While fighting in the area of the Dodecanese Islands on the night
of the 22nd October 1943 the destroyer ADRIAS (L67) was seriously
damaged by a mine but refused to sink.
Under the command of Commander John Toumbas the ship covered a
distance of approximately 700 nautical miles, reaching the port of
Alexandria in Egypt on the eve of the feast of Saint Nicholas, the
patron saint of all seamen.
The Greek Minister of the Navy Sofoclis Venizelos, and the
British Admiral in command of the Royal Navy in the Eastern
Mediterranean, provided an honorary escort for the brave little ship
that had refused to die. A few months later the snub-nosed L67 joined
the fleet of 100 vessels of all sorts which sailed to Greece for the
Liberation.
The photographs were taken by the author (with the exception of
the damaged L67) who travelled back to Greece on H.H.M.S. AVEROF in
the same convoy. The photograph of L84, a similar type destroyer to
ADRIAS shows how much of her bows was blown off by the collision with
the mine.
(H.H.M.S. stands for His Hellenic Majesty's Ship.)
7. German sabotage at the Cable & Wireless station at Pallini, Greece,
in World War II.
As the German army was pulling out of Greece in October 1944 its
engineers carried out extensive sabotage to installations of a
strategic value. At Pallini, not far from Athens, an attempt was made
to destroy the transmitter hall by dropping one of the antenna towers
onto it, but the equipment was not damaged.
They were more successful at the Royal Navy transmitting site at
Votanikos. Here they tried to destroy six 300 foot tubular masts.
One remained standing and also the lower part of another. All the
test gear in the lab was thrown out of a second floor window and
burnt. I was acting as official photographer for my unit at the time.
When I walked into a small store room I saw all the equipment had been
thrown off the shelves on to the floor, but appeared to be intact. I
spotted a box of brand new packed German navy morse keys and decided
the time had come for me to acquire a small war trophy of my own. As
I bent down to pick up a key, I was horrified to see two large sticks
of gelignite perched perilously on the edge of a shelf. The explosive
was tied with white ribbon, with a weight attached to the other end.
I froze to the spot. Gingerly I lifted my trophy out of the box and
began to walk slowly backwards, being very careful not to knock
anything over. I breathed a sigh of relief when I was out of the room
and immediately alerted the engineers who came and defused the booby
trap. So this book might never have been written thanks to the German
army.
At the Athens broadcasting station transmitter site at Liosia my
unit erected a small temporary 'T' antenna which allowed the station
to come on the air again, but a short time later, when the ELAS
guerrillas overran the area they began using the transmitter to
broadcast their own view of events. We provided the broadcasting
authority with a BC 610 mobile transmitter installed next to the
Parliament building in the centre of town, using the same frequency of
610 KHz. Listeners in Cairo couldn't understand what was going on
when one moment they heard an official government announcement and a
little later a war communique issued by the Communist guerrillas.