British aid to Greece

On 16 November 1940 the main British convoy, which had put to sea the day before, entered Piraeus, the port of Athens. Five cruisers, five transports and a tanker carrying aviation fuel were used to carry the whole contingent. It comprised some 2,200 airmen of the Royal Air Force and some 2,000 army soldiers from more than forty small units – anti-aircraft artillery, engineers, signals and supply services – together with about 700 vehicles. According to the unit’s history, No. 80 Squadron RAF, equipped with Gloster Gladiator fighters, also arrived in Athens that same day. This was the most important stage in carrying out a decision that Prime Minister Winston Churchill had forced through at the beginning of November against the reservations of his commanders in the Middle East: Greece, invaded by Italy on 28 October, was to receive direct military aid, even at the cost of weakening the forces in Egypt.

Accounts of 16 November usually state that Churchill ordered part of the British forces in North Africa to be transferred to Greece, although his commanders believed they were needed to fight the Italians in Egypt. The gist of this is accurate, but it needs two qualifications. First, the order was given earlier: the government’s instructions reached the commanders in Cairo on 4 November, and it was the main consignment that arrived in Greece on 16 November. Second, in November 1940 the British did not send ground forces to Greece in the strict sense, that is, infantry or armoured divisions. What went were air squadrons with their ground crews and the auxiliary units protecting their airfields; infantry went only to Crete. A British expeditionary force landed in Greece only in March 1941, in an entirely different situation.

First steps: Crete and a single squadron

When on the morning of 28 October Ioannis Metaxas rejected the Italian ultimatum and Italy attacked Greece, the Greek prime minister invoked the British guarantee of April 1939. Churchill at once promised “all the help in our power”. In practice Britain had little to offer. As late as the end of August, when Metaxas asked what he could count on in the event of an Italian attack, London had replied that as long as Egypt was not secure it could promise only naval action. The forces of General Archibald Wavell, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, faced the army of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, which since September had sat in its camps around Sidi Barrani, some 130–140 kilometres from the main British position at Mersa Matruh. The air force of Air Chief Marshal Arthur Longmore, commander of the RAF in the Middle East, was weak, and many of its aircraft were obsolete.

So the first moves were those that served British interests themselves. On 28 October the commanders in Alexandria decided to occupy Suda Bay in Crete, the island’s best harbour, and turn it into an advanced fuelling base for Admiral Andrew Cunningham’s fleet. With the consent of the Greek government, on 1 November the cruiser HMS Ajax landed there the 2nd Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment, originally intended for Malta, followed by anti-submarine nets, anti-aircraft artillery and stores. Churchill considered Crete a prize worth the risk. “So great a prize is worth the risk and almost equal to a successful offensive in Libya,” he cabled on 29 October. The British presence allowed Metaxas to move most of the 5th Division, stationed on the island, to the mainland. Churchill himself insisted that it should not be withheld from the Greeks: “We shall do Greece a poor service if, while using Crete for our own purposes, we deny her the use of two-thirds of the 5th Division,” he wrote on 7 November to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

The Greeks, however, expected help at the front, not on their own island. On 30 October the British minister in Athens, Michael Palairet, reported that the absence of British aircraft was causing “loud comment” and asked that, instead of defending Crete, Britain help the Greeks to defeat the Italians. Having read this telegram, Longmore on his own initiative sent No. 30 Squadron to Greece, equipped with Bristol Blenheim bombers, half of them armed as fighters. “It seems,” he cabled the Chief of the Air Staff, “that it has become politically absolutely essential to send a token force to Greece, even at the expense of my forces here.” Churchill replied that he had taken “a very bold and wise decision”. At the beginning of November the Blenheims landed at Eleusis airfield near Athens, and according to the British official history the squadron began operations on 4 November.

London versus Cairo

At the moment of the Italian attack the Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, was in the Middle East. On 28 October he was in Khartoum, conferring with the Prime Minister of South Africa, Jan Smuts, and preparing to return home. Churchill held him back and sent him to Cairo. There Eden found Wavell, Longmore and Cunningham in agreement: the defence of Egypt was the foundation of the entire British position in the Middle East, and the forces that could be sent from it to Greece could not in any case decide the fighting in Epirus. On 1 November Eden cabled that sending such forces “would endanger our whole position in the Middle East and upset the plans for an offensive operation now being prepared in more than one theatre”, adding: “We shall best help Greece by striking at Italy where we have built up our forces and where our plans are prepared.” Longmore, Eden reported, viewed with “the greatest reluctance” the prospect of further squadrons which, on unprepared Greek airfields without shelters or anti-aircraft defence, would be exposed to Italian air raids.

Behind these generalities lay a secret. Wavell and the commander of the forces in Egypt, General Henry Maitland Wilson, were preparing a blow against the Italian camps around Sidi Barrani. Wavell was so afraid of a leak that he asked Eden not to mention the plan in any telegram but to tell the Prime Minister in person. Churchill therefore knew nothing and read the cables from Cairo as a sign of passivity. On 2 November he replied to Eden that the situation in Greece must now take precedence over all others, and that aid to Greece had to be weighed carefully, or the whole position in Turkey would be lost, since Turkey would take it as proof that England never tried to keep her guarantees. A day later he was sharper: the fall of Greece without any effort on Britain’s part would have a “deadly effect” on Turkey and on the future course of the war, and the loss of Athens would be a far greater blow “than Kenya and Khartoum”. No one would thank Britain, he wrote, for sitting idle in Egypt with ever-growing forces while Greece and all that depended on her were abandoned; “‘Safety first’ is the road to ruin in war.” He ended by demanding that they send him their proposals or admit that they had none.

Churchill’s reckoning was above all political. Since the fall of France Britain had been fighting alone, and Greece was at that moment the only state on the European continent fighting the Axis powers. If the British looked on passively at her defeat, they would lose credibility in the eyes of Turkey and Yugoslavia, while in the Balkans, within reach of the Romanian oilfields, the Italians – and perhaps the Germans after them – would gain a foothold. Encouraged by the fact that the Greeks, contrary to expectations, were holding the front, and that an Italian attack on Egypt did not seem imminent, the War Cabinet agreed to take the risk. On 4 November Churchill cabled: “Send at once to Greece one squadron of Gladiators and two further squadrons of Blenheims, three in all.” Anti-aircraft guns were to reach the Greek airfields before the aircraft, and once reinforcements arrived from Britain a second fighter squadron was to go to Greece. In return London promised Longmore 34 Hawker Hurricane fighters, to be delivered by the aircraft carrier HMS Furious to Takoradi in West Africa, and 32 Vickers Wellington bombers flying to Egypt via Malta. None of them were due to arrive until early December.

As he left Cairo on 5 November, Eden reported that he, Wavell and Longmore accepted these orders: the additional risk in the Western Desert “must be borne because of the political obligation to help Greece”, but any further increase in commitments would gravely endanger Egypt. According to the British official history, Egypt’s fighter cover was to shrink by as much as a third and its bomber striking power by half. On the evening of 8 November Eden reached London and, in a shelter off Piccadilly, told Churchill about Wavell’s plan. The Prime Minister recalled after the war that he “purred like six cats”, and admitted that the whole exchange of cables had rested on a misunderstanding: Cairo believed London was ordering it to scatter the forces being gathered for an offensive in order to give ineffective help to Greece, while London believed that the commanders in the Middle East were standing idle. On 14 November Churchill instructed Wavell to prepare the attack, but did not reverse the decision on air support for Greece.

The airmen in Greece

The British air force in Greece was placed under Air Commodore John D’Albiac, until then the RAF commander in Palestine and Transjordan, who took up his duties as Longmore’s representative on 6 November. As early as 31 October an inter-service military mission had been set up in Athens under the naval attaché, Rear Admiral Charles Turle, to maintain liaison with the Greek high command. Greece did not have a single all-weather airfield, and the autumn rains flooded the field landing grounds in Thessaly and Macedonia. The bombers therefore had to be based at two airfields near Athens, Eleusis and Tatoi (Menidi), several hundred kilometres from the front, and spend many hours flying over mountains where conditions in winter were appalling. Wellingtons of No. 70 Squadron also flew in from Egypt to help, refuelling and taking on bombs at Eleusis.

After the convoy arrived on 16 November, unloading the men, equipment and stores took more than four days, and the Italians did not interfere at all. In the second half of November four squadrons were already operating in Greece: Nos. 30, 84 and 211 bomber squadrons, all flying Blenheims, and No. 80 fighter squadron with Gladiators. The last of these was moved closer to the front, to landing grounds at Trikala and Ioannina, where the pilots lived in very primitive conditions. On 19 November nine Gladiators fought their first engagement with Italian fighters over Korçë. The British claimed nine victories, though according to Italian records the losses amounted to four aircraft; the RAF lost one. Two victories that day were credited to Marmaduke “Pat” Pattle, who in the following months became the RAF’s most successful fighter ace on this front.

D’Albiac believed that his small force would achieve most by attacking the ports through which the Italians supplied their army in Albania, above all Durrës (Durazzo) and Vlorë (Valona), and the communications hubs behind the front. He resisted pressure from the Greek Commander-in-Chief, General Alexandros Papagos, who wanted the British to support the infantry fighting in the mountains directly. The Greek air force, equipped with an assortment of French and Polish aircraft and lacking spare parts, was rapidly dwindling, while the Italians, by British estimates, had between 150 and 200 fighters in Albania. Daylight Blenheim raids thus became ever more costly, and the RAF gradually switched to night attacks. At the same time Wellingtons from Malta and Egypt bombed the Italian ports on the other side of the Adriatic, Brindisi and Bari.

In material terms this was modest help compared with the effort of the Greek army itself, which in these days went over to the counter-offensive and pushed the Italians back into Albania. Politically and morally, however, it mattered a great deal. The Greeks saw that they were not fighting alone, and the British that their guarantees meant something. Together with the attack on Taranto, which on the night of 11–12 November put half of Italy’s battleships out of action and forced the rest of the fleet to withdraw to Italy’s west coast, the British squadrons in Greece and the base at Suda changed the balance of forces in the eastern Mediterranean. On 26 November Churchill asked Wavell to tell Longmore that the arrival of the Hurricanes at Takoradi would make up for all the feathers they had had to pluck from him for Greece, where the RAF’s part in the Greek victories had been of immense military and political importance.

Place in the war

The Cairo commanders’ fears did not come true in the form in which they had voiced them. The weakened air force in Egypt proved sufficient: on 9 December 1940 Wavell launched Operation Compass, which within two months destroyed Graziani’s army and gave the British Cyrenaica. Another warning proved more accurate. On 17 November Wavell noted that he was quite certain Germany could not afford to let Italy be defeated in Greece – or even merely halted – and would have to intervene. As early as 4 November Adolf Hitler, alarmed that British aircraft had gained bases in Greece from which they could reach the oilfields of Ploiești, ordered a study of sending troops through Bulgaria. In a letter to Mussolini of 20 November he reproached his ally for having brought the British into the Balkans with his expedition, and on 13 December Directive No. 20 gave the planned invasion of Greece the code name “Marita”. Metaxas, aware of the danger, refused to allow British airfields to be built near Salonika, and in January 1941 he rejected an offer of ground troops, so as not to give the Germans a pretext.

Only his successor changed this. After Metaxas’s death on 29 January 1941 and Eden’s talks in Athens in February, Britain halted its pursuit in Libya and in March moved an expeditionary force to Greece that included, alongside British troops, an Australian and a New Zealand division. This time the help was greater, but again insufficient. On 6 April 1941 the Germans struck from Bulgaria and occupied Greece within three weeks, and the British evacuated the mainland, largely to Crete. Pattle was killed in air fighting over Athens on 20 April. In May 1941, in the Battle of Crete, German paratroopers also captured the island that Churchill had regarded in October 1940 as a priceless prize. After the war he admitted bitterly that, despite his orders, Suda had not been turned into a fortified base and that everything had been done half-heartedly.

Historians still debate whether Britain was right to divide its forces between Africa and the Balkans in 1940–1941. Churchill’s November decision was the first stage of that dispersal. A few squadrons of Blenheims and Gladiators could not decide the Greco-Italian War, which the Greeks were then winning by their own efforts, but they showed that Britain kept its guarantees. At the same time, by giving Germany a reason to intervene in the Balkans, they drew Britain into a campaign it could not win alone.