A World at Arms (45 page)

As the Italian situation in Albania and North Africa deteriorated further, the Germans had to examine the possibility of sending troops as well as planes. The idea of sending a corps with two mountain divisions to Albania was eventually dropped for two reasons: the Italian forces appeared no longer in danger of being completely driven into the sea by the Greeks and the logistical situation in Albania simply could not accommodate two German divisions. Since Hitler was unwilling to send anything less than enough for a real push, nothing came of the alternative which Mussolini would have preferred: the sending of only one German division to strengthen the Italian defense.
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The Italian troops in Albania, totally unsuccessful in their efforts at resuming the offensive, had to await the results of a German attack on Greece from an entirely
different direction. The British reaction to this German strategy would not only collapse before it but contribute decisively to the success of the German rescue operation in North Africa.

The Italians, who had earlier proudly refused the German offer of an armored division to help them in the conquest of Egypt, were forced by their December and January defeats to ask the Germans for help. Originally a small blocking force of barely division strength was considered; it would do in North Africa what Mussolini had hoped a German mountain division might do in Albania.
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By the time preparations for this project were under way, the situation of Italian forces in North Africa had deteriorated dramatically. The British victory at Beda Fromm in early February, which led to the destruction of the rest of Italy’s 10th Army, seemed to both Germans and Italians to open the way for a complete British occupation of Libya. Only a larger German force could, it was believed, keep the British from doing to the Italians in North Africa what the Greeks were evidently too exhausted to do to them in Albania. We now know that even before Beda Fromm, the British had decided to halt their North African offensive; but the Germans were taking no chances.
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On February 12 the new commander of a larger German force, requested by the Italians and sent under conditions largely set by the Germans, arrived in Tripoli. This was General Erwin Rommel, whose decisions and forces, soon designated the German Afrika Corps, would change the war in the Mediterranean.

The main German relief expedition for Italy was, however, to attack Greece through Bulgaria from Romania. The weather in the mountains near the Greek–Bulgarian border made such an offensive impossible before the spring of 1941, and the Italians would have to hang on in Albania until then as best they could. Bringing up sufficient forces and equipment for such an operation would occupy the intervening months since such forces had to be shipped across Hungary, built up in Romania, and then launched across Bulgaria into Greece. But in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria there were land transportation facilities directly accessible to the Germans, unlike the Albanian front reachable only by water across the Adriatic from Italy and then across unpaved mountain trails within the Italian colony itself.

The fact that at the last moment bridges across the Danube between
Romania and Bulgaria would have to be constructed by German engineers in practice meant that the assembly in Romania would be shielded against any interference from the south in the unlikely contingency of Bulgaria and Turkey joining the British and Greeks. What may look at first like the long way around was the best from the perspective of Berlin. This route had the added advantages of increasing German strength in Romania, ensuring the cooperation of Bulgaria, which would be suitably rewarded by a slice of Greece, isolating Yugoslavia completely, and making it most unlikely that Turkey could intervene. In a play on the names of three countries, a joke of the time had suggested that when Hitler got hungry, he would have turkey with plenty of grease. Here was the opportunity.

It was an opportunity that the Germans were determined not to miss. Hardly had the Italian offensive on Greece which began on October 28 stalled, than the Germans on November 1 began to consider a drive through Bulgaria to the Aegean. In the following months the project grew until it encompassed a complete occupation of Greece. By November 4 the Yugoslav government was beginning to indicate quietly to the Germans that they would be willing to join in the attack on Greece if they could be promised the Aegean port of Salonika, thus freeing them from dependence on the Italian-controlled Adriatic.
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Simultaneously, there began a series of secret soundings in which the Greeks tried to obtain German mediation for a cease-fire and new peace which could spare them from being overrun.

The soundings from Yugoslavia were welcomed by Berlin and led to lengthy negotiations which culminated in Yugoslavia’s eventually adhering to the Tripartite Pact on March 25, 1941; and when the government which had taken this step was overthrown in a coup two days later, Hitler immediately decided to invade and conquer Yugoslavia along with Greece.
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As for the peace feelers from the latter, Berlin was not interested. No amount of assurances from Athens and no volume of evidence that the country was not becoming a base for British troops or long-range bombers could turn Hitler from his determination to occupy all of Greece.
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There were to be no even slightly loose ends left on the flanks of his forthcoming attack in the East.

The British had considered various schemes to try to create a front in the Balkans to divert Italian and possibly also German forces from the Western Front earlier in the war.
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Like the schemes to sabotage the Romanian oil fields, all this came to naught as Germany drew Romania into its fold and cast its shadow over Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria after its victory in Western Europe. The Italian attack on Greece with its quickly obvious setbacks appeared to offer the British
an opportunity along with an obligation. The obligation was to try to provide some substance to the guarantee the British had given to Greece when Italy occupied Albania; the opportunity was the possibility of creating on the continent of Europe a Balkan front based on Greece and supplied from North Africa and possibly drawing on those other Southeast European countries also menaced by the Axis: Yugoslavia, Turkey, and possibly Bulgaria. And from that base, there might be the possibility of raids on the Romanian oil fields.

Whatever these tempting visions, there were some realities that could not be disregarded and other realities which when disregarded would prove fatal for British designs. In the first instance, the British only sent some air force units to Greece to assist the Greek forces fighting on the Albanian front. In the face of initial Italian domination of the air, this was of considerable help, even though numerically the British forces were never large. In November 1940, the British commander in the Middle East, General Sir Archibald Wavell, was husbanding all his resources and carefully collecting reinforcements for his planned offensive against the Italians in the following month. He could spare little equipment to remedy the desperate shortages of the Greek army, he had no ground forces to send there, and in early November made it clear that none would be dispatched.
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In the following weeks, the British began to inch their way into an army venture in Greece even as their troops chased the Italians over miles of North African desert. In December some paratroops were sent to Crete to replace a Greek army division being sent to the Albanian front–here was a first diversion from the African campaign which temporarily aided the Greeks but otherwise did little good because the British did almost nothing to get the island ready for defense.
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In an astonishing imitation of Italian incompetence, the British had hardly improved those defenses by the time they were getting ready to meet a German landing half a year later!

The Greeks did not want British troops on the mainland because they feared such a presence would serve to provoke a German attack; they did not recognize that it made no difference to Berlin whether the British presence was real or potential. The death of the Greek dictator, Ioannis Metaxas, on January 29, 1941, removed what was probably the last obstacle to a British reversal of policy. Always a realist as well as a patriot, Metaxas might have saved the British from a futile gesture which helped the Greeks little and cost the Allied cause much.
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As it became clear that the Germans would attack Greece through Bulgaria, the Greeks looked at British aid differently and the British revised their own priorities. Having moved the bulk of their forces and
essentially all their supplies to the Albanian front, the Greeks were now interested in British land forces to help defend themselves against a German invasion. The authorities in London, encouraged by excessively optimistic reports from Wavell as well as from the new British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the Chief of Imperial General Staff Field Marshal Sir John Dill, who were in Greece in late February, ordered the land flank in central Libya held while troops and supplies were switched to Greece.
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This diversion of effort from completing the conquest of Libya to aiding the Greeks against Germany left the Italians with essentially all of Tripolitania as a base for the Germans who would then hold on in North Africa and repeatedly threaten Egypt for more than two additional years. It was done in part to honor the political promises given to the Greeks, but it was also in part due to a complete disregard of the military and political realities in Southeast Europe. The military realities were the ability of the Germans to bring massive power to bear on an operation there over land supply routes, and a complete inability of the British to bring even remotely equivalent forces to the same theater. The bravery of the British navy could get British troops to Greece and, when necessary, evacuate them (though without their equipment).

The Royal Navy could also protect the British troops against the Italian navy. This was shown dramatically in the naval battle off Cape Matapan on March 28 when, in part because of their ability to read German code machines,
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in part because of the superiority of British radar, the Royal Navy sank three Italian heavy cruisers and two destroyers when the Italian navy tried to interfere with British convoys to Greece without effective German air support.
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The operation had been launched by the Italian navy under great German pressure; its failure contributed to subsequent greater reluctance in the Italian naval command to risk their ships and hardly increased their eagerness to defer to German wishes.

The British, however, regardless of naval successes, simply did not have the land and air forces in the Mediterranean to hold against the
German offensive into Greece. The successful transport of troops, therefore, only assured the loss of their equipment together with many of the soldiers as well as the confidence of the Australian government, many of whose troops were involved, in the judgement of the British military.

Integrally related to the military miscalculation was an equally serious but more easily understandable political one. The British hoped that they could weld together a general alignment in Southeast Europe against Germany and that this would in particular include Turkey as well as Yugoslavia and possibly Bulgaria. The Bulgarians had decided by the end of 1940 that they would side with Germany. Incapable of recognizing in the face of his belief in Germany and his hopes for territorial gain at the expense of Greece that in the long war ahead Bulgaria’s interest lay in opposing rather than cooperating with the Third Reich, King Boris led his country onto the road to disaster.
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It is indicative of his limited perspective that he thought the American effort to reinforce the British attempt to create an alignment against Germany through the mission of Colonel William J. Donovan to be silly.
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The ruler who would absolutely insist later that year on declaring war against the United States was perhaps not as shrewd as many thought him.

The Turks were terrified of the Germans and the Russians on the one hand and hoped for territorial gains from Greece on the other. In spite of endless efforts, projects, schemes, and hopes on the part of the British, they were not about to join any front against Germany until the Germans themselves invaded Turkey, something the Germans naturally promised they would never do and something they equally naturally planned for the moment it was safe for them to do so, namely after they had conquered the rest of the Balkans and defeated Russia. Until that moment, Germany would exchange limited amounts of equipment for much needed chrome and sweet-talk the Turks far more persuasively than the British.
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In offering portions of Greece to Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, the Germans were careful to exclude that portion of Greece bordering on Turkey. Here was bait to dangle before Ankara’s eyes, and in the event the Turks would receive a minimal slice of Greece so that they could control the route of an important stretch of railway.
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As for Yugoslavia, here too there was no realistic prospect of action against Germany and Italy by a weak regime governing a divided country of feuding nationalities and which coveted a piece of Greece for itself. It is correct that here too British diplomatic efforts had some American support,
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but it was surely unrealistic–given the past record of both Yugoslavia itself and Britain’s and the United States’ obvious inability to provide substantial deliveries of weapons–to expect Yugoslavia to
take the only step likely to be useful: a quick invasion of Albania from the north to throw the Italians out of that colony entirely and join up with Greek forces. The coup in Belgrade on March 27 appeared to give some retroactive validity to earlier British efforts, but by then it was entirely too late. Undoubtedly the British gestures of defiance, both the diplomatic and the military ones, encouraged the spirits of those opposed to the Axis in a grim time. Unlike the Soviet Union, which was still begging to join Hitler,
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the British at least tried to help his victims. They–like the victims–would pay heavily.