This week in diplomatic and military history: November 17

James Barnett | Nov 17, 2014

Although we tend to pay it little attention compared to the monumental battles in Normandy, Stalingrad or the English Channel, the Balkans Campaign of October 1940 to May 1941 was tremendously important in shaping the outcome of the Second World War in Europe.  Within this campaign, it was one country in particular, Greece, that in the span of a few days in November 1940 managed to squash Mussolini’s dreams of an Italian empire and draw Germany into an unexpected campaign and subsequent occupation that would irrevocably tear apart the already fragile region.

The Balkans Campaign really began before the onset of the Second World War, when, on April 7, 1939 Italian dictator Benito Mussolini broke the peace by annexing the 20 year-old nation of Albania.  Mussolini had a grand vision of resurrecting the Roman Empire and transforming the Mediterranean into an Italian Mare Nostrum (“our sea”).  Hitler’s Blitzkrieg in Western Europe in May and June 1940 made Mussolini jealous, as did Germany’s growing influence in Romania and Bulgaria, the former being a state nominally under the Italian sphere of influence.  Driven by a desire for meaningful competition with the Germans, Mussolini ordered his troops to invade Greece from Albania in October 1940.  He did not confer with Hitler prior to the invasion, however, and his invitation to the Bulgarians to take part in the invasion was rejected.  Italy therefore went in alone and unprepared.

The Italians invaded on October 28, but were met with stiff resistance from the start.  The Greeks had mobilized five days prior after being tipped off by their sources in Rome and the Italians were logistically unprepared for sustaining a campaign in the mountainous Greek terrain. After driving through the valleys, the Italians were halted 60 miles inland.  Their tanks and the poorly-trained Regia Aeronautica useless in the mountains, the Italian infantry became pinned down and isolated by well-prepared Greek mountain defenses.  Just a few days after the start of the campaign, Italian commander Sebastiano Visconti Prasca began panicking and withdrawing his best units, while the Greeks, under the leadership of military strongman Ioannis Metaxas and his trusted general Alexander Papagos, methodically pushed their adversary back towards the Albanian border.

By mid-November the Greeks had pushed the Italian 9th Army back to the Albanian border and had mustered a larger force.  Fearing that they could not secure their own territorial integrity without taking the war to the Italians, Metaxas ordered the army to continue its counterattack and on November 17, the Greek III Army Corps broke through the Italian defensive line on the Albanian border and on November 22, the Greeks scored a major strategic success when they took the city of Körçe.  With the onset of winter, lengthy supply lines, and improved Italian defenses in the interior of the country, the Greeks never advanced much further than Körçe and instead focused on consolidating control of the one-third of the country under their occupation.  Nevertheless it was in this brief period of six days in November that the Greek offensive, as minimal as it might have been, managed to completely change Axis strategy in the Balkans.

The incursion into Albania was so humiliating for the Italians that on November 20 Hitler wrote to Mussolini chastising him for the “fiasco” and promising to send reinforcements to clean it up.  This was a change of plans for Hitler:  the German chief of staff had been planning Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR, for spring 1941 and while Hitler had wanted to secure the Balkans in order to protect the southernmost flank of Barbarossa, he had assumed that he could achieve this by putting political pressure on the Balkan nations.  With Greece now at war with his ally, Hitler recognized invading Greece as a prerequisite of Barbarossa.  Hitler understood that a Greek operation could not begin until the spring thaw and thus he set the date for March.  Hitler then turned his attention to Greece’s neighbor, coercing Yugoslavian Prince Paul into joining the tripartite pact in March 1941, a move which angered many nationalist Serbs in the country.  As a result, Prince Paul was deposed in a coup d’etat on March 27 and Hitler was forced to hastily invade Yugoslavia as well.  The invasion of the two nations began on April 6 in conjunction with a renewed Italian assault in Albania.  Although the Greeks were assisted by a British expeditionary corps, the Germans quickly smashed all resistance and took Athens on April 27 and Crete on June 1.  With Yugoslavia and Greece occupied and Bulgaria and Romania in the Axis camp, Hitler could finally say he controlled the Balkans.

Towards the end of the war, Hitler quipped that he would have defeated the Soviet Union had Mussolini not gone and caused a fiasco in the Balkans.  This is far from the truth, as it was ultimately Soviet advantages in men and materiel that defeated the Germans, but Italy’s failed invasion of Greece certainly complicated things for Hitler.  The Balkans campaign forced Hitler to delay Barbarossa several months, which meant that even after swift summer advances, the Germans would not reach the outskirts of Moscow until the onset of winter.  Climate alone did not stop Germany’s advance in 1941, but it certainly played a part.

Germany’s incursion into the Balkans had the biggest impact on the North Africa campaign, as it was in February 1941 that Erwin Rommel arrived in Libya to relieve the beleaguered Italians.  In just a few months, Rommel’s Afrika Korps enjoyed astonishing success against British Commonwealth forces, but his advances were continuously cut short due to a lack of fuel and supplies.  We can only speculate as to whether Rommel would have reached the Suez Canal had Hitler chosen to reinforce the Afrika Korps instead of sending an army into the Balkans, but we cannot discount the possibility.  German troops in the Suez would have dramatically affected British strategic capabilities and would have given the Germans access to Arab oil and paved the way for a possible link up with von Rundstedt’s Army Group South in the Caucus.

With the occupation of the Balkans by Axis forces came repression and genocide.  The German practice of exploiting preexisting ethnic tensions to win local collaboration worked particularly well in Yugoslavia, where the fascist Croats of the Ustaše persecuted and frequently massacred Serbs, Jews, Romani and other minorities.  The Second World War saw a rebirth of nationalism and ethnic conflict in the Balkans as ethnic Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians, Macedonians and Greeks were all played against each other.  The Balkans wars of the 1990s demonstrated that half a century later the conflicts of the Second World War and the legacy of collaboration and genocide had sown the seeds for more turmoil.

Photo courtesy of mideastcartoonhistory.com.           

List of Works Cited

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“PART ONE: THE GERMAN CAMPAIGN IN THE BALKANS (SPRING 1941): PART I.” www.history.army.mil. US Army Center for Military History, n.d. Web. 28 Oct. 2014. <http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/balkan/20_260_1.htm>.

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