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World War 2:
Balkan Campaigns
Campaign in Yugoslavia
Campaign in Greece
Balkan Campaigns
During nearly the entire first year of World War II,
Hitler's primary concern with southeastern Europe was to avoid trouble
in the area. By the late summer of 1940, however, his attitude had begun
to change. The Soviet Union had annexed Bessarabia and northern Bucovina
in June, and it clearly intended to reach farther south and west at
the first good opportunity. Hitler, on the other hand, had started to
think in terms of a conflict with the USSR. In such an eventuality he
would need security on his deep southern flank, and above all he would
need Rumanian oil. He would still have preferred to establish German
hegemony in the Balkans without fighting, and he would probably have
succeeded in doing so had Benito Mussolini not made his bungling attempt
to invade Greece from Italian-occupied Albania on October 28.
The Italian attack was planned as a police action in
the style of the German triumphal march into Czechoslovakia. Its general
purpose was to show the world that Mussolini was not always dependent
on Hitler: specifically, it was intended to match the action of the
Germans, who three weeks earlier had unilaterally stationed troops in
Rumania, then under a joint German-Italian guarantee. Hitler, who had
been irritated by his Axis partner's unexpected move, became furious
when the collapse of the Italian offensive close to the Albanian-Greek
border opened the way for the development he wanted least of all, British
intervention in Greece. The British occupied Crete and Lemnos (Limnos)
on October 31, and in the next few days they established air units in
southern Greece within bombing range of the Rumanian Ploesti oilfields.
On November 4, Hitler ordered the German Army High Command to begin
preparing for an attack on Greece.
Faced with a delay of four or five months until good
campaigning weather returned, the Germans sought to open the approaches
to the northern Greek border by political means. In November, Hungary
and Rumania adhered to the Tripartite Pact of the Axis ( concluded by
Germany, Italy, and Japan in September). The Rumanian dictator, Gen.
(later Marshal) Ion Antonescu, welcomed this insurance against the Soviet
Union. Bulgaria, which was to provide the actual staging area for the
operation against Greece, hesitated to commit itself in view of possible
unfavorable Soviet and Turkish reactions. Hitler, knowing that Bulgaria
as one of the defeated nations in World War I would find it difficult
to refuse an opportunity to obtain revenge, was willing to move slowly.
German army engineers began bridging the Danube River on Feb. 28, 1941,
and on March 1, just before German troops crossed the Rumanian border
into the country, Bulgaria signed the Tripartite Pact.
In the case of Yugoslavia, Hitler was prepared to accept
limited adherence to the Axis, for all he required was the use of the
Belgrade (Beograd) - Nis-Salonika railroad. (Rail connections through
Bulgaria were poor.) The Yugoslav government resisted his overtures,
but in mid-March, after having refused several earlier invitations,
it suddenly changed its policy and offered to sign the Tripartite Pact.
The ceremony was held in Vienna on March 25. A day and a half later,
on the night of March 26-27, a military coup d'etat forced Prince Regent
Paul into exile. Young King Peter II was declared of age, and Gen. Dusan
Simovic formed a new government. While it did not denounce the recent
adherence to the Tripartite Pact, it refused to ratify Yugoslavia's
signature.
On March 27, Hitler declared that he was determined
"to destroy Yugoslavia as a military power and a sovereign state,"
and he ordered the Wehrmacht staffs to complete military preparations
at the greatest possible speed. Turning to their traditional protectors,
the Russians, the Yugoslavs sent a delegation to Moscow on April 3.
They failed to obtain a mutual assistance pact, however, and on April
5 were forced to accept instead a relatively meaningless treaty of friendship
and nonaggression. The next day the German invasion began.
Campaign in Yugoslavia
A rugged, mountainous terrain and wide-meshed, underdeveloped
road and rail networks were Yugoslavia's strongest potential defensive
assets. Although these assets were to be important during the years
of guerrilla warfare, they did not serve to improve the country's very
difficult strategic position in April 1941. To defend a land frontier
of 1,700 miles the Yugoslav Army had a hypothetical maximum strength
of 1,000,000. Even if it had been able to call up that many men, it
could not have armed and equipped them. Since 1939 the army had been
cut off from its principal supplier of weapons and ammunition, the Skoda
works in Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, the General Staff proposed to
employ eight of its nine armies, which at full strength were approximately
equivalent to German corps, in a linear defense of the entire frontier.
In the first week of April, it rejected a Greek plan to sacrifice most
of the country for the sake of securing a strong common front with the
Greeks and the British in the south. Moreover, no matter what the staff
intended, deep-seated differences between the Serbian and Croatian elements
in the population threatened to divide both the army and the nation
as soon as war broke out.
When Gen. (later Field Marshal) Sir John Greer Dill,
the British chief of staff, visited Belgrade on April 1, he found the
government confused and almost apathetic. It seemed above all to wish
to avoid provoking the Germans in the forlorn hope that a conflict could
still be avoided or at least postponed. In the end, the only cooperation
arranged between the Yugoslav and Greek forces took the quixotic form
of a projected joint offensive against the Italians in Albania.
For the Germans the operation against Yugoslavia, in
full swing 10 days after it was first ordered, was mainly an exercise
in staff virtuosity. The most difficult task was to shift the German
Second Army, composed of nine divisions under Col. Gen. (later Field
Marshal) Maximilian von Weichs, to the northern Yugoslav border. The
divisions had to be moved by rail and truck from France, Germany, and
the Soviet border. The other major attack force, consisting of the five
divisions of the 1st Panzer Group under Col. Gen. (later Field Marshal)
Ewald von Kleist, was diverted from the assembly for the attack on Greece.
The plan was for the Second Army to break through the
Yugoslav lines on a broad front north and northeast of Zagreb and to
advance southward between the Drava and Sava rivers toward Belgrade.
The 1st Panzer Group was to cross the border northwest of Sofia ( Sofiya),
Bulgaria, take Nis, and thrust northward up the Morava Valley to Belgrade.
A third force, the 41st Panzer Corps, taking the short route across
the Rumanian border from the area south of Timi5oara, was to converge
on Belgrade from the northeast.
In the early morning hours of April 6, German planes
bombed Belgrade. They came in at rooftop level, and in an hour and a
half killed more than 17,000 of the city's inhabitants and almost completely
destroyed the Yugoslav High Command's communications with its forces
in the field. The 1st Panzer Group crossed the border at daylight on
April 8. While it encountered the Yugoslav Fifth Army, one of the few
fully mobilized Yugoslav units, rough terrain and roadblocks proved
to be the chief obstacles to its advance. After taking Nil on April
9, it broke away rapidly to the north toward Belgrade. In the meantime,
another German force cut across southern Yugoslavia to divide the country
from Greece. The Yugoslavs had opened their Albanian offensive on April
7, and for three days they made steady progress against the Italians.
The German Second Army launched local attacks on April
6, but because some of its major elements were still on the way, it
did not attack in full strength until April 10. On that day, the Croat
troops in the Yugoslav Fourth and Seventh armies, stationed on the northern
frontier, mutinied, and by nightfall both armies had been dissolved.
On the afternoon of April 10, Second Army troops entered Zagreb, where
a newly created Croat government welcomed them as liberators. During
the day, conceding by implication that he had lost control of the situation,
General Simovic called on all Yugoslav units to engage the enemy "wherever
they met him and by any means" without waiting for orders from
higher headquarters.
German forces converged on Belgrade from three directions
on April 12. In the early evening an SS lieutenant from the 41st Panzer
Corps took a patrol into the capital, hoisted the swastika flag over
the German legation, and accepted the mayor's offer to surrender the
city. On the morning of the following day, Easter Sunday, German armored
spearheads entered Belgrade. The chief of the German Army General Staff
noted in his diary that the campaign was over: all that remained was
the mopping up. The Second Army had three columns moving westward and
southwestward toward Sarajevo to block any attempt to establish a front
in the mountains, but it encountered only masses of troops waiting to
surrender. In some places fighting had broken out between Croat and
Serb units.
On April 14, Gen. Danilo Katafatovic took command of
the Yugoslav forces and opened negotiations for an armistice, which
was signed three days later. German casualties in the campaign totaled
558; those of the Yugoslavs ran much higher. The Germans took 344,000
prisoners. The Yugoslav Army had mobilized approximately 500,000 men,
but many of them deserted before the fighting ended. Others, following
the national tradition, slipped away to carry on guerrilla warfare.
Chetnik (eetnici ) units had been organized before the invasion began,
and later Partisan groups also were formed.
Campaign in Greece
The Greek High Command was fully aware that Germany
would not permit its ally, Italy, to be embroiled in an embarrassing
little war indefinitely. In mid-February 1941, therefore, the Greeks
seized their last chance and opened an offensive that was intended to
drive the Italians from Albania before the Wehrmacht could intervene.
The offensive made progress, but it was not sufficient. At the turn
of the month, German troops marched into Bulgaria, and a British expeditionary
force, which with earlier arrivals eventually numbered approximately
62,500 troops, began moving into Greece. Because of its fear of provoking
the Germans, the _ Greek government had previously been reluctant to
accept large-scale British assistance.
The Greek Army, commanded by Gen. (later Field Marshal)
Alexander Papagos, had a total effective strength of 430,000 men. Unlike
the Yugoslav Army, it was fully mobilized and to some extent battle
tested. Its problem in countering a German attack was complicated by
the psychological and political necessity of defending the long northern
frontier. The army command believed that it could not voluntarily evacuate
Albania, since to do so would seem to concede victory to the Italians.
On the other hand, it was convinced that national morale would be equally
damaged if it were to give up the long tongue of Greek territory extending
east of Salonika. There the Metaxas Line covered the Bulgarian border.
Built only for use in the event of a war with Bulgaria, the line could
not withstand a German attack, but it had cost a great deal of money
and in the popular mind had become a symbol of national security. The
British commander, Lt. Gen. (later Field Marshal) Sir Henry Maitland
Wilson (later 1st Baron Wilson of Libya and of Stowlangtoft) lacked
sufficient troops to close the gap between the front in Albania and
the Metaxas Line, and he therefore placed his forces in a short line
facing northeastward along the Vermion Mountains and the lower Aliakmon
River. Apparently, neither the Greeks nor the British had decided on
a course of action if the Germans attacked across the virtually undefended
Yugoslav border, and it was just there that one or two thrusts would
outflank all three segments of the Greek-British front.
The German Twelfth Army, under Field Marshal Wilhelm
List, executed the campaign in Greece. It had three corps headquarters
commanding 12 divisions. In the assembly one corps was stationed southwest
of Sofia, to attack toward Skopje (Skoplje) in southern Yugoslavia and
then southward into Greece. The second was placed in the southwest corner
of Bulgaria to attack through and around the flank of the Metaxas Line
toward Salonika, and the third was moved close to the eastern end of
the Greek-Bulgarian border. The heavy concentration against the narrow
strip of territory east of Salonika resulted mainly from Hitler's desire
to defeat at the outset any British attempt to retain a foothold in
northern Greece or on the Aegean Islands, Thasos, Samothrace (Samothrake),
and Lemnos.
The Twelfth Army attacked on April 6. The units moving
toward Skopje encountered the fully mobilized Yugoslav Third Army and
became involved in heavy fighting, as did those attacking the Metaxas
Line frontally, but everywhere the offensive made good progress. On
April 9, Salonika fell, and the Greek Second Army surrendered, thereby
ending resistance on the Metaxas Line and in all the territory east
of Salonika.
The German corps advancing through southern Yugoslavia
took Skopje on April 7, and began turning south. On April 10, it attacked
through the Bitolj (Monastir) gap between the open flanks of the British
line along the Vermion Mountains, and the Greek front in Albania. The
British immediately began retreating toward Mount Olympus (Olymbos)
, and the next day the Greek First Army decided to withdraw southward
from Albania. When the Germans took Metsovon Pass on April 21, the First
Army's route of escape from the area around and north of Ioannina was
cut. The army surrendered the next day. The British force retreated
southward along the Aegean coast toward Athens (Athenai). The Germans
took the city and reached the Isthmus of Corinth on April 27, and in
three more days occupied the Peloponnesus (Peloponnesos). Most of the
12,000 British casualties were incurred during these last days, when
the German ground forces closed in, and the ships evacuating the troops
were forced to come toward shore without air cover. The Germans lost
1,100 men killed and 4,000 missing and wounded.
Greece was liberated by British troops from the Mediterranean
theater in late 1944 (see section 8. Mediterranean Operations), and
Yugoslavia was cleared of German troops during the Russian final offensive
in 1945 (see section 6. German Invasion of the USSR).
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