All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [76]
Frostbite inflicted thousands of casualties. Spyros Triantafillos grieved at abandoning his beloved grey horse after it broke down in a snowdrift: ‘Starving, soaked to the bone, tortured by endless movement on rocky ground, it was doomed to stay there. I emptied my saddlebags to follow the others on foot, then stroked the back of its neck a little and kissed it. It might be an animal, but it had been my comrade in war. We had faced death many times together, had lived through unforgettable days and nights. I saw it looking at me as I walked away. What a look that was, my friends. It revealed so much anguish, so much sadness. I wanted to cry, but the tears did not come. War leaves no time for such things. Momentarily I thought of killing it, but couldn’t bear to do so. I left it there, staring after me until I disappeared behind a rock.’
Hitler, exasperated, ignored Mussolini’s protestations that he could defeat the Greeks unaided. On 13 December, he issued Directive No. 20 for Operation Marita: ‘In the light of the threatening situation in Albania, it is doubly important to frustrate English efforts to establish, behind the protection of a Balkan front, an air base which would threaten Italy … and, incidentally, the Romanian oilfields.’ Following the installation of General Ion Antonescu as Romania’s prime minister on 12 October 1940, that country and its vital oil reserves fell under German control; most Romanians considered Germany an inescapable ally, when their country was threatened by the territorial ambitions of the Soviet Union.
By January, the Luftwaffe was attacking British shipping in the Mediterranean from Sicily. General Metaxas died suddenly on the 29th. In March, German diplomatic pressure persuaded Bulgaria to join the Axis; Yugoslavia likewise acceded, though a palace coup in Belgrade installed a short-lived pro-British regime. The morale of the Italian people slumped, as it became apparent that their leader’s ambitions had suffered humiliating frustration, with the consequence that they themselves must bow to German hegemony in the Mediterranean region. A police informant in Milan wrote: ‘Many, many pessimists see Italy as a protectorate of Germany, and conclude that if we endured three wars, the severe losses of the navy, the sacrifice of our raw materials and gold reserves … in order to achieve the loss of our political, economic and military independence, there is nothing to be proud of about the policies followed.’ The privations of the Italian people worsened through the winter, with prices soaring. The ration of pasta and rice was cut to two kilos per person per month, when the average worker consumed four hundred grams a day. Italian enthusiasm for the war, always brittle, never recovered from its slump following the 1940–41 defeats. Thereafter, most of Mussolini’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians were unhappy prisoners, chained to Hitler’s chariot wheels.
On 6 April, thirty-three German divisions, six of them armoured, swept into Yugoslavia, easily overwhelming its army. A Luftwaffe bomber attack on the capital killed 17,000 people, an appalling toll which reflected its citizens’ absolute unpreparedness for their fate. Six days later the invaders occupied the city, and on 17 April the Yugoslavs capitulated.
A 56,000-strong British-led force, mostly composed of Australians and New Zealanders, began to land in Greece in March, to deploy in the northeast. Churchill’s insistence on committing imperial troops at the discretion of British commanders provoked serious and understandable