The Battle of Thermopylae (1941)

On 25 April 1941, a few hours after midnight, German troops occupied without a fight the abandoned positions in the pass of Thermopylae, where in 480 BC the Spartan king Leonidas had barred the way to the army of Xerxes. The day before, 24 April, the last big battle fought by British forces on the Greek mainland had taken place there. The New Zealand 6th Brigade at Molos, on the coast road, and the Australian 19th Brigade on the Brallos Pass in the mountains spent the whole afternoon beating off attacks by German tanks, infantry and mountain troops, and after dark they withdrew, destroying the guns that could not be taken away. Behind them, through Athens, columns of troops streamed south, and on the night of 24–25 April they began to be taken off the Greek beaches.

Under 25 April popular chronologies state that Axis forces defeated the Commonwealth forces at Thermopylae “after the Australian general George Vasey had firmly declared” that they would not be beaten. This needs correcting on three points. The fighting took place on 24 April, and on 25 April the Germans merely occupied positions that had already been abandoned. Nor was it a defeat in the ordinary sense: the two brigades were to delay the Germans and cover the evacuation, not hold the pass, and they accomplished this task and withdrew in good order. Finally, the famous words of Vasey, then a brigadier – “Here we bloody well are and here we bloody well stay” – were spoken a few days earlier, when no one in the corps yet knew of the plan to leave Greece, and they were not a promise of victory but an order to stand fast.

Retreat through Thessaly

After the Battle of Vevi the forces of Lieutenant General Henry Maitland Wilson took up a line along the Aliakmon and below Olympus, but held it for only a few days. German armoured and mountain divisions were attacking the Olympus and Servia passes, and from the west they threatened to outflank it via Grevena and Kalambaka, where after the collapse of the Greek Army of Western Macedonia there was no longer any coherent defence. On 16 April Wilson met General Alexandros Papagos in Lamia and told him he was falling back to the Thermopylae position, the only one his two divisions could defend without support from Greek troops. Papagos himself then suggested that the British should consider leaving Greece in order to spare the country destruction.

The retreat across the Thessalian plain was the hardest stage of the campaign. The New Zealand 21st Battalion and the Australian battalions of Brigadier Arthur Allen’s force held the Tempe gorge on the Pineios river until 18 April, and on 19 April a column of lorries more than ten kilometres long crawled from Larissa to Lamia under incessant air attack. According to Gavin Long’s Australian official history, the German air force attacked it in groups of twenty-odd aircraft, and yet more vehicles became stuck or ran off the narrow roads than were destroyed by bombs. On the morning of 19 April the ANZAC Corps was separated from the German spearheads by 60–80 kilometres of wrecked roads and blown bridges. On 18 April Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis shot himself in Athens, and on 19 April, at a conference attended by King George II, Papagos, Wilson and General Archibald Wavell, who had come from Cairo, it was decided that the British forces would be evacuated.

The Thermopylae position

The pass in which Leonidas had made his stand looked quite different in 1941 from how it had in antiquity. Silt from the Sperchios river had pushed the shoreline back several kilometres, and Long wrote that instead of “Thermopylae” one ought to say “Molos”, after the village at the mouth of the pass. The defence line cut across the neck of the long peninsula comprising Locris, Phocis, Boeotia and Attica. Major General Bernard Freyberg’s New Zealand Division took over the coast road from Lamia through Molos towards Atalanti and on to Athens, and General Iven Mackay’s 6th Australian Division the main road, which climbed in hairpin bends from the plain near Lamia to the Brallos Pass, more than 1,000 metres higher. To the west, between Brallos and the Gulf of Corinth, rose mountains crossed by roads from Gravia and Amfissa. On 20 April Blamey warned Wilson that two divisions could not defend so long a front, which could be turned from the east via the island of Euboea and from the west through the mountains.

In the Australian sector the first to take up positions were the battalions of Brigadier George Vasey’s 19th Brigade, weakened at Vevi and reinforced by two battalions from other brigades. Mackay and Freyberg kept telling their subordinates that there would be no more retreats. “I never even dreamed of evacuation,” Mackay said later. “I thought we would hold on for a fortnight or so and then be overwhelmed by weight of numbers.” Vasey, who commanded the defence of the Brallos Pass, then issued his order: “Here we bloody well are and here we bloody well stay.” His brigade major, Major A.T.J. Bell, translated this into the language of regulations: “19th Brigade will hold its present defensive positions regardless of circumstances.”

The rearguards

Wavell arrived at Blamey’s headquarters at 2 a.m. on 21 April and told him that the Greek army in Epirus had capitulated and that the corps would be evacuated. The capitulation had been offered on 20 April, against Papagos’s wishes, by General Georgios Tsolakoglou, and on 21 April he signed it in Larissa in the presence of Field Marshal Wilhelm List’s chief of staff. This laid open the left flank of the Thermopylae position, because the road from Ioannina to the Gulf of Corinth now lay open to the Germans. Wilson therefore brought the plan forward: the first units were to be on the beaches at dawn on 24 April and to embark on the night of 24–25 April.

On the morning of 23 April the corps received the order to withdraw. It was decided that each of the two routes would be held to the last moment by a single brigade: the pass at Molos by Brigadier Harold Barrowclough’s New Zealand 6th Brigade, and the Brallos Pass by Vasey’s Australian 19th Brigade. The rest of the divisions, unit by unit, left for the south, for the beaches of Attica and the Peloponnese. Freyberg, contrary to the corps’ original instruction, ordered his units to keep all their weapons until embarkation. Behind the rearguards roads and bridges were blown, and intelligence reported Germans on Euboea and columns advancing from Ioannina towards Delphi. The Australian 2/5th Battalion took up a position near Livadeia to block any outflanking move from the west.

Facing them were the two German divisions the Germans considered the fastest in pursuit: the 5th Panzer Division, brought over from Yugoslavia via Kalambaka and Karditsa, and Major General Ferdinand Schörner’s 6th Mountain Division, supported by part of the 72nd Infantry Division. Their plan was for a mountain infantry regiment to cross the mountains west of Brallos towards Gravia, while the main force struck along the coast road at Molos. An artillery duel over the Sperchios valley had been going on since 21 April. Two Australian 25-pounders, sited on a rock ledge halfway up the slope, shelled German columns on the road from Lamia for eight hours on 22 April, until German medium guns killed five gunners and wounded three.

24 April at Molos

The real fighting began at about 2 p.m. on 24 April. In the New Zealand sector two German tanks that tried to cross the dried-up marshes in front of the 25th Battalion were hit at long range by field guns, and no more tanks ventured into the marshes. Motorcyclists, cyclists and four tanks moved along the road, while German infantry climbed into the hills south of the road and began to push back the left flank of the 25th Battalion. At about 3 p.m. the main attack began: a column of tanks, followed by lorries carrying infantry and more tanks.

The New Zealanders faced superior numbers of men, but had superiority in artillery on their side. The pass was covered by a medium artillery regiment, four field artillery regiments (three New Zealand and one British, of the Royal Horse Artillery) and two anti-tank regiments. When the tanks drove in among the infantry positions, the guns of the New Zealand 5th Field Regiment, some of which stood in front of the infantry lines, engaged them over open sights at 400–600 metres. One gun, laid by Bombardier E.W. Santi, set nine tanks on fire. The wrecks blocked the narrow road, so the following vehicles could neither pass nor turn back. Shielded by the burning wrecks and smoke, however, the surviving tanks fired on the 25th Battalion, which suffered heavy losses. By about 5.15 p.m. the New Zealanders had counted at least fifteen destroyed tanks along six kilometres of road. The divisional artillery commander, Brigadier Reginald Miles, brought the fire of three regiments down on the road below Thermopylae, and that fire stopped any further attempts. According to German documents cited by Long, a company of 18 tanks, including four Panzer IVs, took part in the attack, twelve of which were total losses. Of some 70 tank crewmen, seven were killed and 22 wounded. The other German units lost about 70 men.

In the afternoon an order reached Freyberg from Wilson’s headquarters to embark with his staff that very night. Freyberg ignored it. “I replied by signal that I was being attacked by tanks, that I was fighting a battle on a two-brigade front, and asked who was to command the New Zealanders if I left,” he wrote later. “The answer I got was ‘Movement Control’. Naturally, I went on fighting the battle.” Mackay, who had received the same order, flew to Crete early on the morning of 25 April.

On the Brallos Pass

In the mountains to the west the Australians faced three companies of the 141st Mountain Infantry Regiment and two companies of the 5th Panzer Division’s motorcycle battalion. In the morning 65 dive-bombers spent two hours bombing abandoned Australian gun positions on which camouflage nets had deliberately been left. From 11.30 a.m. the machine guns of Major R.L. Sandover’s 2/11th Battalion fired on German infantry working their way forward through the scrub. The Germans wrote in their reports that every movement, even of a single soldier, immediately drew fire, and that for several hours they could not get out of the zone of fire. After 4.50 p.m., however, their heavy mortars began to silence one Australian post after another. The commander of the left-hand company, all the section commanders and several men of one platoon were killed or wounded, and at 5.40 p.m., after an exchange of fire at thirty metres, the forward companies fell back to a new line.

Vasey, fearing a breakthrough and an outflanking move via Gravia, where German infantry had appeared at about 6 p.m., brought the withdrawal forward by half an hour. The guns of the 2/2nd Field Regiment, which had fewer than thirty rounds per gun left, kept firing every five minutes to the end to remind the Germans of their presence, and at 8.30 p.m. they drove off along a track specially laid out by the sappers, which was then blown. At 9 p.m. the 2/11th Battalion began to leave its positions, the companies covering one another in bounds. At 10.15 p.m. the last lorries pulled away from Brallos, with soldiers kneeling in the backs, weapons aimed outwards. Half a kilometre south of the village German flares were already going up. The Germans reported that they had taken the Australian positions “by storm” at about 7–8 p.m., but according to Long the Australian forward companies were still in place at 9 p.m.

Night and morning

At Molos the New Zealanders began to leave their positions after 9.15 p.m., when the ammunition column’s lorries, which had earlier lost their way, arrived. The medium and field guns that could not be taken away were destroyed, the last at 11.50 p.m. Before midnight the last vehicles passed Molos, and the column drove south through the rearguard at Cape Knimis and near Erythres with headlights on. At noon on 25 April, after covering about 160 kilometres, it passed through Athens. Long quotes the recollection of an officer of Barrowclough’s brigade: although they were almost the last British soldiers the Athenians would see, and the Germans might be treading on their heels, cheering crowds surrounded the lorries, girls and men jumped onto the running boards, flowers were thrown and people called out: “Come back, you must come back.” “They seemed in despair,” wrote Freyberg, “that our efforts to help them had brought disaster upon our troops.”

Long compared Thermopylae with the almost simultaneous defence of Tobruk: in both places, within a fortnight, German tanks that had seemed invincible until then were halted with heavy losses by determined infantry and artillery.

Place in the war

The Battle of Thermopylae ended the fighting of the British corps on the Greek mainland. Covered by the two brigades, the troops were embarked over the following nights from the ports and beaches of Attica and the Peloponnese: through Rafina, Porto Rafti, Megara, Nafplio and Kalamata. The two brigades from Thermopylae left on successive nights, the Australian from Megara and the New Zealand from the Peloponnese. According to most counts, some 50,000 of the more than 60,000 soldiers shipped to Greece since March were taken off, but all the heavy equipment was lost, and at Kalamata several thousand men for whom ships could not be brought in time were taken prisoner. On 27 April the Germans entered Athens. Many of the soldiers from Molos and Brallos fought a few weeks later in the Battle of Crete, where Freyberg commanded the defence of the whole island and Vasey one of its brigades.

In Greece itself the battle left a bitter aftertaste. At the place most symbolic for Greek national memory it was New Zealanders, Australians and Britons who fought, not the Greek army, which had capitulated in Epirus a few days earlier. Later the leader of the communist ELAS guerrillas, Aris Velouchiotis, himself a veteran of the 1941 campaign, called this the eternal disgrace of the government that had allowed it to happen. For Australians and New Zealanders, by contrast, Thermopylae became one of the few bright spots of an unsuccessful expedition: a battle in which they showed they could stop the Wehrmacht, if only for a single day and only in order to be able to leave.