The Dodecanese campaign begins

On 16 September 1943 one Dakota transport after another landed at the airfield of Antimachia (PL) on the island of Kos. Out of them stepped men of the 1st Battalion, the Durham Light Infantry, a British infantry regiment, which was to defend the only airfield from which Allied fighters could cover the islands of the south-eastern Aegean. That same morning the first German Junkers Ju 88 had appeared over Kos, bombed the Italian coastal batteries and the runway, and then been shot down by patrolling Spitfires. On Leros, a few dozen kilometres away and possessing the best harbour in the archipelago, British liaison officers were preparing to receive the first infantry companies, and reconnaissance parties were arriving on Samos.

This day is sometimes described as the landing of the British on “various Greek islands held by the Italians”, which opened the Dodecanese campaign. That needs correcting: the campaign began a week earlier, on 8–9 September, with the announcement of Italy’s surrender. The first British troops were on the island of Kastellorizo (Megisti) as early as 8–10 September, the unsuccessful mission to Rhodes took place on the night of 9–10 September, and the first Commandos reached Kos on 13–14 September. Mid-September was rather the moment when scattered actions by small parties turned into the regular occupation of the islands by troops. The islands themselves were inhabited by Greeks but had formally belonged to Italy since 1912.

Twelve islands

The Dodecanese – “twelve islands” – is an archipelago in the south-eastern Aegean, strung out along the coast of Asia Minor. The group is usually taken to include the largest island of the region, Rhodes, and tiny Kastellorizo, lying just off the Turkish coast. The Italians seized the islands during the war with Turkey in 1912, and the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 confirmed their rule. The population was almost entirely Greek; in the 1930s the Italian authorities pursued a policy of Italianisation towards it.

Under Mussolini the islands became a forward base for the Italian navy and air force in the eastern Mediterranean. Rhodes had three military airfields. Leros, with the deep bay of Portolago (today Lakki), was turned into a fortified naval base which Mussolini grandiloquently called the “Corregidor of the Mediterranean”. In practice the islands proved less important in wartime than had been promised: supplying them was awkward, and after the fall of Greece in 1941 and the German capture of Crete they lay behind the front. The British had tried to break in as early as February 1941, when Commandos and Royal Marines landed on Kastellorizo, but the Italians quickly retook the island.

Churchill and the Aegean

For Winston Churchill the Aegean had long been an area of great hopes. Since 1940 the Prime Minister had been working to bring Turkey into the war. Ankara’s joining the Allies would have meant opening a route through the Black Sea straits to the USSR, airfields close to the Romanian oilfields, and a new threat to the German positions in the Balkans. President İsmet İnönü, however, listened politely to the encouragement and promised nothing: defeat would mean German occupation, and victory a growing Soviet ascendancy. Taking the Dodecanese was meant to show the Turks that the Allies were close at hand, and to provide bases for future operations in the Balkans.

The Americans saw things differently. At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 and the Quebec Conference in August, the US Chiefs of Staff repeated that the Mediterranean was a secondary theatre and that all forces should be husbanded for the invasion of France. General Dwight Eisenhower, commanding in the western and central Mediterranean, had priority in the allocation of ships, aircraft and landing craft – and he needed them for the landings in Italy.

The Accolade plan

In the Middle East, where General Henry Maitland Wilson was in command, a planning staff had been preparing an operation codenamed Accolade since February 1943. Its main objective was Rhodes, followed by Karpathos and further islands to the north, up to the sea route to Smyrna. Three variants were drawn up: a peaceful occupation of Rhodes if the Italians surrendered and the Germans withdrew; a swift raid if the Italians gave in and the Germans stayed; and finally a full-scale invasion in case both resisted.

Every one of these variants ran up against the same obstacle – geography. The nearest British airfields were in Cyprus and Cyrenaica, some 400–550 km from Rhodes. Single-engined fighters lacked the range, and twin-engined Beaufighters were no match for Messerschmitts. The Luftwaffe, by contrast, had airfields on Rhodes itself, on Karpathos, on Crete and on the Greek mainland. The plan therefore assumed that Eisenhower would lend long-range aircraft, warships and landing craft. In August, as the date of the Salerno landing approached, Eisenhower decided that he could spare almost nothing. By the end of August it was clear that, relying on their own resources, the British could count only on landing where nobody would offer resistance.

The race for Rhodes

The Germans had been preparing for this moment for months. After Mussolini’s fall in July 1943, the plan for Operation Achse provided for disarming the Italian garrisons in the Balkans and the Aegean islands as well. On Rhodes, since the beginning of 1943, General Ulrich Kleemann’s Rhodes Assault Division (Sturm-Division Rhodos) had been forming – some 6,000–7,000 men, motorised and well armed. The Italian garrison under the governor of the islands, Admiral Inigo Campioni, was several times larger – sources give from about 35,000 to 40,000 men – but it was dispersed, poorly equipped and caught by surprise.

On the evening of 8 September the radio announced Italy’s surrender, signed five days earlier at Cassibile. Kleemann reacted at once. On 9 September his troops began seizing key points on the island, including the airfields, and arrested the Italian divisional commander, General Michele Scaroina. On the night of 9–10 September Major George Jellicoe – son of the admiral of Jutland and commander of the Special Boat Squadron – parachuted onto Rhodes with an accompanying officer and a wireless operator. Their task was to persuade Campioni to fight the Germans until the British arrived. Admiral Campioni wanted to know when that would be. When he heard that a British brigade could not land before 15 September, he judged further resistance hopeless. On 11 September, after two days of fighting and German air raids, the Italian garrison of Rhodes capitulated. Jellicoe managed to get off the island.

The loss of Rhodes wrecked the Accolade plan in its original form. The most important island of the archipelago, with its three airfields, remained in German hands and from then on served as a Luftwaffe base at the very heart of the area the British wanted to control.

Kos, Leros and Samos

Even so, London and Cairo decided to press on. Churchill urged them forward: in a telegram to Wilson he wrote that “this is the time to play high”, to improvise and to dare. With Rhodes lost, the British decided to occupy the islands further to the north-west, where there were no Germans and the Italians declared themselves willing to cooperate. The most important was Kos, the only island apart from Rhodes with an airfield capable of taking fighters. Leros had a harbour and strong Italian coastal artillery, while Samos – lying just off the Turkish coast – made it easier to supply the whole force through neutral Turkish waters.

On 12 September a Special Boat Service detachment under Major David Sutherland – 55 men in a motley collection of caiques and motor boats – set out from Kastellorizo for Kos. The raiders reached the island on 13–14 September and found the Italian commander, Colonel Felice Leggio, ready to cooperate. Some 3,500 men of the 10th Regiment of the Italian Regina Infantry Division were stationed on Kos. On 14 September the first Spitfires of No. 7 Squadron, South African Air Force, landed at Antimachia from Cyprus, and on the night of 14–15 September some 120 men of the 11th Parachute Battalion were dropped; the Italians spread straw and hay for them on the drop zone. On 15 September anti-aircraft gunners of the RAF Regiment arrived, and on 16 September the infantry of the Durham Light Infantry. The rocky ground made it impossible to dig the guns in, and there was only one airfield – a second landing strip was still being marked out.

British liaison officers, Jellicoe among them, had been arriving on Leros since 12 September. The Italian garrison – some 8,000 men, mostly sailors – was commanded by Captain Luigi Mascherpa, soon promoted to rear admiral. On 13 September he rejected a German summons to surrender “on honourable terms”. On 17 September destroyers brought the first companies of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Fusiliers, to the island, and on 20 September the commander of the 234th Infantry Brigade, Brigadier Francis Brittorous, arrived and announced that he was taking command of the whole island. From the outset this soured relations with the Italians. On Samos, where General Mario Soldarelli’s Italian Cuneo Division was stationed, liaison officers arrived, followed later by small British detachments. SBS and Long Range Desert Group parties also occupied or reconnoitred smaller islands: Symi, Kalymnos, Astypalaia and Ikaria. Everywhere efforts were made to bring the Italian garrisons over to the Allied side.

The forces were modest. Some 1,500 British troops were sent to Kos, fewer than half of them infantry. Royal Navy ships could operate in the Aegean mainly at night, since by day they were at the mercy of German bombers. The 8th Destroyer Flotilla, which included the Greek destroyer Vasilissa Olga, was sent to Alexandria. On the night of 17–18 September these ships sank a German convoy bound for Rhodes off Astypalaia.

The German response

Hitler had no intention of giving up the islands without a fight. He believed that the loss of the Aegean would shake Germany’s position in the Balkans and might induce Turkey to change sides, as well as threatening supplies of Romanian oil. The commander of Army Group E in Greece, General Alexander Löhr, was ordered to retake the islands. By 19 September the Germans had occupied Karpathos, Kasos and the Italian garrisons in the Cyclades and the Sporades. The Luftwaffe was bringing aircraft to the Aegean from other fronts – at the beginning of October it had more than 350 serviceable machines there. Regular raids on Kos began on 18 September, and on 23 September the commander of the 22nd Infantry Division on Crete, General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, was ordered to capture Kos and Leros.

Without Rhodes and without American support, the British venture stood on shaky ground from the start. In those same days a hard battle for the beachhead was being fought at Salerno – the landing of 9 September had faltered, and only the turning point in mid-month averted the threat of defeat. Eisenhower could not, and would not, shift aircraft or ships to the east.

Place in the war

The opening of the Dodecanese campaign was Churchill’s last great improvisation in the Mediterranean. It rested on the assumptions that the Italians would fight alongside the British and that the Germans would be unable to respond quickly. Both proved wrong. On 26 September the Luftwaffe began systematic raids on Leros. On 3 October the Germans landed on Kos and took the island the next day; they captured some 1,400 British and more than 3,000 Italian troops, and Colonel Leggio and – according to various sources – from several dozen to about 100 Italian officers were shot. On 12 November the German invasion of Leros began, ending on 16 November with the surrender of the garrison. The British evacuated Samos, and on 22 November the Italians there surrendered. Only Kastellorizo remained in Allied hands.

Admiral Campioni and Rear Admiral Mascherpa fell into the hands of Mussolini’s Social Republic, were sentenced to death for resisting the Germans and were shot at Parma on 24 May 1944. To the end of his life Churchill believed that the Americans had denied him the modest help that could have ensured success; his critics compared the campaign to Gallipoli in 1915. The British lost several destroyers and several thousand men killed and captured, and Turkey – watching the defeat at close quarters – remained neutral. The islands stayed in German hands until May 1945. In 1947 the peace treaty with Italy transferred the Dodecanese to Greece.