The Germans on the Danube

In the second half of February 1941, on the northern bank of the Danube, in southern Romania and northern Dobruja, units of Field Marshal Wilhelm List’s German Twelfth Army stood ready. Bridging equipment had been lying on the riverbanks since January, the engineers were waiting for the order to build the crossings, and VIII Air Corps was assembling on the airfields. The objective was Greece, which for four months had been successfully defending itself against the Italians, and the road there led through Bulgaria. Since the autumn of 1940 Tsar Boris III had been finding excuses not to join the Tripartite Pact or openly admit the Wehrmacht, but in February his room for manoeuvre was shrinking fast. Meanwhile the British Foreign Secretary and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff were on their way to Cairo, and from there to Athens, to offer the Greeks ground troops.

Some chronologies record under 21 February that “German troops are marching through Bulgaria towards the Greek front”. That was not the case. On 21 February the soldiers of the Twelfth Army were still in Romania. Work on the Danube bridges began on the morning of 28 February, Bulgaria joined the Tripartite Pact in Vienna on 1 March, and the official entry of German troops into Bulgaria took place at 6 a.m. on 2 March. In February the only Germans on Bulgarian territory were in civilian clothes: officers preparing roads and quarters, and Luftwaffe signals personnel.

An army waiting for the ice and for a decision

Adolf Hitler had approved the plan for war with Greece, Operation Marita, in Directive No. 20 of 13 December 1940. It provided for a strong force to be assembled in Romania which in the spring would advance through Bulgaria to occupy the northern coast of the Aegean and, if necessary, the whole of mainland Greece. At the end of December the first trains carrying the Twelfth Army, transferred from the Vienna area, began to roll into Romania, where a German military mission had been active since October. The first to go was the heavy bridging equipment, which, according to a post-war American study based on German documents, was to be unloaded on the Danube by 3 January. The 16th Panzer Division came with the engineers. The trains ran through Hungary, and in January blizzards and snowdrifts repeatedly held up rail traffic.

By the end of January the headquarters of the Twelfth Army and of General Ewald von Kleist’s Panzer Group 1, three corps headquarters, two panzer divisions and two infantry divisions were in Romania at full strength. At the request of the Bulgarians, who feared Turkey, the panzer divisions were stationed in northern Dobruja, around Cernavodă, the nearest point to the Bulgarian–Turkish border. The infantry was concentrated between Craiova and Giurgiu, opposite the Bulgarian bank. The whole first echelon – three corps, three panzer divisions, three infantry divisions and one and a half motorised divisions – was to be unloaded by 10 February. Two further echelons, with the mountain divisions and six infantry divisions, were to arrive by the end of March. Air support was provided by General Wolfram von Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps, the same formation whose dive-bombers had cleared the way for the panzer divisions in France.

The date of the crossing was put back several times. On 9 January Hitler agreed that the first units should cross the Danube as soon as the ice on the river allowed, and this was expected to happen between 10 and 15 February. Weather and politics got in the way. Ice floes on the Danube hampered the building of the bridges, and a thaw in mid-February turned to mud the Romanian airfields from which the Luftwaffe was to cover the crossings. Hitler also laid down conditions: the Wehrmacht could enter Bulgaria only once VIII Air Corps had assembled in Romania and the ports of Varna, Constanța and Burgas had been given anti-aircraft and coastal defences. According to the British official history, on 6 February the date was postponed by two weeks, and on 17 February Hitler finally decided that work on the bridges would begin on 28 February, the crossing would take place on 2 March and the attack on Greece in the first days of April. The American study describes it slightly differently: Hitler approved the building of the bridges for 20 February and then granted a Bulgarian request for an eight-day postponement. Either way, by 21 February the army on the Danube had only the last week left to wait.

Hitler had explained to Mussolini at the Berghof that the concentration had to be carried out in secret, the Danube crossed as late as possible and the blow struck as early as possible. But secrecy could not be maintained: according to contemporary estimates the number of German soldiers in Romania and Hungary already ran into the hundreds of thousands, and nobody believed they had come for training. On 10 February Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Romania.

Germans in civilian clothes

In these plans Bulgaria was a transit country, but its consent was indispensable. When Boris III visited Hitler on 18 November 1940, he refused to join the Tripartite Pact or take part in the war against Greece, but according to German documents he privately agreed that the Germans could use his country as a base for the campaign. He stipulated, however, that Bulgaria could not be openly involved in the preparations until the last moment, and that in any case the weather and the roads near the Greek border would not allow larger forces to be used before March.

On this basis the Germans entered Bulgaria quietly. A small group of officers under Colonel Kurt Zeitzler, later Chief of the Army General Staff, set up fuel dumps, surveyed the terrain, strengthened bridges and prepared quarters. A mission made up of officers from all three services travelled through the country disguised as civilians and reported that the roads and bridges were poor, quarters, fodder and fuel scarce and accurate maps lacking, but that a winter operation was feasible if the roads were improved beforehand. The Luftwaffe first asked to be allowed to send in one signals company of 200 men, then three. By mid-January all three, in civilian clothes, were manning observation and warning posts in the Bulgarian mountains against British aircraft from Greece. According to the American historian Marshall Lee Miller, by December 1940 there were already several thousand German military personnel in Bulgaria. The government in Sofia publicly denied that there were any German soldiers in the country at all. The visitors in civilian clothes were sardonically called German “tourists”.

In return the Bulgarians demanded weapons. They feared that once the German presence became public, the Soviet Union would try to compensate itself by seizing the Black Sea port of Varna. They therefore asked for modern coastal and anti-aircraft artillery, mines and minelayers, and Hitler promised to deliver them quickly. Prime Minister Bogdan Filov left for Vienna on 2 January, officially for medical treatment but in fact for talks with Hitler and Ribbentrop on the Obersalzberg. He listed the usual concerns: Turkey, shortages of arms, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Hitler brushed aside all but the Soviet one, warned that delay might bring Bulgaria the fate of the Baltic states, and promised it access to the Aegean without the need to fight. All he wanted from the Bulgarians was that they concentrate their army on the Turkish border and cover the flank of the German thrust. Filov gave assurances that Bulgaria would join the pact when doing so no longer risked complications. In Sofia it was decided that this would happen only just before the Germans marched in, and Berlin accepted the condition, since announcing accession before the troops entered would give opponents time to react.

Warnings came from two directions. On 13 January the Soviet TASS agency declared that if German troops were in Bulgaria, they were there without the knowledge or consent of the USSR, and on 17 January Vyacheslav Molotov warned the Germans that he would regard the appearance of foreign troops in Bulgaria and at the Straits as a violation of the Soviet Union’s security interests. On 21 January Ribbentrop replied that the Reich had no intention of violating them, “even if German troops march through Bulgaria”. In January President Roosevelt’s envoy, Colonel William Donovan, visited Sofia and warned the tsar against tying himself to Hitler. When he asked whether he was right in understanding that Bulgaria, if pushed to the wall, would let the Germans through but would not fight itself, Boris merely smiled. At home the democratic opposition publicly called for neutrality on 18 January, and friendship with Russia, the liberator of 1878, ran deeper in society than sympathy for Germany. The police responded with arrests, which in February extended to communists and to people accused of working with British intelligence and, at the end of the month, to Western correspondents as well.

The declaration with Turkey

The most serious obstacle Boris invoked was Turkey. Its army stood in Eastern Thrace, and since the autumn Ankara had been giving Sofia to understand that an attack on Greece or a German march through Bulgaria might be of direct concern to it. Winston Churchill wanted the Turks to state plainly that any such move would mean war, but President İsmet İnönü had no intention of binding himself to such a commitment. As late as 5 February the Turkish daily Yeni Sabah wrote that a power entering the Turkish security zone would be signalling that it did not intend to respect Turkey’s borders. Ankara knew, however, that it could not stop a dozen or more German divisions, and concluded that since it could not secure Bulgaria’s neutrality, it should at least look after its own.

Talks went on throughout January. On 17 February 1941 a Bulgarian–Turkish declaration was published in which the two states recognised refraining from aggression against each other as the unchanging basis of their foreign policy and announced the development of good-neighbourly relations and trade. The Turks stipulated that the declaration did not affect either side’s earlier commitments – in practice, the Anglo-Turkish alliance. For the Germans, who had themselves encouraged such an agreement, it was a valuable gain, since it covered the flank of their advance. For the British it was a blow. The British minister in Sofia, George Rendel, wrote that from then on neither the tsar nor anyone else in Bulgaria could plead the threat of a Turkish or Yugoslav reaction as a reason for not letting the Germans in. The American embassy in Ankara observed that the agreement, not bad in itself, had taken a form that was easy to misrepresent, and that the local Axis representatives were triumphant.

Three days earlier, on 14 February, Hitler and Ribbentrop had received the Yugoslav Prime Minister, Dragiša Cvetković, and the Foreign Minister, Aleksandar Cincar-Marković. The Germans wanted Yugoslavia to join the pact, or at least to allow supplies to be carried on its railways to Salonika. The talks produced no agreement. Belgrade insisted it would defend itself against any aggressor but would not say what it would do if the Germans entered Bulgaria. Boris would have preferred Yugoslavia to give way to Hitler, because its obstinacy threatened a war that might endanger his country and his throne.

The Greeks accept the British

The other side was preparing just as feverishly. In Athens there had been no doubt since December that the Germans would come through Bulgaria. In mid-January Ioannis Metaxas rejected a British offer to send small forces to Macedonia, believing that they would provoke the Germans without stopping them, and agreed to accept the British only once the Germans had crossed the Danube. After his death on 29 January, the new Prime Minister, Alexandros Koryzis, confirmed on 8 February that Greece would resist the Germans at all costs, but asked whether the forces the British intended to send would be enough, together with the Greeks, to halt the attack and encourage Yugoslavia and Turkey to fight.

The question came just as the Italian army in Libya had ceased to exist at Beda Fomm. On 10 February the War Cabinet’s Defence Committee decided not to advance on Tripoli but to halt in Cyrenaica and to concentrate the largest possible land and air forces in Egypt, ready to be moved to Europe. Churchill sent the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Dill, to the Middle East with wide powers. They left London on 12 February, but bad weather held them up at Plymouth and Gibraltar and they did not reach Cairo until late on the evening of 19 February. Over the following days, after conferring with General Archibald Wavell and the other commanders, Dill abandoned his earlier conviction that troops sent to Greece would be lost and that it would be better to support Turkey. In Cairo it was agreed that an armoured brigade and the New Zealand Division would go to Greece first, then the Polish Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade and an Australian division, and in a third echelon another armoured brigade and a second Australian division. The air situation was the worst: three British fighter squadrons and four bomber squadrons were operating in Greece, and there was nowhere to find more. Churchill cabled Eden that he should not consider himself obliged to undertake the Greek venture if in his heart he believed it would end in another Norway.

On 22 February Eden, Dill, Wavell and the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief Middle East, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Longmore, flew secretly to Athens and became guests of King George II at the Tatoi palace. At the outset Koryzis handed them a written declaration that Greece would fight Italy and, if need be, Germany too, even alone. At the final session, late in the evening, the Greeks accepted the British offer. The soldiers agreed that, given the uncertain attitude of Yugoslavia and Turkey, Salonika could not be covered and a shorter line along the River Haliacmon would have to be held. Command of the expeditionary force was to go to General Henry Maitland Wilson. The British left convinced that the Greeks would immediately begin withdrawing their troops from Thrace and Eastern Macedonia. The Greek Commander-in-Chief, General Alexandros Papagos, later maintained that the withdrawal was to depend on Yugoslavia’s answer. This difference in understanding weighed on the whole campaign. On 24 February the War Cabinet in London approved the dispatch of troops to Greece, and Churchill ended his telegram to Eden with the words “Full steam ahead”. On 26 February Eden and Dill flew to Ankara, where the Turks affirmed their loyalty to the alliance but refused to enter the war, while Yugoslavia sent an evasive reply.

Place in the war

A week after 21 February everything went according to the German timetable. At 7 a.m. on 28 February the engineers began building pontoon bridges across the Danube, and the first German anti-aircraft battalion crossed into Bulgaria and was in position at Varna that same evening. The German ambassador in Ankara informed the Turks of the impending entry, and Hitler announced a personal letter to İnönü. On 1 March, in the Belvedere in Vienna, Filov signed Bulgaria’s accession to the Tripartite Pact, giving assurances that his country would remain faithful to its agreements with its neighbours and to its traditional friendship with the Soviet Union. That day Ribbentrop promised Bulgaria the Aegean coast between the mouths of the Struma and the Maritsa. At 6 a.m. on 2 March German troops officially crossed the Danube, and VIII Air Corps followed them to airfields near Sofia and Plovdiv. In many villages the inhabitants greeted them with bread and salt, some in the belief that since Germany and Russia were allies, they would come together. By 9 March the leading units had reached the Greek border, and the panzer divisions had taken up positions facing Turkey.

Moscow confined itself to a protest: Molotov declared that Germany had acted contrary to the Soviet understanding of the USSR’s security interests. Turkey closed the Dardanelles but did not move, and İnönü replied in a conciliatory tone to Hitler’s letter assuring him that German troops would not come closer than 35 miles, or about 55 kilometres, to the Turkish border. On 5 March Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Bulgaria. From 4 March convoys carrying Wilson’s force sailed from Alexandria to Piraeus, but the Greek troops did not withdraw to the Haliacmon line, and Anglo-Greek arguments over this dragged on for several days after Eden’s return to Athens.

On 25 March Yugoslavia joined the Tripartite Pact, and two days later officers in Belgrade overthrew the government that had signed it. Hitler decided to crush Yugoslavia together with Greece. On 6 April 1941 the Twelfth Army struck from Bulgaria at both countries, and the Balkan campaign was over within three weeks. The Metaxas Line on the Bulgarian border put up a gallant defence but was outflanked through Yugoslavia, and the British force, which had barely had time to take up its positions, was evacuated at the end of April, much of it to Crete. Bulgaria took no part in the fighting, but once both countries had been defeated it occupied most of Yugoslav Macedonia, part of eastern Serbia, and Greek Western Thrace and Eastern Macedonia. Some of the divisions intended for the Twelfth Army had been held back in Romania as early as March with another war in mind. In June 1941 they marched against the Soviet Union.