Diggers and Greeks
The Australian Campaigns in Greece and Crete
Maria
Hill
Sydney: University of New South Wales Press,
2011
Hardcover.
xvi-479 pp. ISBN 9781742230146. $(Aus)59.95
Reviewed
by Augustine Meaher
Department of Political and
Strategic Studies, Baltic Defence
College, Tartu (Estonia)
Maria Hill has correctly identified the Australian campaigns in Greece and Crete as being largely overlooked in Australia’s
Second World War history. Hill attempts to correct this oversight by examining civil-military
relations between the Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF) and Greek
civilians. Diggers and Greeks: The
Australian Campaigns in Greece and Crete is well illustrated with excellent
maps and pictures, and it presents an engaging but overstated argument. The
book is at its best when dealing with Australian-Greek interaction [127-194
& 262-373], and if the University of New South Wales Press had insisted on
a more focused and economical book, Hill would have succeeded in producing an
excellent one-volume analysis of the Australian role in the Greek campaign. Instead,
Hill produced an unnecessarily long work that is excellent and insightful in
places and seriously flawed in others.
Hill
transformed her PhD thesis into a monograph but was unable to decide if she was
producing an academic or popular history, and the result is a disappointing
mixture. Her work retains many unnecessary PhD legacies such as conclusions at
the end of each chapter and long block quotes from secondary sources. She also
fails to place Greece
in the Second World War into a European or global context, and thus makes
sweeping and often unsupportable claims that reflect poorly on a good scholar. These
would not be an issue if Hill had focused strictly on Greco-Australian civil-military
relations, but she is determined to argue not only that the Greek campaign has been
overlooked—which it has—but also that it was a major campaign of the war, which
it most certainly was not.
Hill’s
belief that the Greek campaign was a major event in the war is only possible if
one ignores that the campaign was actually very short and that Greece was never strategically important to Great Britain.
Ironically, Greece’s
lack of strategic importance actually explains many of the flaws in the
campaign that Hill unsuccessfully explains by resorting to questionable
secondary sources such as David Day’s Menzies
and Churchill at War. Hill fails to appreciate that the Mediterranean
had been a French responsibility in pre-war planning, and that this, rather
than cultural insensitivity or political intrigue, explains Britain’s lack of adequate information about Greece and the
Greek military. Hill is all too quick to fall into the Australian habit of
blaming Churchill for virtually everything that went wrong with the campaign,
while the Greek government is portrayed as blameless, if largely incompetent. Hill
also displays a shocking lack of knowledge about the limitations Australia
accepted by opting out of the Statute of Westminster, which is essential to
understanding the conduct of Australian foreign and defence policy prior to
1943.
Once
Hill delves into Greco-Australian civil-military relations, however, Diggers and Greeks becomes a valuable
source for future historians. She reveals that larrikinism was a key aspect of
Australian life, and that Australian conduct in Greece
was very different from Australian conduct in Egypt. Her argument that “The
relationship that emerged between Australian soldiers and [Greek] civilians
during the war was warm, sincere and enduring” [187] is well founded and helps
to explain post-war Greco–Australian relations, especially the reception of
Greek migrants in post-war Australia. Even more important is Hill’s discovery
that “Australians were able to harness the goodwill of the Greek people because
of the respect they had shown for Greek values and customs” [383]. This
discovery provides a valuable insight into the Greek campaign, and Hill has
collated excellent examples of civil-military relations in the field and their
importance in military operations.
Yet,
even when discussing civil-military relations in the field, Hill is prone to
sweeping generalisations about how little the suffering of Greeks is
acknowledged in the English literature. There are actually many books on the
subject, most notably Hondros’ Occupation
and Resistance: The Greek Agony, Hionidou’s Famine
and Death in Occupied Greece,
and Mazower’s Inside
Hitler’s Greece, but Hill
only consulted the last of these. Such generalisations are expected in popular
history, but in an academic history—which this book claims to and should be—they
are inappropriate. They would have been avoided if Hill had shown a deeper
knowledge of the Mediterranean theatre and the Second World War. Hill’s failure
to consult Douglas Porch’s Hitler’s
Mediterranean Gamble is difficult to fathom. Porch’s arguments must be
considered in any serious work on the Mediterranean theatre.
Despite its many flaws, Diggers and Greeks provides an excellent insight into the conduct
of Australian servicemen in Greece
and how they interacted with Greek civilians. Maria Hill correctly indentified
the Greek campaign as one needing further research. Diggers and Greeks offers a valuable insight into the role of
Australians in Greece, and
numerous vignettes detailing one of the many campaigns in the Mediterranean.
However, it is not the one-volume history of the Greek campaign that Hill
correctly states we need. Future historians will have to place Hill’s arguments
and evidence into the broader Mediterranean
and Second World War story. She has provided a wealth of interesting examples
that will enrich their work and ensure that Greek civilians are not excluded
from accounts of the Greek and Cretan campaigns.
