When I decided to undertake the compilation of the first ever nominal roll for the Greek and Cretan campaigns of 1941 I really didn’t think about the ‘missing pieces’. I honestly believed that somewhere each and every fragment would be available, albeit with a little bit of digging. I can tell you this has proved not to be the case.
For a great number of years I had seen a very accurate figure for Australian Army personnel embarking to Greece. This figure so often appears in the volumes and volumes of research about these Mediterranean campaigns I felt I had something concrete for which to aim. Once attained I felt I would had completed my task – the complete picture.
Some begin a jigsaw by sorting the colours or the shapes but I tend to approach the challenge by finding all the edge pieces to give me an idea of the scope and size of the intended project. So in looking for the boundaries I sought out the lists of those army units sent to Greece in that April of 1941. With these in hand I was able to layout what I thought would be the clearly defined numerical border for 17,125 individuals, the figure supplied. As time wore on though it suddenly dawned on me that I had far more pieces leftover that needed to be put in place.
Most would think that a huge jigsaw, where each and every piece is marked with a unique identifying number, would be a simple if not a time-consuming matter to successfully reassemble. A service number bound to an individual should provide an obvious and a direct answer to whether or not a particular person embarked for Greece or take part in the operations there. Well, or so it would seem.
