The British land in Greece

On 7 March 1941 British cruisers entered Piraeus, the port of Athens, carrying the first echelon of the expeditionary force that Britain had decided to send to help Greece against the expected German attack. Several thousand men in khaki came ashore, while slower ships with equipment followed the warships. So began, in practice, Operation Lustre: the transfer from Egypt to Greece of a British armoured brigade, a New Zealand and an Australian division, and several tens of thousands of supporting troops. The commander of these forces, Lieutenant General Henry Maitland Wilson, was already in Athens, but at the Greek government’s request he went about in civilian clothes under an assumed name.

This day is often described as the landing of “the first British troops” in Greece. That is not strictly so. British airmen, anti-aircraft gunners and service troops had been arriving in Greece since November 1940; according to the British official history, there were some 4,200 of them before March. What came ashore on 7 March were the first land forces intended to fight the Germans. The Australian official historian Gavin Long gives 7 March in one place and 8 March in another as the day the first echelon arrived, because the ships came in and unloaded over two days. Linked with this day, too, is an event that war chronologies record under 4 March: the weakening of the British forces in Libya, from which the best units were taken for Greece.

The decision to intervene

The British had been preparing for this expedition since mid-February. In January Ioannis Metaxas had turned down an offer of small British forces, fearing that they would provoke the Germans without stopping them. After his death, the new prime minister, Alexandros Koryzis, confirmed on 8 February that Greece would resist the Germans and asked what help it could receive. After the destruction of the remnants of the Italian Tenth Army at Beda Fomm, the War Cabinet’s Defence Committee decided on 10 February not to push on to Tripoli, to hold Cyrenaica with the smallest possible forces and to concentrate in Egypt troops ready to be sent to Europe. The Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Dill, sent to the Middle East by Winston Churchill with wide powers, agreed with the Greeks on 22 February at the Tatoi palace near Athens that Britain would send land forces and that the joint defence would rest on a short line along the Haliacmon river, far behind the Bulgarian frontier. The Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, previously sceptical, adopted the plan as his own. The news that the corps would be led by Wilson, the victor of the Egyptian frontier, was received by the Greek Commander-in-Chief, General Alexandros Papagos, with evident satisfaction, as the British official history noted.

The plan provided for three echelons. The first was to consist of an armoured brigade group and the New Zealand division; the second of the Polish Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade and an Australian division; and the third, if required, of another armoured brigade and a second Australian division. According to the calculations of the staff in Cairo, some 100,000 British troops were eventually to be in Greece, with 240 field guns, 32 medium guns and 142 tanks. The air force was the weakest point. Three British fighter squadrons and four bomber squadrons had been operating in Greece since the autumn, and there was nowhere to find more modern aircraft.

Cyrenaica stripped bare

There was only one place from which troops for the Greek expedition could be taken: the desert where Operation Compass had just come to an end. The Indian divisions were fighting at Keren in Eritrea, the African divisions and the South African division in East Africa, and the 7th Armoured Division, after eight months of fighting, was so worn out that it had been sent back to Egypt to refit. Wavell therefore decided that the victorious and well-equipped 6th Australian Division of General Iven Mackay, which had taken Bardia and Tobruk, would go to Greece, together with the best part of the 2nd Armoured Division, recently arrived from England: Brigadier Harold Charrington’s 1st Armoured Brigade. The brigade had 52 cruiser tanks of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment and 52 light tanks of the 4th Hussars, and the division’s support group was broken up to meet its needs. The commander of the Australian forces, Lieutenant General Thomas Blamey, reshuffled the brigades in the process: he assigned the better-equipped ones to Greece and gave the 9th Division, which was to stay in Cyrenaica, the weaker brigades of the 7th Division.

What remained in the desert was a shadow of the army that had reached El Agheila in February. The British official history states that what was left of the 2nd Armoured Division was “nothing of the kind” its name suggested: it had one weak armoured brigade whose tanks had worn-out engines and tracks, made up in part with captured Italian M13/40 tanks. General Leslie Morshead’s 9th Australian Division was short of anti-tank weapons, signals equipment and, above all, transport: only five of its eight battalions had their own vehicles. On 27 February General Philip Neame took over command in Cyrenaica, and the headquarters of XIII Corps, which had conducted Compass, was disbanded. At the beginning of March the 6th Australian Division began to leave the front. Its 17th Brigade at Mersa Brega was relieved by Morshead’s Australians in the first half of the month, and on 8 March the 16th Brigade set off from Tobruk for Mersa Matruh and on to a camp near Alexandria, where the men were given leave, new Thompson submachine guns and orders to embark.

Wavell knew he was taking a risk. The first skirmishes with the Germans near El Agheila showed that there were already German units in Tripolitania. On 2 March, however, just before leaving for Athens, Wavell judged in a report to London that in about three weeks the enemy would be able to maintain at the front no more than one infantry division and one armoured brigade; he might try to advance on Agedabia but would not dare to go for Benghazi, and no larger offensive was to be expected before the end of the summer. His intelligence staff were more cautious and concluded on 5 March that the Germans could begin to retake Cyrenaica as early as after 1 April. Wavell assumed that nothing serious threatened him before May and that Cyrenaica would receive reinforcements by then. From his first days Neame reported that to defend the province he needed a full armoured division and two fully equipped infantry divisions, but was told that before April he would get at most minor reinforcements. When Wavell and Dill visited Cyrenaica in mid-March, Dill, according to Neame’s memoirs, told him: “You are going to get a bloody nose here, Philip, and it is not the only place where we shall get a bloody nose.”

Three days of argument in Athens

Just as the first convoys were getting ready to sail, the whole expedition nearly fell apart. Eden and Dill, after talks in Ankara at which the Turks refused to enter the war, returned to Athens on the afternoon of 2 March. That day German troops were already entering Bulgaria, which had joined the Tripartite Pact the day before. On arrival the British learned to their astonishment that Papagos had not ordered the withdrawal of his troops from Thrace and Eastern Macedonia to the Haliacmon line. He maintained that at Tatoi the withdrawal had been made conditional on Yugoslavia’s answer, and that the answer had not come. Now he considered it too late to withdraw: pulling the divisions back would take about fifteen days, and the Germans might catch them on the march. He proposed that the British land at Salonika and, together with his weak divisions, defend the passes on the Bulgarian frontier. From Albania, where the main Greek forces had been fighting the Italians for four months, he could take no one.

To Dill this meant sending the only reserve in the Middle East to a front that three weak Greek divisions could not hold, since by British calculations it required nine. Dill called it committing troops to battle piecemeal and refused. Eden and Dill found the Greek commander “unaccommodating and defeatist”. The talks in Athens lasted three days, and the British official history speaks of three days of plain speaking and detailed argument, in an atmosphere entirely different from that of a week earlier. Wavell flew in from Cairo on 3 March and Wilson the following day. On 4 March, at a meeting attended by King George II, Papagos proposed a compromise: the divisions in Eastern Macedonia would remain on the Metaxas Line on the Bulgarian frontier, while two infantry divisions, a motorised division and several battalions from Thrace would move to the Haliacmon line.

The British could either withdraw their offer, which they regarded as a political disaster, or occupy a position on which almost nothing had been built, alongside some twenty Greek battalions instead of the thirty-five promised. Shortly before midnight on 4 March they decided, “with some misgivings”, to stick to the plan. Pulling out would, in any case, have meant turning back the first large convoy, which was already on its way to Piraeus. The British and Greek forces on the Haliacmon line were to be commanded by Wilson, subordinate to Papagos as Commander-in-Chief. To avoid further misunderstandings, the agreement was written down in French and signed by Papagos and Dill.

Hesitation in London and the Dominions

In London the news from Athens was received with concern. The Chiefs of Staff pointed to the twelve days wasted by the Greeks and judged that the risks of the expedition had grown considerably. On 4 March Admiral Andrew Cunningham warned the Admiralty that the convoys and the unloading ports were very poorly protected against air attack, and that German mines dropped into the Suez Canal kept closing the route. On 6 March Churchill cabled Eden that it was hard to believe Britain could still avert the fate of Greece unless Turkey or Yugoslavia joined in, and that the Greeks must not be urged into hopeless resistance. He wrote that sending New Zealand and Australian troops on an enterprise that had become even more of a gamble raised “grave Imperial issues”.

Eden, Dill and the three commanders-in-chief replied that they stood by the decision. They were helped by the presence in Cairo of the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, Jan Smuts, who supported the expedition. To leave Greece to its fate, at a time when the whole world knew that after their victories in Libya the British had troops to spare, they considered a greater evil than a possible defeat. On 7 March, the day of the landing at Piraeus, the War Cabinet authorised Wavell to proceed with the operation, declaring that it accepted “full responsibility” for it.

There remained the question of the Dominions, whose soldiers formed the core of the expedition. The New Zealand government agreed on 26 February, on condition that its division was fully equipped and supported by an armoured brigade, and the Australian War Cabinet on 28 February, on condition that evacuation plans were prepared. The Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, who was in London, was told that the commanders of both contingents agreed to the expedition. Yet Major General Bernard Freyberg, commander of the New Zealand division, later said he had merely been told to prepare to move. On 6 March Blamey heard from Dill and Wavell about the new arrangements and replied that he regarded the enterprise as “most hazardous”. On 10 March, from Alexandria, he sent Canberra a cable in which he predicted that within three or four months the British in Greece would face “overwhelming forces”, and warned of the consequences of defeat and of “a second evacuation, if such is possible”. He called the operation “extremely hazardous”. Australia, however, was already committed, and the first Australian units were on their way.

Operation Lustre

The movement was organised as a series of convoys from Alexandria to Piraeus, sailing roughly every three days from 4 March. Most of the troops travelled in cruisers of the Royal Navy and the Royal Australian Navy, while heavy equipment and supplies went in slow merchant ships under weak escort. The ships usually passed west of Crete, because the eastern route ran too close to the Italian airfields in the Dodecanese. On the western side the convoys were covered by cruisers and destroyers of the Mediterranean Fleet. Italian aircraft from the Dodecanese bombed the ships several times, but in March they did no damage.

In Athens the men from the desert found a country that welcomed them as liberators. Gavin Long quotes the recollections of Australians to whom the bay at Piraeus recalled the harbours of home, while the townspeople showered the lorries with flowers and shouted “Zito i Australia”. On 8 March, the day after the first troops arrived, the right-wing daily Kathimerini published an open letter to Hitler from its publisher, Georgios Vlachos. “It was not we who brought them here,” he wrote of the British. “It was the Italians who brought them to Greece.” He declared that if the Germans attacked, the Greek army would fight in Thrace as it had fought in Epirus.

The landing also had less friendly spectators. Greece was not at war with Germany, and the German legation in Athens was operating normally. The British official history notes that its staff could watch the port freely, and that the German military attaché stood on the quay counting the soldiers coming off the ships, while their own commander could not show himself to them. Wilson had flown to Athens on 4 March and until 5 April appeared in civilian clothes as “Mr Watt”. The Greeks feared that the sight of a British general in uniform would provoke the Germans. As a result he could not properly reconnoitre the ground on which his troops were to stand and had to make do with a single drive along the front.

Further convoys arrived throughout March. By 18 March the 1st Armoured Brigade and roughly half the New Zealand division were in Greece, and between 19 and 22 March the 16th Australian Brigade disembarked. By the end of March the British official history counted more than 31,000 troops transported to Greece. In the end, according to the same history, the Lustre convoys carried 58,364 men in about six weeks. Long, drawing on British figures, gives a total of 62,611 army and air force personnel transported to Greece by 14 April, including those who had arrived earlier. After its commander, the whole force was known as W Force.

The line that never was

The Haliacmon position ran from the sea below Mount Olympus north-westwards along the Pieria and Vermion mountains to the Yugoslav frontier, a distance of more than 110 kilometres as the crow flies. The mountains were steep, and there were only four passes: the coastal one, carrying the Athens–Salonika railway; the Olympus pass; the pass near Veria; and the widest, the pass near Edessa. It was clear from the outset that the position could be turned from the rear, along the valley running from Yugoslav Bitola, the former Monastir, to Florina. Its defence depended on whether Yugoslavia would fight. On 11 March Wilson ordered the New Zealanders to prepare a defence forward of Katerini and on the Olympus pass. The Greek forces on the line, designated the Central Macedonian Army, consisted of three weak divisions, one of which, a motorised division, had only just been formed and had a mixture of British and captured Italian weapons.

The British corps was almost fully motorised, but it had to be supplied through one large port, Piraeus, and the smaller port of Volos, along a single-track railway that was already working at the limit of its capacity to supply the Greek army. Greece had no lorries, carts or draught animals left to spare. W Force’s chief of supply, Brigadier G. S. Brunskill, later wrote that from the Greek point of view the larder was almost empty, and from the British point of view there was nothing on the spot. By the beginning of April the British had built up stocks of food for 58 days, fuel for 38 days and 14,000 tonnes of engineer stores, including 300 tonnes of explosives, which proved very useful during the retreat.

Place in the war

The landing at Piraeus was the boldest and most controversial move of British strategy in the spring of 1941. Supporters of the expedition argued that the only ally fighting on the Continent must not be abandoned, and that Turkey, Yugoslavia and the United States had to be shown that Britain kept its word. Its opponents, led by General Alan Brooke, later regarded it as “a definite strategic blunder” that deprived Wavell of his reserves at the very moment when he could have completed the conquest of Libya or repelled the Germans.

The bill came quickly and from both sides at once. On 24 March German troops occupied El Agheila, and on 31 March General Erwin Rommel struck at the weakened forces in Cyrenaica and within two weeks drove them back to the Egyptian frontier, except for besieged Tobruk. Because of this, the 7th Australian Division and the Polish Carpathian Brigade never sailed for Greece. On 6 April the Germans attacked Yugoslavia and Greece from Bulgaria in the Balkan campaign. The Yugoslav army disintegrated within days, and German panzer divisions came through Bitola and turned the Haliacmon line exactly where it had been feared they would. W Force fell back through Thessaly to Thermopylae, and from 24 April it was evacuated through the ports and beaches of Attica and the Peloponnese. Some 50,000 men were saved, but all the heavy equipment, the tanks and thousands of lorries were left in Greece. British losses, including prisoners, amounted to between 12,000 and 14,700 men according to different tallies. Some of the evacuated troops were landed on Crete, where in May they had to fight German paratroopers in the Battle of Crete.

The expedition did not save Greece, but it was not without political significance. The Greeks remembered that the British had come when no one else had. For the Australians and New Zealanders, however, Greece became, as Blamey and Freyberg had feared, a second Gallipoli: another expedition conceived in London and ending in evacuation under fire. The dispute over who really took the decision to intervene – Churchill, Eden, Dill or Wavell – and whether Papagos had failed or simply had no choice went on in memoirs and official histories long after the war.