All in a day's good fight

(In December 1944, with the end of the Second World War in Europe still five months away, Athens, the capital of Greece, was in the grip of brutal fighting between communist rebels of the ELAS military arm of the Greek Communist Party and the Greek provisional government backed by the liberating British Army. The German occupation troops had evacuated Greece in October, living the field wide open to a communist bid for power. ELAS had invested most of its time during the three-year long Occupation of the country attacking and killing anti-communist Greeks, and dismantling any resistance group not friendly to Moscow, in anticipation of a postwar communist coup d'etat. With the Germans gone, ELAS had quickly encircled Athens and sent its units to spread throughout the city against no opposition. When a communist demonstration in front of parliament building was fired upon in early December, ELAS used it as a pretext to launch an attack on the government and the British troops already in Athens.)


Captain Charilaos, Greek Army Reserve, made himself as small a target as possible behind a narrow section of collapsed wall. Next to him, bent in an impossible fetal position, two of his men held pistols to their chests and waited. The rain had stopped but a thick mist continued to hang over the gray, abandoned neighborhood.

A few yards from their position, lurking in the ruins of a small ice making factory, ELAS guerrillas waited and watched for any capitalist imperialist lackey across no man's land to raise his head above cover. Only minutes before, Charilaos had watched as a grizzled older man, member of a gendarmerie auxiliary unit, was shot in the throat by a communist sniper hiding behind the factory's smokestack. The man's World War One uncannily shiny helmet, knocked off his head, had rolled on the ground to come rest next to Charilaos's boot as its owner died from hemorrhage only a few paces away.

Charilaos, a 40-year old veteran of the Albanian campaign to defend Greece against invasion by fascist Italy in October 1940, was cold, soaked, and famished, just like his men spread out over a patch of burned out tenements. His unit, a hastily reconstituted skeleton battalion of reservists, had been thrown into the fighting with a few rusty Lee Enfield rifles and practically no ammunition. With no uniforms to go around, the men had dug deep into their trunks to retrieve threadbare army tunics and old helmets. Most wore their civilian overcoats, an armband provided by the government their only official military insignia.

The men though, Charilaos soon discovered, had lost none of their spirit or the skill to quickly adapt.

Some from 2 Platoon had gone out to pester the British paratroopers holding the church three blocks down the street for rifle ammo; they had come back with an unbelievable six precious cases of it.

Corporal Michalis had disappeared in the ruins to return just before nightfall with a dozen cans of Australian bully beef and three loaves of rock-hard bread (the battalion master sergeant, a bear of a man called Stratos, saw these meager rations were distributed equitably).

The battalion signalman, not having a radio or a rifle with which to fight, said he knew where to find some winter clothing nearby, had left and returned within the hour carrying several blankets, a Christmas present against the bone-chilling cold.

Charilaos had been ordered to block the communists from pushing through toward one of the main thoroughfares of the city. British intelligence, delivered by runner from British HQ, said Charilaos and his neighboring paratroopers faced a rebel force over 500 strong deployed over several city blocks. The communists, well armed with rifles, pistols, and grenades, had also German machine guns from captured caches and, apparently, plentiful ammunition. Right behind them, on the slopes of a nearby hill, there was also a higher-caliber mortar that began lobbing shells at the slightest movement of Charilaos's men or the paras in the church yard.

From time to time, and during lulls in the fighting, the communists would use a funnel to heap verbal abuse on "the monarcho-fascists and their lackeys" and promise those who resisted socialist paradise that the "punishment they deserve" was on its way.

For three days and three nights, the reserve battalion repelled repeated ELAS attempts to break through and advance into side streets leading to the thoroughfare. It often came to savage hand-to-hand combat -- where Stratos, the master sergeant, excelled with a huge mallet he had retrieved from a nearby blacksmith's. In those frantic, merciless moments, Charilaos used a short American-made bayonet given to him by a paratroop lieutenant. Gerasimos, a barber in civilian life, had emerged as the battalion's number one close quarters fighting record holder: he was already credited with eight rebels dispatched with his fearsome curved knife and a length of lead pipe.

A huge explosion lifted Charilaos and his two men like rag dolls and tossed them into the ruins.

Deafened, nearly blind from the flash, his clothing in smoldering tatters, the captain strained to rise. He could hear cries for help. A black figure pierced the lingering, thick cloud of damp dust, cut an arc in the air for a flicker of a second, and then nearly landed on top of him with a muffled thud.

This is the end, Charilaos blinked, they're on top of us with the bayonets.

"Captain, captain..." the figure bellowed .... "are you well? Are you hurt?"

Miracle.

No communists but Sergeant Stratos, thank God.

"Sir, it must have been an English bomb," the dazed Stratos offered in hoarse, panting explanation. "There's nothing left across the street... nothing, sir, nothing... look ...!"

Charilaos's heart pounded as if it was about to explode out of his chest. He struggled to his feet, rubbed his eyes, and tried to focus on the "tactical field." His nostrils caught the unmistakable smell of burnt flesh.

Where minutes before the low, gray building of the ice factory stood, all pockmarked and ravaged, there was now a smoking crater. An aerial bomb, Charilaos wondered, since the British, he knew, did not posses any field artillery other than some ineffective, anti-tank three pounders.

The friendly explosion though had not spared the reservists. Four of Charilaos's men lay dead in the dense rubble. Another dozen had been wounded, among them Gerasimos, the barber, who lay on a legless table, with a sucking chest wound taking the life out of him, one horrible gurgling breath at a time.

Shrapnel had shattered the heel of Sergeant Stratos, who also had a hole in his upper left arm. Charilaos discovered he had a through-and-through in his right hand. The battalion had no medicine and no corpsman.

Slowly, the Greek reservists crawled out from the ruins and begun to move toward the church and the British paras, the walking wounded dragging those with life-threatening injuries. Gerasimos died as soon they moved him using the table as a stretcher, his face mysteriously blackened out with an oily film of what looked like tar.

The paratroopers had established a well-protected position around the church, directing enfilade fire from behind their sandbags at a row of houses bristling with communists, who, in turn, returned the favor and raked the church with their machine guns. The explosion that had obliterated the ice making factory had though badly shaken the morale of the rebels, whom Charilaos and his surviving men could now see abandoning their hastily fortified positions and retreating up the hill. Their movement was met with a barrage of aimed rifle fire from the paras that sent many of the ELAS fighters tumbling down like bowling pins.

A British tank carrying extra ammunition and cases full of cans of baked beans, and a platoon of British military police with a Lewis gun, arrived soon after. The para major, a dour-looking Scot wearing a tartan parade jacket under his para smock, placed the Lewis gunners at the far corner of the church yard to block any communist potential attempt to cross the street for a flanking movement. The Greek battalion survivors who could still fire a weapon took positions right next to them, fortified with tin cups of hot, bitter chocolate and soggy crackers.

In late afternoon, a para patrol returned with a woman rebel prisoner.

ELAS women had the reputation of brutal fighters. Dark rumors said they tortured and killed prisoners with abandon. But this specimen looked weak and undeserving of any fierce reputation as she stood between two burly paras. Short, thin, wrapped in a coat three sizes larger and tied at the waist with a length of cord, the ELAS prisoner shook in her German trousers and boots, tears streaking freely down a dark-skinned face with high, bonny cheeks.

"Den fteo tipota pedia, den fteo" [I'm not responsible for anything, boys, I'm not...], she cried.

A young para lieutenant, carrying a Bible in his breast pocket, began the interrogation, with Charilaos playing reluctant interpreter since he was still nearly deaf and blind from the explosion and in terrible pain from his hand wound packed with sulfa powder by the para orderly. How many communists are there? Where's your command post? Where's the mortar that has been hitting the paras and the Greeks? What is your exact specialty? Where have your comrades moved after the explosion?

"Den xero, pedia, den xero... ego eimai nosokoma" [I don't know, boys, I don't know... I am a nurse] came the standard prerecorded answer in between sobs.

When the lieutenant gave up, and those paras watching turned the other way to fix their gaze on the row of houses across the church yet again, two of Charilaos's men took the ELAS woman behind the church and shot her with the Walther pistol her captors had found in her pocket.

Sergeant Stratos, patched up by the para orderly, hobbled up to the corpse and returned with the dead woman's blood splattered forage cap, the ELAS insignia still pinned on it.

"Memento," he said -- and stuffed it in his rucksack, smiling.


This short story is dedicated to the memory of the Greek Army troops and officers of the Athens Police and the Royal Gendarmerie who fell in the line of duty during the Battle of Athens, December 1944-January 1945.