Delayed Dispatch

The Germans are still fighting an inconclusive campaign with hard-bitten Chetniks in the Serbian mountains. The Italians last week replaced a general in their Army of Occupation who had failed to conquer the Yugoslav guerrillas. A strict curfew suddenly clamped on Belgrade indicated that the Serbian patriots were operating even in the capital.

Last week people in the U.S. could read about the germination of this strangest of all the war's campaigns. Just published was a book by an ace reporter,* which told a grim and exciting story of the brief Balkan campaign. Robert St. John, then an A.P. man in Belgrade, followed the campaign from Yugoslavia to Egypt. What he has to say reads less like history than like a huge, super-delayed, super-exciting news dispatch.

The first sign that the Axis conquest would be different in Yugoslavia came when children locked themselves into their schoolrooms, scrawled anti-Nazi slogans on the blackboards. Then in a swift overnight coup d'etat, General Simovich seized control of the Government, announced that Yugoslavia would defy the Axis.

Yugoslavia's hopes of successful resistance were bolstered by rumors that the British had 300,000 troops in Greece ready to reinforce the Yugoslav Army. St. John heard these reports from a Greek journalist called Pappas. When he checked with the British Embassy they smiled and said that they could make no official statement, but that Pappas was a very reliable man.

The Nazi attack came almost without warning Palm Sunday morning. Mercilessly and methodically the Nazi bombers pulverized Government buildings, wrecked the business district, set fire to Belgrade's largest hotel. There was little protection against air attack.

St. John and other newsmen worked desperately to follow the Yugoslav Government, first to Vranyska Banya, then to Sarajevo. Above every thing else they wanted a chance to send their reports to Britain and the U.S. But all phone lines were shut and the only radio station operating, as far as the correspondents could learn, was a tiny portable transmitter which belonged to a British diplomat. This was in use 24 hours a day pounding out messages asking for reinforcements from Greece, but finally the correspondents persuaded the operator to send a single 100-word dispatch signed with all their names.

The Yugoslav Government did not last long after it reached Sarajevo, and St. John and his colleagues decided that their best chance of avoiding the invading armies was to head for the coast and find a boat to take them to Greece. Finally four of them set out down the Adriatic in a 20-ft. sardine boat with a one-lunged outboard motor and a sail.

The first night the outboard conked out and they nearly swamped trying to row in a gale and rainstorm. Next day they landed and persuaded a Yugoslav carpenter who had once worked in Philadelphia to come along and help them work the boat. For three days and two nights they sailed down the Adriatic, dodging Italian mines and mine layers. Since no one in the boat knew anything about navigation, they steered by the stars in the southern sky, and did not figure out until weeks later why they were headed nearly due west each morning.

Finally, on the Greek Easter (last year one week later than our Easter), they reached Corfu. After the misery and death they had seen in the Serbian mountains, the warm lilac-smelling air seemed like heaven. But on Easter Monday, the Italians bombed the old city for the first time in a month.

The reporters, still eager to find communications, headed for the Greek mainland. When they landed at Patras at the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth, they were greeted by air-raid sirens. They watched while German planes smoothly skimmed over the harbor, machine-gunning refugees huddled in a string of open barges.

They finally got a train to take them to Corinth on their way to Athens and, they hoped, a telegraph office. By this time the Germans held the other side of the Gulf and Nazi planes had only a short hop to strafe the railroad on the other side. Their train, barnacled with soldiers on roof and sides, was raked again & again with machine-gun bullets. Three out of four of the reporters who were riding together were wounded, one seriously. St. John says he did not know that he had been shot through the thigh until he finally reached Corinth by bumming a ride on an R.A.F. truck.

The flight from Corinth, through the Peloponnesus to a little fishing port where a British destroyer finally picked them up, was a nightmare. More than once St. John and his friends were nearly shot as parachutists because of their knapsacks. On the embarkation dock they watched hundreds of trucks being put out of commission. The drivers shot holes in the tires, raced the engines without oil or water so that they would be ruined.

On the way to Crete, and afterwards in a huge convoy fleeing from Crete to Egypt, St. John learned that there had never been 300,000 British troops in Greece, but only 40,000 men in all.

Of those 40,000, St. John calculated, not more than half returned to Egypt.

Later in a pleasant office in Cairo, St. John argued with a British censor. He had written that the evacuation of Greece was not "another Dunkirk," since at Dunkirk losses had only amounted to 10%, while the Greek campaign had cost a flat 50%. The censor crossed out everything after "Dunkirk."

*From the Land of Silent People by Robert St. John (Doubleday, Doran; $2.50).

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