Hunted from the sky - the day it rained paratroops

One ordinary soldier ... Ray Beehre's war took him to Palestine, the horror of Crete and into a German POW camp. He tells his story to CATHERINE MASTERS.

Armed with only a Red Cross badge, the two New Zealand soldiers scrambled down a steep bank beneath the olive trees and flattened themselves against the Cretan earth.

Invisibility was their only hope against the low-flying German planes methodically machinegunning in a criss-cross pattern across the island. Separated from their unit, the two curled into tight balls trying to make themselves as small as they could.

Dirt sprayed everywhere as bullets thudded all around, and young Ray Beehre felt something hit him.

"I said to poor old Chris, Chris that died the other week, I said, 'Christ, Chris, I've got my fingers shot.' But it was only dirt. It was blimmin' terrifying. Blimmin' terrifying."

More than 60 years later, wrapped up against the early winter cold, Ray Beehre hovers at the doorway of the Onehunga state house he has shared with his wife, Jean, for 50 years.

The 85-year-old has few World War II memorabilia on view among the photographs of children and grandchildren which crowd the lounge cabinets.

He reckons there is nothing special about his story. Probably there isn't.

The Herald spoke to Ray Beehre not to hear tales of heroism, but to find out what one ordinary soldier among tens of thousands sent abroad endured.

This ordinary man was one of a generation called on to do the extraordinary, and they did it with grace and courage.

Ray has hoarded his early war snaps. He brings them out eagerly.

At 23 he headed abroad to the unknown, with his new Army mates on the adventure of a lifetime.

He had few thoughts of the terror ahead, of living through the carnage of the German invasions of Greece and Crete in which nearly 1000 New Zealand men were killed, and of surviving more than two years in a German prison camp.

But Ray won't be hurried into the horror stories. He points to a photo in an album.

This was one from the trip he and a mate made to Palestine during 10 days' leave while stationed in Cairo. They eat oranges from the orchard they scaled the wall to get to, encouraged by the Arab taxi driver who claimed it belonged to a friend.

And here he is with a mate, Reggie Bushell, floating in the Dead Sea. They had been warned not to dive in or the thick saltwater would burn their eyes. But after some larking about, they fell in anyway.

From time to time as he talks, Ray gets the faraway look of the old soldier in his still-clear hazel eyes, remembering some event he thought he had forgotten.

When he recounts it, it sounds edited - maybe the memory is too ugly to tell in its entirety.

He thinks about the war every day. He can still see, clear as day, the hundreds upon hundreds of German paratroopers dropping out of the Crete sky, many of them shot dead by New Zealand infantry before they even hit the ground.

But they kept coming until there were too many.

He can still feel the fear as he raced for cover, trying to avoid being riddled with machinegun fire as the Germans mopped up.

He was unable to fight back. Members of the hygiene unit attached to the Medical Corps had no weapons.

He remembers the freezing nights hiding in caves. He remembers the train trip across Europe to Germany in a crowded, stinking carriage. One tiny window and 50 men.

Ray Beehre was born in Devonport on September 18, 1916. Half a world away, the battle of the Somme was coming to a bloody end.

His dad, William, held odd jobs but could not go to war because he had lost most of a hand in an accident.

The working-class family struggled during the Depression. Ray helped out as much as he could in the family vegetable garden at their Onehunga home and with the backyard chooks.

He left school at 13, a shy boy, with no clear idea of what he wanted to do.

At 15, he got a job in upholstery and spent his spare time cycling.

When the war came, jobs were still scarce. He and thousands like him were drawn to the adventure. They joined up "on instinct" to help Britain, the mother country.

They knew about the horror of war from World War I but believed that this one, too, would be the war to end all wars.

When he volunteered in 1939 Ray chose infantry or machinegunners, but in the end was grateful he had been attached to the Medical Corps and would not have to stab or shoot anyone.

Part of a 36-man hygiene unit, he was trained to check the kitchens, laundries and water supplies, make sure rubbish was buried and the toilets hygienic.

By June 1940, Ray and his unit were on a boat to Cairo in the first wave of New Zealand infantrymen to join the war.

They were set straight to work, and early on he was promoted to corporal.

Until now the war had not really hit the unit, but word was trickling through of Hitler's cruelty.

Most of the time in Egypt there was hygiene to be attended to. He was in charge of "a bloody delousing machine".

"They sent me out on this infernal machine to delouse the clothes, and we used to go to what we called the Wog, the old Gyppo's labour camps."

Lice crawling in their clothes was a fact of life in the Army, and the machine used steam to get rid of them.

"Actually, it didn't have that great an effect," he recalls.

As Hitler advanced through Europe, the unit was sent to Athens. They were strange days. In Athens the German Embassy was flying the Swastika and the Greeks also had their flag up.

But the New Zealanders relaxed. They ate at restaurants and flirted with the Greek girls, hired pushbikes and toured the sights.

When the Germans attacked, the Allies were trounced. Ray, with the remnants of New Zealand units, was sent to Crete.

Ray remembers lying flat on the deck, terrified, as German planes strafed the transport ship. He coped by cracking jokes, keeping the terror at bay.

Sixty-one years ago today, he landed in Crete and was put to work at an Army hospital.

M onday, May 20, is a day none of those still alive will forget: "All hell was let loose that day," says Ray.

It was the beginning of the invasion. The Allies expected an attack, but even now Ray shakes his head at the scale of it.

He remembers having breakfast watching a German spotter plane circling in the clear Mediterranean air.

Two hours later, the air was filled with planes dropping German paratroopers.

When soldiers who were on Crete gather today, they still shake their heads in wonder at that moment. Everywhere you looked parachutes floated down.

"The sky was just full of them, just full of them. You wondered, when the hell are they going to stop sending them?"

Without weapons, Ray and the hygiene unit kept their heads low.

He is filled with admiration at the fierce resistance put up by the men from the Maori Battalion.

But even in war, there are crazy moments of quiet.

That afternoon, as battle lines formed and reformed, Ray and his unit went swimming in the sea by an abandoned German glider, waving at a German plane above to make the pilot think they were compatriots and avoid being machinegunned.

By the end of the day, his unit had been ordered to retreat across the island.

They marched for a week across the freezing mountains by night, hiding out during the day.

They heard a "a terrific battle out at sea" as the German Navy attacked.

In the hills of Crete, he bumped into an old mate from home, Alan Nicholson, who told him, "We'll get them, we'll beat them, don't worry about that."

"He was killed the next day."

The Germans were cleaning up the island, their planes flying overhead machinegunning the trees, where Allied soldiers sought refuge.

In one attack, Ray raced down a bank and tried to hide, but the machinegun fire churned up the earth all around.

Soldiers on Crete still remember the anxiety of never knowing what might happen.

Some are still angry at the weight of men and weapons in the enemy's favour.

"The Germans had the men and equipment, we had nothing. It's a sad, sad story."

Ray and his group retreated to within a couple of kilometres of the designated beachhead to be picked up, and for the next few days hid in cold and gloomy caves

Before they could be evacuated, the Germans had reached that side of the island and the message came through to surrender.

He remembers listening in the cave to German planes machinegunning solid for about 10 minutes, only to be told hundreds of men had been massacred as they walked out to surrender.

The Germans turned his group around and marched them back across the island the way they had come.

They slept on the ground huddled together in paddocks. It was "cold as hell", they were hungry and morale was low.

"We saw a lot of dead soldiers on our march back. The poor blighters were under trees and up in the branches of trees, and whether they were Germans or whether they were our fellas it was hard to say.

"Their bodies had turned black. It was a horrible sight."

They hurried past as quickly as they could.

The tent hospital he had helped at had been "blown to pieces" despite its Red Cross markings, and that still makes him angry.

"Guys got killed in their beds, sick fellas there that couldn't get out of bed."

The prisoners lived for about a month on the beach surrounded by three barbed-wire fences with the sea for a fourth.

Rations were a bit of rice, watery soup, the occasional loaf of bread between five.

Ray lost nearly 20kg. Many of the men got dysentery.

On the boat to Salonika, a port in the north of Greece, the men were locked up in the same room as the overflowing latrines, and at the barracks in Salonika some were shot dead for breaking curfews.

Here the lice and bugs bit, but it was better than the crammed train trip to Stalag 8B in Germany, a 10-day hell journey across Europe with hardly any food.

About 10,000 men were imprisoned at Stalag 8B in Lamsdorf, near the Polish border, and it could have been a long and boring stay but for the prison hospital.

Ray helped doctors prepare for operations.

He remembers 200 Canadian troops captured at the Dieppe raid, with their dressings which stank.

He remembers helping a young Maori lad, Bill Rapone, through the night in the middle of winter as doctors tried to remove a piece of shrapnel from the boy's brain.

They did not have the correct instruments, neither did they have a brain surgeon. He died.

Years later, Ray went to Rotorua to reassure his family that they did what they could.

T he hospital had its dark humour. Ray laughs uproariously.

He recalls playing a trick on "Henry", one of the Germans in charge of stores, by putting an amputated leg in a basket. The legendary legless British pilot Group Captain Douglas Bader was sent to Stalag 8B.

He walked on artificial legs, having lost his own in a plane crash, but still tried to escape from every prison he was in.

He broke out one cold, snowy night, then alerted the guards so he could be let back in because it was so cold.

Everyone lost their Red Cross food parcels as punishment.

It got lonely at night. Ray would think of home and wonder how it would all end.

But he was able to study and read books about surgery, play cricket and go along to the regular concerts. He learned to never let anything get him down.

In 1943, he was repatriated as part of an exchange of German and Allied prisoners.

He remembers not wanting to go home. He wanted to be in Europe when the Germans were beaten. He wanted to see how the Germans handled it when they were the losers.

But he had no choice.

He stepped off the train at Auckland railway station in February 1944, and wondered what the hell he was going to do now.

His mother and his brothers and sisters were crying. But it was hard for him to get back into normal life. He had seen death and war. He had spent long, dull days in a prison camp.

Ray was often sick with stomach troubles he puts down to the diet and stress.

Soon after he returned home, his then girlfriend "dumped me and married a Yank".

He went cycling for a bit, sometimes depressed and finding it hard to sleep.

"There were some funny feelings when you got back. You thought you were all right but it went through your mind, even at night-time when you went to bed."

When he married Jean, she couldn't get a word out of him about the war.

Hampered by illness, he went into sales, became a tour bus driver and held down various other jobs to support his wife and three children.

It has been a good life, he says, but a strange one.

Somehow, his whole unit survived the war and most have since died of old age. Just a handful are still alive.

Active service for Ray lasted just three years, but the war has remained with him for the rest of his 85 years.

As Onehunga RSA's welfare officer, he visits less-fortunate old soldiers in rest homes and hospitals.

He helps with their funerals and makes sure widows know their entitlements, and sometimes just offers a friendly word.

He hopes the world has learned from the war, but worries that it has not.

"Look at all the trouble in the world today. The world is in a mess."

The conflict in the Middle East saddens him. The people there were friendly to the Kiwis 60 years ago.

"This is why we have to impress on the young people today, we don't want any more of it."

But if the call came, he would do it again. Sometimes you have to go to extreme lengths to protect what is yours.

Today is a special day. It means "a hell of a lot", he says. He will go to the Onehunga RSA service, have a beer or two and crack a few jokes with old mates he never otherwise gets to see. And he will hope they are still alive next year.

They will swap war stories, but mostly the day is for remembering the mates that did not come back.

"You can remember your mates that you went over with that didn't come back, and you were lucky enough to come back. You think of them.

"You think to yourself, 'Was it worth it?"'

Feature: Anzac Day

Anzac photo exhibition:
Harold Paton's pictures of WW II