The Cyprus Regiment

The Cyprus Regiment – Part 1

[PHOTOS COMING SOON]

At the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, the British Governor of Cyprus, William Battershill, called on young and able Cypriot men to join the British Forces. Posters with the heading ‘Recruitment of Cypriots for His Majesty’s Forces’ were plastered all over the island with the following information: “The Cyprus Regiment consists of infantry, motor-transport, pack-transport, and pioneer companies. Enlistment will be for the duration of the present emergency with general service in any part of the world. To be accepted for the Regiment, you must prove British Nationality; have no serious crime record and considered a desirably character; you must be physically fit for service in any part of the world; you must be over 20 years old and under 35 (ex-service men, ex-members of The Cyprus Police Force, and specialist tradesmen may be under 42 years old); and you must be taller than 5′ 2” and over 110 lbs. (or 40 okes) in weight.” As for the privileges of service, the British Government offered volunteers; good pay and allowances; free food, housing and blankets; free issue of uniform and kit; free hospital treatment and free dental treatment. Furthermore, if a soldier is discharged as unfit for service as a result of wounds or disease, he will receive a disability pension. If a soldier is killed in action or dies from wounds or disease, his wife, (or if unmarried, his legal dependants), will be eligible for a pension. The pay for a Cypriot solidier varied according to three criteria. (1) their military status (Sergeant, Corporal, Private), (2) whether they were married or single or had children and (3) whether they served in Cyprus or abroad. For example: a solider classified as a Private who was single would earn 9 shillings a week whilst serving in Cyprus or 14 shillings a week whilst serving abroad. On the other hand, a Private who was married would earn 17 shillings a week whilst serving in Cyprus or 7 shillings a week whilst serving abroad and his wife would receive 15 shillings plus 2 extra shillings a week for each child. A solider classified as a Sergeant who was single would earn 1 pound and 8 shillings a week whilst serving in Cyprus or 2 pounds and 2 shillings a week whilst serving abroad. If the Sergeant was married with children and serving abroad, he would receive 1 pound and 1 shilling and his wife would receive up to 1 pound and 14 shillings a week. It’s fair to say that many Cypriots decided to enlist as volunteers for the Cyprus Regiment because of the promise of weekly pay and allowances. Recruiting started in October 1939 in Nicosia. By the end of the month, 500 men had enlisted to work as car drivers, engineers, clerks and cooks. According to records, the first Cypriot to enlist was a Turkish Cypriot named Nevzat Halil from Nicosia. In November, a second recruitment office was set up in Polemidia, outside Limassol where there was also a large army recruit training centre. The Cyprus Regiment was formally established In February 1940. The Cyprus Volunteer Force (CVF) was established in June 1940 after Italy entered the war in support of Hitler and Nazi Germany. According to official records, a total of 16.642 Cypriots had enlisted during the Second World War; 12.192 had joined the Cyprus Regiment and 4.450 Cypriots had joined the Cyprus Volunteer Force. The majority of volunteers (5.155) joined in 1940 after Italy invaded Greece. The slogan used in recruitment posters at the time was ‘Join the British Army to fight for Greece and for your own freedom’. The second greatest surge occurred in June 1943, after AKEL (The Progressive Party of Working People) called on it’s members to join the fight against fascism. The Cyprus Regiment included mule drivers, general transport, mobile washing units, landing craft, an infantry battalion and a battalion of engineers. They served in various fronts in France, East Africa, Greece, Crete, Syria and Italy. Some 15,000 Cypriots manned units in the Middle East. Apart from the Cyprus Regiment, another 7,000 Cypriot soldiers were conscripted from England. Cypriot women also joined as volunteers during the Second World War although, understandably, their numbers were quite small. Records show that around 200 Cypriot women served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service known as ATS which was based in the Middle East. After they underwent training, they took up duties such as drivers, mechanics and storekeepers to replace the men who were sent to the front. The Cypriot mule drivers (muleteers) were especially praised for their courage and expertise during the Second World War. In fact, they were the first colonial troops sent to the western front. During the harsh winter months of 1940, they served in the front lines of France carrying equipment to areas inaccessible to vehicles. They confronted with courage and stamina the difficult conditions and the extreme cold and acquired the fame of exemplary performance of their duties. Cypriot mule drivers were also present in the all-night march to Dunkirk where they suffered the hardships of the evacuation of the British expedition corps. They also took part in the Ethiopian expedition where their contribution was seen of tremendous importance. Apart from transporting equipment to inaccessible areas, the muleteers, under a barrage of constant fire, reinforced decisively the fighting forces there and contributed to the successful outcome of the siege of Keren in less time than first envisaged. In the battle of Montecassino in Italy, (February-May 1944), the Cypriot mule drivers distinguished themselves again for their courage and self-sacrifice. Under a hail of bullets, bombs and an avalanche of rock, they carried military equipment up the rocky hill and brought down the wounded, whilst offering support to the Polish army corps fighting there. Other theatres of war which witnessed the bravery of the Cyprus Regiment included the Western Desert, Eritrea, Syria, Greece and Crete. In Greece, the Cyprus Regiment proved to be worthy of honour and glory. In early 1941 sapper forces were sent to Greece to help the allied troops. Together with the British Engineers their mission was to construct airfields and roads and transport supplies and ammunition to the front lines. The conditions under which the Cypriot soldiers worked during the advance of the Germans were most difficult, with frequent and heavy bombing and artillery fire from low flying fighter planes. Despite all this, their morale remained high. When the allied forces were forced to retreat, some of the Cypriots recouped in the Athens area and managed to be included in the evacuation. Others however, were sent to Nafplion and Kalamata from where, some 2,500 Cypriots were captured and taken as prisoners of war where they were detained in concentration camps across Germany, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Italy. It is reported that thirty-five Cypriot prisoners died of deprivation in those camps while others were executed. Some managed to escape but most were liberated at the end of the war in 1945. In total, 374 Cypriot soldiers, (including a woman) died while serving in his Majesty’s Forces during the Second World War. Their tombs and graves can be found in cemeteries scattered across 23 countries. The island of Cyprus only suffered limited air raids during the war with the first taking place on the 22nd September 1940 in Xeros followed by around thirty air raids targeting Nicosia airport and the Port of Famagusta. As to the military personnel stationed in Cyprus there was around 10,500 men, of whom 1,500 were Britons, 6,000 Indians and the rest Cypriots. END OF PART ONE Next week I will like to present some true-life stories about the Second World War as told by those who served with the Regiment.

 

The Cyprus Regiment – Part 2

Erdoğan Hasan In 1940, after the outbreak of World War Two, Erdoğan Hasan, aged twenty-one, decided to join the Cypriot Regiment. According to his sons Eren and Sermen, he was trained at the Polemidia army base in Limassol and then sent to Lebanon as a muleteer. He was soon promoted to the rank of Corporal and spent almost four years in Italy where he was stationed near Naples and Rome. Erdoğan was able to learn English and Italian during his time overseas. He was also fluent in Greek, which he was able to learn in his village Polis, interacting with Greek friends and neighbours. When the war ended, Erdoğan returned to Cyprus and opened up a nightclub in Polis with his friend and fellow regiment volunteer, Mustafa Şükrü. Apparently, the nightclub was very popular with the local men, especially since scantily clad female dancers were brought over from Italy to perform there. One of the dancers was a woman named Valenzuela Guerriero, whom Erdoğan had met when he was stationed in Naples during the war. Philippos Ioannou In 1942, seventeen-year-old Philippos decided to join the Cyprus Regiment as a volunteer to assist the Allied war effort. Perhaps it was the lure of getting paid two shillings a day or the promise of free cigarettes that enticed him. “We would receive fifty cigarettes a week,” he tells me. “During the Second World War, some Cypriot women were paid three pence a day (two piasters) to fill large army tins with sand, which were loaded onto trucks and transported to Limassol to be used as fortification in case the Germans invaded Cyprus.” Soon after he joined the Regiment, Philippos was sent abroad to Syria and then on to Palestine, Egypt, and finally, to the war front in Italy. It was in Egypt however, when during a training exercise, an English Corporal struck Philippos across the head. “He hit me across the head because I wasn’t following his orders,” says Philippos. “So I hit him back. I was immediately court-martialled and sent by ship to Italy. On that ship I was locked up in a small cabin and guarded night and day by these two Cypriot soldiers. I began shouting at them from my cell. ‘You idiots! Where do you think I will escape to? I’m on a ship for Christ’s sake – in the middle of the ocean.’ They just laughed at me. What could they do.” The Cypriot Regiment consisted of muleteers (or pack transport units) whose main task was to transport food, supplies and ammunition to the British troops fighting at the front line of battle. According to Philippos, the front-line colonial soldiers were mainly from India and Africa. Philippos was not afraid of the horrors of war, and was often the first to lead his two mules to the front line. Each Cypriot muleteer was expected to lead two (and sometimes three) pack animals. On one occasion however, one of the mules that Philippos was leading stepped on a land mine and was instantly ripped to shreds. The shrapnel from the blast injured and wounded a number of the other animals and soldiers, including Philippos. Medical officers quickly bandaged his wound and after a few days rest, he was deemed fit to return to duty. Philippos was one of the lucky ones. It is estimated that around 370 Cypriots were killed in action during the war. This was nothing compared to the casualties suffered by other colonial soldiers. According to Philippos, the Germans slaughtered so many African soldiers that their bayonet blades became blunt and bent. He also recalls how the English commanding officers would scare the African soldiers by telling them that the Cypriot volunteers were in fact cannibals. Philippos could never understand why the African soldiers would recoil back in fear whenever he approached them with fresh supplies. An unexpected surprise for Philippos and the other Cypriot volunteers was the abundance of food that they found in the abandoned towns and villages across Italy. “Whenever we entered a new village we would find all the houses deserted but plenty of food and wine left behind. We would eat and drink what we wanted and our commanding officers didn’t care. I can tell you that not a single Cypriot volunteer went hungry in Italy.” In 1946. after the war, Philippos returned to Cyprus. He was now twenty-one years old. With the money that he earned as a volunteer, he was able to buy a fishing boat. Georgios Hadji Christofi Georgios Hadji Christofi joined the Cypriot Regiment in early 1941, leaving his pregnant mother Kyriakou and two daughters in Agios Athanasios. Like his father Aristovoulos, who had served as a muleteer in the Great War, Georgios became a volunteer for the financial rewards offered by the British Government. After a few weeks training at the Polemidia military camp, he was shipped to Greece. Sometime in late 1941, Georgios and his unit were captured by the Germans while they were defending the port of Kalamata. After a brief internment in Thessaloniki, the Cypriot prisoners were transferred to the Aussig concentration camp in Sudetenland (now Dubí in the Czech Republic). Georgios knew to behave himself to avoid the swift and deadly retribution often inflicted by the guards. “My father did what he was told,” his son Andreas tells me. “There was this one Cypriot prisoner who refused to salute a German Officer and he was shot dead on the spot.” Georgios witnessed the extermination of the Jewish people In Aussig, “My father told me that the poor Jews were stripped naked and marched off to the gas chambers,” adds Andreas. “Men, women and children. It was horrible. By comparison, my father and the other British prisoners were cared for and looked after very well. Britain would ship over crates of food through the Red Cross. In fact, my father put on weight during the war, while the Jews were starved and exterminated. It was horrible.” Remarkably, Georgios was sent to work in a factory in Aussig where he helped to prepare and package supplies of food, general goods and alcohol. “There were lots of young pretty German girls who worked there,” says Andreas. “Oh boy. These girls were very flirtatious and they taught my father how to speak German. He was kept very busy in that factory – if you know what I mean?” After a while Georgios was allowed to assist the German officials with their deliveries to. As a driver, he was able to mix and socialise with the local German population. Andreas went on to explain that his mother received a special bonus by the British Government whilst his father was serving as a volunteer. “Every fifteen days, my mother Kyriakou would go to the English food store at the NAAFI (in Limassol) to buy bags of rice, sugar, coffee, biscuits and chocolate. The NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) was an organisation created by the British government in 1921 to run recreational establishments needed by the British Armed Forces, and to sell goods to servicemen and their families. It offered clubs, bars, shops, supermarkets, launderettes, restaurants, cafés and other facilities. “My mother would often exchange a cup full of sugar or rice with the other women in the village for food that she did not have.” Aussig was liberated by the Russian army in May 1945 and the remaining prisoners were all freed. Georgios convalesced in the United Kingdom for a number of months before he was able to return to Cyprus, where he was reunited with his wife and family. “I didn’t recognise my father when he returned from the war,” laughs Andreas. “I remember I was angry with my mother for letting this strange man share her bed. “’You should be ashamed of yourself mother’, I told her. ‘How dare you let this strange man sleep with you in your bed?’ Anyway, after my father was discharged from the British army, he received 900 pounds for his services as a soldier. Together with the money my mother had saved, our family was able to escape the poverty we had endured before the war. My father found steady work in the stone quarries around Limassol transporting stones to the surrounding villages for the construction of roads and homes. Panayiotis Christoforou Panayiotis Christoforou was born on the 25th of March in 1918 in the village of Lofou. He was a charismatic and renowned rascal in his village and was often in trouble with the police. Somehow, he was able to use his quick wit and charm to get out of trouble. In 1940, Panayiotis married an older woman named Maria Haralambou Moustaka. Although Maria protested against marrying a man who was ten years her junior, her protests fell on deaf ears. After a simple village ceremony, Panayiotis rushed to join the war effort in Europe and enlisted with the Cypriot Regiment. After seeing some action in Tobruk he was captured in 1943 by German soldiers and was sent to a Prisoner of War camp in Germany. Incredibly, he was able to use his natural charm to convince a German officer to recruit him as his personal handyman. The officer took a liking to the charismatic Cypriot and even allowed him to stay in his home, thus sparing him the horrors of the prison camp. In a remarkable and dangerous feat of daring, Panayiotis began a secret affair with the German officer’s young wife. Apparently, sometime after the war, she sent Panayiotis a photo of a child stating that he was the father. She wrote that her husband never suspected anything believing that the child was his own. After the war ended in September 1945, Panayiotis returned to Cyprus and was reunited with his wife Maria. According to those who knew him, he was a changed man. He was once found standing in a field completely naked. The villagers were stunned and did not know why Panayiotis was behaving in this way. Post-traumatic stress was not yet diagnosed as a side-effect of war. Many Cypriot volunteers who had served with the British army are reported to have received no counselling or special medical attention upon their return to the island after the war ended. Alexandros Theodoulos Alexandros Theodoulos joined the Cyprus Regiment and fought against the Germans in Italy. “My father was on the front line with the British soldiers in a place called Monte Cassino,” his daughter Augousta tells me. “He helped in the battle against the Germans.” Monte Cassino (Montecassino) is a rocky hill about eight miles southeast of Rome. During the Second World War, the Germans had occupied a medieval monastery that stood at the top of the rocky hill. Monte Cassino therefore blocked access to Rome for the advancing Allied Forces in Italy. Augousta’s father was part of the advancing force who was trying to take the monastery from the Germans. “My father was stationed in the Middle-East with his regiment for a while before moving on to Italy. He was trained as a muleteer and learned to speak Arabic, English and Italian. He told me that his regiment would transport food and supplies to the soldiers who were fighting the Germans at the monastery but he would always return on his own. The other muleteers and their animals were often shot or blown to bits by the Germans.” At Monte Cassino, Alexandros made friends with an English soldier. One day the solider told Alexandros that he felt like eating ‘bourekia’ (a traditional Cypriot pastry filled with anari cheese). Apparently, Alexandros was known for his culinary skills. “Where do you think we are?” Alexandros told the Englishman. “Look around you. Look where we are. How on earth will I find the ingredients to make bourekia?’ The English soldier told Alexandros that there were many abandoned Italian houses in the region where he could go to find the ingredients. Alexandros finally agreed and went and found the ingredients. As he was cooking the bourekia, a German bomb suddenly exploded nearby. Alexandros along with a Turkish Cypriot muleteer were caught in the blast and buried alive by the rubble. When the other soldiers dug them out, the Turkish Cypriot was dead but miraculously, Alexandros was still alive and survived. Apparently, the English soldier was hiding in a nearby cave eating his beloved bourekia. “When the Germans were finally defeated at Monte Cassino, my father and the other soldiers discovered all these underground tunnels where the Germans were hiding and where they kept all their equipment, automobiles and war machinery. My father found the Germans hiding there. Together with a few other soldiers they set fire at the entrance of these tunnels and the Germans were finished off.” Augousta recalls that the British Army would pay her mother eighteen pounds a month while her father was serving in the regiment “My mother saved every penny and when my father returned from the war in 1946 they bought a large parcel of land, twenty skales in size (around five acres). They planted 100 olive trees. I remember filling the ‘gouzes’ (pots) with water with my siblings and struggling to water all the trees.”

 

The Cyprus Regiment – Part 3

When I first interviewed Charalambos Theodossi back in January 2020, I was taken aback by his incredible recall of fact and living memories as a young volunteer in the Cyprus Regiment. He provided so much information that I have decided to dedicate Part 3 of my Cyprus Regiment series to him and his brother Petros who also served. CHARALAMBOS THEODOSSI Charalambos Theodossi joined the Cyprus Regiment in 1942 a few months after his brother Petros. The brothers however did not meet up during the war as they were stationed in different camps and served in different companies. “There was a lot of poverty and hardship in those times,” Charalambos tells me. “That’s why I decided to join the Cyprus Regiment of the British Army. The first time I went to sign up (in Nicosia) I was turned away by the recruitment officer because I was too young. I was only sixteen. So I went to see the Mukhtari (headman) in my village (Myrtou) who changed the year of my birth from 1926 to 1924. When the recruitment officer saw that I was 18 years old, I was accepted into the Regiment.” After he signed up, Charalambos was taken to the military training barracks in Limassol (Polemidia) where he was dressed like a soldier before being transferred to Mavromouni, near Lefka. “We lived in barracks and slept in camp style beds,” he explains. “There were probably a few thousand soldiers in Mavromouni. Even my school friends from Karavostassi, Potamo tou Gambou, and Xeros were there. We shared the camp with Indian soldiers called Gurkas and we would engage in mock battles with them. I remember they were shorter than us Cypriots. We used blank bullets on each other. The commanding officers were all British. We Cypriot boys knew a little bit of English from what they taught us at school.” Once a week, Charalambos would leave the Mavromouni camp to take his dirty laundry back to his village for his mother to wash. “She used to iron my shirts too,” he admits. “My mother was pleased to see me dressed in my uniform. She was so pleased that her son finally had shoes to wear and looked well fed. I remember we got paid around 10 shillings a week which was a fortune back then. We were also given a bottle of beer, 50 cigarettes and some chocolates each week. I believe that the volunteers who were sent to the front lines were given a bottle of rum instead of beer.” Charalambos was soon transferred from Mavromouni to Yerolacko in Nicosia. “At Yerolacko I was part of a Company that was on-alert in case of enemy attack. Training was vigorous. We would cross the river using rope bridges by hand. Some days we had to march for ten miles. It was exhausting.” In 1943, Charalambos was transferred to Yeri-Xeri to stand guard and look after the Petroleum reserves. “There were lots of thieves around who would steal the petrol,” he explains. “In those days you needed a coupon to get petrol. Then they moved me to Carraolo, Famagusta. I was stationed in Cyprus for a year and in late 1943 we were shipped to Tripoli (and later Zgharta). We were issued Tommy submachine guns.” In Lebanon, Charalambos was sent to the Mule Corp in Tripoli where he served as Corporal. “I was placed in charge of two Ambulance mules. These were two large animals that I would walk and exercise. I was in charge of a group of muleteers and I had to teach them how to march. I think I was the only Cypriot in that unit that had any infantry training. Many of the men didn’t know their left foot from their right foot. What a farce it was. It was pointless shouting out marching orders in English. The muleteers that came from the remote areas of Paphos couldn’t understand a single word of English. I would say to them, when you hear me say the word ‘garlic’ move your left foot forward and when you hear me shout ‘onion’ move your right foot. That is how I taught them how to march as an organised unit.” After a few months, Charalambos’ and his company were sent to Alexandria in Egypt. “We went there by train and then they shipped us all to Italy. We were told that we would be fighting the fascists. I remember we travelled from Ancona to Bologna. There may have been around 600 Cypriots in Bologna. We were part of the Eighth Army which was under the command of General Montgomery. All the senior officers with the rank of Sergeant or higher were English. We taught the English how to swear in Greek and they taught us how to swear in English. The Irish officers were a lot of fun.” Charalambos spent three months at the front line in Bologna. “We had to use mule transportation to take supplies to the English and Polish troops fighting at the front. I was in charge of the mule ambulance. I remember one day, my superior officer ordered me to go and fetch the casualties. When I found out that the casualties were German I said to him. ‘Let’s leave them there. They are the enemy.’ My superior officer became furious and shouted at me. ‘Go and get them you bastard or I’ll shoot you here on the spot.’ So I did what I was told.” According to Charalambos, the Germans took Bologna several times but lost the city to the Allied Forces each time. At one point, the bombardment became so fierce that Charalambos took refuge with an Italian family and was unable to venture outdoors for seven days. Another time, he was almost killed during a bombing campaign. “I jumped into a large crater to avoid being hit by shrapnel. When the bombing eased I climbed out of my hole only to see hundreds of dead bodies strewn across the land. There were bodies all cut up into pieces. It was horrible. I used to count the bombs as they exploded all around me. They were dropping seven bombs in a row; continuously, all day and all night. Sometimes we would hide inside large haylofts. To our surprise, we would find fresh fruit hidden there because the Italian farmers would hide it inside the haylofts to keep it cool and fresh during the hot summer months. What a pleasant change it was for us from the usual tinned food we had to eat such as bully beef and baked beans.” Charalambos was stationed in Bologna for nine months. When I ask if he was scared, he pauses, takes a deep breath and replies. “No son. You have to remember, we were young teenage boys out for adventure. What did we know. We had no fear. Sometimes we would bully the locals to give us wine and bread with cheese or salami. I remember there was this one Italian farmer who refused to give us bread so late one night, we broke into his chicken coop and stole all his chickens. Some of the Cypriot lads made a fire and we plucked those chickens and cooked them over the fire. They tasted so good. That’s how it was for us. Another time, we shot a pig and brought it back to camp where this Cypriot cook made us a most delicious meal. We drank wine and got drunk and then we would start singing Cypriot songs and pester our commanding officer to send us to the front line to fight the Germans. We were fearless.” At the end of the war, Charalambos remained in Italy for a year. “I met quite a lot of Italians who treated me like one of their own. I remember they were very poor. They used to call me Carlos because they couldn’t pronounce Charalambos. I would sometimes steal the boots of other soldiers, or soaps and other army supplies to give to the poor. If by chance I wasn’t able to visit them, they would send a family member to come and find me. A few of us then started getting involved with the black market. I would steal blankets and tyres and anything of value and I would drive about two miles from camp to sell them to whoever was happy to buy them. I remember there was a young Italian girl that caught my attention. Her name was Contalina Formayora. She was the same age as me. This was during the time we were all stationed in Forli, around forty-six miles from Bologna. I spent quite a bit of time with this young girl.” Once in Cairo, Charalambos was confronted with an angry customer who threatened to kill him. “This Arab complained that the tyres I had delivered a day earlier were the wrong size and he demanded his money back. I knew he was lying. The tyres I gave him were perfectly fine. I told him I would bring him better tyres the next day but he wouldn’t listen. He then takes out his pistol and starts walking towards me in a very menacing way. I was scared. ‘This guy’s going to kill me I thought’. I was walking backwards as he was approaching me and all the time I was trying to calm him down. As he got close to me, I swung at him and he fell to the ground firing his pistol as he landed. The bullet whizzed past me. I turned and ran through some nearby vineyards towards my friends who were meant to be waiting for me in an army truck. Unfortunately, there were not there. When they heard the gunshot, they feared the worse and took off. I had no choice but to run back to my base camp in the darkness for about three miles. That was another lucky escape for me.” Charalambos and his unit eventually left Italy and were shipped to Cairo in Egypt where they stayed for a year before returning to Cyprus. “I had an opportunity to stay with the British Army after the Second World War ended and sign up for seven more years with pay. They even promised me that I could serve in any British Colony. This was a great offer. I really wanted to stay in the army and go and serve in Johannesburg, South Africa. Unfortunately, I was approached by a few of my countrymen who were left-wing fanatics from AKEL and they said they would kill me if I signed up for seven more years with the British. That was it. I was scared so I didn’t sign up. I had good reason to be afraid of these men and their threats. I remember when we were returning to Cyprus from Port Said, they punished one Cypriot soldier; I think he was from Kyrenia. They punished him because he could speak very good English and so they thought he was pro-British. I remember how they placed a noose around his neck and tried to feed him grass like he was a donkey.” Charalambos ended his military service at Polemidia (Limassol) in 1946. “Upon being discharged, they gave me a grey shirt, a blue hat and a pair of grey trousers with white stripes and a pair of blue trousers with white stripes. If you ever saw a man wearing this uniform in Cyprus you would know that he was a returned soldier. All returned soldiers were given around twenty pounds when they were discharged plus a special bus coupon so they can go back to their villages.” Soon after he was discharged from the British army, Charalambos found work at the Custom’s House in Xeros. He yearned however to return to fishing alongside his father. “With the money I received from the army, I paid someone to build me a small fishing boat and I bought myself some fishing equipment and supplies. On a good day, I could catch around three kilos of fish and earn around one pound. Some weeks I would earn about three or four pounds from fishing.” PETROS THEODOSSI As mentioned above, Charalambos’ older brother Petros also served in the Cyprus Regiment and was also sent to Italy. Strangely, the brothers never crossed paths. Their brother Costas recalls a few interesting facts about Petros. “He was cunning, very cunning,” he tells me with a laugh. “Petros was always up to no good. As a young boy my father struggled to discipline him. Once my father tied Petros to a tree and whipped him with his belt, but as soon as Petros was untied, he would immediately get up to no good again. He taught himself how to drive from a very young age by practicing with cars he would ‘borrow’ without the owner’s permission. When he joined the Regiment, he put down ‘driver’ as his occupation. He told me that when he was stationed in Italy, his superior officer, (a Cypriot named Pikasios from Lapithos) took him under his wing and together they would steal goods from the British army stores to sell to the locals. My brother became known as a ‘gundra-pajis’ (someone involved in trafficking stolen goods). He had a photographic memory and could remember lots of orders.” Petros made a lot of money due to his nefarious activity selling stolen goods. “When he returned to Cyprus in 1944,” says Costas, “he had this army bag that was full of Italian money. ‘If the Italians and the Germans win the war,’ he said to me, ‘then we are set for life.’ At the end of the war, with Italy on the losing side Petros took all his Italian loot and burnt it. One day I was shocked to discover that Petros got married to a local girl when he was stationed in Italy. The scoundrel even used my name instead of his. She of course, stayed in Italy. Who knows if they had any children? Petros always had the craziest of ideas. Think of the craziest idea and my brother would surely entertain it. He was one-of-a-kind. When he came back to Cyprus he married two more times. First to a Greek woman from Athens and then to a Cypriot woman. He eventually became a ‘kafegis’ (coffee house owner) in Karavostasi. END OF PART THREE

 

The Cyprus Regiment – Part 4

CONSTANTINOS MENIKOU Constantinos Menikou enlisted with the Cyprus Regiment in 1940. “He left on a bus with all the other young volunteers from our village,” his daughter Julie tells me. “I was only seven years old but I remember all the villagers in Dikomo lining the streets chanting ‘there go the volunteers, there go the volunteers’ as the bus drove past them bound for the training camps. My older brother Nicos had also joined the Regiment – about a year before my father. He was seventeen at the time but he was stationed at the Famagusta army base for the duration of the war, whereas our father Constantinos, served overseas.” During the war years, Julie and other children would meet at their local ‘kafenion’ (coffeehouse) hoping to find letters from their fathers and brothers serving in the Regiment, or listening to the radio for any news from abroad. “I would go to the kafenion in the afternoons to ask Christos tou Toufalli if my father had sent any letters. Unfortunately, there were never any letters.” Because her father and brother were volunteers, Julie’s mother would receive weekly food coupons from the English. “My mother would send me to the Cooperative store in our village to exchange the coupons for bread. I remember queuing up with all the other people only to receive this black bread that had sultanas in it. Every eight days, we were entitled to receive a bag of wheat. I think the wheat was imported from Australia. Anyway, my mother would wash and dry the wheat and take it to our local flour mill to grind it into flour. She had to borrow a neighbour’s donkey to carry the bag of wheat to the mill. Every eight days, she would bake twenty-two loaves of bread. Praise God, we had enough food to get by during the war years while my father and brother were away. We also had chickens, pomegranate and fig trees and there was always plenty of edible grasses and weeds near our house.” Sometime in 1941, Julie’s father Constantinos was captured by the Germans and sent to a prison camp in Germany. “My father never spoke about his experience overseas or the time he was captured by the Germans. All I know is that he was a prisoner for four years before the camp was liberated by the allied forces.” Constantinos returned to Cyprus in 1946. Julie remembers gathering at Polydorou’s kafenion (along with the rest of the village) to greet her father upon his return. “My Aunt Tallou was there too,” she recalls. “She was my father’s sister. I remember she pushed me in the back and hissed, ‘go and greet your father you little brat. I was nervous and scared. I hardly knew the man. Remember, I was only seven years old when he left.” Constantinos Menikou was unsettled upon his return to Cyprus. Those who knew him stated that he was highly aggressive, moody and often violent towards his family. In fact, two weeks after he had returned to his village, an incident occurred that caused him to leave his family for good. “One evening on a full moon,” Julie begins to explain. “My brother Nicos had come to visit us after being granted special leave from his army camp in Famagusta. My mother Maria decided to prepare a large feast in his honour. We all sat around a large table in the courtyard under the stars. At some point during the night, my father and my brother Nicos began to argue. I’m not sure why. Suddenly, I see my father pull out a small gun (a souvenir he had brought back with him from Germany). He slowly loaded bullets into the chamber, then he stood up, waving the gun above his head and shouting, ‘don’t argue with me or all blow you all into dust.’ No one said another word. The next day, things got worse. My father was inside our house sleeping while my mother was resting outside under a palm tree. One of our neighbours happened to walk past, saw my mother sitting under the tree and called out, ‘Eh, Maria. Is your husband better now or has he returned the same man as he was before?’ I was playing in the yard with my two sisters Eleni and Androulla and did not hear my mother’s reply. My father on the other hand, must have heard everything because he stormed out of the house in a rage. He ran up to my mother and began to hit her. My sister Eleni who was around seventeen at the time began to scream. My father then lunged at her. It was truly frightening. He somehow managed to wrap one of Eleni’s long plaits around his arm and with all his force flung her head onto the ground. He then kept hitting her head onto the ground while we were all screaming for him to stop. Suddenly he took a deep breath, looked at us with wild eyes and then calmly went back into the house. Moments later he emerged, dressed in his finest clothes and left.” Julie and her two sisters were left traumatised by her father’s antics that day. They ran to their Aunt Myrofora’s house to seek help but their mother’s sister was not very sympathetic. ‘Your mother knew what type of man she married,’ was all she said and sent them away. The following morning Julie and her sisters told the police what had happened. That same day, they located Constantinos at the Büyük Han (the Great Inn) in Nicosia. He was sitting calmly at a coffee shop owned by Kostas Mavromati. He was allowed to return home to pack his clothes and personal belongings and went to live with his sister Tallou. It was the last time, Constantinos Menikou would live together with his family. CHARALAMBOS YIANNOULATOS Charalambos Yiannoulatos joined the Regiment in 1939. “My father didn’t really tell me much about his experience during the war,” his son John tells me. “I know that he lied about his age. He told the registration officers that he was eighteen when he in actual fact, he was only sixteen.” Soon after he joined the Regiment, Charalambos and his battalion were sent to a British army camp in Kalamata, Greece. “It was at this camp,” adds John, “when my father discovered that all the volunteers from Cyprus and India were to be sent to the front line to fight the Germans. My father was terrified. He could hear the bombs in the distance and he knew that whoever was sent to the front line would surely be killed. My father was clever. You see, he had decided it was better to be sent to prison than to face certain death at the front. So, one day, when his commanding officer was looking the other way, he picked up a chair and whacked him across the head. He was immediately arrested and sent to prison. His plan had worked. He had avoided the draft to be sent to the war front.” John recalls how his father always spoke fondly about the Greeks of Kalamata. “He told me that when the Germans invaded Greece, a local family from Kalamata had taken the risk to hide him in the small basement of their house. One day, the Germans decided to go door-to-door searching for British soldiers or volunteers. The Greek owner of the house said to my father, ‘Lambi, Lambi, you have to leave from here. The Germans are coming.’ So my father crawled out of the basement and escaped through the back door of the house.” Unfortunately, Charalambos was captured soon after by the Germans and sent to a prison camp on the Greek island of Paros. A few weeks or months later, he was transported together with the other prisoners to a prison camp in Italy. “I’m not sure how, but my father managed to escape from the prison camp in Italy. He told me that he was on the run with two other Cypriots named George Goureas and Peter Yiallouris. They were jumping on trains in the middle of the night and running on foot during the day, all the while heading for the Italian and Swiss border. They were absolutely starving so when they discovered an orchard, my father and Goureas decided to climb up a tree to pick some fruit while Yiallouris stood guard at the base of the tree. Unfortunately, the fascist soldiers arrived and surrounded Yiallouris, pointing their guns at his head. They shouted at Yiallouris to tell them where the other escaped prisoners were hiding. Yiallouris had no choice but to point up to his two friends hiding in the tree.” John does not know what happened to his father after he was captured by the fascist soldiers, only that he managed to escape from their prison camp as well and somehow, miraculously made his way into Switzerland where he stayed with a local family until the war ended. Charalambos did not return back to Cyprus until 1949. He had been away for almost twelve years, more than double the time spent overseas by most Cypriot volunteers. He left at sixteen and returned home aged twenty-eight. TSIKKINIS KYPRIANOU Tsikkinis Kyprianou joined the Cyprus Regiment in December 1940 by convincing the recruitment officer that he was eighteen, when in fact he was only sixteen and a half at the time. “Dad didn’t really talk about his time in the army,” his daughter Kim tells me. “He did mention that he was sent to Palestine and Egypt where he trained as a barber and would give the other soldiers haircuts. That’s when he met Pambos Louizos who was from Epikospi and they became best of friends.” After the war, Tsikkinis returned to Cyprus and opened up his own barber shop in Germasogeia. He would charge one shilling for a haircut and a shave. Most of his customers paid him in produce, such as eggs and chickens, as money was scarce in those days. One day his friend Pambos introduced him to his sister Nitsa. Although she was older, Tsikkinis agreed to marry her. END OF PART FOUR

 

The Cyprus Regiment – Part 5

GLAFCOS CLERIDES Glafcos Clerides was studying law in London when the Second World War began. He was one of the first Cypriots to enlist in the British Royal Air Force (RAF) joining the Bomber Command on the second day of the war. He was twenty years old. After being trained as a wireless operator and gunner on a British twin-engine, bomber known as a Vickers Wellington he was sent to Europe where he took part in a number of successful bombing campaigns over Germany. One night in August 1942, Clerides was returning from a bombing raid on Hamburg, when his plane was shot down by the Luftwaffe searchlight battery. The crew managed to parachute out of the burning aircraft before it crashed to the ground. Clerides landed safely in a field near Bremen, while the other four crew members drifted out into the North Sea where two of them drowned. Unfortunately, Clerides broke his leg on impact and was soon captured by members of the German Luftwaffe. They took him to a prisoners-of-war hospital near Hamburg where his leg was set in plaster. It was from this hospital that Clerides made his first in a series of daring escapes. When he felt his leg had mended reasonably well, he cut away the plaster with a penknife and using a series of knotted sheets, was able to lower himself from a second-floor window into the yard below. Before his escape a French prisoner at the hospital gave him a pair of dark-coloured overalls to wear as a disguise so that he would look like any one of the foreign workers brought to Germany by the Reich to work in labour camps. Once he was in the yard, Clerides had the presence of mind to pick up a broom before crawling under a barbed-wire fence to freedom. For fifteen days, Clerides walked with the broom in hand, towards the border of the Nazi-occupied Netherlands where he hoped to join the Dutch Resistance. Whenever he feared he might be spotted or approached by a German solider, he would grab his broom and begin sweeping around him. In this way, he managed to avoid any attention or detection by the Germans. He travelled mostly at night, preferring to hide and rest during the day. For food, he would raid the stables on rural farms for oats and root vegetables or steal early-morning deliveries of bread and milk from the doorsteps of German houses in the small towns. As bad luck would have it, Clerides was recaptured just twenty miles before he reached the Dutch border; this time by civilian police. He was transported to the Luftwaffe Interrogation Centre in Frankfurt where he was interrogated for two months before being transferred to the notorious Stalag VIII-B prison camp near the town of Lamsdorf. In the winter of 1943, Clerides managed another daring escape, this time together with an officer from the Royal Yugoslav Army who was also a prisoner at Stalag VIII-B. Dressed in civilian clothes with false identity papers they somehow managed to reach Croatia, travelling a distance of around 600 miles. Unfortunately, they were eventually captured by a group of pro-Nazi Croatian nationalists known as the Ustaše, who promptly sent them back to Germany and Stalag VIII-B where they were placed in solitary confinement. In March 1945, the Germans decided to evacuate Stalag VIII-B before the Russian Army arrived. Clerides was ordered at gunpoint to march in a column of half-starved prisoners westwards away from the advancing Russians. Realising he was marching towards a certain death, Clerides saw the need for another daring escape. When the opportunity arose, he broke away from the column and ran into the nearby woods somehow undetected by the German rear guards. Clerides headed towards the town of Kassel where, to his relief he was rescued by a group of American soldiers who had just liberated the town. Clerides was eventually flown to a military hospital in England, weighing less than 38 kilograms. He was grateful to be alive having come close so close to death at least five times during the war. In an interview in 1950, Clerides shared his views about the horrors of war. “I took part in some of the worst bombings during the Second World War,” he says. “We (Britain) bombed Hamburg four times. Can you imagine, a thousand planes with four tons of bombs in each plane. We bombed other cities in the same way. I’ll never forget, after my plane crashed and I was captured by the Germans, they put me in an open car to take me to the hospital and we drove through Hamburg. That’s when I saw the real destruction that was caused by our aerial bombardment and how inhuman war really is.” Photo reproduced with permission by Katherine Clerides and the Centre of Visual Arts and Research in Nicosia. Special thanks to the research department at the International Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln, United Kingdom.