Rescue in the Dust

It was a cool, breezeless morning in the greenhill isles of Ithaca, Zante and Cephalonia, off the western shores of Greece. Villagers and vacationers from the mainland slept or stirred, or busied themselves quietly about their homes. It was 5:30 a.m. Forty seconds later, the isles lay beneath a yellow shroud of brickdust in the wake of a major earthquake.

A woman tried to get her invalid sister out of a crumbling house; she knelt to pray, could not lift her sister again, and had to leave her behind. A young couple ran back into their swaying house to save their two-month-old baby; they were killed by the falling roof, but the baby, protected by his overturned crib, was saved. Next day the earth shook again, and many fled for the hills in fear that the island would slide beneath the sea. Panic-stricken Cephalonia police radioed to the mainland: "We are all sinking . . . The inhabitants ... are mad with fear. All is crumbling down."

An armada of some 40 warships--U.S., British, Israeli, Greek, French and Italian --sped to the rescue, while new but lesser tremors continued to shake the islands. Said the commander of the British destroyer Daring: "We could feel the ship shaking, as if distant depth charges were being dropped." The U.S. cruiser Salem, flagship of the Sixth Fleet, put a team of doctors and medical aides ashore. They reported: "The silence is broken only by the cries of the injured, and the crunch beneath the shoes of the stretcher bearers." Said Earl Mountbattan of Burma, NATO Mediterranean commander: "Cephalonia looks as if a giant hand had smashed its buildings to the ground."

Greeks, Britons, Americans and Israelis landed food and water, drugs and plasma; they set up hospitals and field kitchens; they bulldozed great boulders from the roads, steering gingerly past fissures down which a few islanders had perished; they dropped food and water from helicopters in the hills; they evacuated the wounded and buried the dead. More food, drugs, clothing, even prefabricated houses were also on the way. From Germany, the U.S. airlifted three tons of blood plasma. The toll: some 600 islanders dead, 700 seriously injured, 4,000 hurt and 100,000 homeless.

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