Hellas, SS Hellas, & ‘Hell-As’:Piraeus, 24 April 1941

On 24 April 1941, 21-year-old Frank Joseph Gill was in the port of Piraeus, unimaginably far from his home in Liverpool, England. His sweat-stained uniform showed that he was a Lance-Corporal in the Royal Engineers. He was part of a band of servicemen from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand who had been ordered to evacuate from Greece, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of German troops. Along with hundreds of civilians and other servicemen, he boarded the yacht SS Hellas, setting up his gun on the upper deck.

Initially, he was impressed: SS Hellas was formerly the luxury steamship, Valiant. A large yacht, 94 metres long, with a beam of 12 metres, and capable of traveling at 18 knots, it had once been commissioned by U.S. tycoon William Vanderbilt. In 1941, however, it had entered Piraeus port where its Greek captain (who immediately absconded with the crew) claimed it could transport civilians and troops to the relative safety of Egypt. Unfortunately, it was carrying guns and crates of ammunition; it was also not displaying a Red Cross flag. This made it a legitimate target for the Luftwaffe.

The luxury yacht SS Hellas prior to the war.

SS Hellas was still under anchor when, just before sunset at 7pm, seven German Stuka dive-bombers swooped from the skies, machine-guns ablaze. Five bombs fell directly on the Hellas, setting it on fire and partially destroying the yacht’s only gangway. Because the boilers had received a direct hit, the fire-fighting equipment was useless. Another three bombs hit the jetty, destroying the fire-hoses on land.

Memories of what happened next haunted Gill for his entire life. Decades later, he could still conjure up the

screams of women and children and men still alive….  I saw a girl pinned to a cabin door with shrapnel through her stomach. Bits of arms, legs, heads and bodies lay all over the place. Blood was pouring from everywhere. What terrible sights!

Severely burnt, covered in blood, and with the bones of his arm sticking out at right angles, he was powerless to help others: all he could hope for was to get ‘off that HELL-AS’.

Frank Gill being interviewed about his war experiences.

Later, Frank Gill discovered that April 1941 had been one of the most dangerous months in modern Greek history. On the day SS Hellas was bombed, German troops were less than 60 kilometers from Athens. Three days later, they would enter Athens and, in the words of an Australian journalist at the time, ‘the crooked cross of evil’ would be ‘hoisted on the sacred rock of the Acropolis’.

Gill was lucky to escape alive. No-one knows exactly how many people were on board when SS Hellas was attacked but there were probably around 1,000 people, including 500 British civilians, mainly elderly Maltese and Cypriots accompanying children to safety. There were also around 400 wounded or sick soldiers from British and Australian hospitals in Athens, and British troops from the 580^th Army troops Company Royal Engineers, New Zealanders from the 4^th Reserve Mechanical Transport Company (who had been repairing military vehicles in Athens), and New Zealanders from the 28^th (Māori) Battalion who, as part of the NZ Division’s 5^th Brigade, had come to Greece from Egypt in late March 1941 to defend northern Greece against German invasion through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.

On 21 April, British Command had ordered all these troops to leave Greece. The Māori soldiers were supposed to have been evacuated from Porto Rafti in East Attica but had been separated from the rest of the battalion after mistakenly following trucks transporting Australian troops to Piraeus. When they boarded SS Hellas, they had no idea that, within fifteen minutes, the boat would be ablaze, trapping hundreds of soldiers and civilians in burning cabins. Between 400 and 700 people died of bullet and shrapnel wounds; others drowned in the oil-slick sea or when the boat capsized. Hundreds were burnt alive. Those who survived were taken to a nearby warehouse and then to hospitals in Athens where, a few days later, they were taken prisoner by the Germans. They eventually ended up in camps in Poland and Germany.

Although being a POW was frightening, it was not as traumatizing as witnessing the agonizing deaths of friends and fellow passengers. One of the most harrowing accounts comes from Miki Harrison of the Māori Battalion. He had grown up in Waipiro Bay, an isolated, sulfuric town on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island, and had befriended Percy Goldsmith. They may have even enlisted together. Harrison and Goldsmith shared a regional culture: Goldsmith was from nearby Ruatōria, a regional trading post but known primarily for its two-storied, drinking establishment called the Ruatōria Hotel and its famously high rainfall. In Greece, however, they found themselves (literally) at the other end of the world from their native land. And not prepared for what they would face.

Half a century after the war, Harrison was still visibly upset when he was interviewed about the death of his friend. Speaking a mixture of Māori and English (today, 44 per cent of people in the region speak Māori and it would have been much higher in the 1940s), he recalled that

Oh, poor bugger… his [intestines] was laid bare/opened up. That’s when he called to me, ‘Brother, I’m buggered, shoot me…. Come on, shoot me’.... And another Pommie [slang for an Englishman] boy came crawling up. All his hands were shattered and half his face here was taken off. And I thought, well, if I have to shoot you, I have to shoot him too. I don’t want two on my hands…. Even now and again I hear that, him calling to me, ‘Brother, brother, shoot me!’…. So I turned away from him and I could hear him [say], ‘You gutless bastard!’

Like Gill, Harrison was also taken prisoner by the Germans.

Miki Harrison in the 1940s and in 1994.

In contrast, Private E. S. A. Ward, an Australian from Port Macquarie in New South Wales, had also been wounded when SS Hellas was attacked, but was one of the lucky ones: he was eventually invalided back to Australia. Five months later, he told New Zealand’s Central Hawke’s Bay Press that

Dive bombers set the ship on fire and flaming oil soon surrounded her…. Screaming women and children either jumped over-board and were drowned or were incinerated. Many wounded soldiers had no chance of escaping. Maoris, every one a hero, repeatedly dashed through the flames and rescued women and children who otherwise would have been burned alive.

Ward was almost certainly aware that he was speaking to a New Zealand audience: reports of gallant Māoris soldiers was exaggeration. Newspaper reports on the attack on SS Hellas were full of inaccuracies, including the repeated claim that the boat had been attacked by ‘about twenty [as opposed to seven] Stukas screaming down out of the setting sun’. Dozens of newspapers at the time described the New Zealand and Australian troops as ‘sturdy warriors… lean and brown and hard after months of fighting in the Libyan desert’, coming to help

Greece, ancient and modern, blended with the same ideals and traditions throughout the misty ages of perpetuated struggles against invaders from north and south, east and west. And these [Australians and New Zealander soldiers] were the men from the distant antipodes, who went to fight in a foreign land, but not for a foreign cause.

In reality, there was little that even the most ‘lean and brown and hard’ warriors could have done, especially since the men, women, and children who managed to make their way down the crippled gangplank were being shot at by ‘Fifth Columnists’ or German sympathizers who were ‘up on the roofs… firing down at everyone getting off the ship’, as Gill recalled.

For all the survivors, their ordeal did not end with the bombing of SS Hellas. Gill provides the most detailed account. In the hospital in Athens, Gill met a Kiwi [a New Zealander] who, despite having both legs and one arm amputated, was attempting to roll his own cigarette. When a fellow soldier offered to do it for him, he dismissed him with the words: ‘no, you won’t! Because I’ve got to learn to do it’. He died of pneumonia not long afterwards. Another patient had burns all over his body due to a fireball that enveloped him when a bullet penetrated a petrol tank. In the hospital, he was ‘screaming like anything… and they had to tie him as best they could to a frame of the bed because every time he moved or anyone touched him he would scream out’.  At one stage, a wounded Cretan soldier was placed in Gill’s ward. He had been found in a ditch and had

maggots falling out of his nose because, apparently, he had had 5 or 7 bullets in his head. And as they brought him in, he was shouting out, ‘Take me home! My mother will look after me!’ And words like that made you feel so so sad.

Believing he was dying, the hospital staff simply made him comfortable in a bed near to Gill. Then, in between ‘shouting for his mum’, he ‘asked for a urine instrument to urinate because he wanted to pass water’. The hospital staff were busy so he ‘threw the sheets back and urinated on the floor and when they saw that they realized that he hadn’t gone as far as they thought’ so they operated on him. Gill did not know whether or not he survived.

But Gill recalled other incidents, some of which reflected badly on the Allied soldiers. On one occasion, a severely wounded Italian soldier was placed in their ward. Because Italy was an ally of the Germans, the other patients would deliberately ‘hit his leg to hear him scream with the pain. And the lads would laugh’. Gill admitted: me, too.

In the carnage of war, these anecdotes may seem minor, but they represent the atrocious nature of armed conflict, when men (and some women) who had been accustomed to working in shops in Liverpool or farms in New Zealand and Australia were recruited to kill other human beings – often in ways intended to cause the most pain.

On 24 April 1941, an unknown number of civilian men, women, and children were killed on SS Hellas. They have no graves or memorials. The military personnel who died throughout the war in Greece have their names engraved on the war memorial in Phaleron War Cemetery in Kalamaki, just outside of Athens. As yet, Piraeus itself has no memorial to those who suffered and died on SS Hellas.

Decades later, there was remorse as well as pain in Gill’s voice when he asked: ‘what good is a war?! What does it do you when you have to suffer?’

The Phaleron War Cemetery in Athens, commemorating Commonwealth troops (including those on SS Hellas) killed while defending Greece.

If you are interested in this blog, you might want to take a look at another one, entitled 'Athens: A Guide to the City' at https://www.joannabourke.com/post/athens-a-guide-to-the-city.