanders, and a Lysander got up and two of the Gladiators got up; they managed to bring down two of the Messerschmitts, but later on the German planes came back again and cleaned up the whole of the outfit.

We got down eventually to a fishing place called Volos, quite a good spot actually, because we were in a trench about 10 feet deep, pretty wide and we could move around quite a bit. We dug the exchange into the side of the bank and ran the appropriate lines and were quite happy there for quite a while. The fields behind us had peas and stuff and they were getting near ripe and we kept popping up and picking a few peas and back down into the village when the planes came over – at least we’d got green peas. It got a bit hectic after a while, and the lines were getting shot up.

Then we got word that the Greeks had packed it in and we were evacuated. I smashed my good BSA motorbike up with an axe and pulled the bank down over it. We had to leave our guns; we couldn’t spike them and destroy them because that would have given the enemy a clue that we were perhaps moving. All we had to do was take the breech blocks, and we took as much of the equipment as we could. I closed the exchange and got on the truck and drove down. We finally got down to the water’s edge and after loading put the telephone exchange into the drink. Our packs, our main packs, all went into the drink; it meant that through the three packs we’d discarded, another man could get on the ship. We didn’t have too much: I had binoculars, gas-mask, revolver, compass, technical haversack, a small haversack on my back, greatcoat, and we had to dump our blankets, mess tin, water bottle.

We made it out to whalers that came in, and every time I tried to get on board I missed out. I’d two cartons of cigarettes, tucked in behind my gasmask, and after several attempts to board, a big Navy hand came and grabbed me by the back of the belt of my greatcoat and hauled me in head over heels, and I never saw the cigarettes again. We got out and climbed up the net on to the side of the destroyer, the Kandahar, and I got assigned to the Petty Officers’ Mess. The entrance into the Petty Officers’ Mess was through a hole in the deck, and I got stuck half way down the hole – it was all the stuff that I had on me – and the next thing I know is a big Navy foot on top of my tin hat, gives me a push and I went through pretty quickly. Things soaking wet, everything was wet having to wade out, and the Navy boys there took all my clothes down to the engine room, gave me Navy pants and a skivvy, and they dried all my uniform out down in their engine room and brought it back. It was great to get a good feed with fresh vegetables, which we hadn’t seen for some considerable time.

We were bombed a bit on the way and I was lying on my bunk resting and saw the side of the ship being pushed in and thought that this is no place to be. I tried to climb up the ladder to get through, but the manhole was closed and the Chicago piano – what they call a “Chicago piano” was a pom-pom – kept them busy firing up on the top, so I had to stay down there wondering whether I’d get out of that. However, we finally made it and landed at Suda Bay in Crete.’

George Brown was a Lieutenant in the 20th NZ Infantry Battalion, and recalls his initial enthusiasm for Greece:

‘We landed in Greece at Piraeus Harbour and marched to our bivouac, which was lovely after the heat of the desert. We explored Athens, learnt a little bit more about its history, drank their lovely wine, ate their lovely steaks and eventually entrained to Katerini. After a few days there we went by truck, I think, to Ryakia; from Ryakia at night you could see the lights of Salonika.

We dug in there, and found the people very hospitable. We officers of our company were billeted in a house and the Greeks would bring us some of their food and bring their babies in to see us. Our battalion pioneers put in a pump in the well in the town. The padre had received a few dozen bars of chocolate – well, a few dozen bars of chocolate weren’t much good to a thousand odd men, so the colonel and the padre went down to the local school and I believe the delight that the children showed when given a cake of chocolate was well worth their effort. We took up various defensive positions round Ryakia. Yugoslavia was expected to fall to the Germans and we were to defend Greece.

George Arthur Brown (left)

Late one night we were all called out and we marched and marched to the front line overlooking the Aliakmon River. It was snowing, and we had no shelter; we settled down for the night, cold, unfed and miserable. Eventually we dug in there, did various patrols and had a communion service. During the service, conducted by a Padre Dawson, the Jerries came over in their planes and took pot shots at us, but nobody was hurt. We then went forward as a battalion for a short time, didn’t really have any skirmishes with the German infantry, and eventually we were withdrawn. During the withdrawal the German Air Force had dominance of the skies and we were severely bombed; there were a few casualties and I think we went back as far as Larisa.

One morning we were told that our company were to take up a position on a very high hill – it must have been about 3,000 feet high. We climbed up that hill – there were no paths, it was really beautiful through the bush, squirrels everywhere. We stopped for lunch and Colonel Kippenberger arrived and sat by me, and whilst we were having lunch a runner came up and delivered him a message. He read it and passed it to me. He said, “George, don’t tell the troops until I am well on my way – we are withdrawing.” After having climbed thousands of feet, we went down. We were then told to destroy everything. My friend Jack Baines, who was tenting with me, he and I had an ‘His Master’s Voice’ gramophone, and we each shouldered a pick and broke it up with all the records. It was devastating.

So then the withdrawal started; we were still being bombed and we got through Athens when the German advance party were actually there. This was fairly late at night; we got on to trucks that were directed to a certain area and we were told to destroy everything except our arms. So we set to and pierced the tyres of the trucks and ran the oil out and started the motors. Then the order came that we were to stop that, because we were going on further, still retreating. We went through a village and there B Company of our Battalion had the most casualties from machine-gunning and bombing from the air. I don’t think our company had anything, although we did fire a few shots. The Germans didn’t seem to be taking any action at night-time, so we marched down to the beach. I don’t know how many miles it was, but it was interminable.

We had got to the beach and dropped down to rest when one of my men came round and said, “Sir, give me your water bottle – we’ve found a dump of rum,” and he brought my water bottle full of rum, which I eventually drank. The caiques appeared to take us out to the Navy ships and I got on the caique and the next thing I heard was a voice from this Navy ship, the destroyer Kimberley: “Hurry up there or you’ll get left behind!” I had fallen asleep.’

Rex Thompson, a driver with the NZ Army Service Corps, related that:

‘We supplied the base at Larisa, which was about half way up Greece. The dump there was a big dump and the Germans, being keen on routine, used to bomb every lunch-time, and the personnel on the dump there would bail out as soon as the sirens went and, being inquisitive Kiwis, we used to take a look around. The rum was very popular and that helped out a lot.

Eventually we started the retreat out of Greece and on the south side of the Larisa there was a tremendous convoy and the road was raised, must have been about 12 or 14 foot above the land – it was all flat. And here we were parked almost nose-to-tail and the Germans were bombing and strafing, bombing with anti-personnel bombs and strafing. And once again we decided it was safer just to get under the truck because they were bombing each side of the road for personnel and we realised later that they didn’t want to actually blow the bridges or clean up the transport. While we were waiting here – we were just held up in this particular place – there was a Dornier, I’m pretty sure it was a Dornier, and the top of the telephone poles were just a wee bit higher than the road, and this particular plane ambles along just above the telephone lines. And we were just looking at it – we weren’t allowed to fire at them because this would bring the whole lot of them on us – and this gunner pulls his turret back half way along the plane there and tosses out a couple of rolls of toilet paper for us – that’s the fun they were having. It wasn’t well received verbally, however, at the time, but it was quite humorous afterwards. And we found out later that a couple of Australians were having breakfast further down the road there and that’s what held the convoy up – they weren’t very popular. But all the way down through Greece we were blowing the approaches to the bridges and on again, and the villages where the road went through, and there was only one road, they bombed them. And that went on most of the whole of the way; we continued the withdrawal until eventually we were set for embarkation.

And we went to a beach south of this area of Greece and this particular night we managed to get on a barge to go out to the destroyer. However, they diverted us to Kea Island and we arrived there in the morning. It got too late for us to embark on the destroyer and they put us on this island for the day. We had to cross the island and there must have been about 100 of us, and it was a very bare island and quite hilly and we had to go to the opposite side to be picked up the following night. And it was quite nerve-racking at times with German planes flying over it regularly, and we were all stretched out on virtually bare land and we went to ground every time we saw one. However, apparently the Germans are inclined to be single-minded and so set on a certain job, well, that was all they worried about. So we put the day in hugging the ground and walking and eventually made the other side of the island where we were picked up that night and put on the Kandahar, and we thought we were heading for Egypt, but apparently during the trip they decided they had to make another trip and put us off on Crete for a couple of days.

We had 13 raids on the way over and we got a couple of holes through the back of the destroyer – they were borderline, fortunately – but without doubt the skipper was very, very adept. He used to wait nonchalantly for the plane and he’d hard to port or starboard and the water would come right up over the decks as he turned. But we missed any direct hits. One or two of the convoy got badly hit.’

Bruce McKay Smith, Gunner, 25th NZ Artillery Battery, was there too:

‘Then we moved to the outskirts of a place called Trikala, which, I understand, had been hit by an earthquake some reasonably short time beforehand, but we were put into olive groves and various scrub and stuff and camouflaged ourselves in. And the next morning, at daylight, the Germans mounted a ferocious attack on Trikala itself; they bombed all day, but how or why we’ll never know; they never saw us. I don’t think anybody breathed for the whole of that day, and that night we moved out. The war was getting fairly intense then. The roads were choked with not only refugees but various units, Australian, British Army and New Zealand – surplus vehicles going one way and us trying to go another way – but eventually, through a lot of manoeuvring and toing and froing, we got into defensive positions again and carried on moving every now and again to more secure positions. The guns were firing a vast amount of ammunition because ammunition was plentiful for some reason, which was most unusual, all the guns getting almost red hot with their continuous rate of fire.

From there the whole show started to deteriorate, and then we were told that the place was getting untenable and we’d probably have to evacuate. So this started a bit of kerfuffle and we had to travel on very exposed roads, mostly being bombed and strafed most of the time, but with little effect, by the German planes, but very scary all the same. We still had all our equipment intact at that stage, but then we were told we’d have to put our defensive positions up if we found a position that was suitable and we’d go into action against German tanks and infantry. Their Alpine troops were a pest – they seemed to be able to go anywhere. The tanks were not as big a problem as we thought they would be – our gunners became very good at knocking them out, especially when they were trying to do river crossings.

From there on we carried on going south; the whole thing was getting chaotic by then. Nobody quite knew what was going on. Actually we got to the outskirts – I’m not quite sure how far out from Athens – and were told that we had to destroy our guns and vehicles and hopefully disperse and await transport by sea. The guns were destroyed as best we could, most of the optical equipment taken off them. The vehicles had a pickaxe put through the sump and the engine started up and raced until the engine seized up.

After destroying the vehicles, we went to a position whose name I can’t recall, with a lot of scrub and stunted trees and olives and one thing and another, not far from the sea. We were told to hide in this undergrowth and, hopefully, we’d be picked up that night by a ship. We spent all day in this scrubby area. The German planes came over continuously, but somehow or another they couldn’t have seen us because we had a trouble-free day. As it approached dark, runners were sent round to various groups to tell them to be prepared at anytime to move and to dump any surplus equipment such as rifles and gas-masks and stuff like that. However, very few of our chaps dumped their rifles – they hung on to them.