Chris Chilton.

Jim Quinn’s battle on Crete lasted a lot longer than most, and his courageous fighting spirit ripples down through the generations. One of thousands of Allied soldiers left behind when the overrun Allies evacuated the island in 1941, Quinn was taken prisoner of war by the Germans but escaped and lived rough in the mountains of Crete for 18 months before taking the last boat off the island in a daring British military intelligence rescue.

When he returned from the war, medically discharged after his escape from the Mediterranean island, Jim Quinn never spoke of his ordeal. Like many servicemen who made it home, the mental wounds from the appalling horrors he had witnessed were too great to forget, and too painful to remember.

Quinn’s surviving children have his war diary, a tiny, dilapidated, hard-bound book he carried with him throughout his war, which began in Greece and ended in Egypt. It contains page after page of the story Quinn never told his wife or nine children, six of whom still live in Southland and one in Australia.

The inscriptions are neatly handwritten, mostly in pencil, and are extraordinary for the cavalier, matter-of-fact way in which they record the dramatic, frequently violent events happening around him.

Some of the pages have smudged and faded over time, so that only fragments of legible writing remain, but throughout, in the finest tradition of any New Zealand man of the land, entries usually start with a summary of the weather. Thursday, April 24, 1941. "Nice sunny morning. Fritz planes over in force. Very hard day. German planes bombing or machine gunning. Germans opened attack at 10 to 6 with dive bombers, artillery & tanks."

From hard-working Irish immigrant stock, Jim Quinn was a South Cantabrian. He grew up on Wainono Station, in the Waimate district, and later had a farm at Willowbridge.

He drove trucks for a living and in his spare time trained trotting horses.

Jim met his love Mollie – Mary Edna Ryan, of Spar Bush, in Southland – at a dance in Oamaru, where she was working at the Empire Hotel.

He was 25 when he enlisted to join the New Zealand Army, at Timaru, in January 1940.

He would write love letters to his Mollie during the war, but he never mentioned where he was or what he was doing. Censors would have blacked out those details anyway.

He married her in 1943 when he returned from the war, medically discharged, at the Christchurch Catholic Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament. There were six people at the wedding.

In 1944, word arrived in Christchurch that Quinn had been twice mentioned in dispatches for distinguished service in the field, although the citations do not record what actions earned him the commendations, or when they occurred.

A few years later the family moved back to Mollie’s home province of Southland, where Quinn had a succession of jobs, from working in the Nightcaps coalmines to pub work in Bluff and Invercargill. He worked for the Invercargill City Council and at the Invercargill Toll Exchange for a time.

He was plagued by ill health throughout his life after the war and died in Nelson on January 10, 1969, from pneumonia. He is buried at the Eastern Cemetery in Invercargill in a grave that does not have a bronze military plaque on the headstone.

It was an inglorious end to the life of a courageous and determined man, who overcame hardships few of us will ever have to endure, thanks to his bravery and that of thousands of young men like him.

The Invercargill RSA has heard his story and has paid for a plaque which will give him due military honour to mark his final resting place this year.

Quinn’s eldest daughter Marie, who lives in Invercargill, is convinced the pneumonia was the result of his weakened health from living rough in the mountains of Crete for 18 hard months during World War II.

Jim Quinn would never have admitted it.

The war began for Gunner James Joseph Quinn 22436 on March 31, 1941, when he arrived in Greece with the 2nd New Zealand Expeditionary Force’s 5th Field Regiment, after six months’ artillery training in England.

He was immediately pressed into action, with his 28 Field Battery positioned in the mountains north of Mt Olympus at Olympus Pass, tasked with halting the advance of the Germans’ 9th Panzer Division.

Initially the Kiwis had success, holding the German advance at bay for three days. Quinn writes in his diary that he fired his first shell of the war at 7.15am on Saturday, April 12, 1941. "Direct hit. Second one dead in centre of road."

Despite rugged resistance from the Kiwis, though, the Germans drove the Allied forces back, forcing the capitulation of Greece.

Quinn writes that on April 23 they ‘‘received word we had to break guns and make for coast’’.

On the 24th, the retreating Kiwis came under heavy attack.

‘‘Fritz planes over in force. Very hard day. German planes bombing or machine gunning. Germans opened attack at 10 to 6 with dive bombers, artillery & tanks … Blew up guns and retired under German M.G. fire. Drove all night. 110 miles.’’

They enjoyed a ‘‘wonderful welcome in Athens’’ on April 25 then shifted into the hills after dark. After a long march to the coast, the New Zealanders embarked south for Crete on the destroyer HMS Kingston at 4.10am on April 27.

Quinn and his colleagues landed at Souda Bay, on the northwestern face of Crete. Part of an artillery force without artillery, which they had had to scuttle and destroy in Greece, Quinn joined other New Zealand soldiers in a composite battalion which became engaged in the defence of the town of Galatas.

Quinn made few entries in his diary during the Battle of Crete, a brief, vicious conflict that started on May 20 and ended on May 30. Just two illegibly smudged pages remain from those desperate days, during which the New Zealanders under Brigadier James Hargest were unable to hold the airport at Maleme and the Battle of Crete was lost.

‘‘Imagine the stress of operating on Crete,’’ says war historian Dr Aaron Fox.

‘‘They have minimal food, always under the threat of being captured and the mountains around Crete are quite mountainous, really steep.’’

Thousands of Allied forces were evacuated off the southern beach at Sfakia from May 28 to June 1, under constant threat from advancing German troops, but many remained.

Once the British destroyers had left for the last time there were about 6500 Allied troops left behind – more than 2000 of them Kiwis, among them Jim Quinn.

They surrendered to the Germans on June 1. Quinn wrote in his diary that day. Sunday, June 1: "Fine hot day. Told that we had capitulated at 0930hrs. German soldiers marched us out of ravine at 1000hrs to village nearby treating us very well. Started very hard march on empty stomach. Capt Hardy died on roadside. Slept in stony field. No rations."

Word of Quinn’s capture arrived at Studholme Junction in South Canterbury a few weeks later, on June 21, when his mother, Lucille, received a telegram from New Zealand Defence Minister Fred Jones: ‘‘Much regret to inform you that your son 22436 Gnr. James Joseph Quinn has been reported missing. The Prime Minister desires me to convey to you on behalf of the Government his sympathy with you in your anxiety.’’

Quinn records few details of the two-day forced march over the mountains and across the island to a prisoner of war camp set up in a converted hospital near Chania, on the northern edge of the island.

Monday 2: ‘‘On march as POW slept alongside a beautiful stream very cold and hungry. Captain Duigan wants me as batman."

Tuesday 3: "Sweltering day still on march. Arrived at hospital near Cania [sic] 6pm, now a transit camp for POW. Released Italian prisoners very good to us while on march."

Quinn mentions that the Germans are "very friendly" but "cigarettes very short, rations short also".

The camp was laxly guarded, and rations were in short supply. On Monday, June 9, Quinn writes that ‘‘everyone short of cigarettes, even officers. Rations terrible, mostly lentils’’.

Wednesday 11: "Terribly tired tonight, been out all day, walked for miles through Galatas, brought back clothes, blankets and food for Capt D. and myself, also quantity wine, proceeding to drink same’’.

On Tuesday 17, Quinn was not feeling well and was sent to the doctor. Three days later illness had swept through the camp, which was now in quarantine.

Life in the camp was not all hardship and deprivation, however.

Quinn writes that on Wednesday, August 20, there was a big dinner in camp. The menu included ‘‘ brandy, asparagus on toast, tomato and onion soup, baked potatoes, peas, cabbage, baked onions and pork, watermelon, biscuits and cheese, coffee royal, grapes and cigars’’.

To amuse themselves, the Kiwis challenged the Australians to a cricket match on Sunday, September 7. Quinn records that the Kiwis won by an innings and 73 runs.

He was sick again in November and spent another week in hospital. He "didn’t like it very much". Rations were "just enough to exist on, everyone losing weight, no cigarettes at all.

"( The Allied naval) Blockade on the island appears to be very effective, nothing coming to the island, plenty of soldiers leaving, presumably for Russia. Jerry has just put plenty barb wire around hospital and very strict guard so apparently are still expecting something to happen’’.

On December 1, Quinn’s routine changed when he started "cooking for the boys’’ in the camp kitchen. "More comfortable living but longer hours," he writes.

By December 23 as more prisoners arrived in camp from Libya, Quinn was thinking about escaping. He writes: "feet getting very itchy planning move for near future’’.

Quinn hatched a plan to escape on the Christmas Eve, along with two other Kiwis.