The Battle of the Kalamas

On 8 November 1940 the Italian divisions in Epirus stopped attacking. For a week the Ciamuria Army Corps had assaulted the Greek positions at the village of Kalpaki and along the Kalamas river, some 30 kilometres from Ioannina, the regional capital. Hills changed hands, tanks sank into the marshes, and the infantry of the Ferrara Division bled itself white again and again on slopes held by a single Greek division. Only on the coast did the Italians cross the Kalamas and reach Igoumenitsa and Margariti. The main road to Ioannina remained closed. When at the same time the Julia Alpine Division found itself encircled in the Pindus mountains, the offensive that its author had promised would give Italy the whole of Epirus in two weeks ground to a halt after eleven days. In Greece the fighting is known as the Battle of Elaia–Kalamas (Μάχη Ελαίας-Καλαμά), after Elaia, as the village of Kalpaki was then officially called, and after the river along which the Greek defence line ran.

The first days of the war

When Italy attacked Greece on 28 October, Epirus was struck by General Carlo Rossi’s Ciamuria Army Corps, named after the Italian form of Chameria, the coastal strip of Epirus that Fascist propaganda portrayed as Albanian land awaiting “liberation”. According to figures cited in the literature, the corps, including its Blackshirt battalions and auxiliary units, numbered some 40,000 men. Its main strength was the 23rd Infantry Division Ferrara, with almost 13,000 soldiers and 3,500 Albanian volunteers; alongside it marched the 51st Infantry Division Siena, with around 9,000 men, and behind them came the 131st Armoured Division Centauro, with about 160 light tanks, of which roughly 90 were serviceable. The right wing, along the coast, was formed by the Coastal Grouping (Raggruppamento del Litorale), with a grenadier regiment and two lancer regiments, about 5,000 men in all. The task was simple: break through the defences on the road from Albania, take Ioannina, and then Preveza and the west coast of Greece.

Facing them stood General Charalambos Katsimitros’s 8th Infantry Division, reinforced by an extra regiment after the outbreak of war. The Greek General Staff’s plan, code-named “IB” (for Italy and Bulgaria), assumed that in a war on two fronts Epirus would be defended only by delaying actions. One version of it envisaged a withdrawal as far as the Arachthos river and the Metsovo–Aliakmon line, which meant abandoning almost the whole of Epirus to the Italians. The choice was left to the divisional commander. Katsimitros, who had held command in Ioannina since February 1938 and had been preparing the ground for defence ever since the Italians occupied Albania in April 1939, judged that the mountains and marshes of the Kalamas would cancel out the Italian superiority in men, tanks and aircraft. Instead of falling back into the interior, he decided to give battle on a forward line. He left five battalions on the frontier to delay the enemy’s advance, based his main line on the Kalpaki pass, where nine battalions took up position, and entrusted the coastal sector in Thesprotia (PL) to two battalions under General Nikolaos Lioumbas.

In the order he issued on hearing of the war, Katsimitros wrote to his soldiers: “Officers and men of the 8th Division, you are entering the moment of fulfilling your highest duty to the fatherland – resistance to the last, in accordance with the plan of operations. Defend the sacred soil of the fatherland with fanaticism against the invader who has come to violate it without any cause. Remember the glorious traditions of our nation and fight the enemy with ferocity.”

The first days went according to plan. The Greek covering forces fell back, making a stand on one hill after another, and the rain that had been falling since 26 October turned the few roads into mud. On the night of 29 to 30 October the covering units withdrew to the Kalpaki line, and on 1 November the Italian vanguards made contact with it. For three days Italian aircraft and artillery pounded the Greek positions while the Italians brought up forces for the assault. Meanwhile in Athens there was growing concern about the Pindus, where the alpini of the Julia Division were advancing towards Metsovo, and on 1 November they took the small town of Konitsa on Katsimitros’s right flank. The Commander-in-Chief, General Alexandros Papagos, telegraphed the commander of the 8th Division that his main task was to cover the Pindus passes and the flank of the forces in western Macedonia, and that he should not make a stand on the Kalamas line if it meant exhausting his strength. According to some accounts, on 31 October Katsimitros received an order to withdraw to new positions. He did not carry it out and did not pass it on to his subordinates. Colonel Drakos, sent by Papagos to Ioannina as the division’s new chief of staff, examined the ground and agreed with Katsimitros, and the high command, if reluctantly, accepted his decision.

2 November: the assault and bombs over Thessaloniki

At dawn on 2 November the Greeks stood on their designated line: from the mouth of the Kalamas through Elaia and Grabala hill to Kleftis hill. From the morning Italian bombers and artillery shelled the positions at Kalpaki, and according to the Greek official history the infantry of the Ferrara Division went into the attack on Elaia at 3 p.m. The attack broke down. An Albanian battalion fared better, seizing Grabala hill, a key point on the flank of the Greek position, under cover of a snowstorm. The next day the Greeks retook it with a counter-attack.

That same day, for the second day running, Italian bombs fell on Greece’s second city. The Italian air force, the Regia Aeronautica, which had some 380 aircraft on this front against fewer than 80 Greek ones, attacked not only the front lines but also ports, railway junctions and towns in the rear. Thessaloniki, the port through which supplies flowed to the troops in Macedonia, had already been bombed at noon on 1 November: according to local sources, twenty bombers escorted by nine fighters struck several districts of the city. On 2 November fifteen CANT Z.1007 bombers escorted by Fiat CR.42 fighters came over the city. They were intercepted by Greek PZL P.24 fighters of No. 22 Pursuit Squadron, based at the airfield outside Thessaloniki. According to Greek figures, three bombers were shot down; the rest dropped their bombs and turned back to Albania.

Second Lieutenant Marinos Mitralexis won fame in this fight. He shot down one bomber, and when he ran out of ammunition he caught up with a second and struck its tail with his propeller. The Italian aircraft crashed (most sources say it was a CANT Z.1007, some Greek ones a Savoia-Marchetti SM.79). Mitralexis made a forced landing near the wreck and, pistol in hand, took the four surviving airmen prisoner. He was the only air force officer in this war to receive Greece’s highest award for gallantry, the Gold Cross of Valour, and his ramming was celebrated in newspapers, on posters and on postage stamps.

How many casualties the raids of 1 and 2 November caused cannot be established separately. Greek tallies state that the Italian bombing of Thessaloniki killed 232 people in total, wounded 871 and destroyed or damaged more than 800 buildings; some works apply these figures to November 1940 alone, others to all the Italian raids on the city during this war. According to the same tallies, families in the outlying districts were hit hardest. Neither the raids on Thessaloniki nor the bombing of Patras, Preveza and other towns broke the Greek mobilisation: the Italian air force failed to stop the movement of troops from the interior to the front, which historians regard as one of the reasons for the Greek success.

Tanks in the marshes

On 3 November the Italians committed their tanks. After a bombardment a column of – according to various accounts – 50–60 L3 tankettes and M13/40 medium tanks of the Centauro Division, supported by motorcyclists, struck at the Kalpaki pass. The terrain, which Katsimitros had chosen precisely with armour in mind, did its job. The meadows and flood plains of the Kalamas, sodden with rain, could not bear the vehicles, and the only road was mined and under the fire of the Greek artillery. Several tanks were destroyed, others got bogged down, and the attack was beaten off. During the night the Greeks shortened their line, withdrawing the units still holding on east of the Kalamas.

On 4 November the Italians confined themselves to shelling the whole front. At noon on 5 November, according to the Greek official history, strong infantry forces with tanks and air support again attacked the Elaia sector. The Greeks beat off this assault too. Over the following days, up to 7 November, the attacks were repeated, chiefly against Grabala hill and the neighbouring heights. On the night of 7 to 8 November Grabala briefly fell into Italian hands again, but Greek reserves quickly retook it. On the wet slopes, in the cold, under machine-gun fire from fortified positions, the Italian infantry suffered heavy losses, and commanders who had counted on a rapid march had no idea how to break the defence.

Greek morale was high. Katsimitros – a veteran of the Balkan Wars, of the Macedonian front in the First World War and of the expedition to Asia Minor, where he had been wounded – had a reputation in the army as a man who distrusted staff caution and was close to the ordinary soldier. His division, made up largely of reservists from Epirus, was defending its own villages and towns. As in the Pindus, in Epirus too women from the mountain villages carried ammunition and food on their backs to positions that mules could not reach.

Across the Kalamas on the coast

The Italians achieved their only success by the sea. The weak Greek covering forces in Thesprotia were pushed back behind the lower Kalamas on the very first day of the war, but bad roads and swollen rivers slowed the Coastal Grouping’s advance. Only on the night of 4 to 5 November did the Italians cross the river: the Siena Division, which had earlier taken the area around Filiates (PL), seized a bridgehead on the southern bank and linked up with the Coastal Grouping. The battalion defending the sector was broken, and General Lioumbas ordered a retreat behind the Acheron river. On 6 November the Italians took the port of Igoumenitsa, and the next day they reached the small town of Margariti. It was the furthest point they reached in the entire offensive.

This success meant little. The Thesprotian coast did not lead to Ioannina, and the Italian columns, advancing along muddy roads and supplied with difficulty, lacked the strength to outflank the Kalpaki position from the south. Katsimitros moved part of his reserves to the threatened sector, and more Greek units were arriving from the interior. A landing on the coast, which might have changed the situation in Epirus, never took place. The landing on Corfu planned for the first days of the war was called off on 29 October because of a storm, and Mussolini had the 47th Infantry Division Bari, earmarked for it, sent to Albania to plug gaps in the front. When on 3 November the Duce proposed a landing near Preveza to break the deadlock, the chiefs of staff refused at once and firmly.

Rome loses its illusions

General Sebastiano Visconti Prasca, who at the conference in the Palazzo Venezia on 15 October had promised to take Epirus in ten to fifteen days, spent the first days of November assuring Rome that the situation gave “no cause for concern”. The chief of the air staff, General Francesco Pricolo, who visited him on 2 November, later described him as “overwrought”. In Rome, however, it was clear that the offensive was at a standstill, and ever worse news was arriving from the Pindus: the Julia Division, which on 2 November had reached the village of Vovousa, some 30 kilometres short of Metsovo, was being cut off in the mountains by Greek reinforcements. To the east, around Korçë, the Greek army in western Macedonia, strengthened by divisions brought in from the Bulgarian border, had been going over to the offensive since 1 November. The Greeks could afford this because Bulgaria had not joined the war, and Turkey had made it clear that it would not stand idly by in the event of a Bulgarian attack on Greece.

On 6 November the General Staff formed an army group in Albania with two armies: the Ninth Army in the Korçë and Pindus sector and the Eleventh Army in Epirus. Command of the whole was to go to General Ubaldo Soddu, Under-Secretary of State at the War Ministry. The decision to remove Visconti Prasca was taken on 8 November, and on 9 November Soddu formally assumed command of the forces in Albania. Visconti Prasca was given the Eleventh Army for a short time, but as early as 11 November he was replaced by General Carlo Geloso. Soddu’s first report stressed the Greek resistance in Epirus and the growing threat in western Macedonia, and recommended going over to the defensive “while awaiting reinforcements that will allow operations to be resumed as soon as possible”. Benito Mussolini agreed.

On the Epirus front the matter had already been decided. On 8 November the Italian units at Kalpaki began to withdraw to defensive positions, and the offensive that was supposed to end with a victory parade in Ioannina was broken off. Soddu ordered the bridgehead across the Kalamas on the coast to be held for the time being, but no further attacks were made.

Losses and dates

Greek and international studies usually date the Battle of Elaia–Kalamas to 2–8 November 1940, from the first assault on the Kalpaki line to the halting of the Italian attack. The statement that on 8 November the Italians ended their whole offensive, however, needs qualifying. In Epirus they did indeed go over to the defensive then, but in the Pindus mountains fighting continued as the encircled Julia Division fought its way back to its start line, and the Greek official history dates the end of the Italian offensive phase only to 13 November. On that day, after a series of local counter-attacks, Greek units once again stood along the entire length of the Kalamas; the day before, the defence of Epirus had been taken over by General Panagiotis Demestichas’s I Army Corps, to which Katsimitros’s division was subordinated.

According to Greek General Staff figures, the 8th Division’s losses in the battle were about 60 killed and 260 wounded, which shows how well prepared its position was. Italian losses cannot be given precisely, because studies give them for the offensive as a whole; but they agree in describing them as heavy, especially in the Ferrara Division, whose battalions repeatedly stormed the same hills. The Italians also lost some of their tanks, and the Centauro Division discovered that in the mountains of Epirus, in the rainy season, armour was almost useless.

Place in the war

The defence of the Kalpaki–Kalamas line and the victory in the Pindus mountains sealed the fate of the Italian invasion. Mussolini, who had wanted the war against Greece to show Hitler that Italy was waging its own “parallel war”, had to change his commander and halt the advance after less than two weeks, and his army in Albania, further weakened by the autumn demobilisation still under way, turned from attacker into defender. On 14 November the Greeks launched a counter-offensive in western Macedonia, on 22 November they took Korçë, and over the following weeks they drove the Italians from the whole of Greek territory and advanced into southern Albania. Katsimitros led his division through the Kakavia pass deep into Albania. Until April 1941 the front ran several dozen kilometres beyond the old border.

For the Axis powers it was one of their first serious defeats on land, and for Britain, which since the fall of France had been fighting without allies on the Continent, the first proof that the army of a Fascist great power could be stopped. The British, who in the first days of November occupied Souda Bay on Crete and sent their first air squadrons to Greece, gained bases closer to the Italian sea lanes – and soon to the Romanian oilfields as well. This in turn led Hitler, who had regarded Mussolini’s venture as a mistake from the start, to prepare a German intervention in the Balkans: on 6 April 1941 the Wehrmacht attacked Greece from Bulgaria, and the Greek army, whose main forces were still in Albania, capitulated in less than three weeks.

The victor of Kalpaki met an ambiguous fate. After the capitulation Katsimitros joined the first collaborationist government of General Georgios Tsolakoglou, serving from April to September 1941 as Minister of Labour and then of Agriculture. After the liberation he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for this. In 1949 he was pardoned by the King and, for his services in 1940–1941, promoted to lieutenant general. He died in Athens in 1962. In Greece Kalpaki became one of the symbols of the “Epic of 1940”: a war museum devoted to that fighting now stands beside the road from Ioannina to the Albanian border.