The Second World War

by John Keegan

  It was to be punished with vehemence and without delay. Hitler judged that the Serbs’ defiance simplified his strategic options in the approach to Marita. Diplomatically it put Yugoslavia in the wrong; for all the popular enthusiasm displayed for the coup – crowds cheering the Allied cause in Belgrade, whose streets were bedecked with British and French flags – the new government could with some reason be denounced as illegitimate. Militarily, it provided OKH with a solution of its logistic difficulties: the Yugoslav railway system, inherited from the Habsburg Empire, connected with those of Austria, Hungary, Romania and Greece (as Bulgaria’s did not), and thereby provided the Wehrmacht with a direct approach to its chosen battlefront in Macedonia. Hitler did not pause to seize the advantage he had been offered. ‘I have decided to destroy Yugoslavia,’ he told Goering, Brauchitsch and Ribbentrop, summoned post-haste to the Chancellery on 26 March. ‘How much military force do you need? How much time?’ The answers to these questions already lay in the files of contingency plans in army and Luftwaffe headquarters. In early afternoon he met the Hungarian minister to offer him a port on the Adriatic for his country’s part in the coming campaign, and then the Bulgarian minister, to promise him the Greek province of Macedonia. ‘The eternal uncertainty is over,’ he told him, ‘the tornado is going to burst upon Yugoslavia with breathtaking suddenness.’ Next day in more pensive mood he told the Hungarian minister (whose head of state, Admiral Horthy, had decided to decline the bribe of an Adriatic port), ‘Now that I reflect on all this, I cannot help believing in a Higher Justice. I am awestruck at the powers of Providence.’

  The Yugoslav conspirators persisted in blissful ignorance of the opportunity Hitler felt they had offered him. They believed that they could placate Germany by declining to accept a British mission and that their coup could not be regarded as a repudiation of Yugoslav accession to the Tripartite Pact because the signature had never been ratified. In fact the terms stipulated that ratification was assured by signature, while in Hitler’s eyes the coup put them in the enemy camp in any case. On the day of the coup itself he issued Führer Directive No. 25: ‘The military revolt in Yugoslavia has changed the political position in the Balkans. Yugoslavia, even if it makes initial professions of loyalty, must be regarded as an enemy and beaten down as quickly as possible. . . . Internal tensions in Yugoslavia will be encouraged by giving political assurances to the Croats. . . . It is my intention to break into Yugoslavia [from north and south] and to deal an annihilating blow to the Yugoslav forces.’

  Halder had directed OKH’s planning staff to prepare plans for such an offensive the previous October. The forces positioned for Marita easily sufficed for an invasion of Yugoslavia as well: the Second Army, stationed in Austria, would simply advance directly on Belgrade, while the Twelfth, positioned to attack Greece through Bulgaria, would now move into southern Yugoslavia before doing so; an Italian army would also attack from Italy towards Zagreb, capital city of the Croats, who were Italy’s clients, while the Hungarian Third Army would seize the trans-Danubian province of Vojvodina, where Hungary claimed rights.

  Yugoslavia’s fate

  The Yugoslav army, a million strong, was organised into twenty-eight infantry and three cavalry divisions; but it contained only two battalions of 100 tanks, and those antiquated. The whole army belonged, indeed, to the era of the Balkan wars of 1911-12 rather than to the modern world – its movements depended on the mobilisation of 900,000 horses, oxen and mules – and, moreover, it was not mobilised. Its General Staff – which General Sir John Dill, the Chief of the (British) Imperial General Staff, visited secretly immediately after the coup on 1 April – behaved, by his report, ‘as if it had months in which to make decisions and more months in which to put them into effect’. Though its deputy chief conferred with Papagos, the Greek commander, in Athens on 3-4 April, it refused to co-ordinate a joint strategy of concentrating its forces in the south to support the Greeks (and the British contingent arriving to join them) but insisted on lining the whole frontier (with Italy, Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria, a sector 1000 miles long) against the threat of invasion – as the Russians were also currently doing in their border zone.

  ‘He who defends everything’, in Frederick the Great’s chilling military aphorism, ‘defends nothing.’ The attempt to defend everything was the mistake the Poles had made in 1939, though with some excuse, since the economically valuable parts of their country lay in frontier regions. It was also the mistake towards which the Greeks were tending, divided as they were by their urge to protect the exposed salient of Thrace as well as the traditional invasion routes in Macedonia. But no country has perhaps ever as irrationally dispersed its forces as the Yugoslavs did in April 1941, seeking to defend with ancient rifles and mule-borne mountain artillery one of the longest land frontiers in Europe against Panzer divisions and 2000 modern aircraft.

  The Yugoslav air force, which had masterminded the coup of 27 March, was overwhelmed in the opening hours of the German attack on 6 April; of its 450 aircraft 200 were obsolete and most were destroyed outright in an initial air offensive which also caused 3000 civilian deaths by a terror raid on Belgrade. The German army’s plan, with which those of the Italian Second and Hungarian Third Armies were integrated, nullified Yugoslav strategy from the start. It turned on throwing armoured columns down the valleys of the rivers – the Danube, the Sava, the Drava, the Morava – which penetrate the mountain chains on which the Yugoslavs had counted to protect their country’s heartland; the columns would then turn to converge and so envelop the Yugoslav formations they had outflanked. It proved brilliantly successful. As the official Yugoslav history of the war subsequently conceded:

  Three initial attacks determined the fate of the Yugoslav army, on April 6 in Macedonia, April 8 in Serbia, and April 10 in Croatia. On all three occasions the Hitlerites breached the frontier defences, pushed deep into the interior and dislodged the Yugoslav defences from their moorings. After the breakthrough of the frontier defences, the Yugoslav troops were soon outmanoeuvred, broken up, surrounded, without contact with each other, without supplies, without leadership.

  What the official history seeks to conceal is the active responsibility of much of the ‘Yugoslav leadership’ for the débâcle. Yugoslavia – originally, by the designation of the Allied peace treaties with Austria and Hungary in 1919, ‘the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes’ – was in no sense a nationally unified state. It had inherited all the tendencies that had racked the Habsburg monarchy’s Slav dominions before 1914 and sought to check them merely by imposing Serb dominance over those minorities which had always preferred Vienna to Belgrade. The invasion of 6 April was seized by the Croat and Slovene nationalists as an opportunity for secession; on 10 April the Croatian Ustashi, a group of extreme right-wing nationalists, proclaimed an independent state, and on 11 April the Slovenes did likewise: both would shortly accept Axis tutelage. Some of the Croat formations of the Yugoslav army mutinied and went over to the enemy in the opening stages of the campaign; the chief of staff of the (Croatian) First Army Group actually conspired with the Ustashi leadership in opening talks with the Germans on 10 April. These were the preliminaries of a collaboration which were to result in the cruellest of all the internecine wars that would torment occupied Europe during the Hitler years. Nevertheless, Yugoslavia’s Serb majority cannot escape its share of responsibility for the suddenness of their country’s defeat. All but one of the army’s divisions was under Serb command, and most of those divisional generals surrendered to the panic which the rapidity of the Wehrmacht’s onslaught induced. So feeble was the army’s resistance that the German invaders suffered only 151 fatal casualties in the course of the campaign; the XLI Panzer Corps lost a single soldier dead, though it was in the forefront of the advance to Belgrade. The only senior Serbian officer who resisted the disabling spirit of collapse was Draza Mihailovicü, deputy chief of staff of the Second Army, who took to the hills at the signing of the armistice with Germany on 17 April.
There, with a band of fifty faithfuls, he founded the nucleus of the Chetnik movement, which consisted of Serbian freedom-fighters loyal to the crown. Until Tito’s communist Partisans emerged as a major force in 1942, the Chetniks sustained the principal guerrilla resistance against the regimes of occupation – German, Italian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, puppet Croatian – imposed on Yugoslavia.

  In Greece, which the Germans also invaded on 6 April, the Wehrmacht met stiffer resistance. The Greek army was already mobilised, had fought a successful offensive against the Italians and was commanded by generals whose campaigning experience stretched back to the Graeco-Turkish war of 1919-22. Moreover, it was supported by a British expeditionary force of three divisions which had brought with it modern tanks and aircraft. Hitler regarded the Greek soldiers as the valorous descendants of Alexander’s hoplites and the Theban Sacred Band – a unique mitigation of his disdain for non-Teutons – and he so admired the bravery they had shown in their war with Mussolini that he instructed OKW, before the campaign began, to release from captivity all Greeks taken prisoner as soon as an armistice should be signed.

  Neither Greek valour nor British arms would avail to postpone an armistice. The Greek plan was flawed, and neither advice nor deployments from Britain could avoid defeat. Papagos, the Greek commander, insisted on keeping four of his eighteen divisions on the Metaxas Line, along the Bulgarian frontier, and disposed three with the British formations – the 6th Australian and 1st New Zealand Divisions, with the 1st British Armoured Brigade – a hundred miles to the rear on the Aliakhmon Line hinged on Mount Olympus. He counted on the Yugoslavs to protect the left flank of both positions and had even arranged a scheme with the Yugoslavs to react to an Axis attack by opening an offensive into Albania against the Italians – who on 20 March had once again tried and failed to revive their own Balkan offensive – with the bulk of the Greek army, fourteen divisions. Professor Martin van Creveld describes the dispositions – without exaggeration – as ‘suicidal’. The defending forces were aligned in three separate positions which depended on their security on a fourth, entirely extraneous Yugoslav force protecting their flanks. ‘Should the Germans’, van Creveld observes, ‘succeed in breaking [the Yugoslavs] rapid and total disaster was inevitable. Yugoslavia and Greece would be cut off from each other, the Metaxas and Aliakhmon lines outflanked, and the Greek army in Albania attacked from the rear. After that it would be a small matter to mop up the rest of the Allied and Yugoslav forces separately.’

  Collapse in Greece

  The course of the campaign developed exactly as thus predicated. In two days of fighting, 6-7 April, the Germans broke the resistance of the Yugoslavs in Macedonia and forced the Greek defenders of the Metaxas Line, who had stoutly resisted frontal assault, to surrender on 9 April. They were thus freed to turn the left flank of the Aliakhmon Line, defended by New Zealanders, and press on down the ancient invasion route which leads from the Vardar Valley in Macedonia into central Greece. A detached force meanwhile unhinged the main body of the Greek army which in Albania was confronting the Italians, who were thus granted the opportunity to begin the decisive advance they had been unable to win by their own efforts in six months of fighting.

  General George Tsolakoglu, commanding the Greek First Army on the Albanian front, was so determined, however, to deny the Italians the satisfaction of a victory they had not earned that, once the hopelessness of his position became apparent to him, he opened quite unauthorised parley with the commander of the German SS division opposite him, Sepp Dietrich, to arrange a surrender to the Germans alone. It took a personal representation from Mussolini to Hitler to bring about an armistice in which Italy was included on 23 April.

  Elsewhere the Graeco-British front was collapsing concertina-like as one position after another was outflanked by the invaders. The Greek Prime Minister, Alexander Koryzis, committed suicide on 18 April, leaving the rest of the Greek government unable to agree with General Sir Henry Wilson, commanding the British expeditionary force, how best to sustain resistance. In fact the British had been in full retreat from the Aliakhmon Line since 16 April. Though they lacked the numbers and equipment to resist the Germans, they had the motorised transport in which to withdraw; the Greek army, like the Yugoslav, belonged to an earlier age of warfare and 20,000 of its soldiers fell into German hands in the wake of the British retreat.

  The British made a stand at Thermopylae, where the Spartans had fallen defying the Persians 2500 years before, but were quickly hustled southward by German tanks. That day and every day they were harried by the Luftwaffe, which, by the report of The Times correspondent, was ‘bombing every nook and cranny, hamlet, village and town in its path’. It had destroyed Piraeus, the port of Athens, on the first day of the war with Greece, so that the fugitives had to head for the Peloponnese to find harbours for their return flight to Crete and Egypt. A German parachute drop on the Isthmus of Corinth on 26 April was timed just too late to cut them off. By then the British – most of them Australians and New Zealanders forming the Anzac Corps, whose predecessor had established the Antipodean military legend at Gallipoli only twenty-six years earlier – had passed through Athens and reached haven. Retreating though they were, ‘no one who passed through the city’, wrote a Royal Artilleryman, Lieutenant-Colonel R. P. Waller, would ever forget the warmth of the Athenians’ farewell. ‘We were nearly the last British troops they would see and the Germans might be on our heels; yet cheering, clapping crowds lined the streets and pressed about our cars, so as to almost hold us up. Girls and men leapt on the running boards to kiss or shake hands with the grimy, weary gunners. They threw flowers to us and ran beside us crying, “Come back – You must come back again – Goodbye – Good luck”.’

  It would be three and a half years before British soldiers returned to Athens, then to participate in a grim and bloody civil war between the parties of left and right which had learned the politics of violence as guerrilla fighters against the German occupation. In April 1941, sunny and flower-scented in the memory of the soldiers who were leaving Greece with the taste of defeat in their teeth, that cold and bitter December would have seemed an unimaginable legacy of the whirlwind campaign they had fought against the Germans. The three British divisions which together with the six Greek divisions spared from the Albanian front had battled against eighteen of the enemy had, rightly, the sensation of having fought the good fight. The Greek campaign had been an old-fashioned gentlemen’s war, with honour given and accepted by brave adversaries on each side. In the aftermath, historians would measure its significance in terms of the delay Marita had or had not imposed on the unleashing of Barbarossa, an exercise ultimately to be judged profitless, since it was the Russian weather, not the contingencies of subsidiary campaigns, which determined Barbarossa’s launch date. The combatants had not felt they were participating in wider events. The Greeks, with British help, had fought to defend their homeland from conquest. The Germans had battled to overcome them and had triumphed, but in token of respect to the courage of the enemy had insisted that the Greek officers should keep their swords. That was to be almost the last gesture of chivalry between warriors in a war imminently fated to descend into barbarism.

  EIGHT

  Airborne Battle: Crete

  The Balkan Campaign, save for its brevity, had been a conventional operation of war in every respect. Even the breakneck speed of the German advance, now that Blitzkrieg in Poland and France had accustomed the world to the Wehrmacht’s methods, seemed rather a revelation of the developing pattern of modern warfare than a further instalment of the military revolution that Hitler’s generals had instituted. Indeed, it had been less revolutionary than the victory of 1940. The sheer disparity in quality between the Wehrmacht and its Balkan opponents, who had furthermore brought defeat upon themselves by the perverse ineptitude of their defensive arrangements, was all the explanation necessary for the catastrophe which had overcome them.

  The Balkan campaign might have ended on that note, wit
h the hoisting of the swastika flag over the Acropolis in Athens on 27 April as a fitting symbol of a triumph of the strong over the weak. But it did not: even as the cost of the campaign was counted – 12,000 British casualties (of whom 9000 were prisoners), uncounted Yugoslav and Greek dead, against a mere 5000 German killed, wounded or missing – and its spoils were divided – Yugoslav Bosnia, Dalmatia and Montenegro given to Italy, South Serbia and Greek Thrace to Bulgaria, the Vojvodina to Hungary, Croatia to the puppet Croatians of the Ustashi movement – Hitler was lending an ear to those in his circle who argued that the Balkan campaign was incomplete and urged that Germany’s victory should be crowned by a descent upon Crete by the one largely untried instrument of Blitzkrieg, Germany’s airborne army.

  Germany was not the first advanced state to have created an airborne force. That cachet belonged to Italy, where the idea of strategic bombing had also been born. As early as 1927 the Italians had experimented with the delivery of infantrymen directly to the battlefield by parachute. The technique had then been taken up by the Red Army, which by 1936 had sufficiently perfected it to demonstrate at large-scale manoeuvres held in the presence of Western military observers the dropping of an entire regiment of parachutists and the subsequent airlanding of a whole brigade; this spectacular operation was made possible by the Red Air Force’s development of transport aircraft large enough to hold complete units of fully equipped soldiers.