19 December 1942. A British Liberator bomber lifts off from Cairo. A few hours later, a 33-year-old New Zealander parachutes out over the mountains of Axis-occupied Greece. His mission: to find a lost commando group and reestablish radio contact with the Allies.
Floating down in the dead of night, he slams into a boulder. All his right ribs and his right elbow are broken. He has internal injuries. He is in agony. He staggers and crawls toward a distant campfire.
“Anglos, Anglos,” shout the Greek guerillas jubilantly. They embrace him warmly, crushing his broken ribs. Agony is piled upon agony.
This is the first day of Bill Jordan’s war.
If anyone deserves to be profiled for Anzac Day, it is Major Bill Jordan. The British press described him as “the bravest man in the war” and he was demobbed with a suitcase of medals, including an MBE and the Military Cross.
And perhaps the most extraordinary feature of his career, which included several years teaching at Riverview College in Sydney, is that it culminated, late in his life, in his ordination as a priest in New Zealand.
Even in his lifetime, his astonishing wartime feats – which were as thrilling as any of Chuck Norris’s Hollywood epics, but true – were forgotten. “Fr Jordan, why didn’t you tell us you won all those medals?” a Maori woman complained at the vigil for his funeral.
William Sydney Jordan was born in 1909 in New Zealand. He began studying for the priesthood, but contracted tuberculosis and had to drop out. Unable to find a real job in the Depression, he became a journalist with the Waikato Times and then the New Zealand Herald in Auckland. A keen observer of politics, he knew how dangerous Hitler was and immediately war was declared, he enlisted.
He ended up in the Special Operations Executive, a British group which supported resistance fighters against the Nazis. His first combat assignment was to join a guerilla group in Greece where he worked on radio communications, ambushes and sabotage.
His citation for the Military Cross commends him for blowing up three major bridges. After he had cut phone lines in another operation, the Germans killed a dozen villagers as a reprisal. Although he was ill with a fever, Jordan rallied the Greek guerillas and drove the Germans off with heavy losses. It was an unbelievably difficult time.
However, the main lesson that Jordan took away from his time as British liaison officer was an implacable hostility toward Communism. It is little remembered nowadays, but along with fighting the Italians and the Germans, a bitter civil war was going on amongst the Greeks, pitting nationalists against communists. There were many atrocities. In an incident seared in Jordan’s memory, communists killed one of his Kiwi comrades and nearly executed him as well.
“Had my mission been worth the suffering and trouble?” he wrote in Conquest Without Victory, his 1969 memoir. “I shall never know the answer to that, but it seems a fair assumption that had our mission not been in Greece … Greece like Jugoslavia, would have escaped from Nazi brutality only to fall into communist enslavement.”
After 14 months, exhausted and malnourished, Jordan returned to Cairo and promptly fell ill with pneumonia. But as soon as he recovered he volunteered for a mission in France. He wasn’t cut out for desk work. In 1944 he parachuted over the Rhône Valley. Again, he nearly killed himself. “I hit the ground. A pain shot up my left leg. I heard the bone snap. I lay on the ground,” he recalled with characteristically understated fortitude.
Notwithstanding his injury, he became a valuable liaison with the British as the French Resistance battled the Germans. The closing months of the War were savage. The Germans slaughtered the French; the French executed German captives and tortured and murdered Vichy traitors. He had to work with communist Maquisards – confirming his hatred of their inhumane ideology.
Finally, as the war was winding up in France, he badly broke his left arm.
Bill Jordan had a good war – always behind enemy lines, always in danger, always, as his citation declared, displaying “inspiring courage and devotion to duty”.
When it was over, though, he found it difficult to adjust to peace. He drifted back into journalism in Australia, writing especially for B.A. Santamaria’s News Weekly. He was passionate about opposing communist influence. But in the end he found the prostitution (his word) of journalism unbearable. Encouraged by his younger brother, the well-known Jesuit Fr Greg Jordan, he became a teacher at Riverview, even though he had no formal qualifications. He worked there from about 1960 to 1967.
Former NSW Premier Nick Greiner was one of his students. “His great humanity, his dedication to principle, but irreverence for humbug and cant, and his wonderful talent in memory and mind games held us spellbound,” Greiner recalled in an introduction to Conquest Without Victory, when it was republished in 1989 by Little Hills Press.
But teaching, too, palled. Once again he felt drawn to the priesthood. Encouraged by his brother, Fr Greg, he entered the Beda College for late vocations in Rome. He was ordained a priest in 1970 by Cardinal John Wright. By then he was 60 years old.
Back in New Zealand, over the next 13 years, Fr Jordan served in several parishes. He was renowned as a fine homilist and confessor. He died in his sleep in 1983. “He was a dedicated priest in spite of health problems and blood pressure,” a bishop told the media. “He managed to stir things up – in a good sense – wherever he went.”
Fr Bill Jordan was buried on a Waikato hillside cemetery on a windy, rainy day. His brother recalled a Maori saying about rain at a funeral: “He must have been a truly great man; the gods are weeping.”
