“CRETE NEWS”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 October 1941, Page 7

“CRETE NEWS”

STORY OF NEW ZEALANDERS’ PUBLICATION DURING FIRST GREAT INVASION BY AIR. “BIG NEWS IN OUR OWN BACKYARD.” (Official War Correspondent N.Z.E.F.) CAIRO, September 16. When the sky over Crete grew quiet again, the old Venetian town of Canea, huddled round its toy port on the northern coast, was left a desolation of shattered and smoking ruins. Many institutions of ancient origin were blasted out of existence by the ruthlessness of the German Luftwaffe, and also at least one with no roots at all in the past—the British forces’ news; paper “Crete News.” Here Private Barry Michael, whose parents reside in Masterton, tells how the news .was printed in the midst of the first great airborne invasion in the history of the world.

Our Canea printery was as similar to the modern, metropolitan idea of a printing plant as a gondola is to a trans-Atlantic liner. It was more like printing must have been in the days when Caxton first started the art in England. Everything was manual or “womanual”; men and girls set all the type by hand, and men operated the press by foot treadle. Our managing editor, Second-Lieut. Geoffrey Cox, a former Rhodes scholar and war correspondent, had to deal with a Greek who had by his own account been a’ big man on a big newspaper in Athens. He had brought English type with the idea of starting an English newspaper in Crete. Actually the type was not quite English, containing practically no W’s; but this was the least of a crowd of difficulties, and was easily overcome by using M’s upside down, and Greek characters.

The owner, Georges Zamaryas, had an unfortunate habit of promising any old thing, whether or not he had any intention of trying to carry it out. The result was that not only was the first page of the first issue—this appeared before the blitz—not set at the promised time, but it was not even started. Zamaryas came to light with the most shattering of his many excuses: The four of his men who could set English type had been enticed away by a jealous rival! Besides myself, Mr Cox had as his assistants another New Zealand journalist, Arch Membery, a Grqek-speak-ing English gchoolteacher named Graham, and Al Taylor, a printer in an Auckland battalion. He dashed out to another Auckland battalion and managed to bring back two more printers, Jan Bryce and Alan Brunton, and later a third, Jock Gould. Finally we got the first issue out, and delivered copies to nearby units before going home for the night. We had to abandon the original idea of printing “Crete News” as a daily, because three papers a week were the most our facilities would run to. The editorial side, however, was much more straightforward. We depended first and foremost on the 8.8. C. wireless bulletins, which we also tended to supplement with local stories, and for our first issue we also drew on an N.Z.E.F. airmail news sheet which had just arrived from the base in Egypt.

FIRST NUMBER. The hurdle of getting the first number out was the most difficult, and after that things were easier but still rackety. We got back one of Zamaryas’ four “deserters”; he was a slick workman, though he often rose to such a high pitch of hysterical and gestureful argument as to interfere not only with his own work but also with that of the others. The head man of the printery, whose name was Nick, could speak no English, but he turned out to be very competent, intelligent and unshakeable. The three girl compositors were able to put in some time on our work and they never asked anything for their extra efforts except to be driven home in the “automobile” — our truck. There was a lot of _ other staff: it never seemed to be quite the same group of people two days running, and it was always impossible to say' definitely who was working and who was just about the place. “Crete News” was forgotten in the excitement of the first day of the paratroop attack. Mr Cox was want-' ed for intelligence duties and the rest of us took part in the general standto in the Force Headquarters area. Next day, however, we got on with the paper. Although the fact that the electricity supply was in suspension prevented us from getting wireless news'the editor explained in a“‘Crete News’ Carries On” paragraph that it did not matter, for the big news of the world was happening in our own' backyard. In our third number we used little else than news of the battle, with the Navy’s interception of the seaborne invasion fleet as our star item. So we were not unsatisfied when we put the paper to bed on the afternoon of the third day of the battle. FINAL APPEARANCE. The day of our fourth and final issue was also the first of several Which the Germans spent in subjecting the town to a process called “Coventrating.” All week, of course, there had been bombing and machine-gunning in and around Canea, but not of a sustained or organised nature. Early on that last morning, when Brunton tried to get a shave in a reopened 'barber’s shop, he was thwarted by a plane which dropped a stick of bombs and machinegunned up and down the street. He came back to tell us the joke, but nobody thought much of it. When he had an even more stimulating experience on his second visit, however, we were more impressed.

Soon it was evident that we were to get the whole works. All that day until it was nearly dark, there was not half an hour in which sticks of bombs were not dropped near us or planes were not flying low over us, spraying the streets and houses with their machine guns. Bombs fell within two doors of us. Our premises, which had some degree of protection, were filled with dust, and water splashed in once from the harbour nearly 100 yards away.

During the early part of the morning we made fairly good progress, still helped by some of the Greek staff, including one of the girls, who impressed us with her placidness. During the middle of the day, which was also the middle of the blitz, not much work was done on the type-setting, because we were either keeping our heads down or occupying ourselves with various domestic matters. For instance we had to go and drag “Momma,” a woman of great age and weight, out of the house where Nick and Zamaryas lived, since it was

in a block that had been bombed and set on fire. The whole of that stieet, in fact, was burning before nightfall. The last I saw of Nick himself, he was standing on the pavement contemplating his fire and taking no notice of my attempts to get him to help us with the printing. A New Zealand soldier came in during the afternoon with the news that he had seen two parachutists among the houses. We went out with him and warned an English party, whose officer set off gleefully with his Tommy gun and his Tommy riflemen. Although the New Zealander could not find the parachutists, he turned out to be quite a remarkable fellow and found all kinds of other things. He would stand looking bored .while the bombing was close, and in between times would wander away and come back with bread, cigarettes (rarer than diamonds at the time), biscuits, sweets, cognac and cherry brandy. MENACED BY FIRE.

By evening we had practically completed the setting of one page, and had started making it up—or rather throwing it together. Most of the civilians were moving out of the town, and the swallows were flying dazedly over the port. The fire was coming up our street all the time our chaps were working, and after a while we were more or less cut off from the other premises, but we still had a way out through an arch at the blind end of the alley. Completely unchecked, the flames had licked up both sides of the street to within two or three houses by the time we started the actual printing towards midnight. The last remaining inhabitants moved out soon after that hour, the very last being another “Momma" like Zamaryas’, only even less portable, who was left sitting in a chair on the pavement. Some Greek soldiers whom I called tried carrying her, but she made such a fuss that they gave up the idea and went off, at which she made even more fuss. I suppose they came back with a stretcher, or something, because she was gone when we passed’ the place on our way home. Being tired, and with our only light, a candle, fast burning out, we contented ourselves with the printing of six or seven hundred copies. We reached headquarters in the early hours of the morning, carrying the entire edition with us, only to find that everyone had moved out to Suda Bay. Before dawn we were in a camp alongside the waterfront there.