All Hell Let Loose (21 page)

Pietro Ostellino wrote on 13 May near Tobruk: ‘We are well advanced now and it is only a question of time. It is quite hot, but bearable, and I am in good health – brown as a salami, partly from the sun and also because we are covered in sand which sticks to our skin and with sweat forms a layer of mud. We have enough water, but fifteen minutes after washing we are back to what we were before.’ Soon afterwards, hearing news of the Axis advance into Greece, he wrote: ‘Yesterday I received a letter from Uncle Ottavio from Albania in which he talks of the great victory they have achieved there. We will soon be emulating them and will throw the English out of everywhere.’ Though the Australians held out in Tobruk even after the Afrika Korps raced past towards Egypt, strategic advantage lay firmly with Rommel. And meanwhile across the Mediterranean, as Ostellino noted, the British had suffered a further series of disasters.

2
A GREEK TRAGEDY

The struggle for the Balkans began with a black farce precipitated by Mussolini. Having dickered with a takeover of Yugoslavia, instead, on 28 October 1940 he launched 162,000 men into Greece from Albania, an operation only revealed to Marshal Graziani in North Africa by Rome Radio’s news broadcasts. Even Hitler was kept in the dark: the Duce was so nettled by Germany’s takeover of Romania – deemed part of Italy’s sphere of influence – without consultation with Rome that he determined to turn the tables by presenting Berlin with his own
fait accompli
in Greece. The pretext for war was mythical Greek support for British operations in the Mediterranean. A small country of seven million people was expected to offer no significant resistance; Greece’s defences faced Bulgaria, not Albania. The British were committed by treaty to support the Athens government, but initially offered only a few weapons and aircraft. Mussolini told his officers: ‘If anyone makes any difficulties about beating the Greeks, I shall resign from being an Italian.’ His foreign minister Ciano, sometimes dovish, favoured the invasion as offering easy pickings. He believed Athens would capitulate in the face of token bombing, and sought to ensure such an outcome by allocating millions of lire to bribe Greek politicians and generals. It remains uncertain whether this money was paid, or merely stolen by fascist intermediaries.

Rome was anyway denied its desired outcome. The Greek people, enraged by an Italian submarine’s sinking of the Greek cruiser
Helli
weeks before Mussolini’s declaration of war, responded to invasion with resolute defiance. Graffiti appeared: ‘Death to the spaghetti-eaters who sank our
Helli
’. Although grievously impoverished, Greece mobilised 209,000 men and 125,000 horses and mules. Its dictator General Ioannis Metaxas, whose rule had hitherto been divisive, wrote in his diary as tensions with Italy mounted: ‘Now everyone is with me.’ A peasant named Ahmet Tsapounis sent him a telegram: ‘Not having any money to contribute to the nation’s war effort, I give instead my field at Variko … which is 5.5 acres. I humbly ask you to accept this.’ On predominantly Greek-inhabited Cyprus, popular sentiment had hitherto been pro-Axis, because it was believed that a Nazi victory would free the island from British colonial rule. Now, however, a Cypriot wrote: ‘The supreme desire was for the defeat of the armies which had invaded Greek soil, to be followed by “the fruits of victory” – “freedom”, as promised by Churchill.’

To the astonishment of the world, not only did the Greek army repel the Italian invasion, but by November its forces had advanced deep into Albania. Italian general Ubaldo Soddu suggested asking the Greeks for an armistice. In Athens, Maris Markoyianni heard a small boy ask: ‘When we’ve beaten the Italians, what shall we do with Mussolini?’ Hitler was furious about the Greek fiasco. He had always opposed it, and emphatically so until after the November US elections: he feared that new Axis aggression must aid Roosevelt. He had urged Mussolini to secure Crete before attacking the mainland, to frustrate British intervention. In a letter from Vienna on 20 November, he expressed dismay about Italian blundering. The Duce, replying, blamed his setbacks on bad weather; Bulgarian assurances of neutrality, which allowed the Greeks to shift large forces westwards; and local Albanians’ unwillingness to aid the Axis. He told Hitler that he was preparing to launch thirty divisions ‘with which we shall utterly destroy Greece’. Those who supposed him a less brutal tyrant than Germany’s Führer were confounded by his directive to Badoglio, his chief of staff: ‘All [Greek] urban centres of over 10,000 population must be destroyed and razed to the ground. This is a direct order.’

He achieved nothing of the kind. Instead, through the months that followed the Greek and Italian armies remained stalemated in the Albanian mountains, amid the worst winter weather for half a century. Sergeant Diamantis Stafilakas from Chios wrote in his diary on 18 January 1941: ‘The door of our shelter will not open because of the snow. The fierce wind drives the snow up against it. Today it is raining again. We are soaked through. There is no chance of lighting a fire because the smoke chokes us. Our nights are spent in excruciating discomfort, so that I get up, go outside and walk around. I tried to build a new shelter, and managed to dig down twenty centimetres before the snow began again and I gave up.’

Frostbite inflicted thousands of casualties. Spyros Triantafillos grieved at abandoning his beloved grey horse after it broke down in a snowdrift: ‘Starving, soaked to the bone, tortured by endless movement on rocky ground, it was doomed to stay there. I emptied my saddlebags to follow the others on foot, then stroked the back of its neck a little and kissed it. It might be an animal, but it had been my comrade in war. We had faced death many times together, had lived through unforgettable days and nights. I saw it looking at me as I walked away. What a look that was, my friends. It revealed so much anguish, so much sadness. I wanted to cry, but the tears did not come. War leaves no time for such things. Momentarily I thought of killing it, but couldn’t bear to do so. I left it there, staring after me until I disappeared behind a rock.’

Hitler, exasperated, ignored Mussolini’s protestations that he could defeat the Greeks unaided. On 13 December, he issued Directive No. 20 for Operation
Marita
: ‘In the light of the threatening situation in Albania, it is doubly important to frustrate English efforts to establish, behind the protection of a Balkan front, an air base which would threaten Italy … and, incidentally, the Romanian oilfields.’ Following the installation of General Ion Antonescu as Romania’s prime minister on 12 October 1940, that country and its vital oil reserves fell under German control; most Romanians considered Germany an inescapable ally, when their country was threatened by the territorial ambitions of the Soviet Union.

By January, the Luftwaffe was attacking British shipping in the Mediterranean from Sicily. General Metaxas died suddenly on the 29th. In March, German diplomatic pressure persuaded Bulgaria to join the Axis; Yugoslavia likewise acceded, though a palace coup in Belgrade installed a short-lived pro-British regime. The morale of the Italian people slumped, as it became apparent that their leader’s ambitions had suffered humiliating frustration, with the consequence that they themselves must bow to German hegemony in the Mediterranean region. A police informant in Milan wrote: ‘Many, many pessimists see Italy as a protectorate of Germany, and conclude that if we endured three wars, the severe losses of the navy, the sacrifice of our raw materials and gold reserves … in order to achieve the loss of our political, economic and military independence, there is nothing to be proud of about the policies followed.’ The privations of the Italian people worsened through the winter, with prices soaring. The ration of pasta and rice was cut to two kilos per person per month, when the average worker consumed four hundred grams a day. Italian enthusiasm for the war, always brittle, never recovered from its slump following the 1940–41 defeats. Thereafter, most of Mussolini’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians were unhappy prisoners, chained to Hitler’s chariot wheels.

On 6 April, thirty-three German divisions, six of them armoured, swept into Yugoslavia, easily overwhelming its army. A Luftwaffe bomber attack on the capital killed 17,000 people, an appalling toll which reflected its citizens’ absolute unpreparedness for their fate. Six days later the invaders occupied the city, and on 17 April the Yugoslavs capitulated.

A 56,000-strong British-led force, mostly composed of Australians and New Zealanders, began to land in Greece in March, to deploy in the northeast. Churchill’s insistence on committing imperial troops at the discretion of British commanders provoked serious and understandable dismay among the leaders of the white dominions. In theory, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand formations could be deployed only with the express sanction of their home governments. But, especially in 1940–41 before dominion ministers dug in their heels against abuses of their constitutional rights, such approval was often sought only retrospectively. The Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, attended the 24 February 1941 British War Cabinet meeting at which the decision was made to dispatch an army to Greece; but he and his fellow ministers were wilfully misled about the opinions and fears of commanders in the theatre, including their own most senior officers. Only after the first New Zealand soldiers had been in Greece for some weeks in December 1940 did their government in Auckland learn of the fact. Anzac rather than British forces were called upon to bear the chief burden of the most hazardous Allied military gamble of the Mediterranean campaign, serving under a British commander-in-chief. Australian politicians, in particular, were deeply dismayed.

Anzac soldiers, however, cherished more innocent sensations. The New Zealanders were voyaging towards their first battlefield; like most young men in such circumstances, they revelled in excited anticipation and exotic sensations, oblivious of peril. Lance-Bombardier Morry Cullen wrote home euphorically about the thrill of sailing the Mediterranean: ‘I have never seen such beautiful shades of blue, from a light sky shade to the deepest blue black and there was hardly a ripple on the water.’ Private Victor Ball wrote in his diary about Athens: ‘Best place we have been in and people very friendly. Had a look at the Acropolis, the old ruins of Athens … The brothel area is a lot cleaner than Cairo. We got very drunk but got home alright.’ Lt. Dan Davin reflected later: ‘We were all absolutely the picture of youth and health … There’s a sort of natural courage in people who’ve been fed all their lives on good meat.’ These dominion troops approached their first experience of war with a confidence and enthusiasm that persisted, in remarkable degree, through the ordeal which now began to unfold. Some of their officers, however, were more cynical: Gen. Sir Thomas Blamey, the seedy old reprobate commanding the Australian corps – ‘a coward and not a commander’, in the words of one of his staff officers – spent 26 March reconnoitring possible evacuation beaches in southern Greece.

The Germans invaded on 6 April 1941, simultaneously with their assault on Yugoslavia. They cited the British presence to justify their action: ‘The government of the Reich has consequently ordered its armed forces to expel British troops from the soil of Greece. All resistance will be ruthlessly crushed … It is emphasised that the German army does not come as an enemy of the Greek people, and it is not the desire of the German people to fight Greeks … The blow which Germany is obliged to strike on Greek soil is directed against England.’ British forces were spread far too thin to check the invaders. Where Germans met resistance – and there were some stubborn little stands – they merely pulled back and probed until they found a gap elsewhere.

New Zealander Victor Ball described the first stage of what became a long, painful withdrawal: ‘We were followed by shellfire the whole way, wherever we went they shelled us. One chap killed outright just alongside me – hit in the throat – and quite a few hit with bits of shale and stone. Planes coming over one at a time bombing and machine-gunning. Things sure get on your nerves when you can’t fight back.’ Russell Brickell, another New Zealander, reflected on the experience of being dive-bombed: ‘It’s a peculiar feeling, lying on one’s tummy in a trench or ditch listening to the scream of an approaching bomb, a second’s silence as it hits the ground, then the earth comes up and hits one in the face and there is a tremendous woomph! and bits whistle through the air.’

German forces were soon pouring through the Monastir Gap on the Yugoslavian border, threatening the rear of the Greek positions in Albania. Allied forces fell back southward in increasing disorder, outnumbered, outmanoeuvred, and naked against air attack. An Australian medical officer described how ‘the patter of feet, human and animal, could be heard all night long’ as the Greek retreat became a panic-stricken rout. Everywhere in the path of the Axis advance, communities were visited by scenes of horror. A column of Italian prisoners being marched under escort through a village was suddenly enveloped in mortar and artillery fire, which killed and wounded dozens. An old woman, who had lost her eldest son Stathi in Albania, began to sob. A café owner urged her now to check her tears for the Italians: ‘They were the ones who killed your son.’ She ignored him, and ran to a soldier torn open by shrapnel, who lay crying: ‘Bread, mother!’ The old woman tried to wash his wounds with a cloth dipped in raki, still sobbing and talking to the man: ‘Don’t cry, Stathi. Yes, I am your mother. Don’t cry. I’ve got both bread and milk.’

The Greek army had exhausted itself confronting the Italians through the winter. It lacked transport for rapid manoeuvre. The Germans ruthlessly exploited their dominance of the air, especially effective in a country with few roads. ‘During the afternoon we had our first look at the great Jerry Luftwaffe,’ wrote Australian Captain Charles Chrystal. ‘190 bombers came over and bombed … till there was not a thing left. They flew in close formation … and I can tell you we simply gasped in amazement and were absolutely spellbound to see such numbers.’ Although the Australians and New Zealanders conducted some determined little rearguard actions, on 28 April the first major naval evacuations began, from Rafina and Porto Rafti. The Germans fanned out across the Peloponnese, where the Royal Navy took off troops from Nauplia and Kalamata.