How Italy Failed at Greece

In early October 1940. The chief of the battalion general staff, Pietro Bagdolio, was ordered by Mussolini to begin preparing for the invasion of Greece. And, on the 28th using the recently annexed Albania as a base, the Italian's vanguard of two divisions advanced into the Pindus Mountains. From the outset, progress was slower than anticipated and within eleven days the Greeks had stopped the invasion dead in its tracks. And to make matters worse, the Italian's logistical system collapsed. By the 14th November, the Greeks had pushed the Italians back to the border and began a unified counter-offensive which shattered the Italian line and threw them into a panic. In some places the Greeks penetrated as far as fifty kilometers or thirty one miles into Albania. The counter-offensive only ended after the Greeks lost momentum and a stalemate then ensued which would only be broken in April by the Germans. This leads us to today's question, how did the Greeks manage to repel an invasion by a seemingly much stronger power. 

In many ways Italy's invasion of Greece was an attempt to imitate the expansionist policies of their German ally. Up to this point Italy's only conquests had been in Ethiopia and Albania, while Italian participation in the second world war had been limited to the French Alps and North Africa. But Mussolini was a man of boundless ambition, and had become convinced that the fastest method of securing dominance over the Mediterranean lay in the annexation of Greece. From the outset, Italian logistics and maneuverability were compromised by the harsh climate of the Pindus Mountains combined with an unusually cold winter. By December, conditions were nearly Arctic, foreshadowing what was in store for their German allies one year later. Pack animals quickly began dying of hypothermia and tens of thousands of men on both sides developed frostbite. But these were not insurmountable obstacles and the hardy Italians were no strangers to bad weather or rough terrain. They also possessed a substantial number of tanks, modern infantry weapons, and a strong air corps . In contrast, the majority of Greek troops had to make do with a truly archaic arsenal consisting mostly of equipment left over from the great war. Furthermore, the axis stranglehold over Europe cut them off from ships of ammunition or spare parts. In terms of air power, the only force the Greeks could muster consisted of mere seventy nine planes. Yet despite their advantages the Italian would soon find that the armor which had proved instrumental in the deserts of Ethiopia were useless in the Pindus Mountains.

Meanwhile, the air force that had terrorized the republicans in the Spanish civil war would be given a harsh lesson in humility by the British RAF, which flew many sorties in defense of Greek airspace from The Island of Crete during the invasion. The British were also able to supply the Greeks with accurate and reliable intelligence on enemy troops movements and strategic objectives.thanks to having cracked Italian military encryption protocols. The character of the Italian military establishment was also a major contributor to the disaster. A culture of mistrust created bitter personal feuds in which generals were humiliating each other than they were with defeating the enemy. Inter-service rivalries were just as severe with each branch cooperating as little as possible out of fear that doing so would undermine their own political relevance. This was not helped by internal competition for the limited resources they had to work with as Italy was a largely agrarian country. Unlike Germany, which did not have large occupied territories to plunder. These issues prevented the use of combined arms tactics that their German allies had used successfully in French and in Poland.

Italian generals were also astonishingly unwilling to consider new tactics, preferring instead to believe that properly motivated equipped infantry units could accomplish anything in sufficient numbers. This attitudes was highlighted when Italian observers compiled a detailed and insightful report on German tactics and handed it to the chief of staff Bagdolio only for him to promptly dismiss it with the words, "We'll study it when the war is over!". Contrary to popular perception , the Italian army was not wholly incompetent. The issue did not lie with the morale or the training of the average soldier, but instead lay in the systemic failures of the military establishment as a whole. Even Erwin Rommel noted that when given proper leadership the Italian troops under his command displayed incredible bravery. But this quote from the war diary of a disgruntled Italian general, underlines the lack of foresight or the strategic planning that went into the campaign. Someone says in fifteen days we must be ready to march against Yugoslavia or in eight days we will attack Greece from Albania as easy as saying "let's have a cup of coffee". The duche hasn't the least idea of the differences between preparing war on flat terrain or in mountains, in summer or in winter. Still less does he worry  about the fact that we lack weapons, ammunition, equipment, animals, raw materials. The factors we've discussed so far, though important, were not enough to guarantee an Italian failure. That was guaranteed by the resolve displayed by the Greek people. 

Before the war, Greek was a nation suffering from many internal divisions. Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas had been a veteran of a great war who had taken to politics after becoming alarmed by the growing communist movement among the Greek peasantry. But after failing to secure popular support, Metaxas was appointed prime minister by the King of Greece, George II. Shortly thereafter, Metaxas used  the thread of a communist uprising to abolish parliament and establish himself as an authoritarian dictator. But despite the fact that his regime was deeply unpopular, Metaxas was a genius propagandist whose total control over the Greek media allowed him to spin a narrative of Italian cowardice and incompetence.

Then on August 15th, weeks before the declaration of war, an Italian submarine torpedoed a light cruiser. This coincided with a major festival to the Virgin Mary and the pious Greeks reacted by elevating the deceased crew to the status of religious martyrs. Metaxas could not have wished for a more perfect opportunity and the state propaganda machine went into overdrive, whipping the nation into a patriotic frenzy for the coming righteous conflict against the vile Italian oppressors. The subsequent tenacity with which Greeks resisted invasion was seen on numerous occasions such as the Battle of Hill 731, in which Italian division supported  by an armored element was repeatedly repuled by a single battalion of Greeks defending an important mountain pass. This act of heroism has often been called the modern thermopylae, and ultimately caused the Italian spring offensive to be cancelled. Yet despite their numerous successes, the Greeks were doomed by factors beyond their control. Even with British aid, their army had effectively run out of supplies by March of 1941. War material capture from the retreating Italians provided only a temporary solution. And by the time Germans invaded, the German army faced an enemy that barely had enough ammunition for a month of sustained fighting. In total, at least 250,000 Greek reservists never even saw combat as their country lacked the means to provide them with so much as a pair of boots. As the mainland collapsed the government withdrew to the Island of Crete, one of the last  targets of the German Balkan Campaign. British, Greek, and Anzac forces would be tested against over 20.000 airborne troops in the largest airborne invasion up to that point. 

Hitler would go on to blame the invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia for the failure of operation Barbarossa, allegedly stating "If the Italians hadn't attacked Greece and needed our help, the war would have taken a different course."

While the fuhrer may have been exaggerating there is no doubt that the conflict in the southern Europe was a significant drain on the limited resources of the axis. Given all the evidence discussed so far, it's easy to see how the Italian invasion was doomed from the start. Italian strategists ignored every lesson of modern warfare, pushing troops into battle with neither the equipment nor the support they needed to accomplish their mission. Individual heroism could not compensate for the abject failures of the Italian military establishment and even after Greece finally capitulated, its remaining soldiers took up arms in the British army of North Africa, while many civilians fought as partisans forming one of the strongest and most effective resistance movements of the war.