Bill Heppell SOME time late on the evening of Thursday, September 7, 1944, holed up in an old monastery in the mountains of northern Greece, deep in German-occupied territory, a young British army officer wrote a brief entry in his diary. He and a group of Greek partisans had spent the previous night and the early part of that day perched on a hillside above the Jannina to Metsovo road, an eight-hour walk from the monastery, planning an ambush. At 6.30am, a convoy of 17 German trucks approached. “I blew down a few telegraph posts and tried to get andartes [the Greek partisans] to go on road to loot and destroy trucks; no success,” the young officer wrote.