In September 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and all of us hastily and voluntarily dismantled our transmitters and scattered the components, as there was nobody to order us to close down.
In the latter part of April 1941 the German army marched into the northern suburbs of Athens at 11 o'clock in the morning. At 3 o'clock in the afternoon of the same day, a strong unit of the Gestapo arrived in the southern suburb of Kallithea and surrounded the block in which my house was situated and broke into it, looking for me and my transmitter. Of course I had dismantled everything 19 months previously and even taken down the antenna. So after this long period of QRT how did they know where to find me? Well, FOUR YEARS EARLIER I had won the first prize for Greece in the D.A.S.D. DX Contest for 1937 and the German society had sent me a nice certificate. You can draw your own conclusions. I heard later (because I had left a few days earlier for Egypt with the staff of the British Embassy) that the Gestapo had visited all the active amateurs and had managed to arrest only one of them, Nasos Coucoulis SV1SM (later SV1AC) and put him in a concentration camp in Italy for nearly a year.
I would like to sketch briefly the turbulent events of the following three years with some extracts from my diaries.
One year earlier, in 1940, following the invasion of Greece by the Italian army operating from Albania, the broadcasting authority in Athens (ETHNIKON IDRIMA RADIOFONIAS) began a news service in English which was beamed to England and the U.S.A. on the short waves. In my capacity as a member of the Press Department staff of the British Embassy I took part in the first programme, and in fact read the first news bulletin, which went out at 3 a.m. Athens time. As I said above, early in April I was transferred to the British Embassy in Cairo, Egypt.
1941: Very small contingents of the British army landed in Greece to help the Greek army. But they proved totally incapable of standing up to the onslaught of the German army which followed soon after. The Greek army laid down its arms in Epirus (north-western Greece). General Tsolakoglou became the first 'Quisling' Prime Minister of Greece. King George and his government, under Premier Emmanouil Tsouderos had left for Cairo.
1942: In North Africa General Rommel had advanced to within 100 miles of Cairo, but his supply lines had become very long. One of the most important was the railway link through Greece, so the British strategists decided that attempts must be made to disrupt it. The Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.) in London, despatched two small groups of saboteurs (about a dozen men altogether) under the command of Brigadier Eddie Myers and Major Chris Woodhouse who had the task of linking up with the various bands of 'Andartes' (Resistance movement fighters) which had started forming in the mountains.
Unfortunately, the British officers were told nothing at all about the bitter rivalries between the various groups, most probably because H.Q. in Cairo were themselves ignorant about the real situation. It didn't take Meyers and Woodhouse long to discover that by far the largest group was E.L.A.S. (the Popular Liberation Army) under Aris Velouhiotis, about 120 ill-equipped men operating in the Pindus mountains. Another smaller group of about 60 men had rallied round a regular officer of the Greek army, Colonel Napoleon Zervas. They called themselves the National Republican Greek League (Greek initials E.D.E.S.)
I met Zervas personally years later when he was Minister of the Interior (and therefore responsible for the Police). I was then acting as interpreter for the Assistant-Head of the British Police Mission to Greece. I remember vividly with what relish he described to Colonel Prosser his method of torturing E.L.A.S. prisoners, which left no physical marks on any part of the body.
It was in the course of a secret visit to Athens that young Chris Woodhouse found out the real chain of command, when he was introduced to George Siantos, the Secretary of the Greek Communist Party (Greek initials K.K.E.). The K.K.E. controlled E.A.M., the National Liberation Front which, in turn, ran E.L.A.S. But with a title like that (National Liberation Front) it was easy to see why E.A.M. enjoyed such widespread support, not only in the countryside, but also among the intelligentsia in Athens.
But the task of the S.O.E. officers was made very difficult for various reasons: Winston Churchill had given orders that they were to support, as far as possible, only those guerrilla leaders who favoured the King—but there were none, or very few. The S.O.E. units had orders to cause the maximum disruption to the German occupation of the country. And that was impossible without the support of E.L.A.S., which was controlled by the Communists. At the outset, it became obvious to the S.O.E. officers that military and political priorities were already in conflict.