German invasion of Greece

• 1. Introduction

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  The German invasion of Greece began in the early hours of the 28th of October 1940, not with German troops but with an Italian ultimatum delivered by Ambassador Emanuele Grazzi to Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas. The ultimatum demanded free passage for Italian forces to occupy unspecified "strategic sites" within Greek territory. Metaxas rejected it outright. Before the three-hour deadline even expired, Italian troops had crossed into Greece from Albania. What followed would stretch across more than six months, pull in forces from Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, and end with Germany occupying one of the most strategically contested corners of Europe. The story of how Greece went from repelling a large Italian army to falling under a triple military occupation raises questions that historians are still debating today. Why did Hitler intervene when Mussolini's campaign was already failing? What made the Metaxas Line both a symbol of Greek resistance and a strategic liability? And did Greek defiance actually shape the outcome of the entire war on the Eastern Front?

• 2. Mussolini's Miscalculation

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  Benito Mussolini was irritated that Adolf Hitler had not consulted him on war policy, and he wanted to match German military success by seizing what he regarded as an easy target. On the 15th of October 1940, he and his closest advisers finalized the decision to attack Greece. The Italian expeditionary force sent into battle numbered only 55,000 men. Mussolini's generals had not issued winter clothing, had ignored the autumn weather, had abandoned the advantage of surprise, and had forfeited Bulgarian support before a single shot was fired. The Italian Commission of War Production had warned that Italy could not sustain a full year of continuous warfare until 1949. Mussolini had not considered those warnings. The Italian thrust was directed toward Epirus, and the first clash with Greek forces at the Battle of Elaia-Kalamas ended with the Italians halted at the defensive line. Within three weeks, the Greek army launched a counter-offensive that carried it into Albanian territory and captured significant cities including Korça and Sarandë. By February 1941, General Papagos opened a fresh offensive aimed at Tepelenë and the port of Vlorë with British air support, though the Greek divisions encountered stiff resistance that practically destroyed the Cretan 5th Division. A March 1941 Italian counter-offensive, launched despite the Italians' superior forces, failed after one week and 12,000 casualties. Mussolini called it off and left Albania twelve days later. The failed conquest would draw Germany into the Balkans in ways Mussolini had not anticipated.

• 3. Hitler's Strategic Calculus

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  On the 4th of November 1940, Hitler decided to intervene in Greece, four days after British troops arrived at Crete and the island of Lemnos. His principal fear was concrete: British aircraft based in Greece could bomb the Romanian oil fields at Ploești, which were among Germany's most important fuel sources. With an invasion of the Soviet Union already under serious consideration, losing Romanian oil would be catastrophic, since once Germany was at war with the Soviet Union, Romania would be the Reich's only reliable source until the Wehrmacht could reach Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus. American historian Gerhard Weinberg noted that neither side understood the enormous difficulties of attacking distant oil fields from the air, yet Hitler's concern about even small raids causing vast destruction was partly grounded in reality, since the British were in fact contemplating using Greek airfields for exactly that purpose. Hitler was also convinced that if he did not rescue Mussolini from mounting defeats, Fascist Italy might be knocked out of the war entirely by 1941. Weinberg wrote that the Italian defeats "could easily lead to the complete collapse of the whole system Mussolini had established." If that happened, British shipping could reclaim the central Mediterranean, and French colonial governors loyal to Vichy might switch allegiance to Charles de Gaulle's Free French movement, depriving Hitler of bases he intended to use against Britain. Germany's Armed Forces High Command issued Directive No. 20 on the 13th of December 1940, designating the campaign Operation Marita and setting a target of occupying the northern Aegean coast by March 1941. King Boris III of Bulgaria had long-standing territorial disputes with Greece and was more open to granting Wehrmacht transit rights in exchange for a promise of Greek territory he coveted. In January 1941, Bulgaria granted those rights, and by February the Wehrmacht's Twelfth Army under Field Marshal Wilhelm List had crossed the Danube into Bulgaria alongside the Luftwaffe's Fliegerkorps VIII.

• 4. The Alliance That Almost Was

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  The United Kingdom was bound by the Declaration of the 13th of April 1939 to assist Greece if its independence was threatened, and RAF squadrons commanded by Air Commodore John D'Albiac arrived in November 1940. British forces were also dispatched to Crete on the 31st of October to guard Souda Bay. Yet the path to a coherent Allied strategy in Greece was marked by missed connections and misread signals at almost every turn. During a meeting in Athens on the 13th of January 1941, General Papagos asked for nine fully equipped divisions and corresponding air support. The British offered only a token force below divisional strength. The Greeks rejected it, fearing that such a small contingent would trigger a German attack without providing meaningful defense. Metaxas himself did not particularly want British troops on the mainland, and during the winter of 1940-41 he secretly asked Hitler whether he was willing to mediate an end to the Italo-Greek war. Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies arrived in London on the 20th of February to discuss deploying Australian troops from Egypt to Greece, and reluctantly gave his approval on the 25th of February. Haunted, like many Australians of his generation, by the memory of Gallipoli, he deeply suspected another of Churchill's Mediterranean plans. New Zealand's Prime Minister Peter Fraser gave his approval on the 9th of March, cabling Churchill that he "could not contemplate the possibility of abandoning the Greeks to their fate." When Yugoslav officers staged a coup on the 27th of March against the government that had just joined the Tripartite Pact, German planning actually accelerated. The generals much preferred attacking Greece through Yugoslavia rather than assaulting the Metaxas Line directly from Bulgaria. By the 24th of April, more than 62,000 Empire troops had arrived in Greece, comprising the 6th Australian Division, the New Zealand 2nd Division, and the British 1st Armoured Brigade, a formation that became known as W Force under Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson.

• 5. The Metaxas Line Breaks

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  The Metaxas Line ran for about 170 kilometres along the Nestos river and the Bulgarian border as far as Mount Beles near the Yugoslav frontier. Built in the late 1930s on principles similar to those of the Maginot Line, it had been designed to garrison over 200,000 troops. On the 6th of April 1941, only about 70,000 were defending it, led by Lieutenant General Konstantinos Bakopoulos. At dawn that same day, German armies invaded and the Luftwaffe began an intensive bombardment of Belgrade. The XL Panzer Corps crossed the Bulgarian frontier into Yugoslavia at two separate points at 05:30. German progress against the fortifications themselves was initially brutal and slow. A report at the end of the first day described how the 5th Mountain Division "was repulsed in the Rupel Pass despite strongest air support and sustained considerable casualties." Two German battalions came within 600 feet of Fort Rupel but were practically destroyed. Only two of the line's 24 forts fell, and only after being demolished. The breakthrough came not through the fortifications but around them. The 6th Mountain Division crossed a 7,000-foot snow-covered pass the Greeks had considered impassable, reaching the rail line to Thessaloniki on the evening of the 7th of April. An armoured advance guard entered Thessaloniki by the morning of the 9th of April. The Greek Eastern Macedonia Army Section surrendered at 13:00 on the 10th of April. In the three days it took the Germans to reach Thessaloniki and breach the line, some 60,000 Greek soldiers were taken prisoner. Most of the surviving fortresses held until Bakopoulos ordered them to surrender after Thessaloniki fell, though isolated positions fought on for days more and required heavy artillery before they were silenced.

• 6. Retreat to Thermopylae

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  Lieutenant-General Georg Stumme's XL Corps captured the Florina-Vevi Pass on the 11th of April, threatening to encircle the Greek forces in Albania and Wilson's entire W Force. On the 13th of April, Wilson withdrew all British forces to the Haliacmon river and then toward the narrow pass at Thermopylae, the same ground where the Spartans had fought Persian invaders more than two millennia before. General Freyberg's 2nd New Zealand Division was assigned the coastal pass, while General Mackay's 6th Australian Division held the village of Brallos. The New Zealand 21st Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Neil Macky repelled a German motorcycle and tank battalion during the night of the 15th of April at Platamon. By dawn the following day, after being reinforced, the Germans assembled a tank battalion, an infantry battalion, and a motorcycle battalion to press the assault, and the New Zealanders were eventually enveloped on both flanks. Macky was told it was "essential to deny the gorge to the enemy until the 19th of April even if it meant extinction." He sank a crossing barge at the western end of the gorge once all his men were across. When the Germans attacked the Thermopylae position proper on the 24th of April, they lost 15 tanks and sustained considerable casualties. The Allies held the entire day before withdrawing. After the battle, General Mackay recalled that "I did not dream of evacuation; I thought that we'd hang on for about a fortnight and be beaten by weight of numbers." The German drive on Athens accelerated once the passes fell. On the morning of the 27th of April 1941, the first Germans entered Athens, followed by armoured cars, tanks, and infantry. The previous night, Athens Radio broadcast a farewell to listeners: "You are listening to the voice of Greece. Greeks, stand firm, proud and dignified."

• 7. The Surrender and the Sea

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  As German forces drove deep into the Greek mainland, the commander of Greek forces in Albania, Lieutenant General Georgios Tsolakoglou, accepted on the 20th of April that further resistance was hopeless. Historian John Keegan writes that Tsolakoglou "was so determined... to deny the Italians the satisfaction of a victory they had not earned" that he opened an unauthorized negotiation with the commander of the German SS division opposite him, Sepp Dietrich, to arrange a surrender to the Germans alone. Hitler ordered the negotiations kept secret from the Italians, and the surrender was accepted. Outraged, Mussolini ordered counter-attacks against the Greek forces. These were repulsed, but not without cost, and the Luftwaffe then practically destroyed Ioannina with Stuka bombers. It took a personal appeal from Mussolini to Hitler to secure Italian participation in the armistice, which was concluded on the 23rd of April. Greek soldiers were not held as prisoners of war and were allowed to go home after their units were demobilized. Their officers were permitted to retain their side arms. The evacuation of Empire forces was equally fraught. By the night of the 24th of April, 5,200 men, mostly from the 5th New Zealand Brigade, were evacuated from Porto Rafti in East Attica. On the 25th of April, Anzac Day, the few remaining RAF squadrons left Greece and about 10,200 Australian troops evacuated from Nafplio and Megara. A Dutch troop ship carrying about 3,000 troops was attacked in the Argolic Gulf on the morning of the 27th of April by nine Junkers Ju 87s. The attack sank two destroyers and the troop ship, killing close to 1,000 people. Only 27 crew from Wryneck, 20 crew from Diamond, and 11 crew and eight evacuated soldiers from Slamat survived. By the 30th of April, the evacuation of about 50,000 soldiers was complete, but the Luftwaffe had sunk at least 26 troop-laden ships, and the Germans captured around 8,000 Empire and Yugoslav troops who could not reach the embarkation points.

• 8. The Argument That Never Ends

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  Field Marshal Alan Brooke, who became Chief of the Imperial General Staff in December 1941, considered the British intervention in Greece "a definite strategic blunder" because it denied Wavell the reserves needed to complete the conquest of Italian Libya and left him unable to withstand Rommel's March offensive in North Africa. In 1947, de Guingand asked the British government to recognize its mistaken strategy. Christopher Buckley countered that failing to honor the 1939 commitment to Greece would have severely damaged the ethical basis of Britain's struggle against Nazi Germany. The sharpest historical debate, however, concerns whether the Balkan campaign delayed Operation Barbarossa, Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. Leni Riefenstahl, describing Hitler's own view, quoted him as saying that without the Italian failure in Greece "we could have anticipated the Russian cold by weeks and conquered Leningrad and Moscow. There would have been no Stalingrad." Eden asserted in Parliament that the Battle of Greece had delayed Barbarossa. The British Cabinet Office's Historical Branch concluded in 1952 that the campaign had no influence on Barbarossa's launch date. Robert Kirchubel identified the main causes of the delay as incomplete logistical arrangements and an unusually wet winter that kept rivers at full flood until late spring. Antony Beevor, writing in 2012, summarized the current historical consensus as accepting that the Balkans campaign "made little difference" to Barbarossa's outcome. Jack P. Greene, while agreeing that other factors mattered more, argued that the Panzer divisions deployed in Operation Marita still "had to undergo refit" before pushing east. David Glantz added a separate point: the Balkans campaign helped conceal Barbarossa from Soviet intelligence, since it discredited accurate Soviet reports predicting the originally planned invasion date, thereby contributing to Germany's achievement of strategic surprise on the 22nd of June 1941.