![]() ![]() The camp guards were more sadistic and trigger-happy than the frontline troops who had captured him, a trait that Jack witnessed first-hand. Jack said he had made several attempts to escape, but that each time he was thwarted. "Life there was an unbelievable hell," he wrote. The POWs were attacked by what he described as "all species of body vermin '' which covered their bodies and the rags that passed for bedding. In a letter to his sister Beatrice, Jack described camp life as being a "hellish … nasty nightmare" where poor sanitation, meagre rations and backbreaking work became the norm. It wasn't long before prisoners succumbed to diseases including dysentery, malaria and beriberi - conditions more typically experienced in Japanese POW camps later in World War II. It was here that "degradation reached its apogee", wrote Flinders University historian Peter Monteath, author of several books about POWs. Housed in a disused army barracks, the makeshift camp was already overcrowded when he arrived. A hellish, nasty nightmareĪs enemy forces streamed south, Jack was marched north to Dulag 183, a notorious prisoner of war (POW) transit camp in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, or Salonika as it was then known. "I felt in a daze," Jack recalled, "and I am sure my mates did too." Nine days later, the Germans swept into Athens and following that, the rest of the Greek mainland was overrun.ĪNU historian Craig Stockings, who co-authored a book about the Greek campaign, described the defeat at the Battle of Pinios Gorge as "one of the most operationally significant" engagements fought by the Anzacs in Greece.Īlthough the Germans were victorious, they were delayed just long enough to allow thousands more retreating Allied troops to avoid capture. "Before I realised what had happened, Jerry was searching us for arms." "Then all of a sudden hell broke loose … The Jerries were in a perfect ambush … Machine guns, mortars and Very lights turned night into day for a few brief moments," Jack wrote in his account of that evening. "The valley was filled with the roar of rushing shells, the thunder of exploding mortar bombs, and the crackle of musketry echoing and re-echoing," the New Zealand historian JF Cody wrote, describing the scene captured in this illustration by fellow countryman and war artist Don McNab.Ī photo published in the German propaganda magazine Signal purporting to show an Allied soldier captured near Mount Olympus. And from the north-west, elements of the 6th Mountain Division trekked over nearby Mount Olympus to outflank them. To the north, a German Panzer division with infantry support approached the Anzac defenders. His mortar platoon was among those ordered to help slow the German advance, which threatened to cut off the main Allied retreat. Private Greaves was there as part of what the diggers called the PBI - the Poor Bloody Infantry. And on Apinvaders once again advanced towards it, opposed this time, not by Greeks, but by Australians and New Zealanders. This geography had long made this gorge a strategic choke point used to defend the Greek heartland from invasion. It was said to have been created when the god Poseidon thrust down his trident, cleaving the rocks through which the Pinios River spills on the final leg of its sinuous path towards the Aegean Sea. Pinios Gorge, also known more poetically as the Vale of Tempe, lies near Greece's eastern coast. After a few days camped near Athens, Jack’s unit was dispatched north to Veria Pass, high in the mountains of northern Greece.īy early April, the German invasion was underway and the entire Allied expeditionary force was soon in full retreat. ![]()
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