The Second World War (22 page)

Yet, though the Balkans do not offer easy passage to conquerors, it is the fate of the peoples who inhabit them to be campaigned over. For, precisely because the region is a jumble of mountain chains and blind valleys, where even the rivers must negotiate defiles and gorges impassable by man or beast, it marks a natural barrier between European and Asian empires. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Islam was on the march, the Balkans were the battleground where Turk fought Habsburg. In the nineteenth, when Turkey had fallen sick, they offered the fronts on which her enemies – Austria, Russia and their satellites – drove the Ottomans back upon their Anatolian fastnesses. And possession of the coasts of the Balkans and their archipelagos – the Ionian islands, the Dodecanese, the Cyclades – have been contested by power-seekers even longer and more consistently; for, as Sicily does in miniature, and Malta on yet a smaller scale, the Balkans dominate the sea-passages and seas by which they are washed. Venice, greatest of Italian city-states, made herself mistress of the Adriatic by control not of her own lagoon but of the fortress harbours which run the length of the Adriatic’s Balkan shore – Zara, Cattaro, Valona – and the Ionian islands at its mouth. In her heyday, Venice also extended powerful tentacles into the eastern Mediterranean by her occupation of the Greek Peloponnese and its satellite islands of Naxos, Crete and Cyprus. The Turks, whatever the ebb and flow of their military fortunes, always assured themselves of an ultimate base of Balkan power by clinging to possession of the Bosphorus, channel of communication between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. In the face of bribes, threats and direct attack – by the Russians in the nineteenth century, the emergent Balkan states in the early twentieth, the British and French in the First World War – Turkey clung limpet-like to Istanbul (the Constantinople and Byzantium of old) in the sure knowledge that it was control of the ‘the Straits’ which in European eyes made her a power to be reckoned with and not, as she would become if she relinquished it, merely a Levantine appendage.

Because the Balkans form both a land barrier and a maritime base, or cluster of bases, at the point where Asia meets Europe and the Mediterranean the Black Sea, the strategy of any commander drawn into the area will tend to be both ‘continental’ and ‘maritime’, and the one will run at cross-purposes with the other. This, as Professor Martin van Creveld, the closest student of German war-making in the months between the fall of France and the inception of Barbarossa, has pointed out, is precisely the complication into which Hitler fell at the end of 1940. His Balkan policy thitherto had been to allow Italy to play the great power in its relations with the maritime and historically ‘Italian’ sphere of influence – Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia – while drawing the inland zone – Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania – into Germany’s. Hungary and Romania had fallen willingly under his sway, signing the Tripartite Pact and allowing German troops to be stationed on their territory; Bulgaria had proved more resistant, but for reasons of understandable caution, not hostility. Yugoslavia had successfully trodden a middle path, insisting on its neutrality but averting a breach with the Axis. Then Britain’s persistence in belligerence had upset his Balkan scheme. Having failed in his efforts to beat down her air defences in the Battle of Britain, as a preliminary to an invasion in which he did not fully believe, Hitler subsequently acquiesced in the Italian attack on Greece (of which he was probably forewarned at his meeting with Mussolini at the Brenner Pass on 4 October), because Britain, whose sole remaining continental ally was Greece, thereby came under increased strategic pressure from another direction. He had calculated that the offensive should diminish Britain’s capacity to prosecute its war in Egypt with the Italian Libyan army, and thereby strengthen the ‘pincers’ he was seeking to construct by drawing Spain and Vichy France into his anti-British alliance.

This complex, but also tentative, strategic design was compromised by the humiliating failure of the Italian offensive. Before the invasion of 28 October, Hitler was considering the dispatch of a German intervention force to North Africa and had actually sent a senior officer (Ritter von Thoma, whom the British would later know well as an opponent) to study the problem of deploying an ‘Afrikakorps’. Once the miscarriage of Mussolini’s invasion of Greece became apparent, however, Hitler felt constrained to rescue his ally – who had anyhow refused the help of an Afrikakorps – from humiliation, even though direct German intervention against Greece, which required the acquisition of bases in Bulgaria, would alarm the Russians at precisely the moment he was keenest to allay their anxieties (or even, had Molotov brought assurance of acquiescence in German continental hegemony to Berlin on 12 November, agree binding non-aggression terms with them). Mussolini’s Greek adventure thus had the direct effect of driving Hitler into heightening his war effort against Britain, though in her Mediterranean empire rather than against her coasts; it also had the indirect effect of committing him to a seizure of territory – useful but not essential to the launching of Barbarossa – which made any agreement of ‘spheres of influence’ between him and Stalin impossible. In that respect the Greek campaign was to be decisive in determining the future course of the Second World War.

Mussolini’s venture into Greece was an operation Hitler was justified in believing ought to have succeeded. The Greek army was greatly outnumbered and was obliged to divide its forces so as to defend Thrace – the coastal strip at the head of the Aegean – against Bulgaria. On paper it should have been overwhelmed in the opening stage of the invasion; but Italy’s forces were also divided, by the garrisoning of Ethiopia and Libya, and it could therefore deploy only a fraction of its much larger army on the Albanian-Greek frontier. The Italian army of 1940 was not, moreover, what it had been in 1915. Then, committed to war on a single, equally mountainous front against Austria, it had fought courageously in one offensive after another, and not without effect. By October 1917 its efforts had impelled the Austrians to appeal for help to the Germans lest its twelfth offensive on the Isonzo succeed in breaking through. Under Mussolini, however, Italian formations had been reduced in size in order to increase their number, a typical demagogic act of window-dressing. The divisions which Mussolini launched into Greece on 28 October 1940 were therefore weaker in all arms, but particularly in infantry, than their Greek equivalents; they were also weaker in motivation. Mussolini’s reasons for seeking war with Greece went no further than a desire to emulate his German ally’s triumphs, settle trifling old scores with Greece, reassert Italy’s interest in the Balkans (he was piqued that Romania, an Italian client, had accepted German protection for its Ploesti oilfields earlier in October) and secure bases from which his British enemy’s eastern Mediterranean outposts might be attacked. None of these reasons counted for much with his soldiers. They began their assault through the Epirus mountains without enthusiasm; even the Alpini regiments, Italy’s best troops, appeared in poor heart. Their Greek opponents, by contrast, defended with a will. General John Metaxas, head of government, was enabled early in the campaign to transfer forces from Thrace to the Albanian front, thanks to Turkey’s warning to the Bulgarians that its thirty-seven divisions concentrated in Turkey-in-Europe would be used if Bulgaria tried to profit from Greece’s difficulty. In the meantime the Greeks allowed the Italian attackers to wear themselves out in frontal attacks on their mountain positions. When their own reinforcements arrived, they counter-attacked, on 14 November, and drove the invaders back in confusion. Mussolini summoned reserves from all over Italy, some of which were flown to Albania in German aircraft, but by 30 November the Greeks opposed fifteen of his divisions with eleven of their own, his whole invading force had been thrown back inside Albania and the Greek counter-offensive was still gathering strength.

Hitler, who had already ordered OKW on 4 November to prepare an operational plan for a German offensive against Greece, was by then committed to its launching. For all the diplomatic difficulties it would cause – affront to Yugoslavia, Greece’s neutralist neighbour, anxiety to Turkey, which was even more strongly determined to remain neutral, alarm to Bulgaria, which shrank from offending Russia by granting Germany the bases the Greek operation required – and for all the military difficulties the operation entailed, particularly those of committing mechanised formations to the least ‘tankable’ terrain in Europe, he now saw no means of avoiding the initiative, except at the price of conceding his British enemies strategic and propaganda advantages he could not allow them. Mussolini, for better or worse – and Hitler was never to waver in his loyalty to the founder of fascism – was seen by the world as his political confederate as well as military ally. Hitler was determined to rescue him from humiliation at the hands of the Greeks, all the more so because he rightly held the Greeks in high esteem as soldiers; he was also determined to deny the British long-term possession of bases on Greek soil, from which they could menace his extraction of Balkan resources – foodstuffs, ores, above all oil – essential to his war effort.

Thus far the Greeks had been careful not to grant the British anything more than short-range tactical facilities. The bases the RAF had set up since 3 November were located in the Peloponnese, on the Gulf of Corinth and near Athens, from which its aircraft could just support the battlefront in Albania. Greece had resisted requests for larger bases near Salonika which would have brought the Ploesti oilfields in Romania within range of its bombers. Hitler had good reason to fear the worst, therefore, from a consolidation of the Greek victory over Mussolini. South-eastern Europe provided half of Germany’s cereal and livestock requirements. Greece, with Yugoslavia, was the source of 45 per cent of the bauxite (aluminium ore) used by German industry, while Yugoslavia supplied 90 per cent of its tin, 40 per cent of its lead and 10 per cent of its copper. Romania and, to a marginal extent, Hungary provided the only supply of oil which lay within the radius of German strategic control; the rest came from Russia under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. If those oilfields, and the railways which carried ores and agricultural produce out of the Balkans to Germany, were brought under British bomber attack, his ability to prosecute the war would be seriously compromised. Moreover, he recognised the depth and antiquity of Britain’s penetration of the Mediterranean strategic zone. British admirals and generals had campaigned in the eastern Mediterranean for 150 years; Nelson’s reputation had been made by his victory at the Nile in 1798. The British had ruled the Ionian islands from 1809 to 1863, had possessed Malta since 1800, Cyprus since 1878, and maintained a fleet and an army in Egypt since 1882. In 1915 a British army had almost captured the Black Sea straits and between 1916 and 1918 sustained an offensive front against Bulgaria on Greek soil (the Salonika campaign). Moreover, the intimacy of their relationship with the Greeks was assured by their title as ‘lovers of liberty’, won by the help the British had given them in their war of independence against Turkey in the 1820s. Byron’s reputation as a romantic hero in both countries was a touchstone of their peoples’ common antipathy to tyranny.

However, Britain’s tentacles reached further than that. Although she had fought Turkey in the First World War and established a homeland for the Jews in Palestine after 1918 in the teeth of Muslim antipathy, she was also a historic protector of the Turks against Russia, in which cause she had fought the Crimean War of 1854-6, and a sponsor of Islamic nationalism by her foundation of the states of Iraq and Trans-Jordan. Her reputation as an exponent of self-determination for small nationalities also stood high in central and south-eastern Europe, where Yugoslavia in particular owed her existence partly to British support for the cause of Slav independence at the post-1918 peace conferences. Britain’s only clear-cut enmity in the Balkans was with Bulgaria, her opponent in the First World War, and that was offset by King Boris’s concern to placate Russia, which he could not afford to offend unless assured of full-blooded German support.

The ambiguity of a Balkan entanglement – which automatically involves an intrusive land power not only in the conflict between central Europe’s vital interests and those of Russia but at the same time in the maritime complexities of Mediterranean politics – therefore worked to divert and fragment Hitler’s strategic purpose in the winter and spring of 1940-1. His overriding aim – to attack and destroy Russia’s fighting power in an early
Blitzkrieg
campaign – was fixed by December 1940; his desire to rescue his toppling Italian ally from public humiliation and to circumscribe the activity of his irrepressible British enemy before he embarked on the Russian war – both in some sense residues of his vacillation of the autumn – drew him into a series of initiatives, some calculated, some adventitious, which were to end in his fighting a larger Balkan-Mediterranean campaign than he had ever intended when he first contemplated venturing southward.

In early January 1941, when he met with his commanders at the Berghof (7-9 January) and exposed to them the Barbarossa strategy in its entirety, the southern difficulty seemed to centre less on the Greeks than on the British. Though planning for Operation Marita (the invasion of the Balkans) was in full flow, he was still not contemplating the outright occupation of Greece. A mere seizure of bases in Greece from which the Luftwaffe might dominate the eastern Mediterranean seemed an adequate strategic solution of the situation in that sector. He was even optimistic that the Greeks, whose promised defeat by Mussolini in a spring offensive he was treating with sceptical (and as it turned out justified) caution, might bring the Italians to accept a bilateral peace treaty. The British, on the other hand, were demonstrating a determination to persist in defiance of Axis military superiority. Not only had they deployed air units to mainland Greece, and troops to Crete and some of the Aegean islands; they had also inflicted direct defeats on the Italians. On the night of 11-12 November a Royal Navy task force, centred on the aircraft carrier
Illustrious
, surprised the Italian fleet in its Taranto base in the heel of Italy and sank three battleships at their moorings by aerial torpedo attack. This success, following earlier surface engagements in July, confirmed the Royal Navy’s dominance over the Italian fleet, despite the latter’s superiority of numbers in the inland sea. Worse was to follow: on 9 December the British army in Egypt, commanded by General Sir Archibald Wavell, launched a counter-offensive against the Italian army which Marshal Rodolfo Graziani had led sixty miles inside the frontier from Libya in September. Conceived as a ‘five-day raid’, it achieved such success that Wavell decided to sustain his advance. In three days Lieutenant-General Richard O’Connor, his tactical commander, had captured 38,000 Italians, for a total loss of 624 British and Indians killed and wounded, overrun a large fortified enemy position and found nothing beyond it to bar his advance into Libya. At Bardia, the first town inside the Italian colony, General ‘Electric Whiskers’ Bergonzoli signalled to Mussolini in the aftermath of the British counter-attack, ‘We are in Bardia and here we stay’; but by 5 January Bardia had fallen to the Army of the Nile, as the 4th Indian and 7th Armoured Divisions had been grandiloquently designated by Churchill, and their spearheads were pressing on along the coast road towards the port of Tobruk. On 21 January Tobruk fell yielding another 25,000 prisoners; the port was to provide O’Connor’s army with logistical support for its continued advance. O’Connor now divided his forces: the remnants of the Italian invaders of Egypt were falling back on Tripoli, capital of Libya, along the Mediterranean coast road which veered north around the bulge of Cyrenaica; a direct route through the desert offered the prospect of cutting them off by a fast mobile thrust. O’Connor accordingly launched the 7th Armoured Division into the desert behind them and on 5 February it arrived out of the sands ahead of the fleeing Italians at Beda Fomm. ‘Fox killed in the open,’ O’Connor signalled in clear – to pique Mussolini – to Wavell; the hunting metaphor described a victory which brought the British 130,000 prisoners in the course of an advance of 400 miles in two months.