The Germans take Kos

At dawn on 3 October 1943 German troops began landing on the beaches of the northern and southern coasts of the island of Kos in the Dodecanese, while parachutes opened over the airfield at Antimachia (PL). Operation Eisbär (“Polar Bear”) lasted little more than a day. On the morning of 4 October the British garrison surrendered, and some 1,400 British and over 3,000 Italian soldiers were taken prisoner. In the days that followed the Germans shot the Italian commander of the island and about a hundred of his officers.

War chronologies record under 3 October: “The Germans capture the island of Kos”. The date is accurate – the landing began and the airfield fell on that day – although the defenders’ actual surrender came the following day, and scattered groups of soldiers held out in the mountains for several days more.

An island with one airfield

After the announcement of the Italian armistice on 8 September the British decided to take over the Italian islands in the Aegean from Germany’s former ally. Prime Minister Winston Churchill saw them as a base for operations in the Balkans and as an argument that might persuade Turkey to enter the war. The most important island, Rhodes, with its three airfields, had however already been secured by the Germans on 11 September. The British were left with the islands lying further to the north-west – and so, from the start of the Dodecanese campaign, the whole enterprise rested on Kos, the only one of them with an airfield capable of taking fighters.

From mid-September further units were brought to the island by air and sea: Special Boat Service commandos, a company of the 11th Parachute Battalion, the 1st Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry (DLI), anti-aircraft gunners of the RAF Regiment, and Spitfire fighters, first from a South African squadron and then from the RAF’s No. 74 Squadron. By the end of September there were about 1,500 British troops on Kos, of whom fewer than 700 were infantry. Alongside them stood some 3,500 Italians of the 10th Infantry Regiment of the “Regina” Division under Colonel Felice Leggio, who had agreed to co-operate with the Allies. The British garrison was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Kenyon.

The position was weak from the start. The rocky ground made it impossible to dig in the anti-aircraft guns or build shelters for the aircraft, and a second landing strip, hastily marked out, was not ready. From 18 September Ju 88 bombers and Bf 109 fighters attacked Antimachia almost daily. By the end of the month only a handful of serviceable Spitfires remained on the airfield. At the same time the Luftwaffe began systematic raids on Leros, where on 26 September it sank two Allied destroyers in the harbour. The German command was bringing aircraft to the Aegean from other fronts – according to historians’ studies it had more than 350 serviceable machines there by the beginning of October – and its superiority in the air grew by the day.

Operation Eisbär

Adolf Hitler had no intention of giving up the islands without a fight. He feared that the loss of the Aegean would shake Germany’s position in the Balkans, embolden Turkey and threaten supplies of Romanian oil. The commander of Army Group E in Greece, Colonel General Alexander Löhr, entrusted the attack on Kos to Generalleutnant Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller’s 22nd Infantry Division, stationed on Crete. The core of the landing force was Battle Group “von Saldern”, made up of several grenadier battalions, artillery and engineers, which was to land on the coasts, while men of the special unit Brandenburg – a parachute company and a coastal raiding company – were to seize key points from the air and from the sea.

On 1 and 2 October British aircraft spotted a concentration of shipping in the ports of Crete and then a convoy heading north-east near the island of Milos. According to British accounts, the command in Cairo concluded that it was carrying supplies to Rhodes, and no attempt was made to intercept it. The convoy – several transports, landing barges, small escort vessels and motor boats – reached Kos during the night.

The landing began at about 4.30 a.m. on 3 October. The main forces came ashore in Marmari Bay and at Tingaki on the north coast and in Kamari Bay in the south-west of the island, with smaller groups on its north-eastern and south-eastern headlands. The paratroopers landed west and south of Antimachia. By around midday there were already 1,200–1,500 Germans on the island with field artillery and armoured cars, and in the afternoon another company of “Brandenburgers” was dropped in the middle of the island. Ju 87 dive-bombers knocked out one defensive position after another. The Spitfires that managed to take off from the shelled airfield could not change the situation.

The British fought doggedly, but they were scattered across the whole island and had little heavy weaponry and few vehicles. The conduct of the Italians varied: some batteries and units fought alongside the British, while many soldiers, taken by surprise and lacking clear orders, quickly laid down their arms. Accounts from the two sides still judge their conduct differently. In the afternoon the Germans took the airfield at Antimachia. The men of the RAF Regiment, having fired off all the ammunition for their light guns, destroyed them and joined the infantry. By evening, when by British estimates there were already about four thousand Germans on the island, the defenders had been pushed back into a small area around the town of Kos and the harbour.

On the morning of 4 October Lieutenant Colonel Kenyon surrendered with the main body of the garrison. Some soldiers escaped into the mountains; a few groups held out for several days more – the last men of the RAF Regiment squadron did not lay down their arms until 8 October. Over the following nights SBS parties managed to take about a hundred soldiers, including a dozen or so officers, off the island by boat.

Prisoners and the execution of the Italian officers

According to figures cited in British studies, the Germans took 1,388 British and 3,145 Italian prisoners on Kos. The British lost several dozen killed in the fighting – the figure most often given is 65 – and the Germans, according to the same figures, a dozen or so. The British prisoners were taken through Greece to camps in Germany. The Italians, whom the Germans had treated since the armistice not as prisoners of war but as “internees”, faced forced transport to the mainland and labour for the Reich.

The grimmest episode came after the battle. Under orders issued by the German command in September 1943, Italian officers who had resisted the Wehrmacht were to be treated as traitors and shot. The same order had led a few weeks earlier to the massacre on Kefalonia, where thousands of soldiers of the “Acqui” Division were killed. On Kos the officers of the 10th Infantry Regiment were subjected, under General Müller’s supervision, to summary proceedings, after which it was decided that all who had taken part in the fighting on 3 and 4 October would be shot – although this criterion was applied arbitrarily. According to Italian findings, of the 148 officers taken prisoner seven went over to the Germans, 28 managed to escape to Turkey, ten were sent to hospital and 103 were shot between the evening of 4 October and 7 October; among them was Colonel Felice Leggio. Other studies give somewhat lower figures, from about 90 victims. The bodies were buried in mass graves. In February 1945 the remains of 66 officers were found in eight graves near Linopotis; in 1954 they were moved to the memorial to the Italian dead overseas in Bari. For decades no one searched for the rest.

The massacre on Kos was one of a long series of killings of Italian soldiers who after 8 September refused to lay down their arms or to go over to the Germans – alongside Kefalonia, Corfu and other places covered by Operation Achse. General Müller answered for it only after the war: a Greek court sentenced him to death, mainly for crimes on Crete, and the sentence was carried out in Athens in 1947.

What the loss of Kos meant

With Antimachia the British lost the only airfield in that part of the Aegean. Leros and Samos were now beyond the range of single-engined fighters flying from Cyprus or North Africa, and from then on Royal Navy destroyers could enter Dodecanese waters effectively only at night. After the fall of Kos the Italian garrison of nearby Kalymnos also surrendered, giving the Germans a convenient jumping-off point for an attack on Leros, a few kilometres away.

Churchill would not accept the defeat. In the following days he pressed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and General Dwight Eisenhower for forces for a joint attack on Rhodes, but the Allied commanders in the Mediterranean decided they would take nothing away from the Italian campaign. General Henry Maitland Wilson, Commander-in-Chief Middle East, nevertheless decided to hold Leros and Samos. The German landing planned on Leros was delayed when the Royal Navy destroyed one of the German convoys, but on 12 November the Germans landed on the island, and on 16 November its garrison surrendered. With the evacuation of Samos and the surrender of the Italians there on 22 November, the campaign came to an end.

Place in the war

The fall of Kos was the starkest proof that without command of the air even deftly seized positions were worthless. The British official account of these operations stated plainly that the campaign had been lost because it had proved impossible to hold airfields in the area of the fighting. The defeat confirmed the Americans in their dislike of Churchill’s “Aegean adventures” and weakened his position in the disputes over Mediterranean strategy, while Turkey, watching the fighting from close by, remained neutral. Kos stayed in German hands until May 1945; in July 1944 the Germans deported the island’s Jews to Auschwitz. Together with the rest of the Dodecanese, the island passed to Greece in 1947.