ANZAG DAY A YEAR AGO

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 5, Issue 45, 27 April 1942, Page 6

ANZAG DAY A YEAR AGO

(Continued from page 2) We turned into a field. At least it looked like a field, but it was a marsh, and the car sank up to its axles. Wc called a truck over to tow lis. out, and the truck sank. Soon we were three. It took us an hour tn> get out. Every tenth minute two black bomb-' ers lazed over and back, bombing each way. The soft ground shook like blancmange. We heaved and sweated and swore. "Hell's Corner" was a hot spot, too. It was an easy and current target .ft sharp bend on a hilltop. We thought we might get around it between bombers. But we were dead on it when the traffic stopped once more. After a while somebody said: "Don't look now, but those nasty airmen are here again!" We shrank into our tin hats. The first stick of bombs rocked the car but nyssed the road. As the planes turned for a second run, Ave began to move again. Move? We crawled. A second was a minute, and the bombers were coming back. They roared low, machine gunning now, but their explosive bullets only peppered the roadside. We were just too late that afternoon to go up in smoke nad rubble and dust with a pretty little town called Pharsala. The dive bombers dropped on it like vultures. It wasn't the first or the last time' I have seen a non-strategic town smash ed that way. I still fail to understand why thej" do it. If you can't visualise the effect, ask a Napier earthquake survivor. We Were Hitting Back This kind of thing was happening to us all day and every day. But we were hitting back. On the eve of Anzc Day, 1941, the smoke clouds of battle gathered over Thermopylae as we hit back again for 12 solid hours. And maybe the ghost of Leonidas, who fought there centuries ago in very similar circumstances, looked down and smiled on us.

Some call it the Battle of Moles, and this name locates it more 1 ac* curately. But it took place just in front of Thermopylae, the narrow pass between the cliffs and waters of Lamia Gulf, where ancient Greeks held out to the last man under a sky darkened by the shafts of the Persians. It was an artillery show above all else. Afterwards we figured that we must have had at least 100 guns in action, ranging in size from our anti-tank two-pounders to British 60 pounders. Probably 30,000 rounds of ammunition were flung from their hot muzzles between eight in the morning and eight at night. Artillerymen have an expression, "gunfire" which means "ramming 'em home and letting 'em go" just as fast as the gun can do it. I doubt whether it has ever meant as much as it did on that afternoon at Molos. The guns were firing for the last time—they were to be destroyed after the action—and so there was literally ammunition to burn. Enjoying It All! "Gunfire till you're told to stop!" Can you picture the scene? Gun crews toiling under their screens of netting and branches, strijjped to the waist, heads singing, eyes reddened, throats dry—but enjoying it all! . . . The crack! crack! crack! and the searing blast of shell after shell . . . The hot sunshine gleaming on the ever-widening litter of empty yellow shell cases. . . Troop officers joining in the never-ending job of passing fresh ammunition ... A colonel bellowing across the vallej' through his cupped hands when his telephone wire goes dead . . . The frustrated, angry planes roaring overhead in droves, and the guns growing quiet for a moment, only to crash into action again as soon as the pilots' backs are turned And up there Avhere the road takes a triple' bend, three more 25-pound-ers get their reward for a day' of patient waiting. Three black beetles —German medium tanks — come scurrying down the dusty road . . . Let 'cm come, let 'em come! Rumbling into the first gun's sights . . Now! The bag here is an even dozen before the day is out—some set on fire, others blown ofT the road. One N T azi crew climbs out and comes at our gunners with Tommy guns blazing. A Bren in the sergeant-major's hands, lays them low. 1 lie smoky dusk closes over Thermopylae. shielding the spiking of the road to Athens. When the sun rose again it was Anzac Day. There was a red poppy in a buttonhole here and there. Some of our men were alrcndj' on the-water bound for Crete. Others (Con! in noxt column)

were driving south across the Corinth Canal to embarkation beaches in the Pelepponesus. I stayed to see the last rearguard action north of Athens. Into the Navy's Hands But it would take as, long as this again to tell the rest. How we lay doggo in another pass, waiting for the Germans (mightily cautious now) to catch up with us again; how we named it "Twenty-four-hour Pass" when parachute troops landed behind us and made us stay another day; how we sped through a silent, darkened Athens a few hours before the Nazi occupation: and the story of the last daylight hours on the coast, when our last guys scattered a German column for the last time, and of the quiet hours of darkness, when we handed ourselves into the navy's good keeping. Like sprinkled blood on a green billiard table, the poppies, arc blooming again in the fields of Greece. The noble people we came to love will have laid wild flowers on the year-old graves of the sons we cherish . Let us remember them.