Jewish Anzacs by Mark Dapin

Author:Mark Dapin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth

Fighting in Greece

In October 1940 the Italians had invaded Greece, only to be forced out by the Greeks. The Germans eventually went to help their hapless ally and the British, joined by Australians and others, came to the aid of the Greeks. At the same time as Rommel and his men bombarded Tobruk, the Germans drove Allied troops from the Aliakmon River, forcing them to retreat to the Thermopylae Line. The defenders of Greece included the Australian 2/2nd Battalion, where Major Paul Cullen was now second-in-command.

Cullen’s men fought a rear-guard action against the Nazis at Tempe Gorge in Northern Thessaly on 18 April 1941. Cullen wrote: ‘My mate, Sergeant Tanner, hit the third enemy tank with his anti-tank rifle, but the bullets were just bouncing back. It was that close … We were forced back [and] I was facing the front, like all good soldiers should, leaning forward, in a sunken road with my men, and we only had rifles, for God’s sake, when a German tank came round the corner and turned its turret in our direction … fired a burst of machine-fire, killed the two men alongside me, and it went through the breast pocket of my tunic, and clipped the lucky sovereign that Mummy had given me, to her darling little Paul, to protect me. The last two German tanks in that area approached the highway [to Larisa]. They were only about a couple of hundred yards away, and down that highway the Anzac corps was departing.

‘All that was left between these last two German tanks and the highway behind was an area of ploughed field about the size of a couple of football fields. I can see it now with a line of poplar trees at the back, and behind the poplar trees was the highway, and the Anzac Corps was rumbling along it … the transport officer, lined up his B echelon. “B echelon” is the transport drivers, the cooks, the clerks, batmen, few signallers, etc. He lined them up and as the two tanks approached he fired a volley, of pistols for God’s sake, against these wonderful German Mark 4 tanks. I shouldn’t think the tanks even knew they had been fired at … Corporal Bill Cameron, a signal corporal, had a twenty-litre can of petrol and his cigarette lighter and he scrambled aboard the leading tank and tried to light the petrol but couldn’t. There is nothing tanks like less than having petrol poured over them, so the two tanks wheeled round within fifty yards of the highway. As they wheeled round to go back they threw Corporal Cameron off into the ploughed field and one of the tanks ran over him … They ran over his thigh but the pressure per square inch of a tank is not that great and in a ploughed field he wasn’t killed. [The tanks] scuttled but by then the Anzac corps had gone.’25

Robert Patkin was at Brallos Pass on 22 April, when the routed Allied troops were ordered to evacuate to Crete.

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