Greco-Italian War

• 1. Introduction

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  The Greco-Italian War began on the 28th of October 1940, when Italy's ambassador in Athens, Emanuele Grazzi, delivered an ultimatum to the Greek prime minister in the small hours of the morning. Mussolini demanded free passage for his troops to occupy unspecified strategic points inside Greek territory. Ioannis Metaxas answered in French: "Alors, c'est la guerre" - then it is war. Within hours, Italian divisions crossed into Greece from Albania.

  What followed stunned the world. Italy was a great power. Greece was a small, diplomatically isolated nation that had spent the previous two decades barely holding itself together. Its army still carried weapons from the First World War. Its air force was outnumbered and outgunned. And yet, within weeks, it was the Greeks who were advancing, and the Italians who were retreating in disarray across the Albanian mountains.

  The British historian Mark Mazower would later call the Greek counter-offensive of 1940 the first Axis setback of the entire war. How did it happen? What drove Mussolini to launch an invasion he had not properly planned, into terrain his generals warned was unforgiving? And how did a nation that Mussolini's king expected to simply crumble hold firm not just for days, but for months?

• 2. Mussolini's Imperial Obsession

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  In the late 1920s, Benito Mussolini told the Fascist Grand Council that Italy needed what he called "spazio vitale" - living space - an outlet for its surplus population. He imagined the conquest of an empire stretching from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Strait of Hormuz. His designs included a protectorate over Greece, economic and military control of Yugoslavia, and dominance across the entire Mediterranean-Danubian-Balkan region.

  Mussolini pursued this vision aggressively. In 1935, Italy launched the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. In 1936, he committed vast military forces to the Spanish Civil War, playing what the sources describe as a decisive role in Francisco Franco's victory. In April 1939, Italy invaded and occupied Albania in just three days, treating it as living space and a foothold for expansion into the Balkans.

  His concept of the war against Greece grew from a peculiar strategic frustration. He called his campaign a "guerra parallela" - a parallel war - in which Italy would conquer its sphere of influence alongside Germany, but without German help. Mussolini was, by mid-1940, vehemently opposed to the Wehrmacht operating in the Mediterranean. He wanted Italy's prizes secured before Germany's expected victory over Britain closed the window. But the consistent German opposition to any Italian move into the Balkans enraged him. When German troops entered Romania in October 1940 to guard the Ploiesti oil fields without informing him in advance, Mussolini treated it as an intolerable humiliation. His response was to advance plans for an invasion of Greece.

• 3. The Men Who Started the War

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  Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law and foreign minister, had pushed harder than anyone for the conquest of Greece. He had already pushed for the conquest of Albania in 1939, and afterwards ruled it as what the sources describe as his personal "fiefdom", with the viceroy Francesco Jacomoni serving as his loyal subordinate. Ciano saw conquering Greece as a way to demonstrate how well he had managed Albania, since an invasion of Greece would have to be launched from there.

  On the 10th of August 1940, Ciano went to Mussolini with a story about an Albanian bandit named Daut Hoxha, whom he presented as a pro-Italian patriot murdered by the Greeks. In reality, Hoxha was a cattle thief with, in the words of the source, "a long history of extreme violence and criminality" who had been beheaded by a rival Albanian gang. The story worked Mussolini into a fury. Ciano wrote in his diary that the Duce was considering "an act of force because since 1923 he has some accounts to settle."

  The man chosen to command the invasion was Lieutenant-General Sebastiano Visconti Prasca, described in the sources as an aristocratic bodybuilder excessively proud of his physical appearance who neglected military duties in favor of exercise. Prasca told Mussolini his forces were more than capable of conquering Greece. He estimated Greek forces in Epirus at 30,000 men and promised to take the port of Preveza in ten to fifteen days. What actually drove this confidence was personal ambition: Prasca was junior in rank, and knew that if he requested more troops, a more senior officer would be sent to command the operation and claim the glory.

  The decisive planning meeting took place at the Palazzo Venezia on the 15th of October 1940. The British historian Ian Kershaw called it "one of the most superficial and dilettantish discussions of high-risk military strategy ever recorded." Neither the navy commander nor the air force chief was invited. The army chief of staff, Mario Roatta, arrived late because he had been invited by Mussolini's secretary just before the meeting started.

• 4. The Unprepared Army

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  Before the invasion, Mussolini released 300,000 troops and 600,000 reservists to go home for the harvest. The invasion plan called for 1,750 lorries; only 107 arrived. The Italian military had undergone a reorganization in the late 1930s under General Alberto Pariani that converted three-regiment divisions into two-regiment binary divisions, increasing administrative overhead without adding fighting power. The new technology of tanks, motor vehicles, and wireless communications was slow to arrive and proved inferior to that of potential enemies.

  The invasion force launched into terrain that punished every one of these weaknesses. The front was roughly 150 kilometers wide, all mountain terrain, with very few roads. The Pindus range divided it into two theatres. The Regia Aeronautica had 380 aircraft available, but about half the fighter force consisted of biplanes, including 64 Fiat CR.42 Falco and 23 Fiat CR.32 Freccia, the latter already considered outdated. The main bomber force consisted of CANT Z.1007s of wooden construction and Savoia-Marchetti SM.81s, a veteran type from the Spanish War flying with fixed undercarriage.

  Italian equipment proved to be of poor quality and little use in the field. Morale remained low throughout the campaign. The port bottleneck at Albania's two main harbors, Valona and Durrës, strangled supply lines. An airlift between Italy and Tirana consumed all Italian Air Force transport capacity, but it could carry troops, not heavy equipment. On the Pindus sector, the elite 3rd Alpine Division "Julia" covered 25 miles of mountain terrain in icy rain only to find itself surrounded, its supply lines cut, and its request for relief attacks unable to be answered in time.

• 5. Greek Determination

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  Metaxas had seen the threat coming for years. After the Italian occupation of Albania in spring 1939, the Greek General Staff developed the "IB" plan, anticipating a combined offensive by Italy and Bulgaria. Of the 851 million drachmas spent on fortification between April 1939 and October 1940, the vast majority went to the Metaxas Line along the Bulgarian frontier; only 82 million reached the Albanian border.

  The officer who would actually stop the Italian invasion was Major-General Charalambos Katsimitros, commander of the 8th Infantry Division in Epirus. The General Staff's plan prescribed a gradual withdrawal deep into Greek territory to buy time. Katsimitros chose instead to defend a line at Kalpaki, which lay across the main invasion axis from Albania and used the Kalamas river swamps to neutralize the Italian tank threat. When Papagos cabled him to avoid costly resistance, Katsimitros disregarded the instructions and held his ground.

  Greek army divisions were triangular and held up to 50 percent more infantry than the Italian binary divisions. Many senior Greek officers were veterans of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, the First World War, and the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22. Most Greek equipment was still of First World War vintage, sourced from Belgium, Austria, Poland, and France - all now under Axis occupation, cutting off spare parts and ammunition. Despite this, local civilians on the Pindus sector, including women and children, helped the Greek forces in ways the sources describe as invaluable.

  Metaxas himself, briefing the press on the 30th of October 1940, was candid about his pessimism. He said: "Greece is not fighting for victory. It is fighting for glory. And for its honour. A nation must be able to fight, if it wants to remain great, even with no hope of victory. Just because it has to." As late as March 1941, a captured Greek officer summed up his countrymen's attitude for an Italian superior: "we are sure that we will lose the war, but we will give you the spanking you need."

• 6. The Sinking of the Elli

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  On the 15th of August 1940 - the Dormition of the Theotokos, a major Greek national religious holiday - the Greek light cruiser Elli lay at anchor in Tinos harbour. An Italian submarine, the Delfino, sank her. The attack was the result of orders from Mussolini and navy chief Domenico Cavagnari permitting submarine attacks on neutral shipping. The governor of the Dodecanese, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, ordered the Delfino's commander to sink everything in sight near Tinos and Syros.

  Despite physical evidence pointing to Italian responsibility, the Greek government announced that the attack had been carried out by a submarine of unknown nationality. No-one was fooled. Ambassador Grazzi wrote in his memoirs that the attack united a people, in his words, "deeply riven by unbridgeable political differences and old and deep-running political hatreds," and gave them a firm resolve to resist.

  Grazzi himself was in an impossible position. A genuine believer in Italian-Greek friendship, he was kept deliberately ignorant of Ciano's shift toward war. He had arrived in Athens with no instructions and was consistently left out of the loop, frequently receiving no replies to his dispatches. Metaxas believed Grazzi to be faithfully executing Rome's orders and was genuinely uncertain about Italy's intentions. Neither man realized that Grazzi was being kept in post precisely to lull the Greeks and conceal the aggressive plans being laid in Rome. The sinking of the Elli transformed Greek public feeling in ways no amount of diplomatic maneuvering could undo, and it made the popular word for Greek resistance - "ochi," simply "no" - feel inevitable long before Metaxas spoke it aloud.

• 7. Counter-Offensive and Stalemate

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  By the 14th of November 1940, the Italians had been stopped and the Greeks were ready to attack. Papagos had over 100 infantry battalions on familiar terrain against fewer than fifty Italian battalions. The Greek counter-offensive began that morning with III Corps attacking toward the Korçë plateau without an artillery barrage, in order to achieve surprise. It worked: the Italians were caught off guard, and Greek forces forced multiple breaches in the Italian line over three days.

  On the 22nd of November, the city of Korçë fell to the Greek 9th Division. By the 27th of November, the entire Korçë plateau was in Greek hands, at a cost of 624 dead and 2,348 wounded. The Greek advance continued: Gjirokastër fell on the 8th of December, Sarandë on the 6th of December. By January 1941, Greek forces had captured the Klisura Pass, a few dozen kilometers inside the Albanian border.

  Mussolini sacked Marshal Badoglio on the 4th of December and replaced him with Ugo Cavallero. The resignations of De Vecchi and Admiral Cavagnari followed within days. By February 1941, the front had stabilized. The Italians had reinforced to 28 divisions; the Greeks held the line with 14 - though Greek divisions were larger. In March 1941, the Italians launched a spring offensive that failed.

  Both sides were bleeding. The Greeks were dangerously short of ammunition and other supplies, unable to rotate their men and equipment the way the Italians could. The arithmetic was grinding against them. Then, on the 1st of March 1941, Bulgaria joined the Axis, and German forces began massing on Greece's northern border. British ground forces began arriving in Greece the next day. Adolf Hitler, who had stayed out of the Mediterranean campaign at Mussolini's insistence, now concluded that British intervention threatened Germany's southern flank. On the 6th of April 1941, German forces invaded northern Greece under Operation Marita. The Greek army had committed the bulk of its forces to the Albanian front; the fortified Metaxas Line on the Bulgarian frontier held only a third of its authorized strength. Greek and British forces in the north were overwhelmed. Greece surrendered to German troops on the 20th of April 1941 and to the Italians on the 23rd. The Italian army suffered 102,064 combat casualties, including 13,755 dead. The Greeks suffered over 83,500 combat casualties, including 13,325 killed.