The Army of Epirus capitulates

On 21 April 1941 in Larissa, at the demand of the commander of the German 12th Army, Field Marshal Wilhelm List, Lieutenant General Georgios Tsolakoglou signed the unconditional surrender of the Greek forces that had been fighting the Italians in Albania and Epirus for half a year. It was the second of the three acts that brought the existence of this army to an end. Tsolakoglou had signed the first protocol a day earlier, on 20 April, with the commander of a German SS brigade, Josef “Sepp” Dietrich; the third followed on 23 April in Thessaloniki, this time in the presence of an Italian representative as well. The army that had halted the Italian invasion in the winter, carried the war into Albania and as late as March had repulsed the Italian spring offensive laid down its arms without having lost a battle to the enemy it had been fighting. It was cut off from the rest of the country by German motorised columns which, within a week, had crossed the mountains from Western Macedonia into its rear. The general who surrendered it did so without the government’s consent and against the orders of the Commander-in-Chief, and nine days later he became head of a collaborationist government in occupied Athens.

Three earlier dates are usually linked with the capitulation. Under 14 April it is said that the Leibstandarte took the strategic Klisura Pass and began to cut off the Greek army’s line of retreat from Albania. This is true, but it refers to a different Klisura from the one most readers know: not the Albanian gorge on the Vjosë, taken by the Greeks in January, but the Klisura (Kleisoura) Pass in Greek Western Macedonia, east of Kastoria. In Greek the word kleisoura simply means “gorge”, so several places in the country bear the name. Under 16 April it is written that the Germans cut off the Greek army in Albania – in fact this was a process that began near Kastoria on 14 and 15 April and was completed only on 19 and 20 April at the Metsovo pass. Finally, under 21 April comes the statement that 223,000 Greek soldiers surrendered. This figure is an estimate from English-language chronicles and studies. Greek sources speak of an army of about 250,000 men, and a German report prepared after the war for the US Army of fourteen divisions. No one has established the exact number, because at the moment of capitulation thousands of soldiers were already on their way home.

An army that would not retreat

When the Germans attacked Greece on 6 April, two Greek armies stood on the Albanian front. The Army of Epirus under Lieutenant General Ioannis Pitsikas, with I Corps under General Panagiotis Demestichas and II Corps under General Georgios Bakos, held the line from the Ionian coast past Tepelenë and the Klisura Pass to the mountains north of it. To its right, facing Korçë and Pogradec, stood the Army of Western Macedonia, commanded since March by Tsolakoglou. In the autumn of 1940, as commander of III Corps, he had taken Korçë, the first sizeable Albanian town captured by the Greeks. Together these amounted to some fifteen infantry divisions, a cavalry division and several brigades – the bulk of Greece’s armed forces. Their condition, however, was poor: regiments were 10–20 per cent below establishment, there was a shortage of lorries, ammunition and pack animals, and the soldiers, who had been fighting in the snow at altitudes of more than 1,000 metres since October, were exhausted. Greek estimates put the time needed for an orderly withdrawal of so large an army along the mountain roads of Epirus at about a month.

Even so, the high command long refused even to hear of one. The Commander-in-Chief, General Alexandros Papagos, and the government did not want to give up without a fight the ground won from the Italians. General Henry Maitland Wilson, commander of the British corps in Greece, later wrote bitterly of the “fetish” that not a yard of ground was to be yielded to the Italians. By the time the Germans entered Thessaloniki on 9 April and their spearheads reached Vevi, in the rear of the Greek Albanian front, on 10 April, it was too late for a calm withdrawal. Papagos did not order the retreat until 12 April. The Army of Western Macedonia began to leave its positions that evening, the Army of Epirus on the night of 13–14 April. The Italians followed, cautiously at first. Around 14–15 April they re-entered Korçë, and on 17 April the Albanian Klisura, for which the Greeks had paid so dearly in January.

Klisura and Kastoria (13–15 April)

The shortest line of retreat for the Greek army from Albania ran south-east through Kastoria and then along the Aliakmon valley or across the Pindus mountains. Anyone emerging westward from the Florina valley would stand squarely in this army’s path. After breaking the defence at Vevi, General Georg Stumme’s German XL Corps sent the 9th Panzer Division south towards Kozani and Dietrich’s motorised Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler brigade west. The 73rd Infantry Division followed behind it.

The road from Amyntaio to Kastoria is closed by the Klisura Pass, a narrow passage between the Vitsi and Siniatsiko massifs. It was to be held by the Greek 20th Division, which had just withdrawn from the Vermio. Its soldiers had marched by night, in snowstorms, to hide from aircraft; on the way, at Ptolemaida and Komnina, they had abandoned much of their ammunition and signals equipment, and one of its regiments, the Dodecanese Regiment, had disintegrated in the retreat from Vevi. When the first SS units arrived at about 5 p.m. on 13 April, the pass was held by two battalions sent there by lorry three days earlier, a machine-gun battalion and the 80th Regiment, which was only just assembling after a night march. The battalions were at half strength and had a third of their heavy weapons. According to a Greek study, fifty defenders were killed on the first evening.

At 4.30 a.m. on 14 April the German artillery opened fire and the SS men attacked on both sides of the road under cover of smokescreens and assault guns. At around 7 a.m. the Greek artillery ran out of ammunition, and the defenders had no anti-tank weapons. German aircraft circled over the battlefield. Before 11 a.m. the machine-gun battalion, which had run out of ammunition, and most of the neighbouring infantry battalion laid down their arms. The commander of the Greek group in Central Macedonia, General Karassos, asked Wilson for a counter-attack by the British 1st Armoured Brigade. Wilson gave the order, but the brigade commander treated it as a suggestion and did not carry it out. The battalions the Greeks tried to bring up from Albania had no transport. The 80th Regiment ceased to exist, and the Germans reported a thousand prisoners. Some studies stress, however, that the Greek division thereby delayed the German advance by almost a whole day.

On 15 April the SS men routed units of the Greek 13th Division, hurriedly brought in from Albania, by Lake Kastoria and near Argos Orestiko, and took Kastoria. The shortest line of retreat for the army on the Albanian front had been cut. By 16 April the Germans had also driven a wedge between the Greek forces and the British, who were falling back south towards Olympus and Thessaly. From then on the two parts of the front fought separately.

Encirclement (16–20 April)

The Greek divisions could still escape south along narrow roads across the Pindus to Ioannina and on to Arta and the Gulf of Corinth. They went on foot, with guns and baggage on mules, under constant attack from Italian and German aircraft, while the Italians pressed their rearguards. The retreat quickly turned into disintegration. From 15 April, as the Greek historian Ioannis Koliopoulos describes, mass desertions began: soldiers whose home villages were already in German hands, and who had heard that the Germans had let the garrisons of the Metaxas Line forts go home, left in whole groups. On 16 April Pitsikas reported to Papagos that signs of collapse were visible in the divisions of I Corps as well, and begged to be allowed to “save the army from the Italians” – that is, to surrender it to the Germans before it fell apart completely. Papagos refused: a capitulation would leave the British, who were still fighting in Greece, in a hopeless position. Yet that same day he himself suggested to Wilson, at a meeting in Lamia, that the British should consider leaving the country.

On 17 April the Army of Western Macedonia was renamed III Corps once more and placed under Pitsikas. Tsolakoglou thus became one of the three corps commanders of the Army of Epirus, but the senior one. On the evening of 18 April, the day on which Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis shot himself in Athens, Demestichas and Bakos resolved to present the government with a twelve-hour ultimatum. If it did not permit a truce, the three corps commanders would form their own government in Ioannina, headed by the Metropolitan of Ioannina, Spyridon, and open negotiations with the Germans themselves – with the Germans, not the Italians. Pitsikas, who was to sign the document and forward it to Athens, kept it back, because he did not want to take responsibility for a capitulation.

Meanwhile the Leibstandarte was encircling the army from the south. On 18 April it came out through Grevena onto the road from Thessaly to Epirus, routing on the way several Greek units that Papagos had sent to stop it. On 19 April and during the night into 20 April the SS men fought their way over the Metsovo pass, at an altitude of about 1,500 metres, the most important crossing of the Pindus between Thessaly and Epirus. The Greek army’s last line of retreat to the south-east was closed, and the Germans were now only a few dozen kilometres from Ioannina, where the army’s headquarters and depots were.

Easter at Metsovo (20 April)

Tsolakoglou still hesitated. He sent his chief of staff, Colonel Athanasios Chrysochoos, to Athens to obtain a decision from the government and Papagos. Chrysochoos found chaos in the capital: after Koryzis’s death the government had practically ceased to exist, and no one was willing to take responsibility for a truce. On the morning of 19 April he cabled the general that the matter “lay within the competence of the army”, and that if Tsolakoglou took it up he should first obtain the authorisation of the other corps commanders. Tsolakoglou read this, as he later claimed, as Papagos’s consent – although the Commander-in-Chief had given none. The cable reached him at about 2 a.m. on 20 April. It was Orthodox Easter Sunday, and also Adolf Hitler’s 52nd birthday.

That day Tsolakoglou, in agreement with Demestichas, Bakos and Metropolitan Spyridon, removed Pitsikas from command and proclaimed himself commander of the whole army. He at once sent envoys to the nearest German unit, which was the Leibstandarte. The British historian John Keegan wrote that the general was so determined to deny the Italians the “satisfaction of a victory they had not earned” that he opened negotiations with Dietrich on his own initiative in order to surrender to the Germans alone. That evening, at about 6 p.m., in the village of Votonosi near Metsovo, the two men signed a protocol of armistice. Pitsikas learned of it an hour later and resigned his command. When Papagos received the news, he condemned Tsolakoglou’s initiative by telegram as contrary to the interests of the fatherland, ordered him to be replaced and the fight to continue “to the utmost limits of possibility”. It was already too late.

The terms of the first protocol were honourable for the Greeks and humiliating for the Italians. Fighting between the Greeks and the Germans was to cease that same day. Within ten days the Greek army was to withdraw from Albania to the old frontier, and the Germans were to place themselves between it and the Italians, so that Italian troops would not enter Greek territory. The soldiers were to be disarmed and demobilised, after which they could go home. Officers were not to be treated as prisoners of war and kept their side arms. The agreement had been concluded by a brigade commander, not an army commander, but Hitler accepted it and ordered that the negotiations be kept secret from the Italians. For many Greek officers who had spent five months beating the Italians in the mountains, this was what mattered most: not to surrender to an army they had defeated.

Three protocols (21–23 April)

When Field Marshal List learned the text of the protocol, he demanded a new and much harsher one. On 21 April in Larissa Tsolakoglou signed the second act: the unconditional surrender of the Greek Army of Epirus and Macedonia to the German high command. On the German side it was signed by the chief of staff of the 12th Army, General Hans von Greiffenberg. According to Greek accounts, Tsolakoglou added that he was signing “as a prisoner, without free will”. The Italians still did not appear in this document. That same day the British finally decided to evacuate their corps from Greece.

Benito Mussolini was furious. He protested that the Greeks were surrendering to those they had hardly fought, and ordered his forces in Albania to go over to the attack. On 21 and 22 April Italian divisions struck at the withdrawing Greek units. The Greeks, who considered themselves already covered by the truce, beat off these attacks but suffered losses. The Italian XXV Corps entered Greek territory on 21 April. The Luftwaffe bombed Ioannina; according to Greek accounts, even a military hospital marked with the red cross was hit. On 20 or 21 April, depending on the source, the SS entered Ioannina.

Hitler could not allow his ally to be humiliated before the eyes of the world. After Mussolini’s personal intervention he agreed to a third ceremony. On 23 April in Thessaloniki Tsolakoglou signed the final act of capitulation. General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the Wehrmacht High Command, signed for Germany, and General Alberto Ferrero for Italy. Some Italian studies place this ceremony in Ioannina, but most sources give Thessaloniki. Under this document the Greek forces surrendered to the Germans and the Italians; the soldiers were to be prisoners of war, released at the end of hostilities, and the officers, in recognition of their bravery, kept their side arms. That same day King George II and the government flew from Athens to Crete.

In practice the Germans did not hold the Greeks in camps. Most soldiers handed in their weapons and dispersed to their homes, many even before the protocols came into force, some of them walking across the whole country. Hitler later said in the Reichstag, on 4 May, that of all their opponents only the Greeks had fought with courage and the utmost contempt for death, and ordered the Greek prisoners to be released. For many soldiers the moment of laying down arms was itself hard to bear. According to one account, an artillery major, Konstantinos Versis, whose battery was still in Epirus, had his guns gathered and destroyed, and then, while his soldiers sang the national anthem facing south, took his own life.

Place in the war

The capitulation of the Army of Epirus sealed the fate of the campaign in Greece. Without it Wilson had no one left to cover the left flank of the position at Thermopylae, and Greece had no force left capable of continuing the fight on the mainland. The British accelerated the evacuation, which began on the night of 24–25 April; on 27 April the Germans entered Athens, and by the end of the month they had occupied the Peloponnese. The Greek state, however, did not capitulate: the King and the government of Emmanouil Tsouderos fought on from Crete and later from Cairo and London, and part of the fleet and several thousand soldiers got through to Alexandria.

The capitulation on the Albanian front also closed the Greco-Italian War. Mussolini got his signature in Thessaloniki, but not a victory: for half a year his army had failed to defeat the Greeks without German help. In return Hitler gave him the greater part of the occupied country. The Italian occupation, introduced between the end of April and June, was a source of constant humiliation for the Greeks, and a German report written after the war admitted that it had squandered the goodwill the Germans had won by releasing the prisoners.

For Tsolakoglou himself, 20 April was the start of the road to collaboration. On 26 April he wrote a letter to Hitler offering to form a government of generals, and on 30 April he became prime minister of a government in occupied Athens. Demestichas and Bakos joined his cabinet. In 1945 a special court sentenced him to death, charging him among other things with having capitulated “in the open field” before his troops had done everything that a soldier’s duty required of them. In his memoirs Tsolakoglou wrote that he had faced a historic dilemma: to allow the fight to go on and the army to suffer a “holocaust”, or to yield to the pleas of its commanders. He claimed he never regretted his choice. The dispute over whether he had saved tens of thousands of men from a senseless death or had broken his oath and opened the way to his country’s humiliation went on in Greece for decades. What is certain is that the army which had been the first in this war to halt and throw back the forces of an Axis power was not destroyed in the field but cut off and dissolved – and that many of its soldiers, who returned home in April 1941, soon took to the mountains and joined the resistance.