GREEK WITHDRAWAL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 April 1941, Page 5

GREEK WITHDRAWAL

MADE FROM SALONIKA MOST VALUABLE MATERIALS REMOVED. HOSPITALS EVACUATED IN GOOD TIME. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, April 10. The Athens correspondent of the Associated Press of Great Britain, who left Salonika aboard the last ship, said the Greeks dynamited everything of military value. Warehouse after warehouse was set on fire and the hangars and petrol stores at the airport went up in flames. The Greek forces in Eastern Macedonia were comparatively small, and the Greeks had long been prepared to give up Salonika if they were hard pressed. For this reason after the beginning of the Balkans war of nerves ships quietly slipped into Salonika at night time and took off the most valuable food and other materials. The Athens correspondent of the British United Press, confirming that the Greeks contemplated only a token defence of Thrace and eastern Macedonia, says that the military and civil evacuation began early in March. Kavalla was evacuated in the first week, and the banks and public services evacuated at Demirhissar on March 10. Thousands of civilians left Thrace as a result of the daily reconnaissances by Germans planes, and 30,000 persons had left Salonika by March 10. The evacuation of the hospitals in Thrace and eastern Macedonia and the chief military hospitals in Salonika was completed in the middle of March. Tankers called regularly at Salonika and took off huge quantities of petrol.