As Rex Trye, a historical investigator of ‘Mussolini’s Afrika Korps’ observed, “The Greek campaign was to siphon off vital men and equipment needed in North Africa.”³

There were other important considerations that urged invasion. King George II and his parliamentarians were outspoken Anglophiles busily transforming Greece into a headquarters for anti-Fascist spies and saboteurs from various parts of the world. For more than two years, OVRA directors had warned Mussolini about Greek-based espionage in Italy, and even urged at least some punitive military action against King George before the outbreak of World War Two. “From maps discovered by the German General Staff in France,” Mussolini added, “it has been established that as early as May, Greece had offered to the British and French all her naval and air bases. It was imperative to put an end to this situation.”⁴

The country’s real leader was General Ioannis Metaxas, an ultra-royalist responsible for modernization of the Greek army. Since the Italian take-over of Albania the previous year, Metaxas had substantially enlarged and strengthened his ground forces in preparation for an inevitable clash at the border. Greece was a definite liability at Italy’s unguarded eastern door. An unexpected thrust through it, with Italian attention fixed on overseas’ events, could have awful consequences for the homeland. Marshal Badoglio told Mussolini he would need twenty divisions to overcome the 150,000 Greek troops, who enjoyed a superiority in the number of machine-guns. But all the Duce could spare were nine divisions which at least possessed more mortars, very useful in Alpine combat.

For operations against Greece, the Regia Aeronautica fielded nine squadrons of forty Fiat G.50s, forty-six Falcos and fourteen CR.32s. While not executing ground attacks, they were expected to escort twenty-four SM.81 and thirty-five SM.79 bombers. Additional air support could be flown in from Brindisi, where 119 assorted bombers, twenty German Junkers Ju.87 Stuka dive-bombers built under license in Italy, and fifty-four fighters were stationed. The Italians would appear to have badly outnumbered and outclassed the Greeks’ biplane defenders–six Czech Avia B.534s and two British Gloster Gladiators–nine, less antiquated French Bloch MB151 fighters, and thirty-six PZLP.24 open-cockpit, high-wing monoplanes from defeated Poland. Three squadrons were equipped with twenty-five Bristol Blenheim IV, Fairey Battle Is, and French Potez 633 light bombers, together with six Hawker Horsley torpedo-bombers.

Known as ‘Contingency C’, the original Italian plan aimed at limited territorial gains into the Epirus region intended to provoke a British reaction. Only if the invasion moved quickly to cover more ground could subjugation of the entire country be considered, a secondary objective. Mussolini knew that “the rugged mountains of Epirus and its muddy valleys do not lend themselves to a lightning war, as the incorrigible experts of a comfortable armchair strategy would suggest.”⁵ Had he been properly informed about the level of Greek preparedness, however, he would have searched for an alternative diversion to distract Churchill. Three weeks before ‘Contingency C’ was launched, Italian agents at the Greek frontier alerted Rome that Metaxas had more than a quarter of a million men under arms, most of them laying in wait along the Albanian border.

Days later, Colonel Mondini, the Italian Military Attaché, reported that the Greeks had already mobilized a full sixteen divisions. This vital information was withheld from Mussolini by the privately anti-Fascist General Visconti Prasca, who repeatedly assured him that Greece was defended by no more than 30,000 troops, an assertion confirmed by the Chief of the General Staff, Pietro Badoglio. “Serving the Duce and the Fascist cause as long as success was on their side,” writes Klibansky of the Marshal, “he withdrew and turned against them once their fortune declined.”⁶ Mussolini was to recall, “He drew away from the regime and began to premeditate his revenge after the start of the Greek campaign, when he was relieved of his appointment as Chief of General Staff.”⁷

Just as the generals had grossly inflated the actual number of Italian warplanes available, now they deflated the real size of enemy troop strength. It was based on their statements that Mussolini had implemented his strategic actions. Promised a quantitative advantage over the Greeks, his men would find themselves badly outnumbered. “All the Army Staff, Badoglio included,” he bitterly remembered four years later, “were convinced that the campaign would be a success. Visconti Prasca was positively lyrical. The information they gave me about the enemy armed forces was such that victory seemed assured in a few days, if not a few hours.”⁸

In October 1941, the Duce’s chief concern was relieving British pressure on his beleaguered forces in North Africa by provoking their attention elsewhere. But more than Churchill would be provoked. Hitler did not want anyone to disturb the Balkans, where he was forging alliances with Bulgaria and Yugoslavia for Operation Barbarossa, his up-coming invasion of the Soviet Union. He thought highly of the Greeks, and had no intention of making an enemy of General Metaxas, whom he personally admired. More critically, nothing must upset his friends in nearby Rumania, Germany’s most important source for oil. It was with some horror then, that Hitler received Mussolini’s greeting, “Führer, we are on the march!”⁹ Il Duce rightly anticipated the German leader’s strenuous objections to the invasion by not informing him of it in advance.

On 23 October, the Italian 9th and 11th Armies’ seven divisions advanced in four lines from occupied Albania into Greece through a driving rain. Mussolini wasted not a moment in telegraphing Marshal Graziani still digging fortifications in the Libyan Desert. “Renew the offensive against Alexandria at once!” he commanded. “With the world’s attention focused on events in Greece, you have been offered a golden opportunity to move forward with new prospects of success.”¹⁰

An impatient Mussolini told his Chiefs of Staff, “I should be in favor of advancing Graziani’s attack by a few days. Then the conquest of Mersa Matruh would make the possibility of such help still more remote, especially in view of the fact that we shall not stop there. Once the cornerstone of Egypt has been lost, the British Empire will fall to pieces, even if London can still hold out. India is in a state of unrest, and the British would no longer get help from South Africa or by the Red Sea lifeline. There is the consideration of morale to be added, to the effect that a success in Africa would give a fillip to our men in Albania.”¹¹

Meanwhile, ‘Contingency C’s’ raison d’être quickly materialized with the arrival of the first RAF forces in Greece. Just days after the Italian attack began, Nos. 30, 70, 80, 84, and 211 RAF Squadrons arrived with some 400 Wellington medium bombers and Hurricane fighters desperately needed in North Africa. Over the strenuous objections of General Wavell, Anthony Eden and virtually all his military advisors, Churchill committed British assistance to opposing the Italian invasion, dispatching men and materiel from the fighting in the Libyan Desert. Churchill’s committment in Greece would eventually deprive Wavell of more than 50,000 troops. But Graziani was still not certain if he should wait for more supplies, or follow Mussolini’s demand to attack. The reluctant Marshal had been gifted with an historic opportunity. Instead, he frittered away his last chance by continuing to indecisively wait for the British behind his fortified camps.

At last, on 9 December, warships of the Royal Navy pounded Maktila. The early morning bombardment coordinated with an offensive comprising the 7th Armoured Division, 4th Indian Division, and 7th Royal Tank Regiment. They were led by General Richard O’Connor, assessed by many historians as among the British Army’s ablest, and certainly most aggressive field commanders of World War Two. At 0735 hours, his forces attacked the garrison at Nibeiwa, where they surprised and swiftly annihilated a large number of M11s whose crews had just begun warming up their engines. Although taken entirely unawares and suddenly deprived of all their tanks, the Italians fought back with intense ferocity, refusing to leave their guns, even as they were being overrun. They were, Trye wrote, “horrified by the lack of effect their weapons had on the enemy armour,” but nonetheless fought to the death.¹²

According to 16th Battery Sergeant Major Robert Donovan 2/2 Australian Field Regiment, Royal Australian Artillery, 6th Australian Division, “The Italian artillery was definitely good at their trade … We were saved from serious casualties because of the amazingly poor quality of the projectiles, many failed to burst, and those that did were ineffective. The gunners fought their guns to the last, many were found dead in their gun emplacements. The Italian dead were everywhere. The guns were piled around with empty cases where men had fired to the very last. The Italians fought like hell at Nebeiwa.”¹³ The same fate befell the Tummar garrisons, weakly defended as they were by puny L3 tankettes.

Only the Italian 37mm and 47/32mm guns, always in short supply, were capable of effectively piercing the new enemy armor. On the first day of the fighting, the British lost fourteen Cruisers to Tummar’s defenders, and warriors of the Maletti Group, whose tanks had been slaughtered in the opening minutes of the attack, knocked out thity-five of the fifty-seven attacking Matildas. All the rest were destroyed in battles for the vital ports of Bardia and Tobruk. The Italians put up a determined defense at Bardia, beginning on 21 December. Outnumbered, outgunned and down to their last supplies, they fought off the tough Australians for more than two weeks.

At Sidi Barrani, where the Italians were so taken by surprise, General Pietro Maletti, still dressed in his pajamas, was killed while shooting his machine-gun at waves of oncoming British troops. Their offensive rolled irrepressibly into 1941. “The defenders of Derna put up dogged resistance against the attacking Australian infantry,” Trye writes, “making them pay for every centimeter of earth in a series of savage rearguard actions. It was the most fierce resistance yet encountered by the Allied troops.”¹⁴ The 7th Armored Division cut off Sofafi and Rabia, from which, however, the Italians staged a successful breakout.

On 7 January 1941, the British XIII Corps captured Tobruk within twenty-four hours. By then, the Italian 10th Army had more than 100,000 men taken prisoner. The Italians put up stiff resistance at various strongpoints, but the tide had turned against them. Efforts to block the enemy advance toward Tripolitania at El Aghelia were cut-off by the 7th Armored Division, which reached the coast seventy miles south of Benghazi. Refusal to obey Mussolini’s orders by maintaining the momentum of the offensive had cost Graziani dear. His entire North African Campaign was on the verge of complete collapse with the loss of 320 kilometers of conquered territory.

By mid-February, more than 115,000 of the Duce’s men had been captured, along with 845 pieces of artillery, added to the destruction of 380 tanks and 200 of their 564 aircraft. Another 50,000 troops evacuated Gallaba to take up better defended positions on more rugged ground in Agordat and Barentu east of Kassala, which they also abandoned. The huge numbers of POWs, sometimes taken by relatively small British units, helped foster Allied propaganda characterizing the Italians as cowards, or, at any rate, unwilling, unenthusiastic participants in ‘Mussolini’s war’. But most who surrendered were actually colonial auxiliaries. In its assessment of the fighting across Libya and Egypt, the British VIIIth Army newspaper concluded that “the Black Shirt and Bersaglieri Divisions were often comparable in courage and fighting spirit to the best troops in the Campaign.”¹⁵

Just as the Italian armies in the Libyan Desert faced certain annihilation, “the British halted their offensive,” writes historian Hans Werner Neulen, “because many of their troops were transferred to Greece.”¹⁶

“This was a major blunder on the Allied side,” Trye concluded, “as there were few strong formations left in Tripolitania to oppose them in early 1941. The occupation of Tripoli at that time would have prevented future Axis build-up, and finished the North African Campaign there and then.”¹⁷

Italian holdings in Egypt had been reduced to Sollum, Fort Capuzzi and Sidi Omar, with the loss of hundreds of thousands of troops taken prisoner, their tanks and artillery all but annihilated or captured. Yet, the Duce’s men were able to hang on, thanks to the respite afforded them by his successful diversion. Into that breathing-period, Erwin Rommel would arrive with his Deutsche Afrika Korps.

Meanwhile, British code-breakers learned of Italian intentions, relaying the information to Metaxas, who knew the day Italy would attack his country. Thus forewarned, the Greek defenders shifted their forces to the Macedonian front, where they would outnumber their opponents. Here, the Italian XXVI Corps, mostly the Parma Division, was already undermanned. And British aid soon made itself felt, especially in the air. On 19 November, nine Gloster Gladiators led by Greeks piloting three PZL P.24s jumped a flight of Italian fighters from the 160th and 24th Gruppi, respectively.

Three Falcos and one G.50 were shot down for the loss of three RAF biplanes. The following month, on the 21st, ten Gladiators of Number 8 Squadron penetrated Italian air-space, where they were intercepted by fifteen CR.42s, both sides each losing two aircraft. While Italian and British airmen traded blow for blow in the skies overhead, the campaign was being decided on the ground by the Greeks themselves.

Metaxas’ counter strategy lay along mountain ranges and rivers, using their features as natural defensive positions. Deteriorating weather conditions transfigured roads into muddy paths, slowing vehicular progress, and rising rivers were difficult to cross. Many of the Centauro tanks bogged down and had to be abandoned after being stripped of weapons. At every turn the invaders were ambushed or stopped by destroyed bridges. Most of the Italian soldiers were raw recruits, and, when the weather suddenly dropped below freezing, many of them suffered for lack of snow-boots or winter clothing. They nonetheless attacked in a four-pronged advance forty kilometers into Greek territory. The Tsamouria Corps clawed its way to Kalpaki through the mountains, as the Littoral Group advanced along the coast.

To their left, a pair of regimental battle groups, intent on taking the Metsovon pass, marched on either side of Mount Smolikas after splitting away from the Julia Alpini Division. In the face of enormous physical difficulties presented everywhere by the terrain and stubborn, persistent resistance from the Greeks, a bridgehead over the Kalamas River was established by the Littoral Group and Aosta Lancers through sheer force of will. The Julia Division was thereby able to thrust a wedge into the enemy line and fended off infiltration attacks mounted by General Papagos in the process of surrounding the Italians. Reinforcements of élite Bersaglieri came to the rescue, breaking the Greek attempt at encirclement, but at the cost of many casualties.

In late November, while awaiting re-supply for a planned 5 December offensive, the Italians dug in along the Devoli River and at the base of the Morava massif to safeguard their rear. Here, they were attacked in overwhelming numbers by the 9th, 10th and 15th Divisions of the Greek Army, which forced them out of the mountains and from Koritsa, a vital valley town, on 21 November. Although reinforcements were thrown into improvised counter-attacks, they could not prevent the loss of another key position at Erseke, which exposed the 11th Army’s left flank.

Additional Greek divisions struck with an all-out effort, overwhelming the Italians and compelling them to retreat down the coast. Infuriated at being pushed across the border into Albanian territory, they launched a virtually suicidal attack at Monastir, retaking a strategic hill known as Height 731, the hinge-pin of the Metaxas’ counter-invasion. As Phillip Jowett observes in his history, The Italian Army, “The individual Italian soldier in Greece often fought with heroism, especially in defense.”¹⁸ The ebb of Greek forces was stopped and began to flow backward.

10 January 1941 marked the high-water mark of their fortunes, when the important Klisura junction was taken. Filled with self-confidence after having driven some of the Italian invaders from their country, Metaxas refused further aid from Churchill, assuring him the Greeks would soon be marching through the streets of Rome. Just then, however, Italian units, inadvertently assisted by the enemy’s over-extended supply lines, frustrated the Greeks on the front south of Vlone, a vital port town. Attempts to capture Vlone achieved initial success, but slowed soon thereafter in the same kind of bad weather that earlier bedeviled the Italians. Now it was the Greeks’ turn to cower under the wrath of General Winter, as all air support was grounded. With casualties sky-rocketing and equipment irretrievably lost, King George II was forced to accept Churchill’s long-standing offer of more reinforcements on 24 February. The chief aim of Mussolini’s Balkan strategy had therefore been achieved, as Britain now poured substantial military aid into the fighting.

But juggling the North African and Greek campaigns had been an oscillating trade-off. Southeastern Italy’s important ports on either shore of the Adriatic Sea came well within striking range of the RAF, which, night after night, went after crowds of transports supplying the invasion of Greece. With the Regia Aeronautica committed in the Western Desert and on the Balkan front, not a single interceptor was available to shield the Italian ships from streams of Beaufort and Wellington bombers. Protection lay entirely with the Regia Marina’s anti-aircraft defenses. But the curtain of fire they put up around the harbors was virtually impenetrable. Brindisi was soon known to British flyers as ‘the volcano of the lower Adriatic’, while they referred to Valona as ‘Death’s Hole’. In fact, Italian naval batteries saved the entire supply fleet. Not one freighter or tanker was lost to aerial attack, although some received light damage. It was during the Greek Campaign that Italian marksmen established themselves as among the best flak-gunners of World War Two, a reputation subsequently proved again on numerous occasions in other theaters of war. But over-reliance on their admittedly high skills alone would lead to disaster at another harbor later this year: Taranto.

Until then, only two ships were lost to slow-moving Fairey Swordfish torpedo-bombers. These included a destroyer escort, the Andromeda, and the Po, the first of several Italian hospital ships sunk by British pilots, who sighted-in on the flood-lit, oversized red crosses draping port and starboard flanks to make easy kills. Mussolini’s own daughter, Edda, had been serving as a Red Cross nurse aboard the Po when it was attacked. He told his wife, Rachele, in a telephone conversation at the time, “Just imagine, she was in the water for five hours, but now she’s safe.”¹⁹

RAF attacks against clearly marked non-combatant ships continued into 1941, when five, small sea-rescue vessels used to save pilots downed at sea were deliberately strafed, killing and injuring those aboard, some of them wounded British flyers picked up by the Italians. Several of the defenseless ships were sunk under the bombs and shells of Fairey Fulmars or Sea Furies. They went on to sink the Italian hospital-ships California (13,060-ton) in the port of Syracuse on 11 August, and the 8,024-ton Arno outside Tobruk less than a month later. These bona fide war crimes were never investigated, either during or after hostilities, by legal authorities on either side, since claims for compensation by ‘Fascists’ against Allied war criminals could hardly have been made with impunity in the postwar climate of the Nuremberg Tribunals.

A single troop ship, the Sardegna, was torpedoed on 29 December 1940. All but three of its 200 soldiers successfully abandoned her, as the Proteus, a Greek submarine responsible for the attack, was almost immediately thereafter rammed and sunk by a destroyer escort, the Antares. But the Regia Marina’s real success lay in its less dramatic transportation of men and material to Albania for the fighting in Greece. By mid-September, an expeditionary force numbering 40,310 troops, 7,728 horses and mules, 701 vehicles, and 35,531 tons of supplies had been delivered without loss in just ten days’ time during one of the most remarkable operations of its kind in the whole war.

Taking advantage of inclement conditions in the Balkans, Mussolini ordered a counter-attack. He threw seven fresh divisions into a 9 March operation between Mount Tommorit and the Vijose River against twice as many enemy divisions holding the Albanian front. The Greeks recoiled, but the counter-offensive suspended ten days later after incurring heavy losses. The Italians now brought up one armored, four Alpine and twenty-three infantry divisions totalling 526,000 men. In April, they coordinated attacks with German forces striking through the Pindus to take Ioannina, forcing the Greek surrender.

Allied propaganda portrayed Mussolini as initially beaten by the Greeks, from who he was saved by Hitler. While the Wehrmacht certainly accelerated events, they were actually brought about, not by the Italo-Greek War, but because sudden replacement of the pro-Axis Yugoslav monarchy with a figurehead sympathetic to Britain precipitated a crisis. As far as Mussolini was concerned, the invasion achieved its purpose when Churchill drained British troop strength into the Balkans, thereby diluting General Wavel’s forces in North Africa. Even though Graziani failed to take advantage of this diversion, pressure on Axis armies in the Libyan Desert had been significantly relieved, thereby staving off a general collapse.

The final phase of fighting in the Balkans opened on 6 April 1941, as twenty-eight Italian divisions covered by 320 warplanes advanced in conjunction with the German Wehrmacht toward turncoat Yugoslavia. During the eleven-day Blitzkrieg, Regia Aeronautica crews shot down five enemy aircraft, losing as many of their own, but wrecked more than 100 Allied planes on the ground. Earlier, over Greece, the Italians flew over 21,000 hours in 14,000 sorties for sixty-five of their machines shot down, with another fourteen lost through accidents or in enemy raids. 223 airmen were killed or missing, with an additional sixty-five wounded. These sacrifices contrasted with 273 Greek and British bombers and fighters destroyed in aerial combat. Yet again, Regia Aeronautica flyers had acquitted themselves with distinction. But their comrades on the ground suffered far greater casualties. They lost almost 14,000 dead, with another 25,000 missing.

After the close of operations in southeastern Europe, Mussolini took over Montenegro, the Dalmatian coast, western Macedonia, Slovenia, and Kosovo. But native armed resistance was so widespread he eventually needed fourteen infantry divisions to occupy the Balkans by July 1943. These were opposed by Josip Broz Tito’s Communist partisans and Serbian royalists known as ‘Chetniks’ led by Dragoljub Mihailovic. The two groups fought each other with greater ferocity than their own enemies, the Axis invaders, so Mussolini took advantage of their mutual hatred by organizing the Milizia Volontaria Anti-Comunista. He encouraged nationalist Yugoslavs to join him against the commonly despised Reds, beginning in early 1942. A year later, the MVAC had 30,000 volunteers, and even Colonel Mihailovic eventually went over to the Italians.

In Dalmatia, the Milizia comprised eight bande made up of 100 men each divided into six Roman Catholic and two Orthodox ‘companies’. Dr. Marko Natlacen’s Slovenska Legiya, or ‘Slovene Legion’, served under the Italians as auxiliary troops, as did Ernst Peterlin’s Slovenian Village Guard and the Legija smrti, the ‘Legion of Death’. It comprised 1,687 elite, anti-partisan fighters in three battalions–the Vrnika, Gorjanci and Mokronag, respectively. Organizing of these diverse identities into a common cause against Marxism shifted Yugoslav nationalism away from the Axis occupiers to the Communists, and tended to ameliorate some of the ethnic or religious antagonism endemic to the Balkans.

Remarked one elderly veteran toward the close of the 20th Century, “If the MVAC had prevailed, there would have been no civil war with all its mass-murders at Kosovo and elsewhere, because each group had its own organization within the Milizia. Tito’s dictatorship only suppressed their divisions for forty years, until they erupted into conflict during the 1990s. If the Allies had not kept him well supplied, we would have won, because he was losing popular support in 1942 and ‘43.”²⁰ In fact, Anglo-American aid to the Chetniks was terminated after Colonel Mihailovic began collaborating with the Axis.

Mussolini himself contributed to MVAC recruitment with elite Italian veterans who fought under his own initial in the ‘M’ Battalions. According to Salvatore Vasta writing in COORTE magazine, they “proudly wore the red M’s and fascetto on their black collar-patches as insignia.”²¹ Their obvious dedication to the cause of pacifying the Balkans with a mixture of force and goodwill renewed the Duce’s favorable interest in southeastern Europe:

“I admit I always opposed the very notion of a ‘Yugoslavia’ as some unnatural coalition of mutually opposed peoples, cultures and faiths indiscriminately cobbled together by the framers of the Versailles Treaty. They manufactured this political abortion out of either evil intentions for future upheaval–to keep our Continent forever in ferment–or from rank stupidity. In place of this monstrosity, I nevertheless propose following the Versailles Treaty at least this one time to the letter of the law by granting the Balkans the ‘self-determination’ of its peoples. While I regard the very existence of Yugoslavia as a threat, not only to Italy, but to the entire region, and the whole of Europe itself, I enthusiastically welcome a revival of those former states, whose racial, religious, linguistic and cultural identities are individually valuable additions to the Western Civilization we all share in common.

“Croatia and Serbia have already achieved their independence within this New Order of the Balkans. I look forward to the day when the rest of the originally autonomous peoples of that former, synthetic ‘Yugoslavia’ have regained their liberty and self-consciousness. The present conflict in which we are engaged offers everyone an unprecedented opportunity to achieve that goal, which Italy will forever champion in the name of genuine peace and rational friendship on both sides of the Adriatic.”²²