GLORIOUS
A poem by
The group of Allied ‘‘evaders’’, as they called themselves, were scattered far and wide throughout Crete. They lived and slept rough in the mountainous, rugged terrain that is the spine of the island, in constant fear that their presence would be betrayed to the Germans or that they would be discovered and captured.
While some evaders settled into pairs or small groups, initially many were alone.
In the book On The Run, written by Sean Damer and Ian Frazer, New Zealand evader Jim McDevitt, who crossed paths with Quinn on more than one occasion, described these times as ‘‘periods of abject loneliness and acute starvation’’.
Six months after his escape from the POW camp at Chania, Quinn became gravely ill with malaria. In June 1942, there were fears that he might die.
McDevitt writes in his own book, My Escape From Crete, that: ‘‘I have an idea that Jim’s complaint was a type of virulent malaria’’.
‘‘His Cretan friends placed lighted candles and holy pictures all around his sick-bed, and the local papas gave him the blessing for the
Inscribed in the back of Jim Quinn’s diary is a poem he wrote, entitled Glorious War. It was recognised by the International Library of Poetry in Australia in 1999 when it was a semifinalist in the library’s international open poetry competition, and was published in an anthology. Although Quinn never spoke of his part in World War II, the poem leaves the reader in no doubt how he felt about his experiences: I’d like to meet the man who writes of war as Glorious War He must have been well behind the lines and never a battle saw More likely he writes it all at home, by a fire in a cushioned seat With lights turned low, a radio, atmosphere complete For there is no such thing as ‘‘Glorious War’’ and I who write this mean it He’s painted a picture that’s all a lie, for I’ve been there and seen it You kneel and crouch and cuddle the earth While machine guns chatter with vicious mirth From planes above you that roar and sweep While your heart in unison near loops the loop Each screaming siren, whistling bomb Seems to say, ‘‘You’re Gone, You’re Gone" And you pray to God for night to come For your frayed nerves need that shot of rum You see your mates go one by one Your heart goes cold and your feet grow numb You smell the stench from men who lie Unburied for days neath the blistering sky With sightless eye and meaningless grins Mangled limbs and their heads caved in And you look around and your best friend’s gone the Greeks as an essential part of their ritual mourning ceremony.
‘‘Once again we were relieved to hear that our second gravely-ill patient eventually rallied but I don’t know what happened to all that ‘kallyva’ which was going begging!’’
Cretan people put themselves in great personal danger by helping evaders like Jim Quinn. To the Germans, helping Commonwealth soldiers was the same difference as being a resistance fighter, a partisan – the Cretans were either aiding the enemy or they were the enemy.
After the Allied surrender on June 1, 1941, the invaders wasted no time signalling their intent on how they would deal with partisans.
The first massacre occurred at the village of Kondomari the following day, June 2, when 25 village men were taken to an olive grove and shot by firing squad. Such executions were commonplace throughout the occupation.
Regardless of these atrocities, the Cretans still helped.
The association between fugitive soldiers and their Cretan hosts was as remarkable as it was dangerous, Dr Ian Frazer and John Irwin write in their detailed record of events, The Final Evacuation.
Soldiers were taken in and treated as part of the family, given food, shelter and medical treatment.
‘‘This was dangerous for both parties, under constant threat of being discovered and losing their lives and all their possessions,’’ Frazer and Irwin write. ‘‘However, a loosely connected underground community slowly formed between the dispersed soldiers, keeping in contact and sharing news as best they could.’’
In his 1991 documentary, In Rich Regard, Irwin portrays the kindred spirit felt between the Cretan hosts and their New Zealand guests.
They were similar types of people, tough, from the land or small businessmen, humble, fiercely proud of their freedom and with a particular hatred for Hitler and what he represented.
Fox says the Cretans had special cause to harbour an overwhelming determination to maintain their freedom. With the 253-year Turkish occupation of Crete having ended only 43 years earlier in 1898, their independence was still ‘‘really, really fresh’’ when the Germans invaded in 1941.
‘‘They’re very, very staunch freedom fighters,’’ Fox says. ‘‘They’ve given the Turks a hell of a time for an extended period and they are fiercely independent . . .
‘‘They’re hardy people. They’re tough. They’re used to living on whatever they can produce on that island. Some harvests on Crete are pretty harsh.
‘‘So they’re a formidable enemy, and they’re a lifelong friend.’’
An ‘‘immense trust’’ developed between the Cretans and the Kiwis, Fox says.
Murray Elliott writes of the harsh, spartan existence of the Kiwi evaders in his book, Vasili: The Lion of Crete, about New Zealand war hero Sergeant Dudley Perkins, who fought with the Cretan resistance.
‘‘The search for food occupied much of their time. Sometimes eels could be caught, and large freshwater crabs which came out at night to forage near the banks of streams.
‘‘Once or twice they joined a fisherman in the hazardous sport of dismantling mines around the coast, using the explosives to blast a haul of octopus, squid or other fish. They learned, too, how to make a meal with the aid of the fungus which grew near the roots of the olive trees. Boiled with tomatoes and onions, with olive oil added, it was quite delicious. There were also mushrooms to be found.
‘‘Less appreciated for the most part were snails. These were first boiled to remove the slime and then, after rinsing, were dropped still in their shells into a vegetable stew into which a liberal amount of olive oil had been poured.
‘‘Meat was never plentiful, but occasional rabbits or hares could be snared. In Western Crete partridges and pheasants were fairly abundant, but this was sometimes a disadvantage as their presence attracted unwelcome parties of German hunters.
‘‘Mulberries, raisins or grapes were often to be had, and a kind of tea made from sage, or some of the German ersatz coffee made out of ground roasted acorns and barley. Of course there was wine, and the potent spirit tsikouthia, or raki and ouzo. Such spirits were not always drunk. They might be rubbed into tender feet, or used as a skin lotion after shaving off a ten-day growth with a blunt German blade. They were also valuable for the rheumatics and lumbago which followed long exposure to rain and damp sleeping places.’’
Sometimes, the cave dwellers harvested snails to trade with Cretan villagers, who in return would give them fare more palatable to Westerners, such as olive oil and lentils.
A year after Quinn’s brush with death he met McDevitt again, when Quinn found himself at Ground Zero of the final evacuation effort, a cave in the mountains a few kilometres north of a village called Koutsouras.
The Cretan locals called the cave ‘‘Nerospile’’, which means Water Cave.
McDevitt writes: ‘‘Sometimes, we also called it ‘the Big Cave’. It got its name not only because it was endowed with its own internal supply of fresh water trickling from its rock face, but also because it was quite spacious. The cavern faced southwards and its wide entrance seemed to invite all the icy, winter winds inside.’’
He said of the newcomer Quinn: ‘‘Back home, he hailed from South Canterbury where he had something to do with training trotting horses. It was he who was at death’s door in June the previous year. Jim was loud in his praise of the kind people who had nursed him back to full health in those critical days of June 1942.’’
The mountainous terrain around the Water Cave and others like it was so steep that war historian Aaron Fox observes the villagers have a particular way of walking through the hills, bent forward, bouncing on the balls of their feet, like mountain goats.
Allied soldiers who stayed on and fought with the Cretan resistance found the gait almost impossible to replicate and, being generally taller and fairer, stood out from the Cretan fighters.
The plot to ferry the evaders off the island was organised by Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Cairo, on behalf of the British agency MI9 (Military Intelligence – Escape and Evasion).
Frazer and Irwin write in The Final Evacuation: ‘‘Between July 1941 and May 1943 there were six evacuations altogether from four different places. Initially it was estimated that there were over 1000 Allied soldiers at large in Crete. When rescue attempts ended, less than half had been rescued; the rest, except for a small number who escaped independently, were captured and became POWs.’’
The plan’s go-between on Crete was a Kiwi, Staff Sergeant Tom Moir, but in a cruel blow he was captured by the Germans less than a week before the final evacuation mission was due to be carried out. The date set was May 7, 1943, labelled ‘‘R-night’’ (rescue night).
In Moir’s absence, a band of Australians including several who had been living in the Water Cave with Quinn, Charlie Hunter, Jack Simcoe and Frank Ezzy, finished what Moir had started.
On the nights of May 7 and 8, 1943, in a daring rescue mission, Quinn was among the final group of soldiers taken off the beach at Tripiti, on the south coast of Crete at the foot of the White Mountains.
In total, there were 38 ‘‘British and Imperial strays’’ and 14 Cypriots in the group, which also included some Cretan refugees.
The rescue motor launch ML355, skippered by Royal Navy Lieutenant Geoffrey Searle, sailed for Mersa Matruh in Eqypt.
Until this point, Quinn’s official record incorrectly assumed that he was still a prisoner of war and that he had been transferred with other New Zealand prisoners from Crete to Stalag Luft VIII-B, a notorious POW camp near the town of Lamsdorf in German-occupied Poland.
The error has not been corrected on his New Zealand war record, which insists that in 1942 Quinn was then transferred to ‘‘German camp unknown POW No 1479.’’
Then, on May 17, 1943, a handwritten line records that Quinn is ‘‘now safe in base Camp Egypt’’ and that next-of-kin have been notified.
His real story would no doubt have been noted with great interest by military intelligence during the rigorous debrief he underwent in Egypt, but it is curious that his official New Zealand war record makes no mention of it.
On June 15, 1943, Quinn’s war was over: Still suffering from the effects of his privation, he left Egypt and returned to New Zealand, where he was medically discharged in November that year.
After Jim and Mollie were married, daughter Marie was born on June 16, 1944, the eldest child of nine. The Quinns moved to Blackmount in Southland, in 1946, where Jim worked on Glenderg Station.
In the next few years the growing family moved around western Southland, first to Wairio then, in 1950, to 9 Leithen St, Nightcaps, where Quinn worked in the coal mines.
He injured his hand when it was caught in a winch and couldn’t make a fist. Marie recalls that to regain strength in his hand her father would squeeze a tennis ball.
Unable to work in the mines, he found employment as a barman at the Golden Age Hotel in Bluff, while the family still lived in Nightcaps. He would come home at weekends, or on his days off.
Later he worked in Deschler’s Hotel, the old Kelvin Hotel and the Clyde Tavern, then the Invercargill City Council and the Invercargill Toll Exchange.
Battling ill health, Jim Quinn moved to Nelson, where he died in 1969, aged 54.
War medals were not issued until 15 years after the war ended, in 1960, and over time Quinn’s were lost. As replacement medals can be issued only during the lifetime of the recipient, Marie set about collecting a duplicate set, as keepsakes for his dozens of grandchildren.
Marie Quinn and members of the family were invited to the 75th and final commemorations of the battle on Crete next month, but Marie has decided to travel privately to Crete next year when, free from the formal itinerary of a tour group, she can follow the paths her father walked on, and see for herself the Water Cave where her father survived those desperate months during the war.