The well-equipped and highly motivated fanatics of the SS
descended on Vevi with great speed. In countering them, Vasey’s problems at
Vevi were prodigious: the Allied position lacked both depth and fixed defences,
the weather was poor, and many of his units were tired from the route marches
needed to get to the front. A regular soldier, George Alan Vasey had served as
an artillery officer and brigade major in the first AIF. Between the wars, he
graduated from the Indian army’s staff college at Quetta, and then served on
exchange for two years with the Indians. Leadership at Vevi would be Vasey’s
first brigade command, after he spent the Libyan campaign on the staff of 6th
Division. He came to the 19 Brigade in curious circumstances. Brigadier Horace
Robertson, who led the unit through the desert fighting, concluded well in
advance that the Greek campaign would be a disaster. He took the opportunity to
repair to hospital for treatment on his varicose veins to avoid being
associated with it, hoping for more propitious command opportunities in the
future. His strategic acumen was commendable, but his career planning less
successful: it would be 1945 before Robertson got another combat command.
In these slightly unseemly circumstances, Vasey stepped into
Robertson’s place. Described as ‘highly strung, thrustful, hard working’, Vasey
would need all of these personal qualities, and more. Upon arriving in the
area, Vasey found his force bolstered by only two Greek units — the 21 Regiment
and the Dodecanese Regiment, the latter manned by troops from the Aegean
islands. These formations were typical of the Greek army: individually brave,
but poorly equipped, often with antique rifles that pre-dated even the First
World War, and supplied not by railway or truck, but by mule trains.
At Vevi, the Monastir Valley narrows into a pass that
traverses the higher country to the south. It was, in effect, the side door to
the whole of Greece for the invading Germans. The village of Vevi itself was
like many other hamlets in the Greek high country: a cluster of stone houses
and dirt roads, snow-bound in winter. In ancient times, forests clad the
mountains, home to abundant game and even big cats now long-extinct on the
European mainland, but thousands of years of human habitation had stripped the
ranges of timber, leaving the uplands completely denuded. Vevi stood at the
head of the pass, through which passed a railway line and road, running in
parallel to the south.
To guard the barren ranges around the pass, Vasey was forced
to string his units out over a line that he estimated to be 13 to 15 kilometres
in length. The map distance was one thing, but the mountainous country
compounded the defence problem because it was so liable to infiltration. Vasey
did at least have some engineering capacity to work with. A detachment of the
2/1st Field Company arrived on-site at 7.00 a.m. on 9 April, and immediately
began work. Three roads entered Vevi, from the north-west, north-east, and the
south: each was cratered by explosive charges. Sergeant Johnson later reported
on how these roadblocks were prepared:
[W]e set to work with
bar and hammer. After jumping two holes approximately 4 feet deep, a stick of
gelignite with fuse and det was placed in each hole to bull chamber sufficient
for each charge. After getting holes ready for charge, we placed approximately
50 lbs of gelignite in each of two charges and blew the crater by 10.00 hours.
This showed a crater of approximately 8 feet deep and approximately 16 feet
wide. After directing a stream of water that was coming from the village into the crater, we built a
stone wall as a tank stop approximately 5 feet high and 30 feet long.
The railway was also blown, once on the outskirts of Vevi
and again at the head of the pass, where a small bridge was demolished. The 2/1
Field Company completed its work by laying fields of anti-tank mines: the
largest of them south-west of Vevi, another at the head of the pass behind the
railway–road demolition, and a third within the pass. Smaller minefields were
also laid on the eastern flank, along roads leading into Petrais and
Panteleimon.
While the engineers had heavy equipment to help them, the
infantry struggled on the high ground to prepare weapon pits in the rock-hard
mountain slopes. On the extreme left was the Greek 21 Regiment and, next to
them on a four-mile front, the 2/4th Battalion. In the centre, Vasey placed the
1/Rangers, just south of Vevi village and astride the road in the bottom of the
valley, buttressed by the 2/1st Anti-Tank Regiment. On the crucial high ground
to the east of the British (Point 997) was the 2/8th Battalion; on their right,
the Dodecanese held a long line right up to the shores of Lake Vegorritis. At
the southern end of the pass, Vasey deployed his artillery, coordinated by
observation posts on the forward hills. Vasey kept his considerable artillery
force under a centralised command, and had the good fortune to have with him
for this role the commander of the 6th Division’s artillery, Brigadier Edmund
Herring. Behind this thin line was the British 1st Armoured Brigade at Sotir,
less its infantry and artillery. Even this small tank force was then split in
two: the cruiser tanks of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment were with Charrington at
Sotir, but the light tanks of the 4th Hussars were a further 50 kilometres
south, at Proastin. Vasey positioned his own force headquarters to the west of
the Vevi road, under trees near the village of Xynon Neron.
The first unit to go into position was the 1/Rangers; the
2/4th Battalion, the 2/1st Anti-Tank, and the New Zealand machine-gunners
followed on the morning of 9 April. The 2/4th moved up onto the high ground to
the west during the day, only for its men to spend the night digging three
separate positions as they were moved about the hills. Conditions were cold and
miserable: Lieutenant Claude Raymond of the battalion’s signals unit resorted
to singing Christmas carols to keep up the spirits of his men.
To his Australian and British infantry, Vasey added the
firepower of the Kiwi machine-gunners from 1 and 2 companies, the 27 MG
Battalion. This unit had been broken up to distribute the available Vickers
guns, and while one half went to Vevi, the other, made up of 3 and 4 companies,
buttressed the 5 NZ Brigade at Olympus Pass. The 27 MG Battalion was a model of
imperial defence, not just for the flawed organisational doctrine it
represented, but for the way the constituent parts of the empire came together
within it: Kiwi crews manning British-designed guns, manufactured at the
Australian Small Arms Factory at Lithgow, New South Wales.
Operating to a shared doctrine, these machine-gun battalions
could in theory go where they were most needed — while the Australian 2/1st MG
Battalion reinforced New Zealand infantry at Servia Pass, the Kiwi
machine-gunners did the same for Vasey’s men at Vevi. These units could also be
broken down into their constituent companies to reinforce a position where a
full battalion could not be employed — thus, while two companies of the 27 MG
Battalion went to Vevi, its 3 and 4 companies stiffened the New Zealand brigade
holding the passes at Mount Olympus. Less satisfactory was the assumption that
units could be broken up and distributed as required, and retain their cohesion
under the stresses of battle when these sub-units fought alongside strangers.
At Vevi, the Kiwi machine-gunners were deployed mostly
through the line on the left held by the 2/4th Battalion, and further west by
the Greek 21 Regiment. In the centre, only two sections were in position to
help the Rangers — Lieutenant W. F. Liley, a 26-year-old platoon commander from
New Plymouth, thought the English infantry were ‘extremely thin on the ground’,
estimating that ‘some sections were 50 yards apart’.
The Germans first tested this fragile defence line on the
night of 9 April. The 1/Rangers reported that a platoon on patrol had been
missing since 8.30 p.m. on 9 April, and a sentry in forward position was killed
later in the night. Sappers of the 2/1 Field Company, waiting to blow another
demolition to be timed with the approach of the Germans, bore witness to this
first contact with the SS. Sergeant Johnson again reported:
At exactly five minutes past twelve (10 April), we were
awakened by the sound of shooting and sentries whistles. On investigating, we
were met with the sight of one of the sentries killed. He had gone forward to
investigate and challenge a party of seven dressed in Greek uniforms. They all
seemed to get around him, and he was trying to explain to them that no-one was
allowed to go past him. Suddenly, two of the patrol fired. They turned out to
be Germans and fifteen .303 and eight .38 bullets were fired at point blank
range. We searched the locality but could find no sign of the party. At approx.
01.30 hrs, we heard a motor start and a car go off in the direction of the
German lines.
The inexperience of the 1/Rangers evident in these first
exchanges with the ruthless SS did not augur well, but the front was still
fluid, allowing a New Zealand armoured-car patrol to go forward into Yugoslavia
on 10 April. The day was cold and wet when Lieutenant D. A. Cole led three
Marmon Herrington cars north toward Bitolj with orders to destroy a stone
bridge, a mission that resulted in the first award for valour in the 2nd NZEF.
Finding their bridge south of Bitolj, Cole covered the demolition work, and
sent further forward the car commanded by Corporal King as a point guard.
The New Zealanders had hardly begun laying their charges
when they were interrupted by the arrival of a column of the Leibstandarte. To
hold up the Germans for as long as possible, King boldly advanced and
challenged their fire, for which he received the Military Medal, only to be
killed a week later in an air attack. Even with the bravery of King and his
crew, Cole could not complete the demolition as the German fire intensified:
‘the enemy were using explosive bullets and the outsides of the cars were
rapidly getting stripped of such things as bedding and tools’. Conditions
inside the Marmon Herringtons were also decidedly uncomfortable, as German
rounds pinged against the armour plates, dislodging the asbestos insulation and
covering the crews in a fine dust. In danger of being overwhelmed, Cole got his
cars together and sped away before the bridge could be blown; by way of
compensation, he burnt two wooden bridges as the New Zealanders made good their
escape to the south. They were not yet home, however: coming to a Yugoslav
village, Cole found a German detachment already in occupation. Gunning the big
cars, the New Zealanders sped through the village, firing as they went, and
returned safely to Allied lines.
The size of the German column heading south had already come
to the attention of the RAF, and during 10 April the infantry on the high
ground around Vevi at least had the satisfaction of watching friendly bombers
attack the approaching German columns. During these raids, a British Hurricane
fighter was shot down by the Germans. As an integrated all-arms formation, the
Leibstandarte was well equipped with automatic 37-millimetre anti-aircraft
cannon, deadly to low-flying aircraft. The British pilot, Flight Lieutenant
‘Timber’ Woods, crash-landed his fighter in no-man’s-land, and was brought back
into friendly lines by a patrol from the 2/4th Battalion led by Lieutenant K.
L. Kesteven (Woods was killed in action over Athens later in the month, in the
last great air battle to defend the Greek capital).
The Germans coming up to Vevi were also harassed by Allied
artillery fire: Captain G. Laybourne Smith of the 2/3rd Field Regiment was
pleased with his battery’s work in laying fire onto Germans debussing on the
plain, directing the shoot from his observation post in the hills. The
artillery fire was not the only obstacle facing the SS. Leading the German
column approaching Vevi was Untersturmfuhrer Franz Witt, younger brother of the
commander of I Battalion: his car hit a mine laid by the 2/1st Field Company.
Despite efforts to aid him, Franz died of his wounds; on the eve of the battle,
a visibly distressed Fritz viewed his younger brother’s body laid out in a
Greek house.
Throughout 10 April, the 2/8th Battalion struggled to get
forward. Having been trucked as far as Xynon Neron (hampered by refugee traffic,
the last 96 kilometres took six hours to traverse), the 2/8th had a
25-to-30-kilometre route march over broken country to take up its position. It
only reached its objective, Point 997, in the evening gloom at 6.00 p.m. The
unit’s medical officer was horrified by the condition of the troops, a fifth of
them new recruits, insufficiently hardened for the campaign. As the men climbed
up Point 997, some even began to suffer from altitude sickness. Snow and mist
compounded the misery of the Australians. When they finally began digging in,
they found the ground to be mostly rock; with their light entrenching tools,
they were unable to excavate weapon pits of any depth. To afford some
protection to their firing positions, they threw up sangars (another term taken
from the Libyan campaign, describing a firing position formed by building a
stone wall on top of the ground) as best they could. Finally, the 2/8th
discovered that the Bren-gun carriers, which should have given them all-terrain
capability, were useless in the conditions. Standing only 1.5 metres tall, and
with a modest 65-horsepower motor, the gun carriers had insufficient ground
clearance for the sodden earth in the bottom of the valley, or the power to
climb the hills above. They were soon bogged in mud once they left the main
Kleidi–Vevi road. This meant that the men were unable to bring forward hot
food, which further dented morale.
The hasty assembly of the defending force showed in myriad
ways, one of the more comical being the arrest by Greek police of Lieutenant
Colonel J. W. Mitchell, a Melbourne company director and now CO of 2/8th
Battalion — the suspicious local constabulary thought the Australian colonel
was a spy.
The defenders endured yet another snowfall during the night
of 10 April, equipped only with greatcoats and blankets, sustained by hardtack
and bully beef. In the cold and snow, the two sides fought further patrol
actions, and the result for the Allies was not propitious. A German force of
about 20 men infiltrated the centre-right of Mackay Force and, confusing their
opponents by calling out in good English, captured 11 New Zealanders, six
Rangers, and six men of the 2/8th Battalion. Fire-fights then broke out in
front of the foremost element of the 2/8th Battalion, the 14 Platoon,
entrenched on the forward slope of Point 997. In this confused action, two
wounded SS men were taken prisoner, and from their insignia the Australians
first learnt that the Leibstandarte was in the line against them. The more
lightly wounded German was removed to Corps Headquarters near Elasson, where he
was interrogated by Private Geoffery St Vincent Ballard, a German-speaking
signaller with the 4 Special Wireless Section. Sitting on the tailgate of a
truck, Ballard struck up a conversation with ‘Kurt’, established he was from
Berlin, and gathered from him some ‘low-level information’ about the
composition and role of the Leibstandarte.
The eleventh of April opened with a blizzard, and the Allied
troops were united in their misery. The New Zealand machine-gunners had spent
the night in sodden gunpits, their boots waterlogged. In the morning, they even
found several guns frozen and unable to fire. Conditions on the higher ground
occupied by the Australian infantry were more difficult again: the 2/8th Battalion,
at least, finally found a use for their cumbersome and despised anti-gas capes,
which helped to keep the men dry. Regardless of this modest protection, men
began to drop out with frostbite.
At six o’clock that morning, Dietrich issued his divisional
orders, forming a kampfgruppe (battle group) around his I Battalion by adding
to it artillery reinforcements and StuG III assault guns, and by instructing
the grieving Fritz Witt to push on to Kozani through the Kleidi Pass. In an
attempt to fulfil those orders, 7 Company of I Battalion pushed through Vevi
village and launched an assault on Point 997 from 7.30 p.m.: the attempt was
abandoned due to inadequate artillery support and the gathering darkness. The
2/4th Battalion on the left also reported defeating a heavy attack at this
time, and a number of Allied units reported that, in the course of the
fighting, two German ‘tanks’, undoubtedly the assault guns, had been disabled
on minefields. It would seem from German records that what the Anzacs in fact observed
was merely the withdrawal of these vehicles, as Kampfgruppe Witt abandoned its
efforts for the day. Vasey duly reported to Mackay at 9.50 p.m. that he had the
‘situation well in hand’.
Nevertheless, the Germans were obviously gathering their strength
for a decisive assault on the Allied position. The hard-driving Vasey, clearly
appreciating the difficulties facing his men, demanded that they not shirk the
issue. He issued an order of the day on the evening of 11 April that said much
about his own blunt character: ‘You may be tired,’ he acknowledged, ‘you may be
uncomfortable. But you are doing a job important to the rest of our forces.
Therefore you will continue to do that job unless otherwise ordered.’
Mitchell, in command of 2/8th Battalion, followed up Vasey’s
exhortation and ordered that no member of the unit leave his post from 9.00
p.m. An hour later, the Germans attempted their infiltration trick again,
complete with cultured English voices, but on this occasion were met by an
alert 14 Platoon that responded with heavy fire. In their unit diaries, the
Germans noted the nervousness in the Allied line — any noise during the night
was met by a barrage of artillery fire; indeed, the 2/3rd Field Regiment later
acknowledged that it spent much of the night firing into a hillside on a false
alarm that German tanks had penetrated the pass. Such incidents might seem
comical in retrospect, but they also eroded Allied strength: earlier on the 11
April, a squadron of precious cruiser tanks from the 1st Armoured Brigade was
despatched from the reserve at Sotire to investigate a report that German tanks
were sweeping around the extreme right, along Lake Vegorritis. They found
nothing in the barren snow-clad hills, and managed only to disable six of their
cruiser tanks when their tracks broke on the rough ground.
By 12 April, the Mackay Force units had nearly accomplished
their task, and indeed had orders to begin withdrawing from 5.30 p.m. that
evening. Unfortunately, that planned withdrawal was upstaged by the
long-heralded German attack. At 6.00 a.m., Dietrich gave his men their final
orders: Witt was to punch through the Allied centre and advance on Sotir; a
second assault force drawn from the 9th Panzer Division, recently arrived on
the scene (Kampfgruppe Appel), would flank the Allied left through Flambouron;
and on the Allied right, another impromptu formation from the Leibstandarte,
Kampfgruppe Weidenhaupt, would attack Kelli. Meyer’s reconnaissance battalion
was ready to exploit any breakthrough, and the Leibstandarte’s assault-gun
battery was moved in behind Witt to force the issue.
The decisive action between the Allies and the SS was now at
hand. In the bottom of the valley, helping to guard the two-pound guns with the
2/1st Anti-Tank Regiment, was Kevin Price, manning a Bren gun. The first thing
that warned Price of the impeding battle was the noise — mechanised warfare
brought with it the hum and roar of thousands of petrol engines: ‘We could hear
the sound, this tremendous roar as they came down the road, with their tanks
and weapons, their motor bikes were out in front, they were testing where we
were dug in.’ Shortly after eight in the morning, up on the high ground to the
right, Bob Slocombe and the rest of the 14 Platoon, 2/8th Battalion, were
getting their first hot meal for days. This welcome breakfast, however, was
interrupted by German shelling, and the SS infantry followed in hard behind.
In this foremost Australian position, the 14 Platoon was
quickly in trouble. Slocombe remembers his platoon commander, 20-year-old
Lieutenant Tommy Oldfield, trying to rally his troops, drawing his service
revolver, and moving gamely into the open. A more experienced soldier, Slocombe
yelled, ‘For Christ’s sake, Tommy, come back.’ But it was too late, and
Oldfield was cut down in this, his first action. As the official historian
recorded, Oldfield had enlisted at eighteen, been commissioned as an officer at
nineteen, and was now dead at twenty. Even with these heroics, the 14 Platoon
was in grave jeopardy, and a number of sections were overrun. Slocombe himself
fought his way out to the safety of a reverse slope, where with 17 or 18 others
he helped to hold up the Germans until mid-afternoon.
Slocombe’s temper would probably not have been helped had he
known that, at 11.50 a.m., headquarters of the 6th Division recorded the action
being fought on Point 997 as a ‘slight penetration’ of the defences. The staff
of higher command had their minds elsewhere at the time, being deep in
conference with Colonel Pappas, a staff officer with the Central Macedonian
army, on how the withdrawal of the Dodecanese on the right might be achieved.
Without trucks, the Greeks faced the prospect of leaving behind 1200 wounded.
The Australians did not always excel at the diplomacy needed to manage
relations with their allies: on this occasion, they were clearly frustrated by
the scale of the problem presented to them by Pappas; at 1.00 p.m., Mackay
finally issued orders to make 30 three-ton lorries available to the Dodecanese.
The wounded soldiers whom the trucks could not carry would apparently have to
march out, or face capture.
Although headquarters might have been sanguine, the loss of
the forward slope of Point 997 had much more profound and unfortunate
consequences for the 19 Brigade. In the valley, the 1/Rangers were effectively
fighting alongside strangers, having been removed from their familiar role as
the infantry element in a tank brigade. The English soldiers, seeing the 14
Platoon in trouble, thought their right had been turned, and began pulling
back. In reality, the fighting that morning on Point 997 was only a patrol
action, in conformity with Dietrich’s orders that vigorous patrols be sent out
prior to the main attack scheduled for 2.00 p.m. However, to exploit any
success by these patrols, Dietrich ordered that ‘wherever the enemy shows signs
of withdrawing, he is to be followed up at once,’ and the dislodging of the 14
Platoon encouraged the Germans to continue to press the Australians.
Thus, even though the main assault was still being prepared,
the German success on Point 997 prompted further local attacks to exploit the
opening. Mitchell soon found both B and C companies, on his left, in trouble:
he launched a counterattack mid-morning, borrowing a platoon from A Company, on
the right, for the purpose, and supported it with covering fire from D Company,
in the centre. This had some success, regaining part of the high ground, and
the position of the 2/8th was stabilised, at least for the moment.
Down in the valley, however, the withdrawal of the 1/Rangers
went on unabated. An officer of the 27 NZ MG Battalion, Captain Grant, the OC 1
Company, attempted to persuade the English infantry to hold their position,
without success. Manning his Bren gun, Kevin Price remembers the British
infantry streaming past the Australian anti-tank gunners. The withdrawal of the
Rangers left these guns, along with the outposts of the New Zealand
machine-gunners, without infantry support, and therefore in danger of being
overrun. The only option for the gunners was to pull out. Unfortunately, five
of the precious two-pounders could not be extricated from the mud in time, and
had to be abandoned. By midday, the shaky line of the 2/8th Battalion on the
heights on the right formed a large salient, as the Allied centre gave way down
the pass; and, on the extreme right, the Dodecanese crumpled in the face of the
advance by Kampfgruppe Weidenhaupt.
