The Kiwi saboteur
Tom Barnes was good at sabotage and spent 21⁄2 years behind enemy lines in Greece during World War II, reports Will Harvie.
One night in late November 1942, New Zealand soldiers Tom Barnes and Arthur Edmonds were trying to attach explosives to a railway bridge behind enemy lines in central Greece.
They and other members of the famed Special Operations Executive (SOE) had been parachuted into Greece almost two months earlier.
The mission of Operation Harling was to blow gaps in the viaduct-style bridge, which was on one of the key supply lines for General Erwin Rommel’s German Afrika Korps, based in North Africa, and had been on the route of the Orient Express.
But Barnes and Edmonds had been given faulty intelligence, and the bridge’s construction was not what they had expected.
Under fire, they had to reshape the explosives to bring down portions of the Gorgopotamos viaduct, about 150 kilometres northwest of Athens.
There were firefights under way at both ends of the bridge, as handfuls of British commandos and larger parties of Greek resistance fighters took on the Italian garrisons.
Barnes and Edmonds managed to reset the charges and bring down one span.
But they wanted to bring down another span because that would make the rebuild job even more difficult for Axis forces.
So they returned to the bridge, set more charges and blew up a second span and pier.
‘‘This attack had required the utmost in fortitude and physical endurance,’’ reads Barnes’ citation for the Military Cross, a British medal for exemplary gallantry. Edmonds got one too.
Today, Barnes is a little-known New Zealand World War II medal winner, says his daughter-in-law, Katherine Barnes.
Her 2015 book, The Sabotage Diaries, is based on the war diaries, letters, reports and more than 1000 photos compiled by Barnes during and after the war. His family kept them for decades in Australia.
He probably breached security by keeping these records while in Greece, Barnes says.
After blowing the bridge, the commandos retreated to the west coast – Italian side – of Greece, expecting to be extracted by submarine.
But the sub was cancelled and Barnes spent more than two years behind enemy lines. He rose to become one of two area commanders for the Allied Military Mission in Greece.
He was promoted to lieutenant colonel and awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), for meritorious service in combat.
Barnes was from Wellington and got an engineering degree from Canterbury College, now Canterbury University. When WWII was declared, he was in his 30s – older and more life experienced than most recruits, Barnes says. He was extraordinarily tough and resourceful, a top boxer, and could fix any motor, mechanism or munition.
During the war, Greek politics were notoriously byzantine. The country was occupied by Germans, Italians and Bulgarians. The pre-war government was in exile, as was the king – actually a line of the Danish royal family from which the Duke of Edinburgh sprang. A famine in Athens in 1941-42 is thought to have killed 300,000. About 80 per cent of the Jewish population – 60,000 to 70,000 people – were shipped to their deaths, most at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Numerous resistance groups eventually coalesced into two main movements, one mostly communist, the other more or less republican. The only major operation on which they cooperated was the attack on Gorgopotamos bridge, Barnes says.
Otherwise they squabbled and fought two civil wars while WWII still raged, not to mention the 1946-49 Greek Civil War that killed about 160,000.
For two-plus years, Barnes hid in caves, eluded enemy patrols and tried to keep the peace between his Greek allies. The Germans had a price on his head and informants were about.
He survived all this, learned Greek, and organised a major sabotage campaign in 1943.
At the time, everyone knew the Allies would cross the Mediterranean from North Africa and attack southern Europe somewhere. There were many possible sites for invasion, including southern France, Sardinia, Sicily, mainland Italy and Greece.
To confuse Hitler, deception operations were staged across southern Europe. In Greece, this meant Barnes led a co-ordinated series of sabotages designed to draw German attention.
Job done, the Allies landed on Sicily in July 1943. Mainland Greece was liberated in October 1944. Barnes was finally evacuated a few months later.
After the war, he moved to Australia and married his sweetheart, Beth Harris. He died in a car crash in Victoria in June 1952, which probably contributed to his relative anonymity, Barnes says.
While alive, he was not the sort to boast, she says. After his death, his widow had a family business to run and three children to raise.
Tom Barnes has no mention in Te Ara, the official NZ encyclopaedia, nor a Wikipedia page. Katherine Barnes’ book struggled to get traction in New Zealand.
The Facebook page devoted to the Sabotage book gets some hits, often from Greeks.
It’s like neither New Zealand nor Australia has claimed him, says the Australian federal civil servant.
She married Tom’s son, Chris, and in the 1990s they inherited some of his diaries, papers and photographs. These were largely unknown to history.
Reading them, especially the diaries, Katherine says his voice got into her head and she wrote the book through Tom’s eyes. She has a PhD in Australian literature.
She reckons Tom Barnes deserves a film about his Greek exploits, perhaps one of those TVNZ Sunday Theatre docudramas.
Among the materials in the Barnes collection are spools of film footage he shot. The sabotage of Gorgopotamos bridge was the first major operation by the SOE and showed it was possible to ‘‘set Europe ablaze’’, as Winston Churchill wanted.