The Battle of Vevi, 10–13 April 1941
The Allied line had therefore already lost cohesion when
Witt launched his full assault from 2.00 p.m. This was supported in earnest by
the StuG III assault guns. Slocombe was astounded by their presence, as his
unit had been unable to get their feeble Bren-gun carriers onto the same
ground. Another 2/8th veteran, Jim Mooney, found the German armour
‘untouchable’ with the Boys rifle, the standard British anti-tank weapon for
infantry units. When the German armoured fighting vehicles (AFVs) came onto an
Australian position, there was little that could be done other than move back,
covered by the fire of a supporting section.
The collapse of the infantry line exposed the remaining
units in the valley who were preparing for the withdrawal. A detachment of the
2/1st Field Company was getting ready the last of the demolitions to break the
railway line deep in the pass, south of Kleidi, and Sergeant Scanlon, the
leader of this party, found his work interrupted mid-afternoon by the arrival
of the SS: ‘We commenced work at about 1500 hours, and had to do a hasty but
thorough job as the enemy was advancing both along the road and the railway
line with his armoured fighting vehicles.’ Scanlon’s attention to detail was
greatly assisted by the nature of the explosives he had to work with, which
included two naval depth charges, each with about 250 pounds of TNT packed
within. These were used to blow the road: the railway line was disposed of with
guncotton charges fixed to the rails. Scanlon readied his getaway car, which
was a ‘utility truck with a Bren gun mounted’. He ordered his men to light
their charges on the approach of the Germans and then, he describes:
[T]hey had just
sighted enemy movement and lit their fuses, when a German patrol, who had
worked their way onto a hill commanding this place, opened fire on them with
M.G.s. This was at approx 18.30 hrs and was about half an hour after completing
the preparation of the demolition. Luckily they got through, the two men on the
railway line having to run about 200 yards under fire to gain the vehicle.
With the Vevi position unravelling, Vasey, regrettably, was
out of touch with events. As Scanlan got about his work at 3.00 p.m. in the
shadow of the panzers, Vasey reported confidently to the 6th Division that he
‘had no doubt that if the position did not deteriorate he would have no
difficulty in extricating the Brigade according to plan’.
An officer of the 19 Brigade thought the atmosphere at
brigade headquarters that afternoon was ‘almost too cool and calm’, and the
implied criticism was warranted. Vasey had wanted to find a headquarters
position further forward, but had not found anywhere suitable: as a result, the
battle was determind while the Australian commander could only react to events.
At 5.00 p.m., Vasey at last informed 6th Division
headquarters that the situation was serious. In response, at 7.45 p.m. the 6th
Division sent forward a driver with a message authorising Vasey to bring
forward the withdrawal at his discretion; but, in the chaos, the driver could
not find him. By then, the position was a good deal worse than serious — the
2/8th was in desperate trouble, having its left flank exposed by the collapse
of the 1/Rangers, and outflanked on the right by the withdrawal of the Dodecanese.
The strong Allied artillery force at the southern end of the pass was under
small-arms and mortar fire by the time of Vasey’s message, forcing the 2/3rd
Field Regiment to pull back its 5th Battery, while its 6th Battery covered the
movement with fire over open sights — a sure sign that the defence was in
trouble, because it meant that the defending gun line was under direct attack.
Even Vasey’s own brigade headquarters was under mortar attack. Vasey had little
choice but to warn the 2/4th battalion commander, I. N. Dougherty, to get ready
to withdraw. ‘The roof is leaking,’ he told Dougherty; as a consequence, the
2/4th had ‘better come over so we can cook up a plot’. Vasey at least took the
sensible precaution of ordering his transport to remain where it was: had it
come up as arranged, it may well have been mauled by the German armour, and the
means to extricate the Allied force may have been lost. He also sent back to
the 6th Division a liaison officer to give Mackay an eyewitness report: he arrived
at 8.30 p.m., and Mackay thereby learned of the ‘increasing pressure’ on the 19
Brigade and of the discomfiture of the 2/8th Battalion.
Meanwhile, at the 2/8th Battalion headquarters, Mitchell
attempted to regain contact with brigade headquarters, the phone line having
gone dead. Two signallers sent to repair it were not seen again, so at 4.45
p.m. he despatched his signals officer, Lieutenant L. Sheedy, to the rear to
report on the battalion’s plight. Sheedy found what he described as a tank
(again, almost certainly a StuG III) already astride the road outside Kleidi,
basking in the flames of a wireless truck it had destroyed. The presence of
this vehicle cut the most direct and easiest line of withdrawal along the road.
Sheedy also observed parties of Germans armed with sub-machine-guns chasing the
fleeing 1/Rangers over the neighbouring hills.
By skirting trouble, and gaining shelter behind one of the
few light tanks of the 4th Hussars behind the battlefront, Sheedy gained the
forward position of the 2/3rd Field Regiment. Even as he gave his report, the
artillery headquarters came under German machine-gun fire, and there was
nothing in any event that could be done for the 2/8th, as the observation posts
needed by the artillery for accurate fire had been swept away in the collapse.
Liley, with the Kiwi machine-gunners, had already concluded that, as far as he
could see, ‘there was no infantry reserve and no tanks or anything else to
restore the position’, so he led his platoon to the rear. For extricating his
men and their guns under fire, Liley received the Military Cross.
A conference of company commanders of the isolated 2/8th was
called at 5.00 p.m., but Mitchell unwisely did not go forward to attend it,
instead sending his adjutant, Captain N. F. Ransom: Mitchell apparently thought
he was needed in the rear to restore communications with brigade headquarters.
As soon as this command conference got under way, it was shelled by a tank on
the ridge where C Company should have been, and subjected to machine-gun fire
from the left. Under these anxious circumstances, the Australian commanders
decided to withdraw in succession from the left. By now, three StuG III assault
guns, together with an estimated 500 enemy infantry, were firmly ensconced on the
position of C Company. One man from the 18 Platoon who stood up from his weapon
pit at this time was blown apart by a direct hit from a 75-millimetre shell. B
Company was assailed on three sides, and the battalion headquarters,
medical-aid post, and ammunition dump were all under machine-gun fire. On the
right, A Company was being flanked as the Dodecanese fell back under pressure
from Kampfgruppe Weidenhaupt.
In these desperate circumstances, a staged withdrawal was
impossible and the retreat of the 2/8th Battalion became a rout. Denied the use
of the road by German armour, the Australian infantry faced a march of 19
kilometres across waterlogged ridges to the reserve position, chased all the
way by bloodthirsty packs of SS infantry. Men of their own volition began
discarding their heavier weapons, particularly the useless Boys anti-tank
rifle, but also the much more efficient Bren gun. D Company, the last to leave
the forward position, was naturally under the most strain: the company’s
second-in-command, Lieutenant S. C. Diffey, resorted to ordering his men to
abandon their personal weapons to speed their escape. Such an order was nearly
unthinkable in a disciplined military force and, when he learned of it, Vasey
was unimpressed. He annotated the 19 Brigade war diary with the observation
that after the action, the 2/8th could only raise 50 armed men, and wrote that
Mitchell was ‘completely exhausted’.
Bob Slocombe of the beleaguered 14 Platoon eventually came
across some British tanks, and was carried out on the back of one; many of his
companions in the 2/8th were not so lucky, and only 250 answered the battalion
rollcall that night in the village of Rodona. Mitchell, the battalion
commander, got as far back as Perdika, and was interviewed there by the 6th
Division CO Iven Mackay who, with possible understatement, thought Mitchell ‘a
bit upset’. When Mackay learnt later that men of the 2/8th came back without
their personal weapons, he was incensed: ‘It is my intention to hold an enquiry
into this position to ascertain how and why so many members of this Bn
[Battalion] came to be separated from their weapons.’ This inquiry never got
underway because of the pressure of events later in the campaign.
On the other side of the valley, things were not greatly
better for the 2/4th Battalion. At 5.00 p.m., Dougherty got the orders from
Vasey to get out as best he could. This cheerful order followed several hours
fighting on the battalion’s front, which had left Dougherty’s B Company nearly
surrounded. The position here was similar to the problem faced by the 2/8th:
with a flank in the air, this time on the right, the battalion could not hold
its ground. Freed up by Vasey, Dougherty ordered that his right hold until dark
to allow the rest of the battalion to fall back. Earlier in the day, Dougherty
had wisely placed his carrier section in the rear of the battalion, where it
could do the most good in assisting in a withdrawal.
An order like this, to stand fast in the face of
overwhelming odds so that others may withdraw, is a desperate one, and it fell
to Dougherty’s B Company to comply with it. Their hard and selfless work done,
the men of B Company were eventually released to attempt their own escape. The
story of Private ‘Dasher’ Deacon exemplifies the courage required. Holding on
until virtually surrounded, Deacon lived up to his nickname, performing what he
called a ‘Stawell Gift’ (a famous Australian foot race) up the forward slope,
under artillery fire as he went. On the reverse slope, the Germans — with ‘Teutonic
efficiency’, he caustically wrote — barred the way with mortar fire: a bomb
fell between Deacon and two mates, killing the latter and blowing off Deacon’s
boot. Staggering back, dazed and barefoot in the bitter cold, Deacon stumbled
in the dark upon some of the battalion’s well-placed Bren-gun carriers, one of
them occupied by Dougherty himself. Hauled aboard with his commander, Deacon
recalled after the war that Dougherty’s help at this stressful moment had left
a lighter legacy: ‘Why even today, when I see an unemployed Lieutenant Colonel
walking, I always give him a lift!’ Unfortunately, Dougherty could not be
everywhere at once, and only 49 of B Company’s 130 men answered rollcall that
night.
As the dazed and disheartened Australian infantry stumbled
to the south, the Leibstandarte celebrated taking the pass, but it was a
victory that came at a cost. Witt’s Kampfgruppe saw 37 men killed and 95
wounded, and the Germans thought enough of the battle to award their highest
decoration for valour, the Knight’s Cross, to Obersturmfuhrer Gert Pleiss, who
led the final assault on the 2/8th.
Whatever the German casualty list, Mackay Force was
devastated. Included in its losses were a further ten two-pound guns and 80 men
of the 2/1st Anti-Tank Regiment, captured when the commanding officer of the
column ignored Dougherty’s advice and attempted to retreat down the line of the
railway, where the Germans were waiting. The senior staff officer of the 6th
Division, Colonel R. B. Sutherland, went forward to assess the situation and
reported at 10.00 p.m. on 12 April that the retiring motor transport of the 19
Brigade was in a state of disarray: he sought to re-establish order at Kozani
by diverting the trucks west onto the ground allotted to the brigade in the withdrawal
plans. The Greeks, however, were unimpressed by the work of the Mackay Force,
Papagos complaining that its withdrawal, without (in his view) serious
fighting, exposed the flank of the Greek 20 Division in the west.
Further forward, Vasey rallied his troops on a stop line
along the ridge just south of Sotire, where the remaining company of the
Rangers and two companies of the 2/4th received the support of the 1st Armoured
Brigade. At dawn on 13 April, the SS were dug in 1000 yards from the Australian
positions, and a fire-fight broke out immediately. Vasey, performing one of the
battlefield reconnaissances that would make him a deeply popular commander, was
caught in no-man’s-land. Dressed in a white raincoat, the Australian brigadier
must have made a tempting target: Vasey scrambled out on hands and knees.
Also caught in no-man’s-land were over 100 Australian,
British, Greek, and New Zealand prisoners who had been taken by the Germans
during the night. Some were killed, and more than 30 others wounded in this
exchange, before a further German attack went in against the Rangers on the
left of the Allied line at 7.30 a.m. What was left of the English battalion was
rescued by the intervention of the cruiser tanks of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment
(RTR), which held the ground while the infantry got away.
The RAF attempted to disrupt the German pursuit, but was
unable to repeat its success on the roads approaching Vevi three days before.
As RAF bomber crews found, to their cost, with airfields now further forward,
the Germans were in a better position to maintain air superiority over the
battlefield. Thus, as it ran in to attack a German column near Florina, an
entire formation of six Bristol Blenheim bombers was shot down by Bf 109
fighters of 6 Staffeln, Jagdgeschwader 27. The Germans also maintained constant
bombing and strafing raids on the British aerodromes, especially the northern
most airfield at Larisa, and these operations succeeded by mid-April in
reducing RAF strength to just 26 Blenheims, 18 Hurricanes, 12 Gladiator
biplanes, and five Lysander army cooperation aircraft.
With British air support failing, the 19 Brigade and the 1st
Armoured Brigade fell back to a second stop line south of Ptolemais, but the
Germans caught up with them again by 2.30 p.m. By then, the German pursuit was
the responsibility of the 9th Panzer Division, the Leibstandarte having been
ordered by Stumme to the west to cut off the retreat of Greek forces falling
back from the Albanian front. Faced by the British armour south of Ptolemais,
the division’s 33 Panzer Regiment pressed home its attack immediately, moving
through swampland on the left of the British, hoping to catch the tanks of
Charrington’s 1st Armoured Brigade in the rear. Again, the cross-country
performance of the German armour was excellent, and even though seven of the
panzers became bogged, the rest of the regiment emerged to fight a sharp tank
battle with the 3rd Royal Tanks and the 4th Hussars around the village of
Mavropiye.
The action was short but bitter. British anti-tank gunners
claimed to have destroyed eight panzers, and the 3rd RTR thought they had
accounted for five more. But as the battle reached a climax, Charrington found
himself without a reserve with which to counter-attack, having made a cardinal
sin before the battle. Lacking armoured cars with which to conduct
reconnaissance patrols prior to the battle, Charrington split up his tanks,
sending the 7 cruiser tanks of his headquarters troop to the New Zealand
Division, in exchange for some of the Kiwi’s Marmon Harrington armoured cars.
This division of the available tank fleet was a bad mistake, since the first
principle of armoured warfare is concentration, and Charrington’s decision to
split up his tanks again underlined British shortcomings in the way they
handled what armour they had in Greece.
Charrington and his men now paid the price for this error,
unable to meet the out-flanking advance of the German panzers. With the enemy
just a few hundred yards from brigade headquarters, the unit’s war diarist
later recorded with some understatement, ‘the lack of the protective troop
[that is, the tanks exchanged with the New Zealanders for armoured cars]
was
very sorely felt …’ One of Charrington’s senior officers, Major R. W. Hobson,
found a British cruiser tank withdraw into a position close by:
Up to now I had been unable to see anything, so I went down
to the tank — whose commander I knew — and asked where the enemy were. ‘Just
over there, about 300 yards away,’ he said; ‘and I don’t think it’s very
healthy for you on your feet.’ Almost at that moment something whizzed and the
ground was torn up just in front of my feet. Moments later that tank received a
direct hit and burst into flames.
Under cover of sacrifices of this kind, Charrington quickly
withdrew his headquarters, but the rapidity with which the British brigade left
the battlefield caused its greatest losses, because vehicles broken down due to
their poor mechanical reliability had to be destroyed: the 33rd Panzer Regiment
reported 21 British tanks set ablaze by their crews. By the end of the day, the
1st Armoured Brigade was down to the strength of a weak squadron, and the only
Allied tank force in Greece was effectively no more.
When men fight and die in wars, many more are horribly
wounded. Once the Greek campaign began for the Anzacs at Vevi, that reality
became clear to Mollie Edwards, who was back with the 2/5th AGH at Ekali. As
the first casualties of the new campaign were ferried back to the hospital, she
found peacetime medical procedures radically transformed by necessity. Medical
staff performed their own sterilisations, using kerosene tins and a primus, and
eventually made their own dressings as well. In normal times, nurses waited
patiently while doctors prescribed drugs such as morphia; but, at Ekali, these
demarcations evaporated overnight. Edwards was given a vial of morphia and a
syringe, and told to get on with it. Writing out doses in red pen on tape, and
sticking these on the foreheads of patients, Edwards was soon tending to 50
patients on a night shift, doing what she could for young men mangled in combat
— ‘Many a time I held their hands while they died.’
Edwards had more work than she might otherwise have faced
because of leadership failures in the days leading up to Vevi. Maitland Wilson
was one of the traditionalists in the British army who derided the theories of
armoured warfare advocated by Percy Hobart. He and Wavell had already paid one
half of the account for dismantling their armoured formations, when Rommel
gobbled up the dismembered 2nd Armoured Division in the desert on 8 April; at
Vevi, they paid the balance. The basic error in splitting the 2nd Armoured was
then compounded by the way Wilson handled his available tanks in the days
leading up to Vevi, where his ignorance of armoured warfare showed all too
clearly. The most precious commodity available to him — the all-arms 1st
Armoured Brigade — was despatched to the extremity of the Allied line, and then
broken up, its infantry and artillery detached from it, and the tanks left to
operate in the old-fashioned role of a cavalry screen. This ensured that the
force at Vevi was beaten in detail. At the first decisive engagement on 12
April, Vasey was routed for the want of armoured support. The pattern was repeated
on the next day, only in the reverse, when the British tanks fought with little
infantry or artillery support. Even a small number of tanks at Vevi operating
behind an infantry and artillery screen would have allowed the 2/4th and 2/8th
battalions to withdraw down the pass road, rather than face a cross-country
retreat, pursued by fresher SS infantry and the deadly assault guns.
It was clear from the presence of German armour around Vevi
on 11 April that the attack would be led by armoured vehicles but, on the
crucial day, the available allied armour was at Amindaion, well behind the
vital ground. Once again, as in France a year earlier, the British had failed
to coordinate their forces in a way that brought a combined force into action
at the decisive point.
Mackay, who was eventually given command of 1st Armoured
Brigade as it fell back, had little experience in armoured warfare, like most
of the Australian commanders at that time. He failed to get tank support
forward to Vasey, perhaps because both the 19 Brigade and his own headquarters
took such a benign view of the fighting for most of the day.
Admittedly, the Greek campaign was strategically flawed from
the start, and was then further compromised by the commanding officers’
inability to face the inevitable loss of Thrace and to pull all remaining
forces back to a central line that might be held, at least for some time.
Wilson’s efforts, however, ensured that the campaign quickly degenerated into a
rout, leaving the rear echelons of his army open to dislocation and loss. On
the Vermion–Olympus Line, Wilson needed to follow the line of thinking that
allowed the Australian general, Lavarack, to hold Tobruk when Rommel first
assaulted it on 14 April, just days after Vevi. At that battle, Lavarack decisively
stopped a German tank attack for the first time in the war, and he did so with
infantry supported by a strong gun line, with his limited armour operating
behind those defences to contain any breakthrough. Applied to Greece, these
tactics would have seen the 1st Armoured Brigade operating as an integrated
formation, behind the mountain passes held by infantry and artillery around
Mount Olympus. Wilson’s handling of the 1st Armoured Brigade was but the latest
rendition of a common British saga in the first half of the conflict — the
persistent failure of British generals to handle tank forces with any
sophistication or success, mainly because they defied the principles of
concentration and all-arms cooperation.
At Vevi, the victims of this ineptitude were the
long-suffering infantry. However, Mackay, the commanding officer of the 6th
Division, was unimpressed by the showing of his units. Admittedly, he thought
the anti-tank guns were sited too far forward, but he wrote critically that the
Australians were not sufficiently trained to deal with German infiltration, and
that ‘[i]n some cases the inf [infantry] did NOT show that essential
determination to stay and fight it out when the enemy did filter around their
flanks’. These drives around the flanks meant that ‘a few local successes by
the enemy immediately rendered localities on either flank untenable for the
enemy was too quick to reinforce these successes’.
Mackay had less to say about the lack of Allied armour at
Vevi, and his own failure to get British tanks forward to help his infantry.
Overrun by the Leibstandarte, the Australian 2/4th and 2/8th battalions were
temporarily disabled as effective military formations. The later careers of the
battalion commanders reflected their relative performance at Vevi — 34-year-old
Dougherty was promoted to command a brigade in 1942, and led the 21 Infantry
Brigade to the end of the war. In contrast, 50-year-old Mitchell was the oldest
battalion commander in the AIF. The Australian army had set an age limit of 45
for battalion leaders, but Mitchell had pulled enough strings to escape the
prohibition. However, his showing at Vevi validated the original wisdom of an
upper-age limit — he was relieved of his command and relegated to lead a
recruit-training centre for the rest of the war.
With the Mackay Force streaming back from Vevi in tatters,
the door to central Greece was open. The Allied commanders now faced the
prospect that their forward positions on the right, to the north of Mount
Olympus, would be turned, and their whole force encircled. Much now would
depend on the staying power of the Anzac infantry, who had to withdraw across
snow-covered mountain passes, harried by the German air force.
