Chapter 20

OCT 1940 ITALY INVADES GREECE

“Hitler truly loved and admired Mussolini just as much as he genuinely detested Italians, although he sometimes talked about a sentiment of friendship towards them.

He considered Italians as corrupted, unreliable, liars, racially mixed and their political and military leaders as incompetent cretins who belonged to an “aristocratic mafia”. On the other hand he regarded Mussolini as a true political genius, the “Maestro” who showed the way to fight Socialism (the Jewish conspiracy of the XX century against the “Aryan Race”) and the only trustworthy Italian.

The prejudice against Southern Europeans, and specifically against Italians, flared up by the Nazis while the Italian Army was accumulating a string of defeats. The Germans saw it as the confirmation that Mediterranean people were inferior and too mixed to show some military value (although Rommel praised the Bersaglieri troops and the English praised the courage of the Folgore, who didn’t surrender, and generally speaking historians rehabilitated the conduct of the Italian soldiers, stressing their attention on the incompetence of the commanders and inadequate equipment).

During his last days in the bunker, Hitler blamed the incompetence of the Italian Army Staff as the main cause of defeat and regretted the alliance with Italy: he considered the Greco-Italian war as one of the main obstacles to the final victory, since it caused a delay of operations in Russia (that Hitler planned to attack in 1941). Yet his love for Mussolini didn’t change and he considered the commander Ciano the only one responsible for that mess. Hitler renovated his contempt for Italian people when he heard the news of Mussolini’s death, killed by the Italian Resistance and strung upside-down in Milan.”

(Feb 2019 observation by Milan student Francisco Reyes with insightful accuracy) There should be no doubt that the Italian invasion of Greece, a neighboring country as doomed from the very outset due to lack of proper planning, inadequate logistics and limited understanding of the fierce Greek character of resistance when fighting off an outside invader.

The outnumbered Greeks were not only able to defend their territory, but they pushed the entire Italian Army out of Greek Territory into Albania in complete disarray.

Needless to say, the Fuhrer was explosively outraged.

He did not blame Mussolini directly for the debacle but laid the adventure at the feet of Mussolini’s military staff and the core of his political advisors that were totally inexperienced in such matters and had a view of the Greeks as some sort of sheep-tending wastrels with lack of military expertise. The truth was that almost every adult Greek male owned at least one rifle and in many cases, the females were equally as dangerous as the males.

The unfavorable terrain in most of Greece precluded the extensive use of motorized infantry and tanks were of no use at all in the mountains except as long-range artillery pieces with a low trajectory. The Italian armored units did not have much indirect fire experience and the lower ranking officers scoffed at the suggestion that their tanks be used in such a fashion when their instincts told them that mobility and crushing power was their ace in the hole.

In the follow-on attack necessitated by the Italian failure, the German Wehrmacht wasted no time on fancy tactics. They basically attacked head on and killed all males of a fighting age with little need to interrogate them because the assumption was that they were all guilty in their destruction of the poorly trained Italian units. The remaining females were sorted for their use as slave labor and entertainment for the battle weary troops. Young males with the right attitude were recruited into the Waffen SS for added numbers in the final assault on the Soviet Union.

The brutality of the Nazi battlefield rules of combat were heavy enough to force a quick Greek surrender and the survivors saw little point in organizing some sort of resistance to the rule of the Third Reich because they had little left to fight for except their very lives.

Hitler felt that the British stubbornness in refusing to surrender added to the Italian debacle in Greece was the straw that broke the camel’s back when it came to the kickoff of Operation Barbarossa. Those precious weeks that Hitler lost attempting to clean up the Italian Army’s mess in Greece threw off his time table for the movement of heavy armor to the gates of Moscow and he discovered that he was in the same trap that had destroyed Napoleon’s efforts to destroy the Russians deep inside their own territory.

I stretched out on the lumpy hotel bed in Marseilles tried to organize my thoughts about the Italian debacle in Greece. It had come at the worst possible time for the Fuhrer because his primary concerns were with the upcoming struggle to finally eliminate his arch-foe Stalin from the chessboard of the global war and he needed his full attention on the timely unfolding of “Operation Barbarossa” ignoring all other brushfires in various other locations. He had nothing but contempt for Greece and his mind it was a dead and buried world power destroyed by its own greed and hedonistic non-Aryan political intrigues. He put the Greeks in the same category as the Gypsies and he had already ordered all Gypsies placed in concentration camps to rid the world of their tricks and deceits that defied common logic.

Of course, I was already fully aware that the Italian Army would suffer a distressing defeat at the hands of the well-armed Greek civilians and militia and run with their tails between their legs to the relative safety of their home bases in Albania. It was more than a retreat; it was a disturbing rout of a large formation of uniformed military that left their heavy weapons behind for the use of the Greek patriots. My futuristic knowledge was of little use except with the nudging reminders that Herr Hitler was suddenly faced with a major defeat on the record for the Axis pact and he lost some of that “invincible” shine that caused most small countries to simply throw up their hands and wave the white flag of surrender.