The Battle of Pindus

On 13 November 1940 Greek troops reached the Albanian border in the Grammos and Smolikas massifs. Along the whole sector of the Pindus mountains, through which Italy’s finest mountain division had broken into Greece two weeks earlier, not a single enemy soldier remained. The 3rd Alpine Division Julia, which was to cut Greece in two and isolate the Greek forces defending Epirus, had reached the village of Vovousa on 2 November, some 30 kilometres short of its objective; it was then almost surrounded, fought for a week to escape the trap and returned to its start line, having lost, according to Italian studies, roughly a fifth of its strength. The Battle of Pindus, fought at the same time as the defence of the Kalamas line, sealed the defeat of the Italian invasion and opened the way for a Greek counter-offensive deep into Albania.

A wedge through the mountains

When Italy attacked Greece on 28 October, the front ran for some 150 kilometres through mountainous border country. The Pindus range, the backbone of northern Greece, divided it into two theatres: Epirus in the west and western Macedonia in the east. In practice they were linked by a single road, running over the pass near the small town of Metsovo. Whoever held it could cut off the Greek forces defending Epirus and Ioannina from the rest of the army.

That was precisely the idea of General Sebastiano Visconti Prasca, commander of the Italian forces in Albania. The main thrust, by the Ciamuria Corps, was aimed at Epirus, but between it and the corps around Korçë, passive for the time being, the Julia Division was to cross the mountains: some 10,800 alpini from Friuli and Venezia Giulia, regarded as the elite of the Italian infantry. They had been commanded since September 1940 by General Mario Girotti, a veteran of the First World War. The division set out from the area of Ersekë and Leskovik in five columns towards the Smolikas massif and on along the upper valley of the Vjosë (in Greek, the Aoos) towards Metsovo. At a conference before the war Visconti Prasca had given assurances that the mountains would be no obstacle to his troops; in the Italian plans the alpini were to reach their objective in a few days.

On the Greek side the Pindus passes were covered by Colonel Konstantinos Davakis’s Pindus Detachment, headquartered in the village of Eptachori. It numbered about two thousand men: two battalions of reservists of the 51st Infantry Regiment, mobilised at the end of August, a cavalry squadron and a battery and a half of artillery. The regiment’s third battalion had been formed only on 15 October and was still on its way when the attack came. The detachment had to defend a front 35–37 kilometres wide in exceptionally difficult terrain. Davakis, a forty-three-year-old officer from Laconia who had fought on the Macedonian front in 1918 and in the war in Asia Minor, was known in the army as a theorist of armoured warfare and the author of tactical manuals; in 1937 he had retired from the service through ill health and returned to it only with the partial mobilisation.

Julia’s advance

The alpini moved off at dawn on 28 October in a downpour that had been falling for two days. The Greeks abandoned their forward posts, especially in the central part of the sector, and that same day fell back to the second line. Davakis threw in the companies of the late-arriving battalion one after another as soon as they reached the front, and soon had no reserve left at all. On 29 October the first snow fell in the mountains. Even so, the Julia Division pressed on, and on 29–30 October it forced the Greeks to retreat towards Samarina, at over 1,400 metres one of the highest villages in Greece.

Progress, however, was bought with enormous effort. The Italians advanced along mule tracks, and the rain turned them to mud and swelled the streams; the alpini themselves later called the campaign “the war of mud”. The artillery and supplies fell behind, and in the bad weather the Italian air force could scarcely support the advance or attack the approaching Greek reinforcements. The division, strung out in long columns over several dozen kilometres of trackless mountains, had less and less strength at its head and ever more exposed flanks.

The Greek command quickly grasped how dangerous the Italian wedge was. General Alexandros Papagos, appointed Commander-in-Chief on the day war broke out, instructed the commander of the 8th Division in Epirus to treat covering the Pindus passes as his most important task. The headquarters of the Army of Western Macedonia in Kozani, under General Ioannis Pitsikas, sent every unit it could muster into the mountains. The Pindus sector was taken over by General Vasileios Vrachnos’s 1st Infantry Division, and on the flanks and in the rear of the Italian wedge a cavalry division, the 5th Infantry Brigade and a newly formed cavalry brigade were deployed to close the key passes. The Greeks could afford to move these forces because – thanks to the stance of Turkey, which had warned Bulgaria against exploiting the opportunity – the Bulgarian border seemed safe for the time being. From 30 October the Pindus front stopped falling back.

Vovousa and encirclement

At seven in the morning on 1 November units of the 1st Division struck the left flank of the Julia Division. For the moment the counter-attack was limited in scope, but by evening the front had stabilised and Greek morale had risen markedly. The next day, 2 November, the Italians achieved the greatest success of the entire operation: after covering some 40 kilometres of mountain terrain, the division’s leading units came down into the Vjosë valley and took the village of Vovousa. Metsovo was roughly 30 kilometres away. That same day, however, brought a turning point in their rear. The Greek 1st Division took Tambouri hill and the village of Fourka, cutting the routes by which supplies reached the forward units, and in the afternoon the cavalry brigade retook Samarina.

That day, near Fourka, Colonel Davakis was badly wounded. A bullet struck him in the chest while he was personally reconnoitring on Profitis Ilias hill; he was unconscious for two days and had to leave the front, and Major Ioannis Karavias took his place. To the Greeks Davakis became the hero of the battle: Greek tradition stresses that from the second day of the fighting he saw the mistake of the Italian commander, who was pushing forward without covering his flanks, and decided not to stop the wedge head-on but to let it penetrate deep and then close it off from behind.

By 3 November the Italian spearhead was surrounded on almost all sides. General Girotti asked for relief attacks and reinforcements. Visconti Prasca sent into the mountains the Bari Infantry Division, freshly shipped over from Apulia, whose units went into action piecemeal straight off the ships; its 139th Regiment was placed under the Julia Division in the area of Konitsa and for several days held an important bridge over the Vjosë at Perati. But no relief reached the encircled alpini. On 3 and 4 November the Greeks retook Vovousa and the other villages taken earlier, and from 4 to 6 November the 1st Division’s attack gathered strength. The cut-off battalions of the Julia Division, without radio contact with their command and supplied only by air drops, received no regular rations for eight days and fought Greek units that were working round into their rear along mountain paths.

The inhabitants of the Pindus mountain villages played a huge part in those days. Carts and lorries could not reach the front line, so ammunition, food, blankets and the wounded were carried on the backs of mules and people. The work was done by men who had not gone into the army, but above all by women, often knee-deep in snow and under fire. The image of the “women of Pindus” carrying crates of shells up to the passes became one of the most enduring symbols of Greek resistance in 1940 and remains part of the Greek commemorations of the outbreak of the war to this day.

Retreat and the end of the battle

On 7 November the corps commander in the Korçë area, General Gabriele Nasci, to whom the Julia Division was subordinate, ordered it to retreat. Withdrawing from an almost closed pocket took several days of hard fighting against Greek units that had infiltrated the division’s rear. According to Italian studies, what was left of the Julia Division broke out of the encirclement and assembled around Konitsa on 10 November, from where it was sent back for a short rest and reorganisation. The Greeks followed. By 13 November they had cleared the Italians from the whole Pindus sector, including the Grammos and Smolikas massifs, and reached the Greek–Albanian border. Greek, Italian and English-language studies take this date as the end of the battle.

The losses on both sides are known only approximately. It is most often said that the Julia Division lost about a fifth of its strength. Some tallies give about 1,700 killed, wounded and missing in October and November, others about 5,000 men, the higher figure probably also including the units sent to its aid. Greek losses are not given separately for this battle; they were considerably smaller, although the Pindus Detachment, which took the first blow, suffered heavily.

The defeat in the mountains coincided with the collapse of the whole offensive. In Epirus the Italians ended their unsuccessful assaults on the Kalpaki–Kalamas line on 8 November, and heads rolled in the command: on 9 November Visconti Prasca was replaced as commander-in-chief in Albania by General Ubaldo Soddu, and on 11 November he was also relieved of command of the newly formed Eleventh Army. On the night of 11 to 12 November British aircraft torpedoed three of Italy’s six battleships at Taranto. For Benito Mussolini it was the worst week since Italy had entered the war.

Why the Italians lost

The reasons for the Julia Division’s defeat were identified as early as 1940. The plan assumed that a single mountain division, without support from its neighbours and without roads, would cover several dozen kilometres through high mountains and hold out in the enemy’s rear. This stemmed from the conviction of Visconti Prasca and his superiors that the Greeks would not have time to mobilise and would not want to fight. In fact the Greek army, partially mobilised since August, moved division after division into the mountains faster than the Italians could bring in supplies through two small Albanian ports. The autumn weather robbed the Italians of the air superiority on which they had counted most: the Regia Aeronautica was able neither to support the alpini nor to hinder the Greek columns marching towards the Pindus. The Greeks fought on ground they knew, with the help of the local population, and their commanders knew how to exploit the overextension of the Italian wedge.

The structure of their army also worked in the Greeks’ favour. Greek divisions had three regiments each and were thus considerably stronger than the two-regiment Italian divisions, and their soldiers, often highlanders from Epirus and Macedonia, were used to marching with loads along mountain paths. Italian propaganda, by contrast, portrayed the Julia Division’s fight as a heroic defence against a superior enemy; in 1943 a feature film, Mario Baffico’s I trecento della Settima, even likened the alpini to Leonidas’s three hundred Spartans.

The battle’s place in the war

The Battle of Pindus was one of the first land victories since the start of the Second World War in which the army of an invaded country defeated the forces of an Axis power and forced them to retreat. Together with the defence of the Kalamas line it closed the first phase of the Greco-Italian War: after two weeks of fighting the Italians had not only failed to take Epirus but had been thrown back almost to their start lines. The greatest danger the Greeks faced – their army being cut in two – had also been averted.

The day after the battle ended, on 14 November, the Greeks launched a general counter-offensive. On 22 November they entered Korçë, at the end of the month Pogradec, and in December they took Sarandë, Gjirokastër and Himarë, carrying the war onto Albanian territory. The Julia Division, hastily rebuilt, was back at the front after only a few days and suffered further heavy losses throughout the winter; in January 1941 it was unable to hold the Klisura (Këlcyrë) pass. Colonel Davakis never recovered sufficiently to take up a command again. After the Axis occupation of Greece the Italians arrested him as a hostage in December 1942, suspecting him of links with the resistance; he died in January 1943 when the ship Città di Genova, carrying Greek officers to a camp in Italy, was torpedoed off the Albanian coast. In Greece he is remembered as the hero of the Pindus.

The defeat in the Pindus and in Epirus also had consequences far beyond the Balkans. It made a laughing stock of Mussolini and his plan to wage a “parallel war” independent of Germany, and forced Italy to seek help from Adolf Hitler. Hitler, who had opposed the Italian venture from the start, had to reckon with the possibility that British aircraft operating from Greek airfields would threaten the Romanian oilfields. As early as December 1940 he ordered an attack on Greece through Bulgaria to be prepared. The German Balkan campaign of April 1941 ended with the occupation of Greece. Historians still argue over the extent to which this expedition, forced on Germany by Italy’s defeat, delayed the German attack on the Soviet Union.