The Battle of Vevi

On 12 April 1941, after two days of skirmishing in snow and fog, troops of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler motorised brigade broke onto the heights above the Klidi Pass near the village of Vevi in Greek Western Macedonia. The pass was held by a hastily cobbled-together Australian, British, New Zealand and Greek force under General Iven Mackay, named Mackay Force after him. By evening the Australian 2/8th Battalion had been broken, and German assault guns had driven up slopes that the defenders had thought impassable to vehicles. The force withdrew south during the night, but it had largely accomplished the task it had been set – to hold the Germans for two days and give the Greek and British troops time to regroup. For the Commonwealth forces in Greece it was the first serious battle against the Germans.

War chronologies record under 12 April that the Germans defeated Commonwealth troops at Vevi, and under 8 April that they took Thessaloniki. The first statement is accurate, although it leaves out the Greek part in the defence. The second needs correcting: the German 2nd Panzer Division entered Thessaloniki on the morning of 9 April, not on the 8th. The two events are linked, because the fall of Thessaloniki and eastern Macedonia meant that the British and Greek forces had to abandon their first line of defence, and the fight at Vevi was part of that withdrawal.

Thessaloniki and the Metaxas Line

When the Germans attacked Greece on 6 April, Field Marshal Wilhelm List’s Twelfth Army struck from Bulgaria in two ways. General Franz Böhme’s XVIII Mountain Corps advanced head-on against the fortifications of the Metaxas Line along the Bulgarian border. At the same time part of the force entered Yugoslavia, which came under German attack that same day, in order to outflank the Greek forts from the west. The Greek garrisons fought tenaciously. According to Gavin Long’s official Australian history, on the first day the Germans took hardly any of the forts, and some of them, such as Echinos in Thrace, held out long after the mountain troops had passed through the line beside them. The commander of the German 72nd Infantry Division is said to have told the Greeks afterwards that he had met no such effective resistance either in Poland or in France.

Yet the fate of eastern Macedonia was decided not by the forts but by the road through Yugoslavia. General Rudolf Veiel’s 2nd Panzer Division passed through the Yugoslav town of Strumica on 6 April; on 7 April its spearheads reached Lake Dojran, and on 8 April they broke through the thin screen of the Greek 19th Motorised Division, which in reality had the strength of barely a brigade. Late that evening the German column was in Kilkis, and there were no longer any troops between it and Thessaloniki. The British 1st Armoured Brigade, to which the Greeks had appealed for help, could only blow the bridges over the Vardar (Axios) and fall back westwards.

During the night of 8–9 April the commander of the Eastern Macedonia Army, General Konstantinos Bakopoulos, sent an envoy to the German armoured division proposing a ceasefire, although he ordered his units to keep fighting until matters were settled. On the morning of 9 April the German armoured spearhead drove into Thessaloniki, the second city of Greece, and at 1 p.m. that day Bakopoulos capitulated. The forts, including Rupel, formally surrendered on 10 April, and some accounts give that as the date of the capitulation. According to Long, the Germans accorded the garrisons the honours of war, and their officers praised the Greek fortifications as a “golden mean” between the Maginot Line and the fortifications of other countries. Even so, in four days Greece had lost four of the six divisions it could field against Germany. Long remarked that the campaign was the fall of France in miniature.

The Monastir Gap

The fall of Thessaloniki was a blow to the Greeks, but for the corps of Lieutenant General Henry Maitland Wilson, which had been landing in Greece since March and was taking up positions along the Aliakmon, what was happening further west was more dangerous. General Georg Stumme’s XL Corps, with the 9th Panzer Division, the 73rd Infantry Division and the Leibstandarte brigade, crossed southern Yugoslavia in two days. On 7 April it took Skopje and on 8 April Prilep, and the Yugoslav army in the south of the country ceased to exist. A British patrol that pushed north of Monastir, that is Bitola, on 8 April reported that three Yugoslav divisions had surrendered and that fleeing staff officers were gathering in Florina. The route that had been feared from the start was opening up: down the valley from Bitola through Florina to Kozani, into the rear of the Aliakmon Line and onto the flank of the Greek army that had been fighting the Italians in Albania since the autumn.

On the morning of 8 April, at a conference at the headquarters of the Australian corps commander, Lieutenant General Thomas Blamey, Wilson decided to form a force that was, as he put it, to “stop the blitzkrieg down the Florina valley”. He gave the command to Mackay, commander of the 6th Australian Division, which a few months earlier had taken Bardia and Tobruk. At the same time a more important decision was taken: the existing line from Olympus through the Vermio mountains to Vevi was henceforth to be no more than a rearguard position, and the main defence was to be made further south, on a line running from the pass below Mount Olympus along the Aliakmon. On the morning of 9 April Wilson ordered the withdrawal to that line. Mackay’s force was to cover the manoeuvre, and in particular the passage of the Greek 12th and 20th Divisions, which, without motor transport and with pack animals, were crossing the valley westwards to the Siatista and Klisura passes. On 10 April Wilson, Mackay and General Karassos, the new commander of the Greek Central Macedonia Army, agreed that the Greeks would withdraw in three night stages, ending on the night of 12–13 April, and that only after them would the Australians pull out. This meant that Mackay’s thin line had to hold the pass for two days and three nights.

Mackay Force

Mackay Force was, as Long wrote, “tiny and ill-balanced” for a force that was to face what might be the main German thrust into Greece. When Mackay reached Sotir just before midnight on 8 April, there was not yet a single infantry battalion in the area of the pass. He entrusted the defence of the pass itself to Brigadier George Vasey, commander of the Australian 19th Brigade, which had only two battalions in Greece: the 2/4th (less one company, sent to guard headquarters at Volos) and the 2/8th. To them were added the British 1st Battalion, the Rangers, of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, the New Zealand 27th Machine Gun Battalion, the Australian 2/1st Anti-Tank Regiment and strong artillery: the British 2nd Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery, the Australian 2/3rd Field Regiment and the 64th Medium Regiment. In reserve stood Brigadier Harold Charrington’s British 1st Armoured Brigade, whose tanks were already badly worn. On the right, above Lakes Vegoritida and Petron, was the Greek Dodecanese Regiment of the 20th Division, and on the left flank, in the mountains, a battalion of the Greek 21st Brigade of the Cavalry Division.

The Klidi Pass, which links Vevi with Amyntaio to the south, is a narrow, winding defile 100–500 metres wide, with steep, stony and almost treeless sides. The position was naturally strong but too long for three battalions: it stretched for some sixteen kilometres, and the platoons had to keep in touch by patrolling. The men, only recently brought over from the Libyan desert, had arrived by lorry along sodden roads after several sleepless nights, and then climbed with full loads to positions above the snowline. There were not enough blankets, because there was nobody to carry them; food could not be heated; and the rocky ground allowed only shallow trenches to be dug.

The first clashes

On the morning of 10 April Greek and Yugoslav refugees were still coming through the pass. At around 10 a.m., when it was judged that the last Greek guns had passed the position, the Rangers blew the road in front of their minefield. In the afternoon observers saw a German column moving across the plain “like a dark grey caterpillar across a great green lawn”, and the artillery opened fire at long range. That day the Leibstandarte took Florina, but the German guns could not keep up with the infantry on the wrecked roads, and no coordinated attack took place. This was fortunate for the defenders, because the 2/8th Battalion was still clambering up to its positions to the right of the road.

On 11 April it was fine in the valley, but on the heights snow was falling and fog limited visibility to a few dozen metres. During the night German patrols infiltrated between the scattered posts of the 2/8th Battalion, calling out in English “Get up, Steve” or “Friendly patrol here”. Before the Australians saw through the ruse, the Germans had captured several of them, a section of New Zealand machine-gunners and a few Rangers. During the day two tanks were blown up on the mines in front of the Rangers’ position, and towards evening two battalions of German infantry advanced astride the road, but the artillery stopped them a few hundred metres short of the positions. When the Australians captured two wounded prisoners during the night, it turned out that they were facing SS men of the Leibstandarte. Attacks on the Greeks’ left flank by Lake Petron and attempts to get through the Pisoderi Pass, held by the Greek Cavalry Division, were also beaten off. By the morning of 12 April the snow on Hill 1001, held by the 2/4th Battalion, was thirty centimetres deep, and men suffering from frostbite and utter exhaustion were being sent back from the line.

12 April

At 3.45 a.m. on 12 April Wilson ordered the withdrawal to the Olympus–Aliakmon line “as quickly as possible”. Mackay directed that the 2/4th and 2/8th Battalions begin coming down from their positions at 7.30 p.m., with the Rangers covering their departure. Until then the pass was to be held. The Germans, however, struck first. At 8.30 a.m. (9 a.m. according to some German sources) the companies of Sturmbannführer Fritz Witt’s battle group, without an artillery preparation but covered by mortars and machine guns, attacked the left flank of the 2/8th Battalion and its junction with the Rangers. They came on in close groups, which surprised the Australians, who had been taught to spread out in the attack. The forward platoon of Captain Bill Robertson’s company was swept away: six men survived. The rest of the company, supported by fire from neighbouring posts, held on to the ridge.

At around 11 a.m. Captain Coombes’s company saw the Rangers in the valley below pulling back, perhaps in the belief that the Australians had already been driven off. This opened the way through the defile itself to the Germans and split the two Australian battalions apart, and five of the six anti-tank guns pushed out ahead of the infantry were left without cover and had to be abandoned. Brigadier Vasey was for a long time unwilling to believe the reports of the Rangers’ withdrawal, as his headquarters stood some ten kilometres behind the line. At 2 p.m. the commander of the 2/8th Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel John Mitchell, led a counter-attack that regained a key stretch of the ridge. After six hours of fighting the battalion still held the heights, but it now formed a deep salient under fire from both sides. After 4 p.m. the Greek Dodecanese Regiment on the right flank withdrew as planned, and the Rangers fell back a second time, to a position near Rodona.

At around 5 p.m. Vasey telephoned Mackay to say that the situation was becoming “serious”, and passed to the commander of the 2/4th Battalion the agreed codeword for an immediate withdrawal: “the roof is leaking”. Half an hour later some five hundred German troops with StuG III assault guns and Panzerjäger I tank destroyers attacked along the whole front of the 2/8th Battalion. The Leibstandarte’s reconnaissance commander, Kurt Meyer, later recalled his astonishment as he watched the heavy guns climbing ever higher up the slopes. Nobody, German or Allied, had imagined that armoured vehicles could get up such stony hillsides. The Australians, worn out after three nights without sleep, had nothing to stop them with, because their anti-tank rifles could not pierce the armour. The battalion’s withdrawal turned into a disorderly scramble across the hills. Some officers ordered heavy weapons, and even rifles, to be abandoned, judging that heavily laden men would be cut off. Long stressed that the weapons were discarded not out of panic but out of exhaustion.

In the centre it was the gunners who saved the defenders from disaster. The guns of the British Royal Horse Artillery and two Australian anti-tank guns fired over open sights at the advancing tanks and infantry until the Germans were less than 400 metres away, and only then withdrew in good order. In Long’s words, they “saved the day”. At 6 p.m. the SS men took the village of Klidi and soon afterwards the mouth of the railway tunnel, capturing, by their own reports, some 250 prisoners. The Greek battalion of the 21st Brigade on the left flank was still holding out in the evening and in a short bout of hand-to-hand fighting lost 11 killed, 18 wounded, including the regimental commander, and 96 taken prisoner. In the evening Major Barham’s company of the 2/4th Battalion, which by mistake had not received the order to come down far to the west of the road, walked in the dark straight into a German roadblock. Barham was killed, and some seventy Australians were captured.

Sotir and Proastion

During the night of 12–13 April some 250 men of the 2/8th Battalion gathered near Rodona, only fifty of them with weapons. On the morning of 13 April Charrington’s armoured brigade, reinforced by what was left of the 2/4th Battalion and the Rangers, took up position on the neck of land at Sotir, between the lake and the marshes. When the Australians opened fire on German positions on the plain, they did not know that the prisoners taken the previous evening were lying between the lines. Several of them were killed by that fire. When the Germans broke into the Rangers’ position, the tanks held them off long enough for the rearguard to get away south. In the evening, at the second position, at Proastion south of Ptolemaida, some thirty German tanks worked round the British flank. In a fight in which German dive-bombers attacked the defenders for the first time in the campaign, British anti-tank gunners destroyed, by their own reckoning, a dozen or more tanks. The brigade slipped away under cover of a smokescreen, but it had practically ceased to exist as an armoured unit: its tank regiment, mostly through breakdowns, had dwindled to a single weak squadron, and its infantry battalion had lost half its men.

Losses and the dispute over covering the Greeks

The Germans reported taking 480 “English” and 40 Greek prisoners at Vevi. They judged their own losses to be relatively high: according to List’s chief of staff, General Hans von Greiffenberg, some forty men were killed. Other German returns give 37 killed, 95 wounded and 2 taken prisoner. The Australian 2/1st Anti-Tank Regiment lost sixteen guns, and from one of its batteries, cut off by the demolished road, some eighty men were taken prisoner. The worst hit was the 2/8th Battalion, which did not regain its fighting value for the rest of the campaign, and the Rangers.

After the war General Alexandros Papagos sharply criticised the British. He wrote that the order to withdraw from the Klidi Pass at 6 p.m. on 12 April had been given rashly, although the losses did not justify it and although units of the Greek 20th Division were still west of Lake Vegoritida and the 12th Division had not yet crossed the Servia–Kozani–Ptolemaida road. As a result, both Greek divisions reached their new positions in disorder and only in part. Long replied that Mackay had held the pass until dark on 12 April and the next day covered the withdrawal at Sotir, in accordance with the agreed plan. He admitted, however, that the Greeks had been given a task beyond their strength: infantry divisions with pack animals could not cross the whole valley in three nights, and communication between headquarters was woefully poor. As he put it, the British and the Greeks spoke different languages not only literally but also in the sense that one was a fully motorised army and the other an army of foot soldiers and mules.

Its place in the war

The fight at Vevi was short, but it cost the Germans the two days that Wilson and Papagos needed. The position on the Aliakmon and below Olympus, however, was manned too late and too thinly to hold for long, and the Greek front split in two: the British forces fell back to the south, while the Greek armies from Albania and Western Macedonia withdrew west and south-west into the Pindus mountains. The Leibstandarte drove into that gap. As early as 13 and 14 April it was fighting Greek rearguards at the Klisura Pass near Kastoria, and it then pushed on through Metsovo towards Ioannina, cutting the Epirus Army’s line of retreat. On 20 April one of the Greek commanders, General Georgios Tsolakoglou, offered his capitulation to none other than the Leibstandarte’s commander, Josef “Sepp” Dietrich.

Wilson’s forces, meanwhile, went on falling back: through the Olympus and Servia passes, the Vale of Tempe and the plain of Thessaly to Thermopylae, from where, from the night of 24–25 April, they were evacuated through the ports of Attica and the Peloponnese. For the Germans Vevi was further proof that their motorised troops could get through where the enemy considered the terrain impassable. Two of the Leibstandarte’s commanders at Vevi, Fritz Witt and Kurt Meyer, led the SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend in Normandy in 1944, and after the war Meyer was convicted as a war criminal by a Canadian military court.