A World at Arms (44 page)

The Italians had already declined German offers of armored units in North Africa to help them with their operation into Egypt.
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They would move forward in Egypt on their own, that is, whenever the Italian commander on the spot could get around to carrying out Mussolini’s orders. Now they would try to launch an invasion of Greece without proper preparations or adequate forces, in fact right after partially demobilizing their own army. Both operations briefly appeared to the Italians like a way to secure some spectacular victories of their own at a time when the Germans had been able neither to make peace with England, nor to invade the island, nor to knock it out by air attacks.
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In a series of incredibly confused conferences the Italian military leaders heard Mussolini explain his decision to attack Greece on or about October 26 and argued over various unlikely schemes for implementing this project. Simultaneously it became clear that the army in North Africa was, as usual, not ready to move forward. The Germans were not told officially about the invasion of Greece until the last moment, and the contradictory indications they received ahead of time were in any case no basis for decisive action which might seriously offend their Italian ally, at a time when Hitler still hoped to work out some accommodation of Italy with France and Spain. Whether or not he had given Mussolini a green light the last time they met on October 4, when the two met again at Florence on October 28 he could only put a good face on the situation created by that morning’s Italian attack. Anger came later.
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The Italian attack concentrated on a push south in the Albanian-Greek coastal sector, an effort to cut the only significant east–west road across northern Greece at the central portion of the front, and a minimal holding attack at the Macedonian end of the border. The Greeks had been alerted by prior press polemics and diplomatic pressures and hence had begun to move up forces to meet an anticipated invasion.
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Bulgaria’s refusal to join in the attack on Greece-perhaps out of concern that Turkey might then join in–meant that the Greek leadership could move troops from Thrace to Macedonia to aid in stemming the Italians.
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After initial advances the Italian forces in the coastal sector were held, those on the offensive in the middle were cut off and destroyed, while
those at the northeastern end were quickly pushed back. Within a week it was clear on both sides that the Italian forces had suffered a serious setback in spite of having control of the air and alone fielding armored vehicles. A Greek counter-offensive began on November 14 and quickly threw Italian forces back into Albania. The front then stabilized approximately thirty miles inside Albania with Italian counter-offensives held by the Greeks, and further Greek attacks in January and February 1941 making only smaller advances; both sides were exhausted.

The Greek forces had better artillery and were assisted after the first days by some British air force support–about which more later–but these cannot be assigned a major role in the outcome. It also will not do to point to the terrible weather and terrain since these were the same for both sides. Certainly terrain and weather conditions kept the Greeks from exploiting their victories into clearing the Italians out of Albania altogether, as they would quite possibly have made it difficult for the Italians to exploit a victory in the initial battles had they won any, but the actual events were decided by the determined and brave fighting of the Greeks on the one hand and the almost incredible incompetence of the Italian planning, preparations, and leadership on the other. Anyone who has seen the terrain over which Italian troops fought in World War I will recognize that they are entirely capable of fighting bravely under the most difficult circumstances; but in an army where intelligence and rank were distributed in inverse proportions, nothing but utter disaster could be expected. Twice the top commander on the Italian side was relieved, but all to no avail. Two decades of Fascist rule had left Italy with an army dramatically more poorly led, and equipped, and trained than that of 1915.

As if these setbacks were not sufficient, the British navy carried out a previously planned assault by torpedo-carrying planes from an aircraft carrier on the Italian fleet at Taranto in the night of November 12–13. Three battleships were hit, one of them beyond repair.
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Furthermore, the British were building up their forces in Egypt for a counter–attack there.

The Italians had halted after their initial advance to Sidi Barrani and had for months argued about the next step toward Alexandria: an offensive to seize the railhead eighty miles to the east at Mersa Matruth.
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Every few weeks the Italian commander, Marshal Rudolfo Graziani, had either promised to move or received orders to do so. He was still contemplating either his navel or the sand dunes when the British struck.

In spite of the danger of invasion of the home islands, the British had sent significant reinforcements to Egypt.
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Though nothing like the forces subsequently engaged in the North African campaign, the extra
tanks, planes, and troops–the last primarily from India and Australia–added to the units defending Egypt enabled the British commander, General Sir Archibald Wavell, to launch an offensive on December 9. Surprising and overwhelming the Italians, the attacking forces quickly destroyed the armored and infantry units in the Sidi Barrani area; in a few days the British disposed of three Italian divisions and pushed almost sixty miles to the Egyptian–Libyan border, where the Italians attempted to make a stand.

After a two-week pause to bring up supplies, the British struck again on January 3, 1941. In a series of moves, alternating infantry assaults with daring thrusts by armored spearheads, the British in the following four weeks destroyed whatever remained of the Italian 10th Army after Sidi Barrani. The Italian garrisons at Bardia, Tobruk, and Derna were routed or captured. In two months the Italians lost not only their toehold in Egypt but the whole of Cyrenaica. The British took 115,000 prisoners; and for the time being removed the threat to Egypt and redoubled the blow to Mussolini’s prestige –or what was left of it after the prior Italian defeat at the hands of Greek troops.
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Other international and internal Italian repercussions of these disasters will be dealt with shortly, but there was one immediate military one of great strategic importance in the war as a whole. Italian forces in East Africa had occupied British Somaliland and a border post in the Sudan; thereafter they had very unwisely shifted to a defensive posture at a time of Great Britain’s weakness. The isolation of Italian East Africa was increased and made almost absolute when the concentration of Italian air transportation efforts on re-supplying the faltering forces in Albania ended even this tenuous link with the distant garrison. Now, in February 1941, the British counter–attacked from Kenya, and then landed on the coast of both British Somaliland and Eritrea while an expedition under Orde Wingate headed for Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, from the Sudan. In short order the main Italian forces were defeated, the remainder surrounded at isolated points in the interior, and the Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie returned to his throne.
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Over 100,000 more Italian soldiers had become prisoners of war; the conquest of Ethiopia, Mussolini’s proudest accomplishment, had been undone; for the first time, a country occupied by the Axis had been liberated. There were two implications of great import for the continuing war. The United States government could claim that the Red Sea was no longer a war zone and thus open to American shipping; as of April 11, President Roosevelt so announced. United States ships could now go to Suez to carry supplies directly to the British forces there and relieve the pressure on British shipping. Furthermore, the removal of
Italy from Northeast Africa cleared the western shore of the Indian Ocean, a matter of major significance when Japan entered the war later and there were Axis hopes of cutting the Allied lifelines through those critical waters.

The humiliating setbacks suffered by Italy’s armed forces on the Greek front in November, accompanied by the Taranto raid, and soon followed by the collapse in North Africa, shook the Fascist system in Italy. Here were unmistakable signs of incompetence on the one hand and a war obviously about to last a long time on the other. If anyone in Italy had doubts on either score, the remobilization now ordered, a dramatic tightening of the rationing of basic foodstuffs on December 1, and the British naval bombardment of Genoa on February 8,
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enlightened them.

There was great disaffection which Mussolini could not divert from himself by firing Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the Chief of the General Staff, instead of his son-in-law Ciano whom many Italians blamed for pushing Italy into the Greek adventure.
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The public relations stunt of sending all Cabinet members aged 45 or under to the front in Albania in January entertained rather than reassured the people at home, even as it alienated those associates of Mussolini who found their pleasant berths in Rome replaced by distinctly uncomfortable tents in the frozen highlands of Albania.
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Since neither the King nor the church nor the military leadership could or would act against the regime, the police and the activist elements in the Fascist Party–with considerable use of their traditional means of persuasion, clubs and castor oil–managed to hold the discontent of the people in check. A major appeal by Churchill on December 23,
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by pointing out that it was “one man alone” who had brought the Italians into this disastrous situation, clearly suggested a way out, but practically no one was prepared to take it.
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Mussolini’s dreams of great power status had turned into a mirage by the light of shell-fire at the front,
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and the regime would have to be rescued from its Balkan folly and North African calamity by Germany. The price of German rescue was the end of Italy’s independence; won in the nineteenth century, it could be reestablished only by the Allies.
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The Germans would have had no serious objections to the Italian invasion of Greece had it been as promptly successful as their own
invasion of Norway, and they had themselves repeatedly urged the Italians forward in the North African theater. Militarily, success in these two endeavors could only help German war plans at the time. Italian control of Greece would seal off the Balkans from the south during the invasion of the Soviet Union. An Italian conquest of Egypt, for which the Germans offered an armored division, would strike a very hard blow at Britain and simultaneously free Axis forces to threaten Vichy-controlled Northwest Africa on the one hand and assist in the reconquest of the French colonies in Equatorial Africa from de Gaulle on the other. From the perspective of Hitler’s own political and ideological views, there would similarly have been advantages. He viewed the Mediterranean as Italy’s destined
Lebensraum
(living space), and his repeated reassurances to Mussolini on this point were by all available evidence sincerely meant. The German navy, which saw the problems of the Mediterranean and North Africa in very different terms–as a major theater of war for the defeat of Great Britain–was never able to convert Hitler to its view.
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As for the oil resources of the Middle East, these could nourish Italy’s fleet and air force while the oil wells of the Caucasus would supplement those of Romania in supplying Germany’s on a scale even more lavish than could be attained by trade with Russia.

The reality of Italian defeats, by contrast with the possibility of Italian victories, opened up a series of dangers from the perspective of Berlin. The defeat in Greece could lead to the opening of a real Balkan front in the war-an intolerable situation for a Germany which wanted to concentrate its land and air forces for an attack on Russia-and, possibly even more dangerous, might result in the stationing of British planes on Greek air bases from which they could attack the Romanian oil fields.
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It must be remembered that the enormous difficulties of air attacks on distant oil fields were not understood by either side at this time; it was assumed on both sides that even small air raids could bring about vast fire and destruction.

An Italian defeat in North Africa which led to the British occupation of all of Libya would open the Mediterranean to British shipping, Italy itself to attack from the south, and quite possibly to the defection of the Vichy-controlled French colonies in North and West Africa. Moreover, the blows to the prestige of the Fascist regime from such disasters, accompanied by the apparently unavoidable loss of Italian East Africa, could easily lead to the complete collapse of the whole system Mussolini had established, and this was recognized at the time; it is not hindsight from 1943.
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In view of these facts, the Germans moved promptly to assist their ally. Whatever the doubts and sarcastic comments of some German
officials and officers, Hitler himself was absolutely determined to take action to save his friend. He might at times dictate military strategy and priorities to Mussolini, but he was always careful to try to do so in a manner calculated to offend Mussolini minimally because he recognized then, as he had repeatedly stressed earlier, that only Mussolini assured Italy’s loyalty to the Axis.
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In the immediate situation in Albania, the Germans provided transport planes in December to assist the Italian air force in ferrying troops and supplies to a land poorly provided with docking, unloading, and internal transportation facilities.
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The Germans had originally planned to send dive bombers to Italy and Sicily to participate in attacks on British ships in the Mediterranean; upon the first great British victories in Egypt and at the Egyptian–Libyan border, the German air force speeded up its dispatch of the 10th Air Corps from Norway to support the Italian forces and attack British naval and merchant ships. By mid-January the Luftwaffe was flying numerous missions primarily from bases in Sicily.
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This immediately altered the situation in the Central Mediterranean; it was from this time on that Malta came under serious bombardment.
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Moreover, in mid-January the Germans began bombing and mining the Suez Canal–as Hitler had wanted to do for half a year–with massive effect on all British operations in the Mediterranean theater.
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