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LOCAL HISTORY
The Battle of Crete
(I Mahi Tis Kritis, Μάχη της Κρήτης)
Bdr Charles Leaver. AWM photo PO2466.039
Eighty years ago, on 20 May 1941, Nazi Germany launched an airborne invasion of the island of Crete. They expected to be welcomed by the locals, and to meet little allied resistance, but they were very wrong.
Along with Greek soldiers and the people of Crete, Australian, New Zealand, Indian and British troops fiercely defended the island. The battle lasted thirteen days, but the bonds formed between the Cretans and the Anzacs were enduring.
A number of men from the Georges River area fought in the battle. Nearly 300 Australians were killed in action and over 1,000 were wounded; and 3,100 Australians, mostly from the infantry battalions were taken prisoner of war by the Germans. Those who were taken prisoner had to endure great privation for the remainder of the war. The people of Crete put up strong resistance to German occupation, and 30,000 of them died during the course of the war.
Among those who gave their lives was Kogarah man, Bombardier Charles James Leaver, of the 2/3rd Field Regiment, who was killed in action on 27 May 1941, aged 26. He grew up in Ocean Street, Kogarah, where his mother still lived. He is remembered on the Athens Memorial at Phaleron Cemetery.
The wounded included Gunner Ronald Dixon, of Carlton, a former pupil of Hurstville Central Technical School.
Many local men who served in Greece and Crete are legion, most of whom had previously fought in North Africa. A number were taken prisoner of war, including Private Roy Bowmaker of Lugarno who had previously fought in Libya and Greece; Corporal Alston Fowler of Hurstville; Private Norman Freeberg of Penshurst; Private Lionel Paynter, Corporal Frank Collins, and brothers Sydney and Walter Malcolm of Hurstville. They were to spend four years in a Stalag before liberation in 1945. Driver William Illingworth, a resident of Ramsgate, was imprisoned and repatriated in 1944.
Other local men who were involved in the Crete campaign were able to escape, with the help of locals who faced the danger of savage reprisals from the Nazis. They included Private Rupert Brooks of Penshurst, Private Keith Thompson of Kogarah and Alfred Hawkins of Oatley. Driver John Glossop, of Forest Road had previously been wounded in World War One. Following his escape, Captain R J F McIntosh, whose parents lived at Hurstville, retuned to Australia to marry in 1942.
Corporal Walter Leslie Bowman, another to escape, was awarded the George Medal for gallantry displayed at Tobruk. He was a former resident of Hurstville, whose sister was Mrs Barter, of Barter’s department store in Forest Road. Warrant-Officer Herbert Doig, who had been Hurstville Council’s Health Inspector before the war, was involved in setting up military sanitation on the island, and was mentioned in despatches for his efforts in fighting both disease and the enemy. On his return to Hurstville in May 1942, he was interviewed by the Propeller newspaper. Referring to the hasty reinforcement of the island by allied troops, he stated “Some of the men landed there without even so much as a hat, and they nicknamed the place ‘The Island of Doomed Men’, such was their plight”.
At Rethymno on Crete, where Australian and local forces held back the German paratroopers in May 1941, the local community erected a memorial to commemorate the event. A plaque on the memorial records every major Australian unit that fought the Germans on the island. In Canberra, the Australia Hellenic Memorial, a Doric column representing civilization, is at the top of Anzac Parade, close to the Australian War Memorial, and commemorates all who died in the Allied campaigns in Greece and Crete in 1941.
Herbert Doig, 1926
Street parade, Mort’s Road, 1920, open-air picture show in background
What’s in a name? Mortdale
The name ‘Mortdale’ commemorates the innovative businessman Thomas Sutcliffe Mort, who acquired a large land-holding in the area in the 1850s. Mort’s land was subdivided into small farms and orchards, straddling either side of ‘Mort’s Road’.
The face of Mortdale transformed with the arrival of W G Judd’s Hurstville Steam Brick Company. Judd’s brickwork was the dominant industry in Mortdale for many years, and its chimneys stood out over the suburb until their demolition in 1973. The Oatley Senior Campus of Georges River College now stands on the site of the brickworks.
With the arrival of the Illawarra Railway, the suburb of Mortdale began to take shape. A post office and public school both opened in 1889. The first Mortdale Station had to wait until 1897, to be replaced in 1922 by the current platform.
Shops grew up along Morts Road and Pitt Street. Daniel Saltwell’s Hotel in The Avenue opened in 1895, and its license was transferred in 1930 to the new Mortdale Hotel in George Street. An open-air picture show, in the vicinity of present-day 60 Morts Road, brought cinema to Mortdale from 1915 onwards. Although its days were numbered when the glamorous air-conditioned Paramount Theatre opened in 1929.
From 1908, Mortdale had its own Fire Station, manned by volunteers who earned half-a-crown for every call-out. Its engine was drawn by horses, which cropped a nearby paddock when they were off-duty. It remains Sydney’s oldest operational volunteer fire brigade.
Headmaster and teachers of Mortdale Public School, 1924
