Weller's War

by George Weller

  All Hellenic eating records collapsed from the time when the first German Feldwebel [sergeant-major] planted his feet under a table at Zonars and pounded for attention. The record of sixteen chocolate cakes consumed at a single sitting—at a time when ragged Greek officers, having marched for three weeks from Albania eating grass, were begging for food at back doors—was seized by the infantry from the Luftwaffe gourmands, who specialized in rich, American-style sundaes.

  In any occupied town it is a common occurrence to see a German blitz straight down a menu consuming double orders throughout and tripling anything really toothsome. Such decathlon eating records would be merely a pleasantly human counterweight to Nazi asceticism if the factory girls in Athens were not fainting repeatedly at work for lack of sufficient nourishment.

  Every restaurant from Alexandropolis to Calamata has its own incredible German eating records. Flocas, a famous meeting place in Salonika—the city whose only flour mill was burned down the night before the Nazis entered—is still talking about five Germans who demanded five orders of bacon and eggs with three eggs each. At the time only smuggled eggs were obtainable, at 12 cents each, about five times the normal price. When the Germans finished the first order they commanded another. After that they commanded a third, still with three eggs on each plate. Before invariable successions of rounds of sundaes they insisted on having two large orders of ham apiece.

  This was at a time when the marketplaces were bare to the boards and the writer was unable, regardless of cost, to get anything but string beans, cherries and bread. It has been common in Athens for civilians to be denied eggs with the proprietor's answer, “Must save all my eggs for the Germans or I will be arrested.”

  For several weeks it was impossible for restaurateurs even under threat of imprisonment to supply all the food the Germans wished. In order to be sure the Reichswehr's strength did not fade, the Stadtkommandantur farmed out wholesale orders to the Greek middlemen. The writer has studied several such orders. They say nothing about price. Price is never an object to the Reichswehr, because they print their own money wherever they go and their bayonets do the legalizing.

  The large supply of tinned beef and other food left behind by the retreating British for the American Red Cross was taken away by the clique of Germanophile Greek generals who preceded the Tsolakoglou government. When the American relief man tried to recover the food for distribution in refugee quarters in Piraeus and Athens, where rickets and malnutrition are rampant, he was turned down with the bluntest discourtesy. Later two truckloads of the same food were distributed by the Germans in the same suburbs while Nazi cameramen ground busily.

  At the present rate of approximately five ounces daily per person—one-sixth the normal diet of the Greek laborer—wheat stocks mixed with corn meal will hold until the new crop late in July. But the ration cannot be extended and the workman must simply tighten his belt over the hollow place caused by lack of essential food.

  When German officers, suspicious that they are not to get everything on hand, insist on visiting kitchens and ice chests, Greek cooks receive them with scant courtesy. But simply by ignoring politics and fighting with the Greeks strictly about food, many members of the Reichswehr have picked up a surprising command of the Greek language. Three sitting in a tavern below the Acropolis the other night ordered in German, as the cap to an enormous meal, “Three coffees, bitter.”

  “Three poisons,” yelled the waiter in Greek, with a malevolent look.

  One Nazi raised his head: “Make that two poisons and one coffee,” he said in perfect Greek. “I happen to be Austrian.”

  GESTAPO FAILS—BRITONS STILL HIDING IN GREECE

  Athens, Greece—July 27, 1941

  Although the purpose of the Greek campaign announced by Adolf Hitler was to drive the British from Greece, the British are still here. The Gestapo, ordered to round up the surviving members of the expeditionary force, has been at the job for twelve weeks and is about ready to give up. For when the Greeks hide anything, it stays hidden, and since mid-April they have been hiding Australians, New Zealanders and English technicians who failed to catch the last boats.

  The Germans do not know exactly how many British the Greeks, at the risk of their lives, are hiding, but they have become sufficiently bothered by the phenomenon to start a separate Greek department of the Gestapo to catch them. These manhunters are chiefly Greeks who have lived in the United States or British colonies and speak English freely. It is short-term work, but pays well—twenty-five hundred drachmas (about $20, in normal times) for 10 days' work, plus expenses.

  The job of the Greek sleuth is to go into the vast ranges of mountains, where the Aussies and Kiwis have fled, and represent himself as an agent of a secret rescue committee, preparing a motorboat for the escape of soldiers. Such committees exist, and because many Greeks aided British to escape in this way before Crete fell, the excuse is plausible. The Greek gets instructions from the Germans not to enter into direct contact with the Britons, but merely to obtain the names of people hiding them, and the place. The Germans do the rest.

  It is a good plan, but with Italians in Greece it has outlived its usefulness. The Gestapo no longer has sufficient staff men to carry out the captures, and as for going up in the frowning Greek mountains alone, the Italians suffer from squeamish memories of the inhospitable Albanian highland. The Italian is more courageous than either the Germans or Greeks give him credit for, but he doesn't want to have the Germans send him up in them thar hills again.

  These German attempts began after the fall of Corinth when, as a propaganda move intended to carry a pointed slur, the Germans offered 150 drachmas “head money” for every Aussie or Kiwi captured, and 100 for every Englishman. There were no takers. After the parachute attack on Corinth a store clerk hid twenty-three Australians in a public bomb shelter while paratroops searched all the city's homes. Afterward he led them by night through the German lines to the chief embarkation port at Nauplia, where they got away safely.

  Other Britons were lost in Athens and could not find their outfits in time to pick up with any coastal evacuation parties. Some bought grey Greek suits and cheap shoes and set out for the hills. Many were hidden in private houses.

  The Greek police, whose officers were discharged by the Germans for non-cooperation when the German battle flag was purloined from the Acropolis, gave the fugitive Britishers every help. In one instance, a Greek living on Lycabettos, the conelike hill in the center of Athens, learned that a uniformed Englishman was hiding in the ravine behind his house. To be sure that his record was clear with both the Germans and the police, he sent a small boy to guide the police to the hideaway. A patrolman went to the spot, dismissed the boy with thanks, changed clothes with the Englishman, gave him money, and sent him away.

  While Britons who have been able to pass the closely guarded roads and get up into the mountains are secure once they get in the hands of shepherds, those taken into family homes and apartments in Athens suffer not only from confinement but fear of exposing their hosts to risk. Arguments, mostly in sign language, occur almost daily, the Briton maintaining he must give himself up, the Greek family that he must remain where he is. When children in the family would be confused by a stranger speaking an alien tongue and might make an accidental betrayal, the fugitive is lodged in an adjacent vacant building. Incredibly enough, many Britons go out regularly at night, attend cinemas and mingle with crowds. Cockneys of short stature with dark hair are particularly free in their movements. A considerable number have dyed their hair; German efforts to trace them have been unavailing.

  This freedom sometimes leads to excessive confidence and mishap. In a resort near Athens a saloonkeeper hid seven Australians in an outbuilding. Taking compassion on their confinement, he kept them primed with generous quantities of retsina, the strong Greek wine. One evening he joined in, and becoming somewhat awash, suggested a procession with himself as leader. A victory march through the village to the tune of Tipperary ens
ued. The celebration ended when the parade marched straight through an astonished German motorcycle column, which was almost too dumfounded to do its duty, but not quite.

  PORTABLE PLANT PRINTS CASH AS NAZIS ROLL ON

  Italians Imitating Nazis—Go on Spending Spree in Greece with ‘Phony Money’

  Athens, Greece—July 29, 1941

  The mystery of how Germany is able to pay for her wars is no mystery at all for citizens of occupied countries. The German people have paid for the actual tools of killing and its training, but as soon as the Reichswehr crosses a new frontier by force, the invaded people begin meeting the Nazi bills.

  The mechanics are simple. They consist of two hooded German army trucks, backed up together so the combined printing plant operates in a line. The supply of money, that is, army purchasing power, is limited only by the supply of paper and ink. The Germans fix the rate of the new currency—Reichskreditkassenscheine, national treasury notes of credit—at any exchange rate that seems convenient. Because the supply is unlimited, the rate does not matter. In Greece the exchange happens to be 50 drachmas per occupational mark, as the notes are usually called.

  Besides his salary, every soldier on leave in Athens was given 100 such marks, or about 5000 drachmas, the equivalent of a month's salary for a Greek civil employee of the middle class. (A parachutist earns 250 marks monthly.) Large illustrated posters appeared in all banks and shop windows by German order, showing the marks and their Greek equivalents.

  The soldiers quickly spend their allotment—worth $40 if the currency were not being simultaneously inflated—for clothing, soap, pajamas, silk stockings for German womenfolk, the many things in which Germany is deficient. Multiplied by an army numbering at least 350,000 men, the purchases swept Greek shops clean of the few things left over from the war. Tailor shops, particularly, were left bare. The purchases would have been serious in peacetime, but in war, with Greece totally cut off from importing either finished or raw materials, they were disastrous.

  Some Greeks attempted to close their stores to conserve their stocks, but were ordered by the Reichswehr to remain open. The Greeks observed that there was no signature of a responsible official on the Reichskreditkassenscheine, but the alternative of nonacceptance was imprisonment. Nazi officials paid all purchases in big bills; one was seen on Stadium Street, crossing from shop to shop, breaking one 5000-mark note after another.

  This form of refined looting—whose effect was to leave the Germans in possession of all vendable articles and the Greeks with fistfuls of paper—has since been kept under control so that it has never broken dangerously out into the open. All that the uneducated Greeks understand is that the Germans have the money and they do not. Prices have climbed steadily except where forcibly pegged by the government, and in such cases merchants are literally giving away their articles. Food prices, except for bread and milk, have tripled.

  The practice of offering military money on a bayonet in beaten countries after hostilities are over goes back at least as far as the leather-punched thongs distributed by Kubla Khan's army in Asia, and continues up through the armies of Louis XIV to the rubles printed by the German forces in Russia during the last war.

  The suffering among salary-and cash-dependent Greeks has been great. Topping the German Army's inflation is the 5000-mark note, worth 250,000 drachmas—the price of an automobile. Now a new Italian inflation has come along, just as after the conquest of Albania. Although the Greek cupboard is bare, the Italians have demonstrated their hopes by printing money as high as 100,000-drachma notes. Issued by the Cassa Mediterraneano di Credito per la Grecia, a hitherto unheard-of organization, and in drachmas, not lire, it proves that Italy assumes the state privilege of printing Greek currency. From this it is reasoned that the Duce may be planning to draw Greece permanently within the empire.

  Greece's newest funny money is pale green, with a head of Mercury on one side and a head of wheat on the other. Printed both in Greek and Italian, it gains little popularity from two Greek inscriptions which both contain mistakes.

  The issuing bank itself translates its own name wrongly as the “Mesogeion Tameion” instead of the Mesageiakon Tameion. The only other Greek sentence—“The present note must be accepted for its nominal value”—is translated into Greek in thirteen words which contain four grammatical errors and a misspelling.

  GREEKS PAY FINES—FOR FUTURE TOO!

  Athens, Greece—July 31, 1941

  In taking possession of the Ionian islands when occupying Greece, the Italians pasted up on all the principal buildings of Cephalonia—birthplace of the late dictator Metaxas—large posters of Mussolini in belligerent attitude, his jaw outthrust. This proved to be too much for the Cephalonians. When morning came all the posters had been torn down.

  The Italians fined the entire population ten drachmas (about eight cents at the official rate of exchange) per head. The Cephalonians came obediently before the courts and paid, but some of them when summoned placed twenty drachmas upon the magistrate's desk.

  “What's this for?” asked the judge. “The fine is only ten drachmas, not twenty.”

  “That's for tomorrow,” was the reply.

  1*George II (1890-1947), who “ruled” Greece from 1922 to 1923, and again from 1935 to 1947. In between came thirteen coups and twenty-three changes of government. He spent those years in Britain, as he spent World War II after the events in this chapter.

  2*General Georgios Tsolakoglou, who surrendered Greece to the Germans on April 20 and was their collaborationist prime minister until December 1942. After Greece was liberated (see Chapter XVII), he was sentenced to death, but died in prison in 1948.

  3*Cook left an irregular trail. Weller ran into her again in April 1945 in Tehran, Iran, where—having escaped Greece via Turkey and Afghanistan, and converted to Islam—she was the director of the Persian state theaters and censor of all performing arts, including movies. She also ran a ballet studio in her villa for the daughters of good families. Her eighteen-year-old son became a lieutenant in the Greek army.

  III

  Canopies over Crete

  Fruitlessly awaiting permission from the Gestapo to leave Athens, Weller woke early one May morning to droning German planes embarking on the first paratroop invasion in history. Beyond what Weller uniquely saw, these dispatches (merged into one) contain valuable eyewitness material, the result of interviews with veterans of Crete's defense nearly a year later, who told him their story.

  It was necessary for the Nazis to take the island of Crete to complete and solidify their hold on Greece. (Though the mainland was occupied by Bulgaria and Italy as well, the most important areas were occupied by Germany.) About twenty-five thousand British troops joined the fourteen-thousand-man British garrison already defending Crete. Greek forces numbered about nine thousand. The Greek government of George II, which had retreated to Crete, retreated onward to Egypt. In the last days of May, only sixteen thousand British troops were evacuated by ship; all Crete had surrendered by June 1.

  Whatever dispatches about the island that Weller wrote from Athens in May or June never reached Berlin via his underground mail railroad; no copies survive. Those given here were sent from Portugal just before he left for Africa.

  Despite heavy German losses, the military potential of paratroopers stayed with Weller. Chapter XII contains his evocative writing about how it feels to parachute, and his archive contains notes for a never-completed book on the history of ballooning. Indeed, his penultimate book, for younger readers in the popular Landmark Books series, was The Story of the Paratroops (1958).

  CANOPIES OVER CRETE

  Somewhere in Australia—May 20, 1942

  Today is the first anniversary of the airborne invasion of Crete. Exactly a year ago, German parachutists came floating down upon Malemi Airdrome and opened a wedge for the capture of the strategic island. In a tactical sense this invasion ended one chapter of military history and opened another—one that is still incomplete.


  Crete was taken, held and mastered entirely by air-conveyed troops. Seaborne reinforcements were sunk but airborne forces continued to arrive. Crete was purely an aerial triumph, although not so planned. The first steamer bearing Germans arrived only after the Nazis, by mastering the air and land, had mastered the sea.

  This correspondent has obtained previously unpublished details of the epochal attack by talking with Australians who defended Crete. Up to now the German winged invasion has been described coherently only from the Axis point of view, because no Allied correspondents were upon Cretan soil at the time and because survivors' narratives were curbed by military exigencies.

  Three reporters—Wes Gallagher of the Associated Press, Leigh White of the New York Post and this correspondent—remained in Greece on invasion day and were overtaken by the German wave. Through circumstance—White and Gallagher being elsewhere in Athens at the time—this correspondent was the only actual witness of the Luftwaffe's launching of the air armada.

  I watched the paratroop invasion from Mount Lycabettos, a cone-shaped hill 700 feet above the Athenian plain and overlooking the Acropolis, the Saronic Gulf and Peloponnesus peninsula. Across the eastern side of this seaward-sloping rectangle I was destined to see the beginning of the world's first airborne invasion.

  For weeks the Germans had been assembling gliders at Tanagra, a small airdrome north of Athens. It was Germany's big chance for a rehearsal of the air invasion of England and Der Fuehrer was not inclined to let the opportunity pass untested. Yet the secret was well kept.

  Small Greek steamers and schooners at Piraeus were held to be the answer to how Crete would be invaded. Nobody had any intimation the Luftwaffe would attempt more than isolated chutist attacks upon exposed points. The Germans, through plasterings of Crete's airdromes, had reduced the British bombing threat to a point where, upon German-held airdromes around Athens, blinking beacons revolved all night. Thus the German glider bases were rid of the bombing threat in the rear.