The military principle for use in the coming parachutists' war in the Far and Middle East is that, if the invader's reconnaissance planes are driven off or his vertical photographs made meaningless by camouflage, he cannot estimate the defenders' forces. But the defending force must be able to deploy itself with scouting patrols in the broad periphery around an airdrome because the chutists, while they prefer to land upon an open surface, can land in open countryside. In the Rethymnon engagement the tide was eventually turned by 500 parachutists who landed the first day 3½ miles west of the airdrome.
Crete's lessons are therefore applicable in the event of a German attack upon England. Perhaps American troops would go by air from Ireland to the attacked area. Only when thousands of soldiers and eventually an entire army is ready to buckle on parachute and leap into action from plane doorways as readily as from the aprons of motor trucks can the foot soldier's full mobility be considered achieved.
Anything that can be carried can be dropped. Only lack of that priceless quality, imagination in warfare, limits its future application. Mercury was the first winged god who flew over the Aegean; parachutists dropping upon Crete opened the future.
HEROINE BORN IN HOLOCAUST OF CRETE WAR
Athens, Greece—August 1, 1941 (Delayed)
Hospital No. 7 has given Greece its greatest heroine of the war, an Englishwoman of Greek lineage who went through, on the island of Crete, ten days of the fanciest kind of hell the blitzkrieg can provide. She is Joan Stavridi, daughter of the London banker, Sir John Stavridi. She is a tall, attractive woman in her early thirties who looks like a champion tennis player. Taken prisoner at first by the Germans, who were astonished that a woman could go through what she has experienced alive and unruffled, she was immediately released and is now living here, unmolested.
Although the Axis-controlled cabinet of General George Tsolakoglou dare not recognize her heroism, the Germans tended by her admit that her spirit is the kind that has left Greece, though defeated and starving, still uncrushed and defiant.
Hospital No. 7 was located, for the inscrutable reasons that governed many things in the British campaign in Greece, in the perilous no man's land between the island's two chief strategical objects. Grouped around a two-story central building with a 40-foot red cross painted on its roof were forty tents, fifteen of which were wards for wounded and the rest shelters for personnel. The tents were unmarked by red crosses. So thoroughly and repeatedly was Hospital No. 7 bombed after the blitz began that Joan decided it had to be moved. She was not only the only nurse, and chief superintendent of the hospital; she was the only nurse left in western Crete, the New Zealand nurses having been evacuated two days before “it” began.
Attired in a brown-trousered battle costume and wearing above it only her white nurse's insignia, she ordered the transfer. The only place to go was a chain of caves under the shelflike Aegean seashore. Hospital No. 7 had lost all its own regular doctors a few seconds after the blitz struck. They had been having a swim off the beach, and were machine-gunned to death in the water by a passing plane. They were replaced, but there was never anyone to replace or relieve Joan Stavridi.
When the first 800 German parachutists came down upon Malemi they were wiped out by Australian sharpshooters. “I've just spent an hour of the best duck-shooting I ever had,” said one Australian. This was before the bombing of Hospital No. 7 began. Wounded Germans were placed in tents beside the wounded Imperials.
Many chutists had broken thighs from being dropped too close to the ground. None seemed more than twenty. They had nervous, glassy eyes; their glances were wild and unseeing. They could not talk clearly. They remained in that condition for two hours, then had simultaneous seizures like patients emerging from a drug. The Australians claimed to have found chocolates with a peculiar taste in their equipment.
Then came the heavy bombing of Hospital No. 7. “They may have thought we were an army camp with a hospital in the middle,” said Joan, “but they had photographed us so many times I don't see how they could have failed to know that we were undefended and had wounded.” When the bombing broke loose, she was in the second story of the hospital building. “I could look out the window and see the planes strafing after they had bombed, and they seemed lower than the second story.”
For 2½ hours of the intensest raid she lay in a slit trench beside an Irish Catholic priest, her tin helmet over her eyes. It was impossible to move the patients until night, when they began carrying them, bombed Britons and bombed Germans, down to their cave hospitals.
The next day the Stukas and Dorniers started work on the warships in Suda Bay. It required almost two days of dive-bombing to reduce the cruiser York to helplessness, but on the first day fifty sailors were wounded by a single hit. Hospital No. 7 now had bluejackets as well as Australians, New Zealanders and Germans.
Then the Germans came hard at Malemi again, having lost the intervening sea battle when about fifty small Greek schooners were sunk. The Luftwaffe pilots pancaked down the big, slow Junkers-52s wherever they found an opening. This time, having bombed the anti-aircraft thoroughly beforehand, they got a force on the ground who moved fast along the shore and captured Hospital No. 7. They sent back to Malemi all the British and Germans able to walk. That lasted a couple of hours.
Then the Australians attacked along the road and won back Hospital No. 7. The Germans fell back toward Malemi. Joan Stavridi had more wounded, of both sides, for the few cots left by those the Germans had forced to walk.
“By this time we had pretty well broken all the rules of war for both sides,” says Joan. “I don't think either the British or the German manuals approve of a nurse trying to operate a hospital permanently in advance of the front line. Do they?”
Once the Maoris made a surprise attack on Malemi with fixed bayonets, and when it was over there were dark-skinned islanders as well as Nazis on the beds.
Hospital No. 7, for the last nine days of the siege, consisted of five caves on a fire-swept shingle of beach. It was a ten-minute walk of death from the westernmost cave to the easternmost, always under either German or British fire. The hospital was badly in need of food and there was no way to get it. Then a bright New Zealander took a captured Nazi flag and spread it on the ground for the Luftwaffe to see. Food began to parachute down in abundance.
After the Nazis took Malemi things got really difficult for Hospital No. 7. Supplies had been destroyed in the first bombing. Although by some miracle there were no deaths, there was only a single vial of morphine for hundreds of cases of screaming pain. When the parachutists began calling for anesthesia, Joan Stavridi held up her two hands and said: “This is all I have left now to quiet your pain.”
The British, though dive-bombed by clouds of Stukas, refused to take the fleet out of Suda Bay as long as Malemi could be bombarded and there was a battleship gun to do it. All day and most of the night a continuous yowling archway of shells passed over the hospital, 14-inchers that landed among the encamped parachutists. Once again they started for Canea and took back Hospital No. 7.
But that did not end activities in the no man's land around the hospital. The Australians had, meantime, occupied a height behind Joan Stavridi's hospital, a place called Galata. From there they commanded the road, both ways, to Malemi and Canea, and were able to enfilade the German advance.
Nobody in the cave dared raise his head above the shelf of rocks. But Joan Stavridi had to find a way to get operations done, because wounded were still being brought in by scurrying stretcher bearers. She spread the last sheets on a slab of rock outside the cave mouth and kept on saving and sometimes losing the lives of patients. When bombs began to fall again on the beach and in the sea, Joan decided the cave hospital had to be better marked than the tent hospital had been. A daring messenger stole up by night to the abandoned hospital building, sawed the red copper screenings out of the windows and brought them back to the cave. That night the international patients sat up together by the light of hurricane l
amps, forgetting their pain and helping Joan sew red crosses onto the sheeting.
The wounded continually asked for more water, but the nearest spring was ten minutes away. Joan asked the Germans whether they would allow her to send for water. “Yes, if you can find two orderlies willing to go.” Two Britons volunteered, and shortly one came panting back. “John's hit,” he said.
He was, and in a few seconds died with a bullet from Galata through his spine.
The agony ended only when the Germans took Canea, and the Aussies holding Galata had to fall back into the hills. When the German staff found that there was a woman at Hospital No. 7, who had been caring for all who fell for the past ten days, they could not believe it. “A woman here?” they said. They put her on a plane taking wounded back to Athens, and there she is today.
There are many Greek women who served the British and Greeks well without having opportunity for such heroism—fifty-two nurses were killed in the three weeks of fighting and all five of Greece's hospital ships were sunk—but the place of Joan Stavridi is the highest among those whose courage is known.
NAZIS WIPE OUT MEN IN VILLAGE
TO AVENGE ATTACK ON CHUTISTS
Athens, Greece—August 2, 1941
The harvest is good this year in Christomathos, one of the Cretan villages that fell under the German parachute attack, but it will rot in the fields. There are not enough hands to pick it.
When the parachutists came down with their tommy guns blazing, the Cretans went out to meet them. Because the Metaxas government (of the late dictator) had disarmed them for their anti-royalist sympathies, they had few rifles, but they had knives and sickles. Before they were overcome, they gave as good an account of themselves as the Middle Ages could in fighting against the blitzkrieg.
The parachutists passed on, leaving five dead. On the fourth day after the island was in German hands, a detachment of soldiers headed by an officer, with a captured Greek Army doctor, a surgeon, as interpreter, came up from Canea to Christomathos. The Germans called the village population to assemble in the little square. Almost all were women and children.
“Where are your men?” asked the German officer.
“There are not many left.”
“I need twenty-five men. I want men that are strong and healthy, none younger than 18 and none older than 42.”
Only sixteen men could be found within these age limits. They sidled curiously into the square, and were counted.
“Not enough,” said the German officer. “I must have the full count of twenty-five. I will extend the age limit from 16 to 55.”
Twenty-three were found. By including one boy of 15 and one old man the quota was eventually rounded up in about an hour. In their farmers' working jackets and sag-seated Cretan trousers, the peasants were guided into the square. The German soldiers drew up on each side, facing inward upon them in two lines of a broad V formation. At a sudden signal from the officer, the machine guns began to speak. The entire manhood of the village was wiped out.
The Greek doctor almost fainted. “What is the reason for this?” he asked.
“We are following orders,” said the German officer. “I am ashamed that I must do a thing like this, but I must, because it is the personal order of the Fuehrer.”
“What are his orders?”
“Where snipers instead of regular soldiers kill our men, we are ordered to execute an equal number of civilians in that place. But where our men's bodies bear traces of mutilation—not bullet wounds but knife thrusts or slashes—the Fuehrer has ordered that we must exact five lives for the life of every German soldier.”
The Greek doctor, turning pale, turned to go away.
“Wait, doctor,” said the officer. “We have orders to visit several other villages, and you must go with us.”
“You can kill me if you like,” said the doctor, “but I cannot take any more part in this.”
The Germans allowed him to go. But other peasants, who came to help bury the bodies of the villagers of Christomathos after the Germans had left, tapped the doctor on the shoulder.
“We have some cases up in the mountains that need care,” they said guilelessly. “Come with us.”
But the doctor read their intentions in their eyes: they took him for a traitor. He fled the island and is now hiding in Athens.
IV
The de Gaulle Debacle in Brazzaville
Following Weller's liberation from the Nazis in Bern, his editor, Carroll Binder, sent him a telegram in Portugal on July 20 instructing that his next destination was to be Africa—once he finished sending in his series on Greece. “If getaway quick, you'll monopolize this promising colorful assignment.”
From Estoril he went by ship to the Congo seaport of Banana, by car to Boma and Matadi, and by boat up the Congo River to Léopoldville (now Kinshasa).
Besides Weller's memorable portraits of Léopoldville and Brazzaville—and a ride in an experimental airplane—his encounter with General Charles de Gaulle had significant repercussions for both men (as biographers, and A. J. Liebling in The Road Back to Paris [1944], have pointed out). I have used not the original dispatches but a more reflective piece that Weller wrote later in the war. Beyond the loss of a reportorial naïveté which he perhaps exaggerates, the encounter shows Weller was already focused on the strategic importance of bases. This thinking bore fruit in his 1944 book, Bases Overseas (Chapter XIV), whose thesis of worldwide strategy annoyed nearly everyone.
A phrase that occurs often in this collection bears explaining. From March 1941, through the program known as “lend-lease,” the United States supplied Britain, the Soviet Union, China, Free France, and other allies with $50 billion worth of arms, aircraft, motorized transport, and matériel—over $700 billion in today's money. Three-fifths of this aid went to Britain, largely in return for the use of bases; it was a way for America to take sides six months before it declared war.
WILD CONGO JUNGLE, NOT WAR,
TAKES LIFE OF A BELGIAN PLANTER
Boma, lower Belgian Congo—August 20, 1941
Trop parler peut tuer (“Too much talk can kill”), says a wall poster with a black Bangala warrior—like those now trickling back from the Ethiopian victory—lying crumpled upon it.
The poster is nailed upon the veranda wall of the administration building in this town of 250 whites and countless thousands of blacks, the second stopping place on the two-night upriver trip to Matadi, seaport of the Congo.
Below the poster, scattered upon the veranda floor in pathetic array, lie the disordered household effects of a white man who died, not from talk but from double pneumonia—an incidental victim of the Congo's economic effort to put its shoulder to Great Britain's wheel.
The only one among the civilian casualties in this civilians' war, which reaches into the jungles of the Congo watershed as well as into metropolitan air-raid shelters, Georges Paquay was swept to his death a few hours after this correspondent's launch, fighting up the tricky channels through crocodile and boa constrictor country, reached Boma's quay.
At midday he was considered only slightly ill, but before the jungle moon arose he was dead. Now, in the morning sun, his friends, as the quickest way of settling his affairs, were auctioning off his possessions among themselves. A handful of colonial officials, river pilots, banana company executives in white puttees and sun helmets, accompanied by wives of several of their number, made bids casually from positions along the veranda rail.
Below, against the background of the tawny river, Cabinda blacks with store trousers and tattooed cheekbones occasionally made bids.
“What am I offered for this handsome set of living room chairs?” asked a roly-poly little colonial administrator who traditionally officiates at these auctions. “Examine that beautiful upholstery,” he cried, snapping his suspenders with a professional air.
The upholstery consisted of American flour bags turned inside out to show less of the lettering. They were stuffed with straw. Chipped enamel plates, batte
red knives and forks, a Flemish-French dictionary and an insecticide gun all bore the unkempt look of a womanless household.
“They're not worth much,” said a woman nearby. “His wife and two children in Brussels may discover only after several months that he's gone, and even then we won't have much money to send them.”
The small pistol, which once made the jungle nights seem less dangerous, went for less than $5 to a newly arrived member of a British propaganda mission.
How had this planter died?
“Well,” was the explanation, “we ordinarily buy in the United States our trucks for hauling to port the palm oil which is essential for British fats. But shipping is slow and uncertain, and now most American trucks are going to the Middle East. We're forced to take our chances and make old equipment last.
“Two nights ago a native boy drove Paquay's remaining American truck into the river mud. A murderous chill comes from the Congo now at the end of the tropical winter. Paquay worked all night in hip-deep mud, sweating and chilling himself alternately, because he knew he was unable to get another truck from the United States. By morning he had double pneumonia.”
“What bids do I hear for this beautiful American-made home lighting plant?” cried the auctioneer.
He threw a switch and the motor began to hum. The auctioneer pointed to the manufacturer's plate.
“Made in Weesconsin, Ooo Esss Aah [U.S.A.],” he said.
The Cabindas and Senegalese crowded closer. The sun made the whitewashed walls of the Portuguese fort in Angola, across the river, gleam whiter. Beyond tin-roofed sheds and river dredges the sleek, brown Congo moved patiently and disdainfully toward the sea.
FREE BELGIANS AND FREE FRENCH BURY RIVALRY
Weller's War Page 10
