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A New Zealand officer, a former dairy farmer from Auckland, told how he and his comrades butchered a gang of Germans trying to cross a stream in one of the Olympic passes: "We sank one boat after another. After two hours the river was teeming with half-sunken boats drifting downstream, and with splashing, drowning men. Some of the boats were littered with dead and wounded men. We got sick of killing them. It was mass slaughter." Parachutists in grey shorts and heavy grey jackets, armed with submachine guns, floated to the aid of the men in the river. "Our position appeared to be in danger until my captain drew a bead on the leader in short pants with an anti-tank machine gun. The German was a six-footer. The blast got him squarely in the chest. He disintegrated from the waist up. His followers, seeing what had happened to him, hurled their grenades and withdrew."
But eventually weight told. The same British, Australian and New Zealand troops, five divisions at most, fought day after day, while the Germans rotated 40 divisions, constantly feeding fresh troops into the battle.
Ahead of the lines the Air Force did its work with the steady efficiency of a stone-crusher. Village after village was pulverized. Larissa was pasted until it looked like Louvain in World War I. More than 1,500 Nazi planes were in action in the Balkans.
The British tried to hold successive lines, each hinged on mountains and dominating passes. The first line ran from Mt. Olympus to Corizza in Albania. Against this line the Germans threw heavy attacks aimed at Larissa and Kalabaka, both crucial railway towns, on lines leading to southern Greece. The Italians put on a drive from Albania. On the right, near Olympus, the British at first held firm; it was on this front, at Sarandaporo Pass, that bloodshed was worst. But in the center the defenses were pushed back, and in Albania the Greeks lost Corizza.
From then on it was just a matter of steady advance in the face of stubborn and well-coordinated rear-guard actions. The British-Greek line, which held together well, fell back to shield Larissa and Yanina in the Pindus Mountains, then back to the narrowing of the peninsula between Lamia and Arta. Early this week the Germans had reached Thermopylae, 100 miles from Athens, and were still going strong; and the British and Greeks had not much left to be glad for except that they had killed a lot of Germans and some time.
Having spotted numerous British transports, and proceeding to bomb many of them in Peiraeus and off Chalchis, the Germans accused the British of planning another Dunkirk. "Pay close attention to your ports," they urged the Greeks, "because when British transports come for a second time—empty—it is high time to capitulate." This week the Germans claimed they had bombed and sunk five British transports which were trying to evacuate troops.