The fight for Greece
Graham Caldwell describes how Britain’s last ally in mainland Europe fell to combined German and Italian forces despite dogged resistance
Graham Caldwell describes how Britain’s last ally in mainland Europe fell to combined German and Italian armies, despite dogged resistance from Greek and Commonwealth forces.
At the start of 1941 Hitler was the master of Europe and Scandinavia. Only Great Britain opposed him, with Greece being Britain’s the one continental ally left by this stage. Hitler next turned his attention east to the invasion of Russia, planned to commence on 15 May 1941. Meanwhile, obsessed with what seemed like an easy victory in the Balkans, and jealous of Hitler’s victories, the Italian dictator Mussolini ordered his armies into Greece on 28 October 1940.
Italy had longed coveted Greek territory which, in 1940, was a constitutional monarchy under King George II. Suffering a shortage of modern weapons, the Greek army, headed by General Alexandros Papagos, comprised one mobile, 14 mountain and five infantry divisions with a total strength (including untrained conscripts) of almost half a million men by March 1941. Albania, across the border, was annexed by Italy from Greece in April 1939 and it was from there that the Italian forces began their invasion. 28 divisions of the Italian
Ninth and Eleventh Armies attacked across the frontier on 28 October 1940, but the Italian tanks got bogged down in the muddy ground of the hills and the advance stalled. Counterattacking, the Greeks pushed the invasion force back, occupying large swathes of Albania. Conducting an inept campaign, Italy renewed the advance on both flanks, but these were again repulsed, the
Italian supreme command not even arranging winter clothing, causing over 12,000 casualties due to frostbite alone.
Fighting at altitudes of up to 5,000ft in a severe winter, the Greek mountaintrained soldier’s toughness, training and knowledge of the country was more than a match for the Italian army.
After this disaster General Ugo
Cavallero took over and waited until the spring thaw of 1941 before renewing the offensive on 9 March. Attacking on a 20 mile front, the Italian Ninth Army was supported by bombers flying in from home airfields. British air support for Greece was provided by two RAF squadrons of Blenheim bombers and two RAF squadrons of outdated Gloster Gladiator bi-plane fighters, commanded by Air Commodore John d’Albiac. Despite repeated Italian assaults, the Greek positions held and all Italian efforts to break through failed. On the 18 March
Mussolini, who had refused German support for reasons of prestige, had to settle for a stalemate. General Papagos’s handling of his army’s inferiority of numbers, difficult terrain and poor outdated equipment was impeccable.
Churchill’s pledge to aid Greece
At 2.30am on 22 February 1941 General Henry Wilson, the Military Governor of Cyrenaica, was woken up to read an urgent telegram from General Archibald Wavell, C-in-C Middle East, ordering Wilson to meet him 180 miles away at El Adem airfield at 10am. Wavell explained that under the Declaration of 1939, Prime Minister Churchill would be called upon to provide aid
and military assistance to Greece if that country’s independence was threatened. Wilson had been selected to command an Imperial contingent named Force W, due to land in Greece on 7 March, hastily made up of an Anzac Corps of two divisions under the Australian Lieutenant General Thomas Blamey, comprising Major General
Iven Mackay’s 6th Australian Division and Major General Bernard Fryberg’s 2nd New Zealand Division. In addition there was Brigadier Henry Charrington’s 1st British Armoured Brigade, all being shipped from Egypt, the latter armed with outdated Cruiser Mk.II (A10) tanks sent without spare parts. The Polish Independent Brigade Group and the 7th Australian Division were also earmarked for Greece, but in the event couldn’t be spared; nevertheless Wilson’s Commonwealth command totaled 58,000 troops, plus 4,000 volunteers of the British Cypriot Infantry Brigade from Cyprus. Force W was massed along the Aliakmon Line directly under Blamey’s command, whilst Wilson dealt with British strategy and liaised with the Greek High Command. The Greek Second Army of five newly formed divisions of mainly conscripts and reservists, occupied the fortified Metaxas Line facing Bulgaria, brisling with tank traps, anti-aircraft towers and 21 artillery forts. The much larger Greek First Army of 15 regular divisions manned the static Albania front holding off the Italians.
Operation Punishment
Before invading the Soviet Union, Hitler first needed to secure his Balkan flank.
This included assisting the Italians in Greece, once the 1941 spring thawed the Balkan roads. Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were already in the German camp, but the Yugoslav Regent, Prince Paul (on behalf of the 17-year-old King Peter II) was under pressure from Hitler to sign a treaty to allow the German military to transit through Yugoslavia unhindered. A German-Yugoslavia nonaggression pact was duly signed on 25 March 1941. However, when announced to the anti-Nazi Yugoslav population, and armed forces, an uprising led by the Yugoslav Air Force overthrew Prince Paul’s government and revoked the pact. When notified, Hitler flew into a wild rage and demanded swift retribution. Using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, 19½ divisions of the Second and Twelfth
Armies and the army-sized Panzergruppe 1, in addition to 800 German aircraft, invaded Yugoslavia on 6 April with a three-pronged drive on Belgrade, crushing the country in 12 days. Greece was next on Hitler’s list.
The Grecian Blitzkrieg
On 4 April 1941 Hitler signed Directive No. 27, which read in part: ‘The Yugoslavia forces are in the process of disintegration. This creates conditions which, after an attack on Greece with the aim of annihilating the Anglo-Greek forces there; occupying Greece and thus finally driving the British from the Balkans’. Operation Marita, the German code word for the occupation of Greece, now became an extension of Operation Punishment.
Commencing on 6 April Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm List’s Twelfth Army made two separate thrusts into Greece. From Yugoslavia in the north, XL Panzer Corps with SS Motorised Brigade Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (SSLAH) plus 5th and 9th Panzer and 73rd Infantry Divisions, emerged south through the Yugoslav Monastir Gap, leading to the Greek Vevi Pass.
This threatened to encircle the Greek
First Army in Albania facing the static Italians, a move which re-enthused the Italian forces to recommence offensive operations. Simultaneously, XL Corps continued south to face the Aliakmon Line defended by Force W.
List’s second thrust was made from the north-east by attacking out of Bulgaria with XVIII Mountain Corps, comprising 2nd Panzer, 5th and 6th Mountain and 72nd Infantry Divisions, plus XXX Corps of 50th and 164th Infantry Divisions.
General der Gebirgstruppen Franz Boehme’s XVIII Mountain Corps made a direct assault on the forts of the Metaxas Line, encountering fierce resistance that held out for three days, the forts being bombarded by artillery, bombers and smoke fumes, until 2nd Panzer Division enveloped the position and captured Thessaloniki, cutting off the 62,500 soldiers of the Second Greek Army.
The Army’s commander, Lieutenant General Konstantinos Bakopoulos, unconditionally surrendered on the 9 April. Just the day before General Blamey had pulled Force W back from the Aliakmon River Line to a shorter line starting at the Aegean coast, continuing through the Mount Olympus passes, towards the wooded mountains of the Monastir Gap. The Commonwealth units had already spent a week on the cold icy mountain ranges enduring snowstorms without proper rest or a hot meal. This was the first time that many of the Australians had ever seen snow.
Elements of 6th Australian Division and 1st Armoured Brigade, plus their combined artillery, were ordered to deny the Vevi Pass to the enemy for at least three days. Specially trained, Englishspeaking, Waffen-SS infiltrated at night by making out they were British, but the Australians soon discovered the ruse and captured several, declaring that soldiers of the SSLAH were found to be young, tough and cocky! The pass was held until 12 April, but the tanks of 3rd Royal Tank Regiment (3rd RTR) succumbed to the superiority of 9th Panzer Division’s Panzerkampfwagen III tanks. 3rd RTR was equipped with 52 1935-era Mk.II Cruiser A10 tanks, which had virtually worn out their tracks in the Western Desert, losing only one to enemy action, the rest
littered all over Greece, abandoned where each broke down! Force W now faced the prospect of being attacked on both flanks with the XVIII Mountain Corps from Thessaloniki via the Platamon Railway Tunnel and XL Panzer Corps descending through the Vevi Pass. This forced Blamey, commencing on 13 April, to withdraw his corps 100 miles back to the Thermopylae Pass via the Pineios George, a manouver that took several days employing a series of rearguards.
This single road was subjected to continuous hammering by dive bombers of General der Flieger Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen’s VIII Flieger Korps, which maintained complete air superiority over Greece. The Luftwaffe had previously destroyed most Allied aircraft on the ground, plus sinking the Greek Navy’s two old battleships lying in harbour at Salamis, the 1908-built Kilkis and Limnos. Monumental traffic jams of slow moving Force W vehicles and men, buses crowded with retreating Greek soldiers, farm carts with refugee families and their belongings, all had to run for cover every time the
Stukas made their appearance. Generalleutnant Georg Stumme, commanding XL Panzer Corps, smelt blood and ordered 2nd and 9th Panzer Divisions to go at all speed to destroy the Allied force whilst it was virtually static and in the open, but the brave Anzac rearguards, particularly the artillery with their 25-pounder field guns, now turned into very effective anti-tank guns firing over open sights, held continuous armoured attacks back at river crossings and defiles, then at the last possible moment they would they pull back.
The retreat of Force W, which began on 13 April, exposed the right flank of the much larger Greek First Army, which was still successfully holding off Italian attempts to break through in Albania, but now had no option but to withdraw back into the safety of Greece. This was not missed by Stumme, who diverted the SSLAH to cut off the 15 Greek division’s line of retreat. Heavy fighting took place on 14 April when the First Greek Army was blocked by German forces at the Kastoria Pass, with the Italian’s in (hesitant) pursuit.
By 19 April the Germans had captured the Greek Army’s supply route, causing its commander, Lieutenant General Georgios Tsolakoglou, to deliberately surrender the following day to the SSLAH commander, SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Sepp Dietrich, who accepted the surrender. Allied newspapers called it a modern day Greek Tragedy. WWII historian John Keegan wrote that: ‘Tsolakoglou was so determined to deny the Italians the satisfaction of a victory they had not earned, that he opened quite unauthorised parley with the commander of the German Waffen-SS division opposite him to arrange a surrender to the Germans alone’. Outraged by Sepp Dietrich’s acceptance, Mussolini ordered counter-attacks against the already surrendered Greek army, which had yet to be deprived of their weapons which, yet again failed!
Hitler bowed to Mussolini’s insistence that a second surrender ceremony take place on 23 April to be accepted by the Italian commander. Generalfeldmarschall List generously allowed the Greek soldiers to go home after the demobilisation of their units, the officers permitted to retain their side arms.
Last stand at Thermopylae before evacuation
Thermopylae is famous for the sacrifice of 300 Spartans defending its mountain pass against the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC. Wilson ordered a modernday defence of the Thermopylae Pass, the gateway to Athens 125 miles further south, to allow an unhindered evacuation of the main body of Force W. The Australian 19th Brigade held the village of Brallos, while the New Zealand 6th Brigade was given the task of defending the coastal pass. The mutual decision to evacuate Force W from Greece was taken between Wilson, King George II and General Papagos on 21 April. Two days
later the King, his brother Prince Paul and their families, left the Greek mainland for exile in Great Britain, journeying via Crete and Egypt. Units of the dog-tired men of the fighting rearguards were still streaming back along the single road through the Thermopylae Pass as fast as possible, because Stumme had now withdrawn his infantry in favour of the mobility of the 2nd and 9th Panzer Divisions and Motorised Brigade SSLAH.
The 3rd RTR, now without a single tank and converted into an anti-paratroop role, plus the 4th Hussars (Sir Winston Churchill’s old regiment, of which he was the honorary Colonel) were given the job keeping the Corinth Canal Bridge open, over which the entire expeditionary force would have to cross to the safety of the Peloponnese Peninsula. The Hussars still had their armoured cars and the last 10 Mk.VIB (machine-gun) tanks, but when the time came, this famous regiment was overrun and surrendered, losing all their senior officers and 400 men as prisoners.
Operation Demon, the evacuation code-word, began on the night of 24
April under the control of Rear Admiral Harold Baillie-Grohmann, who had organised a force of 19 troopships and 20 destroyers protected by seven cruisers. All vehicles, field guns and equipment was to be destroyed, with embarkation timed between sunset and 3am each day so as to be far from land by dawn, thus avoiding enemy dive-bombers. Because so much time was needed to organise the operation, it was vital that the last rearguard held Thermopylae until the 23 April. However, to the surprise and enormous relief of the defenders, XL Panzer Corps had outrun its supply tail, which took them four days to bring up ammunition and fuel over Greece’s appalling roads, delaying their assault by four days until the 24 April. After bitter fighting all day, including the repulse of a mass panzer attack, the Anzac rearguard held and a breakthrough prevented.
The next day 2,000 paratroopers of the Luftwaffe 2nd Parachute Regiment made a surprise parachute and glider assault to capture the Corinth Bridge in an effort to prevent the escape of more Commonwealth forces, but the bridge was blown by the Royal Engineers, trapping only the 4th NZ Brigade on its north side, which was successfully diverted and evacuated over the beaches at Attica. Nevertheless 8,000 New Zealanders were stranded in the port of Kalamata and became prisoners. German troops entered Athens on 27 April. Two days later on 29 April, Freyberg, before leaving Greece, lit a candle in a local Greek Orthodox Church and, after the war, told the story that:, “As I was carrying a very large sum of money, I put the equivalent of a fortune into the donation box!”
Finally, when General Wilson flew out by seaplane, he could rest in the knowledge that he had been proceeded by over 50,700 of his men who were disembarked on the island of Crete.
Whilst the military decision to go to Greece’s aid had lead to defeat, it was difficult for the British to have honourably done anything else, irrespective of the cost. As Churchill declared before it all began, “If on their own, the Greeks resolve to fight, we must share their ordeal”. Of greater import, the decision to invade the Balkans delayed the launch of Operation Barbarossa by several weeks. As a result, German formations, in their battle with the Soviet Union, were forced to race against the approaching early winter, with its severe snow and ice, a delay that contributed to denying them the major prize of Moscow.