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2 A GREEK TRAGEDY

The struggle for the Balkans began with a black farce precipitated by Mussolini. Having dickered with a takeover of Yugoslavia, instead, on 28 October 1940 he launched 162,000 men into Greece from Albania, an operation only revealed to Marshal Graziani in North Africa by Rome Radio’s news broadcasts. Even Hitler was kept in the dark: the Duce was so nettled by Germany’s takeover of Romania – deemed part of Italy’s sphere of influence – without consultation with Rome that he determined to turn the tables by presenting Berlin with his own fait accompli in Greece. The pretext for war was mythical Greek support for British operations in the Mediterranean. A small country of seven million people was expected to offer no significant resistance; Greece’s defences faced Bulgaria, not Albania. The British were committed by treaty to support the Athens government, but initially offered only a few weapons and aircraft. Mussolini told his officers: ‘If anyone makes any difficulties about beating the Greeks, I shall resign from being an Italian.’ His foreign minister Ciano, sometimes dovish, favoured the invasion as offering easy pickings. He believed Athens would capitulate in the face of token bombing, and sought to ensure such an outcome by allocating millions of lire to bribe Greek politicians and generals. It remains uncertain whether this money was paid, or merely stolen by fascist intermediaries.

Rome was anyway denied its desired outcome. The Greek people, enraged by an Italian submarine’s sinking of the Greek cruiser Helli weeks before Mussolini’s declaration of war, responded to invasion with resolute defiance. Graffiti appeared: ‘Death to the spaghetti-eaters who sank our Helli’. Although grievously impoverished, Greece mobilised 209,000 men and 125,000 horses and mules. Its dictator General Ioannis Metaxas, whose rule had hitherto been divisive, wrote in his diary as tensions with Italy mounted: ‘Now everyone is with me.’ A peasant named Ahmet Tsapounis sent him a telegram: ‘Not having any money to contribute to the nation’s war effort, I give instead my field at Variko … which is 5.5 acres. I humbly ask you to accept this.’ On predominantly Greek-inhabited Cyprus, popular sentiment had hitherto been pro-Axis, because it was believed that a Nazi victory would free the island from British colonial rule. Now, however, a Cypriot wrote: ‘The supreme desire was for the defeat of the armies which had invaded Greek soil, to be followed by “the fruits of victory” – “freedom”, as promised by Churchill.’

To the astonishment of the world, not only did the Greek army repel the Italian invasion, but by November its forces had advanced deep into Albania. Italian general Ubaldo Soddu suggested asking the Greeks for an armistice. In Athens, Maris Markoyianni heard a small boy ask: ‘When we’ve beaten the Italians, what shall we do with Mussolini?’ Hitler was furious about the Greek fiasco. He had always opposed it, and emphatically so until after the November US elections: he feared that new Axis aggression must aid Roosevelt. He had urged Mussolini to secure Crete before attacking the mainland, to frustrate British intervention. In a letter from Vienna on 20 November, he expressed dismay about Italian blundering. The Duce, replying, blamed his setbacks on bad weather; Bulgarian assurances of neutrality, which allowed the Greeks to shift large forces westwards; and local Albanians’ unwillingness to aid the Axis. He told Hitler that he was preparing to launch thirty divisions ‘with which we shall utterly destroy Greece’. Those who supposed him a less brutal tyrant than Germany’s Führer were confounded by his directive to Badoglio, his chief of staff: ‘All [Greek] urban centres of over 10,000 population must be destroyed and razed to the ground. This is a direct order.’

He achieved nothing of the kind. Instead, through the months that followed the Greek and Italian armies remained stalemated in the Albanian mountains, amid the worst winter weather for half a century.