For two nights have waited on quayside lying on ground, finally in shattered steel box numbed by noise of bombing. I was sleeping fitfully, almost despairing, woken every few minutes by the Scumbarda battery blazing away to keep Jerry awake, and reflected I was living worse than a tramp, absolutely filthy. Unbathed for eight days, clothes not off, ditto, gradually losing all gear, and no home—choice either crowded, dusty, smoky, overcrowded tunnel on hill or overcrowded Iti [Italian] naval headquarters, where Itis having nothing else to do but rush in and out, although bombers miles away. Then wake with start to find a destroyer alongside, and troops slid down chute, scrambled down ladders, ammo dumped ashore. “Well done, arrival of these troops should make all the difference.”
Such were the candid, if dismal, impressions of Leonard Marsland Gander, the only Allied war correspondent on the Greek island of Leros during a five-day battle for its control, as recorded in his notebook on Nov. 15, 1943. Whomever Gander quoted regarding the landing of British reinforcements was overly optimistic. They would make no difference whatsoever.
Leros is one of 15 main islands among 150 smaller ones that constitute the Dodecanese archipelago in the southeastern Aegean Sea, which in the fall of 1943 was the unlikely setting for a series of air-sea landings by German forces. Two months later defending British troops were subjected to a humiliating defeat, with some islands
