http://xanthoulabertwrigley.blogspot.com
Bert and the Greek guerillas (antartes).
Indeed, Slim had
wasted no time. Soon after he joined a
group of guerillas, they came upon a village where they found and collected
weapons left behind by New Zealanders when they retreated during the
catastrophic evacuation. Slim helped
carry the weapons up to the highest village on Mount Olympus
“While we were in Pouliana, I met the British Colonel,
his code name was Hill, his real name was Rupert Sheppard. Anyway, he said he would try and notify Cairo
It seems that
the interview Colonel Sheppard gave Slim lasted several hours during which he
had to give accurate details about his division, about what part of Australia
he came from and about all the events that led up to his joining the Greek
guerillas. Convinced that here was a young
man with fire and endurance as well as discipline, the British Colonel accepted
him as a member of the British Mission in Greece
and told him to stand by waiting for the final orders to come from headquarters
in Cairo Cairo Mount
Olympus
Slim finally
managed to slip into Katerini to see Bruce, who writes:
“Yes, Slim was full of praise for the guerillas. Life with them, he said, was good, if maybe
rough. He described one raid on a convoy
when they had cleaned up eighty Germans, at the same time only suffering fifteen
casualties themselves. In addition, they
had gathered up a good stock of rifles before clearing off into the hills. Then he told of how, on another occasion,
they had stood guard over a village which had been raided and burnt to the
ground by Italian carabinieri, while the villagers returned and dug up their
belongings from holes in the ground where they had buried them. They had seen them with their bundles, their
crying, ragged and excited children, safely into the hills, there to build a
new village and begin life once more as best they could”. (pp.79-80)
Now Slim had come
down to Katerini to convince his friend Bruce to follow him up to the
mountains. Bruce felt more comfortable
going, now that he knew the British were involved.
“Later I was to discover that originally three men had
been dropped into Greece, the Colonel and two others. The third never reached his destination – his
parachute failed to open. With the
arrival of these two men the organization of the guerillas into an armed and fighting
force began, and Slim and I had the honour to be the first and, at the time,
only Australians to be in on it. For, of
course, in the end I told him I would go with him”. (p.80)
But going up
there was more easily said than done.
Bruce was still suffering from his debilitating mysterious illness, as
well as from recurring bouts of malaria, and it was at least a ten hour hike,
even from the village of Moni Petras to the village of Pouliana. He collapsed half-way there and had to rest
in a makeshift guerilla “hospital”, housed in what had been a school. Bruce has warm memories of the young doctor
who attended to him, mostly talking with him, since his only supplies were “a small amount of quinine, a thermometer and
some bandages”. “There was nothing much he could do for me,
but it was pleasant lying about in that mountain air; (...)
I could feel the strength coming back into my limbs, so much so that at
the end of a week I was ready to go on with Slim up into Olympus to the Colonel”.
(p.81)
The rocky track
was good for goats, sheep and mules, not for human feet. Bert remembered that he had to support and
even carry Bruce part of the way up until he completely collapsed and had to
rest for a week. There were still
several hours of a stiff hike before reaching Pouliana. And then, it was clear that the partisans
weren’t too happy about the Australians going to work with the British. Slim had proved himself to be a very
reliable, resourceful and brave fighter, or as “crazy” as they were during the
German convoy attacks. Naturally they didn’t
want to lose him as a combatant.
The following
quote from Bruce’s book gives us a clearer picture of who Bert Wrigley was at
the time, and the portrait I am attempting to draw of him is greatly helped by
what Bruce writes with memories still fresh, only about a year after they
returned. It is certainly in much more detail
than what Bert gave me himself later, at least regarding himself and what he
was like back then.
“Slim was all for this. He liked the life, he tried to persuade me
that I would like it too. After all, he
pointed out, the British knew about us, knew we were with the guerillas; he had
given all the particulars about us. If
they wanted us they could get us at any time, and probably they would only give
us some job of a static nature. The guerillas offered adventure, movement and
an experience we’d probably never know again”. (p.82)
Bruce naturally
hesitated, and after looking at the long steep climb to reach the village of
Pouliana in order to meet the Colonel and join the British Mission, he felt too
weak to tackle the goat track. So they
stayed with the band of partisans who were indeed happy to have them. In spite of all his reservations, Bruce
admits that in the months that followed “[he]
lived as [he] had never lived before – among a mixture of men it might be impossible
to collect together under one flag anywhere else on earth”. (p.83)
Bruce also recalls
that Slim and he had “a few arguments”
on those days, as life with the partisans seemed to suit Slim much better than
it did him.
“Slim had ceased to worry about getting to the
British. Life was great as it was. The sudden race down out of the hills; the
swift attack on a convoy, with its attendant smells of gunfire and death, and the
shouts of men; the race back to cover, had almost become life itself to him (p.87). (...) I came to the conclusion that in the first
encounter with him [the British Colonel]Slim had given him to understand that
he was perfectly happy sharing the wild, untrammeled life of the guerillas, and
the Colonel had naturally assumed it was the same where I was concerned. Yet I would have given much for him to send
for us”. (p.97)
Life with the
partisans meant not staying in one place more than twenty-four hours, sleeping
during the day in creek beds and caves, marching by night, sometimes getting
into a village where the Germans and Italians had not been for a while. On such occasions, they would build a fire in
the village square, feast on goat meat, bread, cheese, milk and sometimes wine,
if the village happened to be a “grape village”, offered willingly and joyfully
by the villagers, dancing and singing all night long. In his book, Bruce has a striking description
that takes up several pages. Here is an
excerpt:
“Gradually their hunger was appeased; the fire died a
little, and the shadows from its flames danced over the weather-beaten faces as
the singing began. First one voice would
start in the clear atmosphere and then another until all the men were singing,
and a volume of harmony rose into the night that was wholly satisfying, wholly
pagan”. (p.89)
It is understandable
that if he, an unenthusiastic participant, was so taken by such experiences,
how much more they would inspire an adventurous young man like Slim. He was part of these people who exuded such
primitive energy and passion. No wonder
he had forgotten the British!
They continued in this way, attacking when they could, retreating
when outnumbered and outgunned, and always on the move so that, except for a
few trusted messengers, no one knew exactly where they were. Rumors of the British having come back into
the country, supplying the Resistance fighters with money in the form of gold
English sovereigns, guns and food through drops from the air, organizing and
training the partisans, made the Germans nervous. Determined to wipe out those rumors and
destroy the hopes of the Greek population, they started systematically burning
off villages and killing their inhabitants at the slightest suspicion. In the towns and the cities, they arrested
and sent off to prison camps not only all those who actually opposed them but
also all those who were likely to
oppose them, such as liberally-minded teachers, doctors, lawyers, bankers, as
well as less well-educated people who didn’t cooperate or were reported to be
helping or hiding allied soldiers and the guerillas. Reprisals in the form of mass executions were
taking place regularly in the outskirts of the two big cities, Athens
and Thessaloniki Mount Olympus where the armed resistance had begun, but
also throughout the rest of Greece
All this time,
the Resistance fighters, with the help of Slim and Bruce, were doing their best
to harass the enemy. The general idea
was to do as much damage as they could with the minimum of losses, by blowing
up bridges and railway lines to prevent the enemy from moving troops easily, and
by ambushing convoys and capturing more guns.
Slim was involved immediately in such attacks, even before Bruce joined
them. Bruce mentioned in his book how
Slim, with a small group of partisans attacked a large convoy of German trucks and
seized a substantial number of weapons. They
only took one prisoner, the one who wasn’t killed during the attack and who had
surrendered. Whether that prisoner actually survived later, that will never be
known. The Greek guerillas weren’t
likely to follow the Geneva
Bert in my tape
still had some memories of that ambush:
“It was before the close of ‘42 we went up to Pouliana
and joined with this guerilla band, “Omada ‘Georgaki’ Olympou” (“Band of ‘Little George’ of Mount Olympus”). There were two
ambushes... We were heading on to the
road one night, and we walked into a German patrol, we lost one man, he walked
right into them. The rest of us got
away. Next day, we were waiting for this
convoy to come down from the mine. We
were not far from the village, what was its name..., I don’t remember now. It overlooked the road, there was a bit of a
creek at the bottom. Anyway, we shot the convoy up, took one prisoner and then
went up to Pouliana.
There were other “omades”
(bands) with us at the time, there were a
couple of hundred of us for that ambush.
We knew they were coming and we were waiting on either side of the
road. They were walking on the road
pointing their rifles on the scrub, but we were up on the sides. With light mortar and machine guns, we pulled
them up quick smart. We wiped them out”
(From tape)
In spite of
occasional successful attacks, there still wasn’t much hope of actually
protecting the people living in the villages and their homes. The guerilla
bands were almost always outnumbered and outgunned. When the Germans decided to
wipe out a village, it was inevitable, and as a rule the villagers tried to
flee before the fatal event, if they had enough warning. Sometimes they would
resist, but the end result was the same, total obliteration. At the beginning -- as Gilchrist records in
his book after interviewing Bert and Bruce --, they helped the people of one
village by the name of Tsaritsani (again a village I know) to put on the run
the Italians who came to confiscate their harvest of wheat and grapes. Bruce’s and Slim’s band of guerillas lured
the Italians out and fired on them. The
Italians left and the people of Tsaritsani celebrated with the partisans,
offering them a feast of meat, bread, and wine.
But then, a little later and unexpectedly, the Germans came back with light
tanks and an Italian cavalry brigade and burned Tsaritsani to the ground
(Gilchrist, p.69). Few of its
inhabitants managed to escape, and more families were wiped out.
Gilchrist
records the facts, and Bert confirmed them later to me when he came to Greece
in 1973 and we visited Tsaritsani. But
Bruce Vary’s poignant account is one that brings life to this tragic event. Here is a small part of it:
“They sent for the head man and demanded that he call
every man, woman and child into the square. (...) The next order they received
was a surprising one. The men were all
to be drawn up on one side of the square, the women on the second, and the
children on the third. Then the commander in charge of the enemy forces addressed
them. He said the conditions of living
and the governing of the country depended on each man, woman and child;
therefore he proposed to speak to each separately, that was the reason why he
had asked for them all to be drawn up in such a manner. That the regrettable differences which had lately
occurred between his soldiers and themselves must never be repeated. There must be collaboration between the
people of Greece
With that he summoned a firing squad into the square,
and before the dazed people could grasp what was happening, short, sharp
commands echoed in the still air, and machine-gun bullets ripped into their
midst, dropping them where they stood, men, women and children. A few recovered their senses in time to run,
but they were very few. More than seventy-five per cent of the villagers lay in
heaps, their blood already beginning to stain and creep across the stones of
their square. Before it had dried the
flames belched upwards from the houses left empty (...). Soon the last wreaths
of smoke that had risen from the ruins crept against the face of the mountain,
there to hang a while, all that was left to tell that grim tale of an effort to
obtain collaboration”. (pp.94-95)
Even though they
were not present themselves at the slaughter, Bruce and Slim were quite sure of
the facts, as they heard the description immediately after the event. With a few others, the two Australians were
sent back to the village to investigate a rumor that amongst those who escaped the
killing there were two people who had acted as agents for the Germans: a girl
of twenty-two and a boy of sixteen. They
caught the two young people and Slim and Bruce were invited to be present at
the interrogation. What follows in
Bruce’s book (pp.95-96) is a description of their gruesome fate in the hands of
the guerillas, which confirms that, in time of war, atrocities are committed by
all sides...
Other memories recorded
by Bruce are related to their biggest confrontation with the enemy. It was the time when the Germans and
Italians, with enough information now about the guerilla groups and the British
Mission headquarters on Mount
Olympus
“Altogether there were approximately 5,000, and with
them were four or five light tanks, but we soon discovered their equipment
consisted of two-inch mortars. Mortars,
in my experience up to date, were Itie’s best weapons, and the ones which
undoubtedly worried the guerillas more than any others”. (Vary, p.98)
Their orders
were to stem the attack in an area about six to eight hours down from Pouliana. The
ground was not in their favor. It was out
in the open, on the top of a ridge,
with no other cover than some stones the guerilla leaders had ordered the men
to pile up and to use as shelter. Slim
and Bruce objected to that, they thought that the piles of stones stood out and
gave away their position. In fact they
were providing a target for the enemy. But
the guerillas didn’t listen. However, they allowed Slim and Bruce to find
their own shelter, which they did.
The situation
looked hopeless. They were 300 men, sitting
on a bare ridge, against several thousand enemy troops. Bruce mentions 5,000,
Bert in his tape mentions 3,000 of them on the plain, but he also mentions that
an Austrian Alpine Battalion was coming from behind them, from another
direction, so the total could have been close to the figure mentioned by Bruce. Either way, those figures easily remind us
of an event in ancient Greek history: the battle at Thermopylae with the king
of Sparta, Leonidas, and his 300 warriors against the hordes of Persians. History does repeat itself! At least the Spartans were fighting on better
ground – a narrow pass through which the Persians had to march. Also, the Persians didn’t have mortars and
tanks at their disposal!
The guerillas
had only 25 machine-guns, ten Italian two-inch mortars and a rifle for each man
(Vary, p.98). In addition, they had never
fought a real battle until then, they were used to hit-and-run tactics. Bruce and Slim knew this battle was going to
be lost, but they stayed anyway. They
both remember that soon all hell broke loose.
The enemy advanced rapidly replacing constantly the men who fell. “In
spite of incessant firing they appeared to come on uninterruptedly” (Vary p.98). At the same time, the enemy mortars targeted
the heaps of stones, just as the Australians had expected, and the effects were
deadly. Many of the partisans were
killed instantly. Bruce heard a mortar
shell land beside Slim and for a moment he thought his friend was dead. However he soon discovered that Slim, as if
by a miracle, had not been hit, as he saw him “staggering away the other side of the ridge!” (p.99). From that time, Slim had to put up with a
perforated ear-drum and be hard of hearing from one ear for the rest of his
life.
When the order
was given to retreat, Bruce writes that he felt mad: “I suppose it was the only thing to do, anything else would have been
suicide (...) but I had never wanted to disobey a military order so badly” (p.99)
Here is an
account of that memorable battle as Bert himself recalled it for our interview,
still remembering great details some fifty years later, especially the precise names
of villages which are still there, and which he asked to visit during his two
visits to Greece, in 1973 and in 1981. My
elder sister Eleni and I drove him to that area in 1973.
“From Pouliana, we moved out at 3.00 a.m. one morning,
in the direction of Elassona. We moved down onto the plain, down onto the
flat. We took up a position there
because we had a report that there were about 3,000 troops, mixed Italian and
German troops, with light tanks, artillery support, coming out from Elassona in
our direction. There was a drive in the
general direction of Mount Olympus , and allegedly out from the back of Mount Olympus Mount
Olympus
The Greeks were commanding (...) Captain Sotiri, he
was our chief. He was a pretty bright
sort of bloke (...) They turned their
mortars and guns on us and tried to knock us out first. At the beginning, I was with Thanassis, the
machine-gunner. I had the magazines
(...) I must have dropped some. I picked
up some and then I dropped some, so I went back to get them. And then when we were withdrawing, I heard a
mortar and I dropped down and stayed there.
I was in a bit of a hollow and I was lying there shooting. (...) that’s when they nearly got me. That’s when I got a perforated ear drum. It
wasn’t only my ear, my nose was bleeding from the blast. Anyway, Sotiri came back to make sure I was
dead, he wouldn’t let us get caught and tortured. They’d string you up anyway as a bandit. He came and I got up and just walked, we
walked back together, and he said “den tha pethaneis pote” (“you will never
die”). From the blast, I first thought I
was blind, it exploded very very close, on the edge of the hollow. I was saved by the fact that I was down a bit
lower. I must have got hit from the splinters.
I fancy it was a mortar bomb, they had heavy mortars mounted on the back
of trucks. If it wasn’t a mortar, it was
a bloody good shot on somebody’s part, only the fact that I was in this bit of
a hollow saved me.” (From tape)
They withdrew. After
a fast and painful hike back up to their “throne
of Olympus”, as Bruce calls the village of Pouliana, the Australians
wondered how long it would take the Germans to make it up the precipitous
track. It may take them a while, they
thought, but the Germans would do it. They were desperate to eradicate the
guerillas and the British Mission. Would
they all have to make a last stand up there, fighting to the last man, or was
there a way out? Slim thought the Greeks
would find a way out, and they did.
There was another track, rarely used because it was rough, narrow and
slippery, with a chasm gaping beneath it, therefore dangerous for both man and
mule. And because it was rarely used it
had become overgrown and therefore even more dangerous. In fact one couldn’t quite call it a track. More than that, it wound down through an area
so close to where the Germans had camped for the night that if one spoke his
voice could be heard. And to all of that
was added the fact that this particular night was going to be “one of the darkest nights possible for
anyone to imagine” (Vary, p.101)
Bruce mentions
that Slim already knew that track: “... he
had ridden back to camp one night and had gone over the same track the next day
in daylight, and realised he must have ridden the whole way with his feet
hanging over into space!” (p.103). It seemed that they were caught, like Ulysses,
between Scylla and Charybdis. Still, the
decision was to move. The British
Mission had to be preserved at all costs, with all its gear: wireless, charging
engine, fuel, battery, personal belongings of the men and supplies of the
guerillas, as well as weapons. They were
all loaded onto an insufficient number of mules, and started, into the dark
night, on the perilous journey down.
Bruce thought that if this venture was to succeed “it would be something in the nature of a miracle” (p.101)
Bert also
remembers, even some fifty years later, that escape from Pouliana. Here is a small segment from the tapes:
“When they put on the drive from Elassona and from
Karya, the other side of Mount Olympus, we fell back onto Pouliana. Well, from 3 o’clock that morning till dark
we were on the move. I remember when we
got up to Pouliana, a couple of antartes gave us a bowl of cream and Bruce and
I ate it, and I went fast asleep for hours, they had to wake me up in the
middle of the night. They had us boxed
in but there was one little place they hadn’t closed off at that stage, and
there was about 400-500 guerillas, the British Military Mission, some other
British officers who had come in the meantime, and we all finished up over the Pindos
Mountains”. (From tape)
The Pindos Mountains are actually a long way
up in northwestern Greece, and getting there must have been a long and
exhausting journey over rugged country.
But by then, Slim and Bruce were used to considering an eight hours’
walk as a short distance, like my grandfather and all other Greek people living
in mountainous Greece
The interesting
thing is that, as time moves on, we are witnessing a change in Bruce’s
attitude. He is becoming more and more
involved in what seemed like a lost cause to him to begin with -- involved
enough for him to say:
“But since it meant an attempt to secure months of
difficult and dangerous work – work it was hoped would lay the foundation of
Greece’s liberation and independence – I doubt if there was one of us that
didn’t feel the thrill of the gamble. (p.101)
For hours it seemed we put one foot in front of the
other – on rocks, in holes, knocked our shins and stubbed our toes, stumbled
and recovered ourselves, got mules to their feet when they fell. When daylight
came we had not only passed the German camp and its sentries, who were
certainly no credit to any army, but also were well on our way. Later I discovered we were heading for the
Pindus Mountains”. (pp.104-105)
The one good
thing about that dangerous trek was that Bruce got close to the British Colonel,
the same one who had interviewed Slim earlier.
He writes that he walked silently beside him for most of that
night. At the end of that perilous
descent, Bruce was able to tell Colonel
“ Hill ”
“It wasn’t long after that that Colonel Hill sent a
messenger for me, one of the “antartes” came over with the message, I was to
accompany him, and I was to be operative with the British”. (From tape)
So a new chapter
begins for the two young men, as the only Australians ever to work with the
British Mission in Greece Cairo Greece
Slim didn’t
exactly like the new assignment. Here is what he says in the tape:
“I wasn’t over happy about it, because I didn’t like
being closed in, you know. I had to
learn the codes for the radio, to assist the radio operator, in other words I
was just helpful with the knowledge of the language and the country etc”.
Somehow, he
manages, at least for some short spells, to get away from what he considered a
“closed in” assignment and get back
into action. He recalls, again with
amazing exactness, his next assignments:
“And then one of these other British officers was
given the job of sabotage. He was a
sabotage officer, his name was Paul Harker, and I went with him. We spent quite a while blowing up bridges and
culverts, and we went up through Metsovo. (Metsovo
is a beautiful village in the area of Epirus, in the north west of Greece.) We
were up there. That’s when the big tunnel coming out from Giannina to Metsovo
was mined. I spent about a fortnight
with Paul on that job -- we had drops of explosives. We slept on the ground, it wasn’t too bad.
Then for a while we operated around Deskati. (Deskati is a small town back in the Mount Olympus area. Slim kept moving around a lot, and he
probably knew the Greek mountains better than most Greeks). Paul was then taken off the
sabotaging bit and was given an area, which wasn’t too far from Kalambaka.
(This location is further down south of Deskati, in the well-known area of
Meteora.)
We were in that area and that’s where we stayed for a while. A messenger
was sent from each group, each group supplied information to us and we
transmitted it to Cairo”. (From tape)
In his book,
Bruce Vary records in detail their movements and the job they had to do. It is interesting to see that his tone has
changed. From someone who suffered
debilitating sickness, cold, hunger, loneliness and fear, Bruce is transformed
to an active and dynamic person, in spite of his still fragile health. He sounds eager to serve and contribute to
the fight against the enemy. At last he
feels he is doing something rather than being passive and just trying to
survive.
“Now we had to protect an organization that meant the
eventual security of a great-hearted country, and the upholding of our own
national prestige”. (p.107)
Besides
operating and maintaining the radio communications between Cairo
and the mission in Greece ,
another vital job that Slim and Bruce had to do was to find appropriate areas
for planes from Egypt and Libya
However, by the
end of 1943, Bruce felt no longer fit for the job:
“After twelve months with the English I knew I was
coming to the end of my tether. The nerve strain of this life, coming on top of
the eighteen months’ fighting, starvation and sickness, made me feel in a
condition I knew was no good for the job I was trying to carry out”. (p.117)
And Slim? How did he feel? Did he still want to stay and fight?
Well, apparently
not. Slim had also come to the end of
his tether, especially after he nearly died of pneumonia. He collapsed during a night of a plane drop
from Cairo
Here is how he
remembers those events, fifty years later:
“Every sortie, every plane load of stuff dropped,
everything was organized through Cairo.
The whole of Greece
This unusual kind
of treatment he received from the partisan doctor, at least unusual to him not
to me who had seen my mother perform it in the village a few times to people
who were very ill, produced, it seems, a miraculous recovery. He survived and the razor blade cuts could
still be seen faintly on his back. The story is very much the same as recorded
by Bruce in his book, so I will borrow Bruce’s more detailed description which
is indeed very accurate, with only a couple of small details wrong on which I will
comment.
“In addition, he had been attacked by pneumonia, and
no one had thought he would pull through.
The guerilla doctor, brought to him as he lay practically unconscious, had
shaken his head. The only thing he could
do, he said, was to give him the Greek treatment known as “vandoosa” [the correct Greek word is actually “vendouzes”, in the plural], a proceeding in which the Greeks had great
belief. He made a number of cuts at the
base of Slim’s back with a razor blade.
In the meantime he had six or eight glasses or bottles ready [they
are actually special round glass cups with a wide rim and no handle, designed
especially for that purpose, and some Greek households still have them], into which, after making the cuts, he
plunged a fork, at the end of which was a swab of cotton wool that had been
soaked in methylated spirits and set fire to; the bottles were then placed over
the cuts. They were left in position for
the matter of minutes, removed while the lighted cotton wool was again thrust
into them and replaced, the idea being to cause a vacuum and draw blood. But the whole set of movements had to be
carried out with speed and sureness or the treatment failed. Whether or not it was due to this treatment,
Slim recovered sufficiently for it to be obvious he would live, but he was a
sick man”. (Vary p.118)
To Bruce’s
surprise, Bert was also ready to leave the guerillas and Greece at this point:
“Strangely enough, Slim was of the same mind. He had never been quite the same after the
mortar episode in the battle for Pouliana”. (p.118)
The pneumonia
episode took away any energy and desire for fighting he had left. Slim and Bruce requested permission to leave
the country and it was granted to them by their commanding officer. But in order to actually leave they had to
wait for an official answer from the Cairo Headquarters. The message with the approval finally came the
usual way, through the radio, and it was Slim himself who received it. Bruce describes him “lying besides his wireless,
listless, and feeling rather hopeless (....
[He]) began to decode letter by letter, word by word the permission for
his and my release, the plan for getting out”. And immediately he adds: “Poor old Slim was too ill even to
celebrate...” (Vary, p.119)
One would think
that from now on things would go smoothly. Instead, now will begin the odyssey of
their escape from Greece. In Patsy
Adam-Smith’s book quoted earlier, the person she interviewed and whom she quotes,
Sergeant Staff Bill Gamble, didn’t and couldn’t know the details of Slim’s and
Bruce’s evacuation from occupied Greece.
The two lines devoted to it, “Eventually
Slim got pneumonia and these partisans organized to have him evacuated out by
submarine to the Middle East”.(pp.161-162), are correct about his illness, but not quite so about the means of
his escape. A submarine coming into
Greek waters to take him away sounds glamorous indeed, and swift, but it is far
from the actual events. The real story,
told orally by Bert himself in my tapes, and by Bruce (pp.119-126), is also
reported by Gilchrist (pp.71-72), who of course heard it directly from both of
them. It is much less glamorous, with some
narrow escapes and unpleasant situations.
There were also some funny moments, which, as usual, Bert remembered
well.
Here is how it really
happened.
Soon after the
good news, Bruce and Slim loaded a mule with their personal belongings. With
mixed feelings of joy and sadness they said goodbye to the people with whom
they had shared so much. There was more
travelling at night on rough and tortuous tracks coming down from the mountains.
In spite of some danger, everything went well until the moment of crossing the
main railway line between the towns of Thessaloniki and Larissa. This was the area around the town of
Katerini, about midway on the railway line between the two others. It was an area with which they were both
fairly familiar. The railway line was heavily guarded by German troops stationed
one kilometer apart for fear of guerilla sabotage. Once they had located those stations, they
tried to slip in-between them at night.
But the mule wasn’t as careful as Bruce and Slim, better suited to climb
up and down rough tracks than crossing a railway line. It struck the railway line with the metal
shoe under its hoofs and the still air was filled for a few seconds with a
vibrating ring. Immediately, shots and
flares went up in the darkness and the mule fell with all of its load. The two escapees knew they had no time
to worry about the mule or about their belongings. They ran for their lives back where they came
from, lying low and hiding into the scrub until things had calmed down. Then they attempted to cross the railway line
once again, this time without the mule, orienting themselves towards the town of
Volos and the area called Pelion. It was necessary to keep a rapid pace because
they had to reach their destination before dawn, as the arrangements to meet a small
ship at a particular spot were very precise both in location and in time. They were given a map to guide them where the
boat would be waiting for them, and they were told they had to be on board that
night so that the boat could leave before dawn. If they were late, they might miss their
chance of getting away.
With a new-felt
anxiety, they made their way to the meeting spot, a small cove beneath high
cliffs on the coast southeast of the town of Volos. With eyes wide open they waited in the dark
for the signal: a quick flicker of light was to flash a couple of times. It never did, and dawn came. Exhausted from the hazardous and tiring trip,
disappointed, with no provisions, no blankets to cover themselves on a cold
December night, they hid as best they could in an area near the sea with no natural
shelter. They waited for the next night hoping that the boat would come, while
the thought crossed their mind that if it didn’t they would have to go back.
But the next
night it showed up, although they still were not able to leave until the
following night. When they reached the
boat, they found much to their surprise that other people were waiting for it
as well. For example a number of
guerillas were there to help unload arms smuggled into Greece. Fortunately, for that second night and the
next day of waiting, the two Australians were taken up to a village in Mount
Pelion where the officer of the British Mission, Captain Michael Ward, gave
them shelter while waiting for the boat to be unloaded and to be ready to sail
again.
Bruce surprisingly
does not mention that detail in his account, although I have in my hands three
photos taken by the British officer in a village in Pelion, in two of which he
is clearly visible. It must have slipped
his memory at the time his book was written in 1945. This incident is also recorded
by Gilchrist, who based himself on Bert’s and Bruce’s memories at the time he
interviewed them.
Gilchrist
reproduces in his book a clear photo of Bruce and Slim, standing in front of
the steps of a stone house, with Slim wearing a scarf elegantly tied around his
neck and tucked inside his jacket. He is
also wearing German knee-high boots without laces, while Bruce wears the usual British
army short boots with laces. Bert talked
about these German boots in my taped interview, again remembering the funny
side of things. He was still amused, as
he remembered the incident in 1992, that when they arrived in Turkey
In the published
photo, two copies of which are in my hands, the two young Australians look thin
but quite perky. Understandably so, as
their ordeal was coming to an end. At
the bottom of the published photo in Gilchrist’s book we read: “Corporal Vary (left) and Sergeant Wrigley,
in the village of Veneton on Mount Pelion ,
23 December 1943. (Courtesy, Captain
Michael Ward.) On the back of one of the two photos in my hands, Bert writes
in his distinctive handwriting: “Veneton,
Dec. ’43. Bruce Vary and Self,
1943. Day before we left Greece for Turkey
The second but
same photo has the following written on its back, but not in Bert’s
handwriting:
“Slim” and “Bruce – Australian soldiers at Veneton on Mt. Pelion Thessaloniki
I am not going to try and guess exactly how it happened that two copies
of the same photo exist with different inscriptions on the back, but at least
it is definite that this photo and two others were taken by Captain Ward. He either gave them to Bert at the time, if
he had the means of developing photos, which is unlikely, or sent them to Bert
later, after the war ended when Bert somehow connected with him. Bert must have given one of them to Gilchrist
at the time of their meeting in Canberra, to be included in his book.
Two days and
nights after they arrived at the cove, the two Australians together with
several others (Bruce says there were fourteen) boarded the ship. “Greeks, Armenians, guerilla officers,
English carrying important papers to Cairo Greece
The meeting with
six of those daring pilots is also mentioned by Bert in my tape:
“When we got to Pelion we were joined there by a group
of American pilots. They had been shot
down. They had gone over to bomb Ploiesti , a big oil field in Romania ,
and on their way back they were shot down and crashed in Greece
Indeed, a third
photo in my sister’s possession shows a group of nine people, including Slim
and Bruce, whose names are inscribed on the back of the photo in a formation
according to their position in the photo: at the top “John Cook and Themie Marinos”, on the left Slim and an “American pilot”, in the center “Hutchinson”, beneath him “Peter” (“American”), at bottom left “Yannis Lazaris” and sitting down on the
stone steps of the house Bruce and “Costas
Mainos”. The handwriting is probably
that of Michael Ward, who must have given or sent these photos to Slim. A third photo shows a young man with a round
face, light moustache and short beard, hands in his pockets, smiling and standing
in front of the same steps of the same stone house. On the back, in Bert’s handwriting, we read: “Mike Ward, 1943. Later British Consul in Salonika
1973”. This last detail indicates that Bert wrote this piece of information
at least 30 years after he had met Michael Ward in Mount Pelion. It is quite possible that he may have
corresponded with him at some point, and very likely saw him in Greece in 1973,
when Bert actually visited Greece, including Thessaloniki (referred to as
Salonica), for several months.
Now back to the
escape. The boat was supposedly trading onions between the island of Mytilene
and the port of Volos in Pelion, but in reality it was smuggling into Greece
arms for the British, and smuggling out, through Turkey -- a neutral zone --, people
who had to leave for one reason or another. And all of that under the onions! With German aircraft doing their regular daily
patrol, and two sea planes circling over them again and again, the small boat
started its voyage into the Aegean Sea , flying
its two flags, the Greek and the swastika.
It was Christmas Eve 1943, one that would never be forgotten by the men escaping
aboard that boat. Bruce’s description of
that voyage to freedom is unforgettable, and, in spite of everything, it has
its funny moments.
“Those onions!
Never shall I forget their stench in that airless hold, as the sixteen
of us trampled on them! There were other
things too – the complete and hopeless way in which we were all seasick – the
failing of the engine after we had been going a couple of hours, more hours in
which we drifted and continued to be ill. Then, after we at last got the engine
going and were chugging along nicely between the strongly fortified islands of
Khios and Mytilene, a spark blew on to an oily bag on the deck, and in a second
there was a blaze that put the stars to shame.
Sixteen seasick men made a dive for that bag, all swearing in different
languages!” (Vary, p.122)
After a last
scare from a patrol boat (fortunately it was a Turkish one and not German),
they landed at the small Turkish village with a harbor called Alatsata, and
were taken to a warehouse on the water front used by the British. After waiting a while, they were driven to
another fishing village where they went through the Turkish customs. There they were fumigated and
vaccinated. Bruce remarks “I grant we needed it!” A sixty-mile long drive followed that seemed
interminable to them into the night. But
it was worth the wait and the fatigue because they found themselves in the best
hotel of the city of Izmir (Smyrna). Bruce
says how pleasantly surprised they were to find people with smiles and a full
meal on the dining room table waiting for them.
They were told to wait in the morning for civilian clothes to be brought
to them before going down for breakfast. There were German officers in the same hotel. Turkey
being neutral ground, both the Germans and the British could actually be in the
same hotel! So here takes place the
incident with the German boots.
“We were still in British uniform at that time,
British clothing anyway, you’ve seen that photo of me with the German
boots. That was because I had got my
feet frost bitten a few times in Greece
We landed on the coast, a covered truck took us into
Izmir itself. We had to take our
clothing off. Then we met the Turkish
chief of police, he gave us the documents, then we went to the hotel in Izmir
For the first
time in more than two and a half years Bruce and Slim could luxuriate in hot
baths and lie in beds with sheets. It
felt like a dream, especially as they found out that all expenses were paid,
and they also received one hundred lira a
day. Both young Australians were amazed
at the “attention, courtesy and kindliness”,
in Bruce’s words, they received as they passed through Turkey and Syria
to Egypt , to the port on the
Red Sea at the end of the Suez Canal . Bruce does not give a name here, but he is
probably referring to Port Tawfiq, close to the city of Suez
Unfortunately,
Bruce had a serious relapse of his debilitating and still mysterious illness.
“But all the time I was getting worse and worse; only
that I was able to hang on to Slim’s arm I could not have gone along a street. However, I did my best to disguise my
condition; above everything I did not want to be put into hospital. But by the time we had reached our
embarkation port I had caved in completely and had to be carried on board. Just prior to that we had been told that if
we wished we could go home by way of England
So they both
sailed on the “Darra”, a new
ten-thousand-ton cargo ship, only on its second voyage, equipped with a submarine
detecting device, which they surely needed.
The Gulf of Aden was, in the words of
Bruce, “infested” with German
submarines. The “Darra” was going directly to Australia
Bert sums up
that last part in very similar words:
“There were two attempts at getting us back. There was a German submarine pack where the Red Sea opens up like the neck of a bottle. The German submarine pack was working across
the Red Sea .
We had to turn back, because we had picked up the survivors of a ship
that had been torpedoed the night before.
We picked them up and we headed into Aden and when we came out we came
out in a convoy that was going to India.
(...) It was an ordinary cargo ship. Anyway, they tried to torpedo us, but they
missed. We zig-zagged and the torpedoes
missed us. They never had another go at
us after that. And then we landed at Fremantle
early February 1944.” (From tape)
A last mention
of Slim is made in the very last page of Bruce’s book. It sums up in a few words the bonding that
had been formed between these two men.
“There an ambulance was waiting for me, in which Slim
accompanied me to hospital, and I believe he resented the nurses doing their
job, for he insisted on bathing me himself!”
(p.126)
What happened
after their return? Bert recalls:
“We got home eventually, we came by plane, we flew
from Perth, eventually we landed here in Melbourne, and I was put into hospital
because I was under weight. Then I was
sent up to a convalescent camp for special feeding”.
After about 2
months of convalescing in a camp in Ballarat,
the two friends parted company:
“Bruce was on his way up on discharge, and then they asked
me what did I want to do. Well, I said,
I wanted to join what they call the Independent Companies fighting against the
Japs”.
When I asked him
why he wanted to do that, after everything he had been through in Greece, he
replied in his usual understated way:
“Well, I just thought, carry on, you know.....”
Indeed, he did “carry
on” for more than a year and here is how it happened:
“Then I went into the Tablelands to do a Commando
course, special commando training. (...) They made them into regiments these
Independent Companies. (...) The Independent Companies were originally of about
200 men, you go in hit the Japs and race out again. This is what I do, this is
what I had joined for. In the meantime I
had an interview for the Z special force, a group of ultra-commandos. They’d sailed a ship from north Queensland into Singapore Greece
Bert says little
in that tape about his Borneo experience and fighting the Japanese, but we know that Australian Military Units were
sent to Borneo as early as September 1944, as soon as US troops landed on the island of Morotai
I have no other details
from Bert himself about his time there, as I didn’t ask him specific questions
about that part of his war experiences. In
1992, I was focusing mainly on his time in Greece Greece
Here is the rest
of the tape:
“Then September-October that year, 1945, I was sent
home for discharge. Having been a POW, I
was entitled for discharge. I was on
patrol, when this happened: I fell into
a hole and broke the skin on my leg, by the time I went back to the camp my leg
was infected and swollen (...)”
My tape ends
rather abruptly with that final statement.
And although we talked more at that time about the war, the recording
stops here. I remember sensing that he
had finished for that session, and I didn’t ask for another one. Another piece of information I remember and can
add here from other conversations with him is that the “hole” into which he
fell was actually a trap, which the Japanese were good at setting deep into the
ground as part of their jungle warfare.
Bert didn’t
recover easily from that wound, which became dangerously infected. His malaria also kept recurring and he
finally accepted to be discharged, something he had refused in 1944, after his
recovery in the convalescing camp of Ballarat.
Among the papers that my sister gave me, an Air Travel Authority
document shows that he was flown from the airfield of Morotai Island to
Brisbane on the 28th of August 1945. Bert’s official Certificate of
Discharge bears the date of 12th September 1945, from Royal Park , Melbourne Australia
For his war time
service, Slim was given seven medals, all now in the hands of his one of his sons
John, who showed them to me:
1)
The 1939/45 Star, for campaigns
in Greece, Crete, Syria, and the Middle
East – West of Suez Canal.
2)
The Africa Star, for those in Palestine,
and also for those called forward to Alexandria area in Egypt with a view to
embarkation for Greece.
3)
The Pacific Star, for
operational service in the Pacific theatre.
4)
The Italy Star, for operational
service in the Mediterranean area.
5)
The Defense Medal, for six
months service in non-operational areas subjected to air attack.
6)
The War Medal 1939/45, for full-time
duty personnel of the armed forces for a total of not less than 28 days.
7) The Australia Service Medal, for full-time duty of not less than
18 months.
Back in Melbourne Borneo
was to look up his friend Bruce. For the
many years that followed, although living in different places but not too far, Bruce
and Slim, as Bruce always addressed Bert, kept in touch and continued their
friendship. They were indeed “cobbers”, as Bruce had said right after they met
in Greece
But we need to
go back a little. After he came home
from Borneo , Bert experienced some of the
difficulties faced by returned soldiers.
Many of those who had taken part in battles on the ground or sailed on
ships that had been torpedoed had seen the horrors of war and were traumatized
by what they had been through. Some of
them, like Bruce and Slim, were hospitalized for a time for treatment of
illnesses like malaria and pneumonia, injuries from wounds, frost bite or simply
mal-nutrition. After their stay in hospital,
many of them were sent to recover in convalescing camps. Sometimes, in addition to bodily injuries,
many suffered from shock and depression and needed medical treatment and
support. Bert’s younger brother Eric, serving
on board the HMAS Hobart when it was torpedoed on the 20th of July
1943 in the Solomon Islands, was for many years of his life troubled by a
nervous condition for which he had psychiatric treatment with medication.
Feeling restless
and not being able to settle down were the lightest symptoms that returned
soldiers had to deal with. Bert, with a
more resilient nervous system than his younger brother, managed better the
transition from the army to civilian life. But it still took him some time to find his
way. He began by exploring job possibilities in Queensland with Bruce, and when
that didn’t work out he tried other alternatives. At some point, he invested his savings from
his war pay by buying into a milk farm in Wonthaggi ,
Victoria
What was the
event that changed his life decisively? He
received a letter from Greece and was now hoping to get married, feeling for
the first time that there was someone special out there who would share a new
life with him.
We will see
later how this came about. But before
leaving his experiences in Greece behind, let me add a note about how I came to
have some personal and privileged information on that time of his life well
before I interviewed him in 1992.
It was during a
trip Bert made to Greece on his own in the summer of 1973 that I heard many of
his experiences for the first time. It
was his first visit to Greece since he escaped to Turkey on Christmas Eve in
December 1943, almost exactly 30 years later.
He had spent exactly two years and nine months in Greece after he had
landed in the port of Piraeus in the spring of 1941, and for many years he was
dreaming of returning. When we heard of his intention to come to Greece, my
husband and I, who used to go to Europe from the US and also visited Greece and
my family every summer, suggested that we meet him in Paris where we usually
landed. We rented a car in Paris and,
after a week or so in France, we drove down through Italy to the port of
Brindisi, and then caught the ferry to Greece.
We first visited my brother who lived then in the city of Ioannina in
Epirus, close to where we disembarked from Italy. After staying with my brother who guided us
through mountain villages in the area, some of which Bert recognized (like
Metsovo), we drove through the tunnel (the one he and the British officer, Paul
Harker, had blown up many years before) and also through the Pindos mountains
in northwestern Greece, where he had been with the guerillas and the British
Mission. Bert became more and more
excited and reminisced frequently as we slowly made our way through the area of
Kalambaka and Meteora (an area where he had operated with the British Mission
and Paul Harker again), to the city of Thessaloniki where we visited my
mother. He didn’t want to see the prison
camp where he had been for a couple of months, and neither did we for reasons
that will become clear later in the story.
Then we visited
my elder sister and her family who lived (and still lives) in Katerini, a town
he had got to know so well. We also
drove him to some places he knew, and he looked for people whom he had met
during the war. Some remembered Slim
well and gave him a warm welcome. Especially my mother’s cousin, Mitsos
Kragiopoulos, who was the young shepherd with whom he stayed on more than one
occasion up in Fteri and who had now become a priest. Father Mitsos had tears
in his eyes as he embraced Slim thirty years later. Besides towns like Thessaloniki and Katerini,
Bert wanted to see our grandfather’s village, Ritini, where part of our old
house still stood and where we still have relatives; the villages of Elatohori,
Karya, Deskati (unfortunately, the road to Moni Petras had not yet been opened
in 1973), the town of Elassona, and others.
He would look wistfully at mountain tops and whisper “I’ve been up there...”
I remember that
our cousin, the priest, offered to go up to Fteri with him, but Bert’s feet
weren’t up to the task, the old frost bite from Greece and injuries he had suffered
in the Borneo campaign had taken their toll.
But after my husband and I left for the States and Bert stayed on in
Greece for a while longer, I heard that another young relative took him up to
those locations by mule. Bert was wearing special orthopedic boots for some
years now, and he knew he couldn’t make it to Fteri on foot, let alone to
Pouliana, much as he would have liked to.
I remember him joking more than once about the way Greeks, those days at
least, calculated distances not in kilometers but in how many hours it would
take to cover them on foot. He still
remembered my grandfather saying, when asked how far a certain village was:
“Oh, not too far, about eight hours on foot!”
Bert spent the
whole summer with us in 1973. It is
still for me a great time to remember, our drive through France and Italy and
our time together in Greece. I finally
felt I could repay a little my debt to him for bringing me to Australia and for his unfailing and generous
support of me during my difficult student years in Melbourne Greece Greece
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