Post by Dave Homewood on Oct 5, 2014 11:38:19 GMT 12
I found this via Paper's Past
Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 83, 5 October 1944, Page 8
ONE MAN'S WAR
ASTOUNDING STORY
WORK AMONG PARTISANS
(Official News Service.) LONDON, October 2.
A former New Zealand newspaperman, and an officer in the Second Division, arrived here with a limp and his arm in a sling, and with one of the most fascinating stories of the war, of the part he and other officers had been playing for months far behind the enemy's lines, in helping to organise resistance by patriot forces.
He is Temporary Major William Sydney Jordan, aged 35, a native of Timaru, who was a reporter on the "New Zealand Herald" before he joined the N,Z.E.F. at the outbreak of the war. His mother, Mrs. C. M. Jordan, lives in Hamilton.
For a while he was an official war correspondent in the Middle East. He volunteered there for special operations, involving parachute and commando training, and jumped first into Greece,' where he spent fifteen months, then into the south of France, whence he has just returned.
He wears the ribbon of the M.B.E., the insignia of a parachuter, and the emblem qf the French Maquis forces.
Little may yet be told of the work of this officer and his colleagues. He himself is reluctant to describe his own part in it, but the veil has been lifted enough to reveal the extraordinary nature of the lives they have led in occupied territory. Their jobs were created for them, as Major Jordan says, by the fact that, there are men and women everywhere who love their freedom and know how to fight for it.
His first task took him to Greece, in search of an Allied party dropped earlier, but which had lost contact with the outside world.
A BAD LANDING.
He looks back on that first jump as the hardest, because he was alone, and it was to be his first experience of life in the enemy's midst. The leap was made at dead of night, from a bomber piloted by an Auckland squadron leader, one of a group of Allied pilots and crews to whom he paid a warm tribute for their little-publicised but exacting work.
This venture almost ended in disaster, for his parachute swung him heavily against the rough side of a mountain. All his right ribs and his right elbow were broken and he suffered internal injuries. But he half-crawled, half-walked until he met some guerrillas, who sheltered him for the rest of the night, and then sent him off on a nine-hour journey by mule to a village where a doctor lived.
In that village he met a member of the party he was looking for, and there as he recuperated he organised the first successful radio link between the Greek guerrilla forces and the Middle East.
Within a month of his landing, however, the party was being harried by a strong force of Italians. They lost all but one of their radio sets, and that narrowly survived destruction when the mule carrying it rolled over into a gorge from a mountain track. For the rest of his fifteen months in Greece he did liaison and sabotage work with the guerrilla forces. He and other Allied officers helped to organise bands of Greeks, who aimed constant blows at the German communications by blowing up bridges and roads. He experienced the complications of the six months' civil war between the rival Greek factions, and had a hair-breadth escape from being shot.
A band of Greeks belonging to one of the warring factions stormed his headquarters and after one of his fellow-officers had been shot he himself was ordered to stand in front of the firing squad. The rifles were actually raised at him when one of the party's leaders ordered him to be released.
NEARLY STARVED.
"We went through periods of near-starvation in Greece, and at one stage our military tasks were becoming more and more difficult because we had to devote time to the relief of the civilian population and the distribution of dehydrated food brought in by various means. After the armistice with Italy we had another problem on our hands, in the shape of thousands of Italian soldiers wandering through Greece without food."
Major Jordan had to go to hospital when he left Greece, but within a few weeks was ready for his next task. This time it was in France where he and other Allied officers were charged with co-ordinating the resistance activities of the Maquis with the pre-invasion measures required by the Allied Command.
Again his landing was a rough one. He broke a leg, and could only get first aid treatment for it, and until it set he did his job on his back, being carried in and out of hiding on a stretcher made from parachute silk. Later he went about, in a car armed with a tommy-gun and a pair of crutches, and with a machine-gunner in the front seat.
Maquis groups and Allied officers with them set about making the Germans' movements as difficult its possible. They did this mainly by laying ambushes, and with great success. When the Seventh Army landed, their operations became part of the general military plan.
THE GALLANT MAQUIS.
Major Jordan found the Maquis ready to give full co-operation. He said the resistance movement was magnificent. He instanced the case of a band of a dozen lads in their teens, led by a boy of 18, who ambushed a German convoy and in a three-hour battle against an enemy far more heavily armed, killed about forty and wounded as many others.
"That same band was later part of a force which held out against the Germans in a bitter fight during the last days. They fought until they fell. Most of them the lucky ones, were killed. The wounded were executed by the Germans after being horribly mutilated. I myself have seen the bodies of Maquis wounded and captured and then executed after dreadful things had been done to them."
In the middle of one night, as he drove in a civilian car with the tricolour flying, he met advanced forces of the Seventh Army moving up from the south coast, and he knew his job was almost over. As fate would have it, he suffered yet another accidental injury right at the end. Dodging an Allied convoy, he tripped on his lame leg on the cobbled French road, and broke his left arm.
After what he has been through he looks back with justifiable amusement on one day in a military camp in New Zealand, when the doctors told him he would never be able to go overseas. He was an invalid for several years in his youth.
Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 83, 5 October 1944, Page 8
ONE MAN'S WAR
ASTOUNDING STORY
WORK AMONG PARTISANS
(Official News Service.) LONDON, October 2.
A former New Zealand newspaperman, and an officer in the Second Division, arrived here with a limp and his arm in a sling, and with one of the most fascinating stories of the war, of the part he and other officers had been playing for months far behind the enemy's lines, in helping to organise resistance by patriot forces.
He is Temporary Major William Sydney Jordan, aged 35, a native of Timaru, who was a reporter on the "New Zealand Herald" before he joined the N,Z.E.F. at the outbreak of the war. His mother, Mrs. C. M. Jordan, lives in Hamilton.
For a while he was an official war correspondent in the Middle East. He volunteered there for special operations, involving parachute and commando training, and jumped first into Greece,' where he spent fifteen months, then into the south of France, whence he has just returned.
He wears the ribbon of the M.B.E., the insignia of a parachuter, and the emblem qf the French Maquis forces.
Little may yet be told of the work of this officer and his colleagues. He himself is reluctant to describe his own part in it, but the veil has been lifted enough to reveal the extraordinary nature of the lives they have led in occupied territory. Their jobs were created for them, as Major Jordan says, by the fact that, there are men and women everywhere who love their freedom and know how to fight for it.
His first task took him to Greece, in search of an Allied party dropped earlier, but which had lost contact with the outside world.
A BAD LANDING.
He looks back on that first jump as the hardest, because he was alone, and it was to be his first experience of life in the enemy's midst. The leap was made at dead of night, from a bomber piloted by an Auckland squadron leader, one of a group of Allied pilots and crews to whom he paid a warm tribute for their little-publicised but exacting work.
This venture almost ended in disaster, for his parachute swung him heavily against the rough side of a mountain. All his right ribs and his right elbow were broken and he suffered internal injuries. But he half-crawled, half-walked until he met some guerrillas, who sheltered him for the rest of the night, and then sent him off on a nine-hour journey by mule to a village where a doctor lived.
In that village he met a member of the party he was looking for, and there as he recuperated he organised the first successful radio link between the Greek guerrilla forces and the Middle East.
Within a month of his landing, however, the party was being harried by a strong force of Italians. They lost all but one of their radio sets, and that narrowly survived destruction when the mule carrying it rolled over into a gorge from a mountain track. For the rest of his fifteen months in Greece he did liaison and sabotage work with the guerrilla forces. He and other Allied officers helped to organise bands of Greeks, who aimed constant blows at the German communications by blowing up bridges and roads. He experienced the complications of the six months' civil war between the rival Greek factions, and had a hair-breadth escape from being shot.
A band of Greeks belonging to one of the warring factions stormed his headquarters and after one of his fellow-officers had been shot he himself was ordered to stand in front of the firing squad. The rifles were actually raised at him when one of the party's leaders ordered him to be released.
NEARLY STARVED.
"We went through periods of near-starvation in Greece, and at one stage our military tasks were becoming more and more difficult because we had to devote time to the relief of the civilian population and the distribution of dehydrated food brought in by various means. After the armistice with Italy we had another problem on our hands, in the shape of thousands of Italian soldiers wandering through Greece without food."
Major Jordan had to go to hospital when he left Greece, but within a few weeks was ready for his next task. This time it was in France where he and other Allied officers were charged with co-ordinating the resistance activities of the Maquis with the pre-invasion measures required by the Allied Command.
Again his landing was a rough one. He broke a leg, and could only get first aid treatment for it, and until it set he did his job on his back, being carried in and out of hiding on a stretcher made from parachute silk. Later he went about, in a car armed with a tommy-gun and a pair of crutches, and with a machine-gunner in the front seat.
Maquis groups and Allied officers with them set about making the Germans' movements as difficult its possible. They did this mainly by laying ambushes, and with great success. When the Seventh Army landed, their operations became part of the general military plan.
THE GALLANT MAQUIS.
Major Jordan found the Maquis ready to give full co-operation. He said the resistance movement was magnificent. He instanced the case of a band of a dozen lads in their teens, led by a boy of 18, who ambushed a German convoy and in a three-hour battle against an enemy far more heavily armed, killed about forty and wounded as many others.
"That same band was later part of a force which held out against the Germans in a bitter fight during the last days. They fought until they fell. Most of them the lucky ones, were killed. The wounded were executed by the Germans after being horribly mutilated. I myself have seen the bodies of Maquis wounded and captured and then executed after dreadful things had been done to them."
In the middle of one night, as he drove in a civilian car with the tricolour flying, he met advanced forces of the Seventh Army moving up from the south coast, and he knew his job was almost over. As fate would have it, he suffered yet another accidental injury right at the end. Dodging an Allied convoy, he tripped on his lame leg on the cobbled French road, and broke his left arm.
After what he has been through he looks back with justifiable amusement on one day in a military camp in New Zealand, when the doctors told him he would never be able to go overseas. He was an invalid for several years in his youth.
