The Defence and Fall of Greece, 1940–41 by John Carr

Author:John Carr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / World War II
ISBN: 9781473828308
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2013-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

The Greeks were right to be jittery. There were spooks and spies of every conceivable kind everywhere. An example presented itself during the funeral of Prince Peter’s aunt, Princess (and grand duchess of Russia) Maria of Greece, who had died after a harrowing railway journey from Italy through Yugoslavia on the floor of a goods wagon crowded with refugees. The officiating priest was one ‘Father Dimitrios’, an English monk who had supposedly embraced Greek Orthodoxy and had spent some years in the autonomous monastic community of Mount Athos. As a result ‘Dimitrios’ had become identical to a Greek priest in speech and bearded appearance and profound knowledge of the ancient Orthodox liturgy. Unbeknownst to most who came into contact with him, his real name was David Balfour. He was a British agent whose second job beneath the black gown and cylindrical hat was to gather intelligence for London. (Balfour was soon to abandon Orthodoxy and don the uniform of a British Army officer in Egypt. As for Gambier-Parry, after leaving Athens he arrived in Egypt, to be promptly captured by an advanced German patrol in the Western Desert. The man who had with satisfaction watched the Greeks gather up columns of Italian prisoners himself languished as a POW of the Italians until September 1943.)8

Metaxas had no doubts about what he would do if the Germans attacked; Greece, he assured the British, would stoutly uphold its share in the alliance. ‘But that doesn’t mean,’ the prime minister added in an aside to Prince Peter, ‘that if the British reach the North Pole we’ll follow them there’. The prince spent long and fatiguing days acting as a two-way interpreter between Greek officials and senior officers on the one hand, and the British on the other. Part of his multi-faceted job was to take custody of the personal effects of RAF crews killed on missions and hand them over to D’Albiac’s staff. The case of a crew that had crashed near Agrinion particularly haunted him:

It was a sad task to note down these few objects [the prince wrote], as I was constantly thinking of these boys’ families. Their names were: Flight Sergeant Harry Taylor and Sergeant N.A. Hallet[t]. The address of the former’s mother was: Mrs F. Taylor, 30 St John’s Street, [Ely?] Cambridge and the other address: 14 Fifth Avenue, Heaton, Newcastle-on-Tyne.9

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