The Defence and Fall of Greece 1940-41

321 Pages·2013·5.29 MB·English

by  John Carr

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
P E N & S W O R D M I L I T A R Y
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Copyright © John C. Carr 2013
ISBN 978-1-78159-181-9
PDF ISBN: 978-1-47382-916-9
EPUB ISBN: 978-1-47382-830-8
PRC ISBN: 978-1-47382-873-5
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Contents
Preface
List of Plates
Maps
Chapter 1 ‘Incoming Torpedo!’: Greece on the Eve of War
Chapter 2 Over the Edge
Chapter 3 Punch and Counterpunch
Chapter 4 Mud, Blood and Cold Steel
Chapter 5 In the Teeth of the Blizzard
Chapter 6 Fiats and Gladiators
Chapter 7 Metaxas: ‘Let us fall like men’
Chapter 8 Apocalypse on Hill 731: The Spring Offensive
Chapter 9 Falling Stars
Chapter 10 ‘This one’s for the Elli!’: The Naval War
Chapter 11 The Allies Arrive
Chapter 12 6 April 1941: The Saga of Fort Rupel
Chapter 13 Final Countdown
Chapter 14 Behind the Wire
Appendix
Notes
Sources
Preface
Warfare has always been a potent generator of myth. Ever since Homer brought
the sacrifices and sufferings of war to lasting attention in The Iliad, people have
wanted to remember and commemorate them, to find some way of assuring
themselves that those tribulations and vanished lives meant something, that what
happened was for some meaningful purpose.
Wars beget myths in proportion to how ‘right’ they are perceived to be.
Hollywood and the global media industry have made colossal profits out of this
largely artificial distinction. Even now, the Allied viewpoint in the Second
World War prevails in the public mind as supposedly a clear case of punishing
an evil tyrant, be it Hitler or Tojo. More recent wars such as Vietnam or the two
Gulf conflicts have not had the benefit of such a Manichaean framing. The
presumed moral guidelines of the later wars were far less clear and hence less
liable to myth-making.
I employ the term ‘myth’ in its sociological rather than colloquial sense. A
myth need not be outright fiction. It can refer to an undoubted historical event.
The myth-making consists of elevating and refining – and distorting – the
memory of that event until it becomes a defining cultural trait, a part of who a
people are. An essential element in this process is the imposition of a moral
framework, ‘a good guy, bad guy’ narrative, with ourselves, of course, as the
good guys. To take one example, books and films about the Battle of Britain
from the 1950s to the 1970s were all about fresh-faced, insouciant and jokey
British lads shooting down legions of grim-jawed, beetle-browed Sieg Heil-
barking Luftwaffe pilots, even though in real life the characters of both classes
of men were pretty much the same. Both included heroes and cowards, bad
apples and near-saints as well as ordinary chaps. The moral distinction between
them was nil. They were simply men in uniform called on to fight for their
country. Yet even today the myth of ‘good’ RAF versus the ‘bad’ Luftwaffe
persists.
To turn to the subject of Greece, few modern Greek myths have been more
potent, more igniting of national pride, than the story of the Italian invasion of
October 1940 and subsequent repulse in the mountains of Albania in the ensuing
months. It remains one of the few examples of such myths (again, in the
sociological sense) largely justified by the historical record. The pride the
Greeks still feel in this fully rivals, if it does not exceed, the pride the British feel
for the Battle of Britain in the same year. For the past seventy-odd years the
Greek media and schools have been part of a great campaign of historical
parallelism, likening the Albania campaign to the glories of Marathon and
Thermopylai, endlessly repeating Churchill’s facile hyperbole that it ought to be
said not that Greeks fight like heroes, ‘but heroes fight like Greeks’. In Italy, on
the contrary, the post-war tendency has been to forget about the whole thing like
a bad dream. As one Italian friend put it to me some years ago, the present-day
Italian military establishment shame-facedly regards the Albania debacle as ‘la
vergogna del corpo’ – the disgrace of the corps (in this case the Alpine troops).
That said, however, Mussolini’s aggression on hitherto-neutral Greece was
frankly as naked as it gets. If there is such a thing as completely unprovoked
aggression, 28 October 1940 came close, on a par with Hitler’s march into
Poland, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in
1990. In the Greek case, even a good portion of the Italian military establishment
was aghast at the decision. And when within a matter of days the Greeks threw
the aggressor well back into Albania, the Allied world applauded. Here, it
seemed, was justice on a divine scale. It was thus especially tragic that Hitler, to
drag Mussolini out of the mire of an Axis defeat, steamrollered over Greece and
wiped out all the country’s gains in April and May 1941.
Yet a serious historian cannot rely on myths, however well-grounded in fact
they might be. It is all too easy to approach a study of the Albania campaign
with a predisposition in favour of the victim Greece. The purpose of this history
is not to ‘justify’ Greece at the expense of Italy, nor indeed to ‘justify’ the Allies
against the Axis. That is the task of the myth-driven mass media, not the military
historian. When the guns begin to speak, issues of ‘right and wrong’ have a
tendency to quickly evaporate in the reciprocal struggle to survive. It’s the fate
of all soldiers in all uniforms, from the youngest private to the top field marshal,
to struggle through the fog of all wars. The arms are the man, not what the
politicians say he has to fight for.
To provide as authentic a picture of the campaign as possible, I have relied
mostly on the earliest possible sources, written when memories were fresh.
These include the memoir of General Papagos, the Greek commander-in-chief.
Though it is mostly a ponderous and dull chronicle of the technical details of the
campaign and has little narrative ‘meat’, it has the merit of scientific
impartiality. By far the best writer on the Italian side is Mario Cervi, whose
classic and admirably balanced Storia della Guerra di Grecia (available also in
English as Hollow Legions) draws on all the key original sources in a unified and
perceptive narrative, though the author’s rather too-obvious anti-Mussolini
animus is a drawback in that it tends to pile blame on a single leader. The
standard Greek history of the campaign is Angelos Terzakis’ Greek Epic 1940–
1941 (available in Greek only), a strongly-written work which, however, suffers
from the defect of sensationalism – a necessary attribute, it must be admitted, for
a market among the Greek public. During my initial researches I was extremely
fortunate to discover the War Diaries of Prince Peter of Greece, who served as a
liaison officer with the British Military Mission in Greece in 1940. The prince’s
direct observations, which I believe have never been translated into English,
throw a fascinating and often startling light on the thinking and activities of
Greece’s British allies at the time. The last volume of the diaries of Ioannis
Metaxas is crucial for an understanding of what went on in the mind of that great
statesman in the months before his death. Another diary, a hastily-scrawled one
by an Evzone soldier named Miltiades Nikolaou, illustrates the ordeals of the
men at the front.
I have taken the story up to the fall of Athens and the eve of the Battle of
Crete, i.e. the end of April 1941. As many excellent books have been written
about the Battle of Crete, to merely summarize it in a final chapter would not
have contributed much. To all intents and purposes, Greece had already fallen
before the first German paratrooper landed on the beleaguered island.
The reader may excuse me for recommending my own first book under the
Pen & Sword imprint, On Spartan Wings: The Royal Hellenic Air Force in
World War Two, for those who would like more details of the air war.
Ultimately I have tried to avoid loading the text with armchair strategy. A
certain amount of background explanation, of course, is necessary, and this can
be found in Chapters 1 and 2. This is a book of description, not theory. I am one
of those inclined to believe that, whatever men may plan and do, the influence of
the Divine Arbiter of Events is decisive. Socrates and C.S. Lewis were right
when they said that ultimately, none of us can ever ‘know’ anything by sheer
mental exercise. When a considerable time has passed between a particular
campaign and the writing about it, and the smoke has long ago dissipated, we
think we can see, for example, where so-and-so went wrong and what the result
of such-and-such a move was. As a corrective, I have chosen to try and recreate
that smoke, as it were, to portray what it must have been like during the action.
Unless he has been a soldier himself, and in a rare case (in this era) actually been
in combat, the military historian must approach his task in a spirit of humility
and constant respect for those in any uniform who risked and gave their lives for
a cause greater than themselves.
George Mermingas was of enormous help, as always, with his extensive
library on Greek military history, plus his research team, including Wing
Commander Pantelis Vatakis HAF, Constantine Lagos, Ioanna Georgakopoulou
and Captain Nikolaos Garbatsis of the EEES Kirikio Cultural Foundation.
Yannis Korodimos of the Hellenic War Museum was there with his usual
unstinting help and encouragement, especially noted in a time of crunching
economic austerity when the museum budget was being relentlessly squeezed.
My friend and fellow-author Alex Martin stepped in at just the right time with
help on naval issues. Special thanks also go to Nasos Athanasiou, George Tassos
for his hospitality while I was doing research at the Albanian border, John
Chatwin for providing more facts about Squadron Leader ‘Pat’ Pattle, and
Dimitris Pitellos, whose contribution to research on the naval war went
considerably above and beyond the call of duty.
A note on style: to avoid reader confusion over the numbers of Italian and
Greek army corps, I spell out the Italian and German (e.g. Fourth Corps,
Twenty-sixth Corps) while leaving the Greek in classic Roman numeral form
(e.g. I Corps, II Corps). As a conscientious journalist I have tried to give the full
names of everyone mentioned in the text, though in a few cases only rank and
surname have been available and I have had to make do with those.
John C. Carr
Athens
October 2012
List of Plates
1. Ioannis Metaxas and Lieutenant General Alexander Papagos (Hellenic War
Museum)
2. Sketch of Italian bombers over Kalyvia, 28 October 1940 (with permission)
3. Greek conscripts go off to war, 28 October 1940 (Hellenic War Museum)
4. Greek cavalry fords the Kalamas River, November 1940 (Hellenic War
Museum)
5. The village of Elefthero (Author’s photograph)
6. Bicycle used by Italian Bersaglieri, in the Kalpaki Museum (Author’s
photograph)
7. Greek troops in the snows of Albania, December 1940 (Hellenic War
Museum)
8. Greek artillery is placed in position in Albania (Hellenic War Musem)
9. Greek soldiers with captured Italian tank (Hellenic War Musem)
10. Ground crew refuel a RHAF PZL24 fighter (Hellenic War Musem)
11. The Mertzani Bridge over the Aoos River today (Author’s photograph)
12. The rear deck of the RHN destroyer Queen Olga (Hellenic War Musem)
13. Commander Athanasios Spanidis on the submarine Katsonis (Hellenic War
Musem)
14. German infantry attack Fort Rupel, 6 April 1941 (George Mermingas
collection)
15. Germans pinned down in front of the Metaxas line (Hellenic War Musem)
16. Major George Douratsos, commander of Fort Rupel (Hellenic War Musem)
17. Death notice of Gefreiter (Private) Franz Rothmeier (George Mermingas
collection)
18. Field Marshal Wilhelm List (Hellenic War Musem)
19. Greek officer surrenders Fort Rupel (George Mermingas collection)
20. German 92mm howitzer at the Rupel National Memorial (Hellenic War
Musem)