by John Keegan
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.
‘Fox killed in the open’
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.
Churchill exulted in Wavell’s triumph. ‘We are delighted that you have got this prize,’ he wrote to Wavell. But the victory, though spectacular, was not really one of modern warfare. The Army of the Nile was little more than the sort of colonial ‘movable column’ with which the British Empire’s native enemies had been defeated in the campaigns of the nineteenth century. Its success was due not to its superiority over the Italian troops, who had fought bravely in defence, but to the incompetence of their leadership and, as in Greece, the attenuation of their means of making war, the result of Mussolini’s appetite for campaigning over a wider front than Italy’s resources could support.
Hitler’s efforts to check a British offensive had earlier been frustrated by Mussolini’s reluctance to accept help; now he would not brook refusal. ‘The crazy feature is’, he complained to his staff, ‘that on the one hand the Italians are shrieking for help and cannot find drastic enough language to describe their poor guns and equipment, but on the other hand they are so jealous and childish they won’t stand for being helped by German soldiers.’ On 3 February, rather than Manste
in, he chose Rommel to lead an Afrikakorps willy-nilly to Graziani’s assistance, because of his proven ability to inspire soldiers; on 12 February the vanguards of the Afrikakorps, to consist of the 15th Panzer and 5th Light Divisions, began to arrive at Tripoli; by 21 February Rommel had his forces in position to begin preparing a counter-offensive.
Nevertheless Hitler’s determination to restore Axis prestige and consolidate Germany’s strategic position in the Balkans could not wait on a future desert victory. The British were profiting from their superiority in arms in the one strategic region where they still enjoyed freedom of action to puncture the imperial pretensions of Mussolini in humiliating detail. On 9 February their Mediterranean fleet had appeared off the Italian port of Genoa, and bombarded the harbour without suffering riposte; it was a foretaste of the defeat they were to inflict on the Italian fleet at the Battle of Cape Matapan (Tainaron) in Greek waters on 28 March. In East Africa, where Italian forces had seized undefended British Somaliland in August 1940 and made incursions into the Sudan and Kenya, the British counter-attacked. A British force based in the Sudan had entered northern Ethiopia and the colony of Eritrea, Italy’s oldest possession in East Africa, on 19 January; and on 11 February another British army, based in Kenya, began an offensive into southern Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland. British Somaliland was retaken without a fight on 16 March. Worse was to follow. During February the British had been in continuous conclave with the Greek government on the nature of the assistance it would be willing to accept as a guarantee against German intervention. Metaxas, the Greek dictator, had died on 19 January; General Alexandros Papagos, the army commander-in-chief, was less cautious in negotiating measures which might provoke Germany to action. A figure of four British divisions was eventually agreed as an acceptable contribution to reinforce the eighteen Greek divisions deployed on the northern frontier. Their advance guards – withdrawn from the desert army, which was thereby dangerously depleted – began to disembark on 4 March. It was the start of an ill-fated venture.
This initiative made up Hitler’s mind. Bulgaria, which on 17 February had secured a non-aggression pact with Turkey (overawed by Germany’s military might in a way Greece was not), acceded to the Tripartite Pact on 1 March. As a result the Wehrmacht’s ‘army of observation’ in Romania, which by 15 February had reached a strength of seven divisions, was free to begin bridging the Danube into Bulgaria and construct its attack positions for Operation Marita. In view of Britain’s deployment of the four divisions to Greece, Hitler now decided that Marita’s objects would not be limited to securing a strategic position in Greece from which the Luftwaffe might dominate the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean; they were to comprehend the occupation of Greece outright.
He was not prepared to risk the reopening of another ‘Salonika front’ from which Britain (with France) had harried Germany’s southern flank of operations in 1916-18. Here, as so often elsewhere in his conduct of the Second World War, Hitler’s strategic calculations were influenced by his experience and memories of the First, in which he had fought as a common soldier. Then the British had profited from their maritime mobility to sustain campaigns which diverted Germany’s armies from their war-winning task in the great theatres; he was not prepared to concede them the opportunity a second time.
During the spring of 1941 he was, indeed, attempting to play their own game back at them. His failure to persuade Franco and to pressure Pétain – who had dismissed the pro-German Laval from his government on 13 December – to join the anti-British alliance had closed the western Mediterranean to him as a forum of opportunity. In the eastern Mediterranean and its hinterland, however, he detected openings for the same sort of subsidiary campaigning and subversion as Germany, with and through its then Turkish ally, had conducted against British interests in 1915-18. For example, he had hopes of persuading the French administration of Syria and Lebanon to accept German military assistance, and so eventually the basing there of Luftwaffe units with which the Suez Canal and the oilfields of Iraq might be brought under attack. In Iraq itself, a former British mandate, the nationalist party was pro-German; his contacts with it were indirect, passing through the Mufti of Jerusalem, leader of another anti-British Arab party, but he could calculate on its dissidence to complicate Britain’s efforts to sustain control of the Middle East. Indeed, throughout the region Churchill’s difficulties resembled Mussolini’s in his African empire – those of straining to make over-stretched resources meet over-large responsibilities.
The threat that German interference in the Levant and Iraq offered to the British bulked so large in their assessment of risk in the spring of 1941 that it would prompt them to take possession of both areas later in the year. For Hitler, by contrast, any advantage he might win in either was likely to prove ephemeral and therefore did not merit any major investment of force. That was not the case with Greece, where Britain’s involvement had produced a direct and provocative challenge to his military control of the continent and, though they did not guess it, threatened the unhampered development of his campaign against Russia. It had in consequence to be crushed outright; he could not, for example, count upon any eventual success from Rommel’s counter-offensive in Libya (to be delivered in late March) which might oblige the British to re-embark the divisions they had just deployed from Egypt to the Greek mainland, even if that were its probable result. Operation Marita had to produce a direct and clear-cut victory.
During the first weeks of March he was working to complete the preliminaries essential to its launching, the last of which required concessions by Yugoslavia. For military reasons, which OKH had made clear to him in relentless detail, neither Albania nor Bulgaria provided suitable terrain or adequate logistical bases from which the Marita forces could operate. Albania was crowded with beaten Italian troops and could be reinforced only from the sea or by air. Bulgaria’s roads, bridges and railways were few and primitive. The Wehrmacht therefore needed to deploy troops along the southern Yugoslav railway system in order to open a third front at Monastir and on the Vardar river – traditional invasion routes – if the Greek army and its British confederates were to be overwhelmed with dispatch.
Yugoslav resistance
German pressure on Yugoslavia to accede to the Tripartite Pact, as Romania, Hungary and now Bulgaria had done, had been unrelenting since the previous October. With great courage the Yugoslavs had resisted. In their negotiations with Berlin they insisted that the Balkans would be best designated a neutral zone in the ongoing European war; in private, Prince Paul, the regent, an Anglophile who had been educated at Oxford and said he ‘felt like an Englishman’, did not conceal his sympathies for Britain’s cause. Moreover, as the husband of a Greek princess, he had no desire to co-operate in the defeat of his southern neighbour. During the winter and spring of 1940-1, as Hungary, Romania and finally Bulgaria began to fill with German troops, his ground for resisting German pressure shrank under his feet. His government nevertheless contested every demand that the Germans thrust upon them; eventually, on 17 March, in return for what must almost certainly have been a worthless assurance that Yugoslav territory would not be used for military movements, it terminated diplomatic resistance and agreed to join the pact. The signatures were entered at Vienna on 25 March.
Hitler exulted in the result – but too soon; incautiously as a former citizen of the Habsburg Empire with which the Serbs had played such havoc, he had failed to allow for the impetuosity of the Serb character. On the night of 26-27 March a group of Serb officers, led by the air force general Bora Mirković, denounced the treaty, seized the capital, Belgrade, next day, obliged Paul to resign as regent and then had the uncrowned king Peter, installed as monarch. Paul, who might have rallied support among the kingdom’s Croat population, which differed automatically with the Serbs in politics and was heavily penetrated by pro-Axis sympathies, accepted the coup as a fait accompli and went into exile. A government was set up under the leadership of the air force chief of staff, General Duša
n Simović, who later headed the Yugoslav government in exile.
The Mirković coup still appears in retrospect one of the most unrealistic, if romantic, acts of defiance in modern European history. Not only did it threaten to divide a precariously unified country; it was also bound to provoke the Germans to hostile reaction, against which the Serbs could call on no external assistance whatsoever to support them. They were surrounded by states that were wholly inert, like Albania, or as threatened as themselves, like Greece, or actively hostile, like Italy, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, with all of which they had bitter and long-standing territorial disputes. If Croatia, which would shortly take its own independence under Italian tutelage, is added to the roll of the Serbs’ enemies, the behaviour of General Mirković and his fellow-conspirators of 27 March appears the collective equivalent of Gavrilo Princip’s firebrand assault on the Austro-Hungarian monarchy personified by Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914. It ensured the extinction of the Serb national cause as if by reflex; it would also doom Serbia, as in 1914, to invasion, defeat and occupation and with it the peoples of Yugoslavia, of whom the Serbs had assumed the leadership in 1918, to an agony of protracted civil and guerrilla warfare for the next four years. Of none of this do Mirković, Simović or any of the other Serb patriots – reserve officers, cultural stalwarts and the like – who staged the 27 March coup seem to have taken the least reckoning. There is no doubt that they had been encouraged in their foolhardiness by the British and the Americans. Colonel William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, future head of the Office of Strategic Services and in 1941 President Roosevelt’s personal emissary to Belgrade, had arrived in the capital on 23 January bearing an exhortation about the preservation of national honour; Winston Churchill was meanwhile pressing his ambassador to ‘pester, nag and bite’ the Yugoslav government to stay outside the Tripartite Pact. But Western warnings and encouragement were ultimately beside the point. The 27 March coup was an autonomous Serb initiative, to be seen with hindsight as the last outright expression of sovereign defiance made by any of the small peoples who lay between the millstones of German and Russian power since Poland’s rejection of Hitler’s ultimatum in August 1939 and their subjection to Stalinism.