Inferno - Max Hastings [77]
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. The 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 U.S. 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. Sgt. Diamantis Stafilakas, from Chios, wrote in his diary on 18 January 1941: “The door of our shelter will not open because of the snow. The fierce wind drives the snow up against it. Today it is raining again. We are soaked through. There is no chance of lighting a fire because the smoke chokes us. Our nights are spent in excruciating discomfort, so that I get up, go outside and walk around. I tried to build a new shelter, and managed to dig down twenty centimetres before the snow began again and I gave up.”
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,