Germany attacks Greece

At 5.15 a.m. on 6 April 1941 Field Marshal Wilhelm List’s German 12th Army crossed the Bulgarian–Greek border. Operation Marita had begun – a war, prepared since December 1940, against a country that had for five months been successfully defending itself against Italy. On the narrow strip of Greek Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, German mountain and infantry divisions attacked the concrete forts of the Metaxas Line, while at the same time panzer divisions set off through Yugoslav territory to outflank the Greek fortifications from the west. A quarter of an hour later the German minister in Athens handed the prime minister, Alexandros Koryzis, a note in which the Reich announced that its troops were coming to drive the British out of Greece. Koryzis replied that Greece would defend itself.

The first day did not bring the Germans what they had expected. The forts in the Rupel Pass, through which the Struma (Strymonas) flows from Bulgaria into Greece, beat off every assault despite a full day of dive-bombing. The decision came elsewhere: in the Yugoslav valley of the Strumica, along which the 2nd Panzer Division was advancing towards the Vardar and the road to Salonika (Thessaloniki), and during the night in Piraeus, where, after a German air raid, an ammunition ship blew up and took most of the port with it.

It is often stated under this date that German, Italian and Hungarian forces, “advancing through Romania and Hungary”, began the invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. As far as Greece is concerned, this is inaccurate. Greece was attacked on 6 April by German troops alone, and from Bulgarian territory, into which the 12th Army had crossed the Danube from Romania at the beginning of March. Italy had been at war with Greece since 28 October 1940, and its armies in Albania advanced only a few days later, once the Greeks had begun to withdraw. Hungary did not fight Greece at all: its troops entered Yugoslavia on 11 April.

The road to Marita

Adolf Hitler decided to move into Greece in the autumn of 1940, when the Italian attack on that country turned into a fiasco and British aircraft arrived at Greek airfields. From Greece, RAF bombers could reach the Romanian oilfields at Ploiești, without which the Wehrmacht could not wage war. Directive No. 20 of 13 December 1940 ordered the assembly in Romania of a strong force that in the spring would advance through Bulgaria to seize the northern coast of the Aegean and, if necessary, the whole of mainland Greece. Through the winter the 12th Army waited on the Danube, and when Bulgaria joined the Tripartite Pact on 1 March 1941 it crossed the river and by 9 March stood on the Greek frontier.

The original plan envisaged an attack on Greece alone, with the friendly neutrality of Yugoslavia, which joined the pact on 25 March. The coup in Belgrade on 27 March changed everything. Hitler decided to crush Yugoslavia together with Greece, and Directive No. 25, which reached List’s headquarters on the morning of 28 March, ordered the 12th Army to detach a strong armoured force for an advance through Niš on Belgrade. Nine days remained before the attack. According to a post-war American study based on German documents, some divisions marched as far as 640 kilometres along Bulgarian back roads to reach their start lines, which they occupied only on the evening of 5 April.

List’s plan repeated the Wehrmacht’s experience in France: rather than storm the fortifications, outflank them with armoured wedges through the weakest link – Yugoslavia. General Georg Stumme’s XL Panzer Corps, with the 9th Panzer Division, the 73rd Infantry Division and the reinforced SS regiment Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, was to advance from western Bulgaria through Yugoslav Macedonia on Skopje, cut Yugoslavia’s links with Greece, and then wheel south towards Bitola and the Greek border near Florina. General Franz Böhme’s XVIII Mountain Corps, with the 5th and 6th Mountain Divisions, the 72nd Infantry Division, the reinforced 125th Infantry Regiment and the 2nd Panzer Division, was to force the Rupel Pass and the mountains above it, and to outflank the Metaxas Line through Yugoslavia with its panzer division. XXX Corps, with two infantry divisions, was to reach the Aegean in Thrace by the shortest route. All three corps were to meet in Salonika. They were supported from the air by General Wolfram von Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps, with hundreds of Ju 87 dive-bombers.

A defence split three ways

Greece met this blow exhausted. Fourteen of its divisions, the core of its army, stood in Albania, where in March they had repulsed the great Italian spring offensive. The Commander-in-Chief, General Alexandros Papagos, refused to withdraw anyone from Albania, regarding a retreat before the beaten Italians as a moral defeat. On the Bulgarian frontier, against British advice, he left General Konstantinos Bakopoulos’s Eastern Macedonia Army Section: three infantry divisions, a brigade on the Mesta river, known in Greek as the Nestos, the fort garrisons and frontier units – some 70,000 men in all according to the American study. In western Thrace, on the Evros (Maritsa), there was also the weak Evros Brigade. The 19th Motorised Division, recently formed with a mixture of British and captured Italian weapons, was held in reserve south of Lake Dojran, near the point where the borders of Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria meet.

The Metaxas Line, named after the dictator Ioannis Metaxas, who had died in January, and built from 1936 with a war against Bulgaria in mind, ran from Mount Beles – the Belasica range on the Yugoslav border – along the Bulgarian frontier to beyond the Mesta valley, over a distance of some 170 to 215 kilometres depending on how it is measured. It consisted of more than twenty independent forts, hewn into the rock and linked by underground galleries, sited on the possible invasion routes. Between the forts there were only field defences; the line’s strength lay in the inaccessibility of the mountains. According to some studies, it needed more than 200,000 soldiers to man it fully. In April 1941 it was not yet complete, and its weakest, western end was the sector closest to Salonika.

The second group, General Ioannis Kotoulas’s Central Macedonia Army Section, with two weak divisions, had been placed on 28 March under the British corps commander, General Henry Maitland Wilson. Together with the British it was to hold a position along the Aliakmon river and in the Vermion mountains, from the sea below Mount Olympus to the Yugoslav border, to which the troops of W Force had been arriving from Egypt since 7 March. The position lay far behind the Metaxas Line, and between it and the forts of Eastern Macedonia there remained a wide gap through which the Vardar flowed. From the west it could be outflanked along the valley from Yugoslav Bitola to Florina.

The British were not ready either. Until 5 April Wilson had to appear in civilian clothes, and only on that day could he openly assume command. The 1st Armoured Brigade stood on the plain in front of the position, preparing to demolish the bridges as far as the Vardar, known in Greek as the Axios. General Bernard Freyberg’s New Zealand Division held positions in front of Katerini and in the Olympus pass, while of General Iven Mackay’s 6th Australian Division only the first brigade was moving into position near Veria. On 5 April Wilson also learned that because of Rommel’s offensive in Cyrenaica neither the 7th Australian Division nor the Polish Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade would be coming to Greece. According to the official history, on 6 April the British air force in Greece had a mere eighty serviceable aircraft, against an estimated eight hundred German aircraft in the Balkans and several hundred Italian ones.

A note at dawn

On Hitler’s orders Greece received neither an ultimatum nor a prior declaration of war. The attack on the Greek frontier posts began at 5.15, and at 5.30 the German minister in Athens, Prince Victor zu Erbach-Schönberg, handed Koryzis a note. In it the Reich government announced that it had ordered its troops to remove British armed forces from Greek territory, and that any resistance to the Wehrmacht would be ruthlessly crushed. The justification was the same as in Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium: the Germans were supposedly coming to forestall the British. Koryzis replied that Greece would defend itself. At the same time, as part of the same operation, German bombers were flying over Belgrade and German troops were crossing the borders of Yugoslavia.

News of the attack did not take Athens by surprise: from the moment the Wehrmacht entered Bulgaria at the beginning of March, no one there doubted that the Germans would come. King George II and the government of Koryzis, which in February had assured the British in writing that Greece would fight Germany even alone, no longer had any choice.

The battle for the forts

The first blow fell on the western end of the Metaxas Line, on the mountains above the Rupel Pass. General Ferdinand Schörner’s 6th Mountain Division advanced across the western part of the Beles range, where there were no permanent forts, only scattered machine-gun nests. The Greeks regarded this sector, with its snow-covered peaks rising above two thousand metres, as impassable. The mountain troops broke through two lines of defence there and, according to Greek studies, reached the railway near Rodopoli on 6 April itself, although German and American studies state that this happened on the evening of 7 April. It was the most dangerous breakthrough of the first days, because it opened the way to the rear of the forts on the Struma.

East of this sector General Julius Ringel’s 5th Mountain Division, supported according to Greek studies by some 165 guns and incessant air attacks, assaulted the forts of the eastern part of the Beles range. At the forts of Istibei and Kelkaya the mountain troops climbed onto the roofs of the works, threw grenades and smoke candles inside and tried to block the embrasures, but the garrisons did not come out. The Rupel Pass itself, where the road and railway from Bulgaria enter the Struma valley through a narrow gorge, was assaulted by the 125th Infantry Regiment, which had fought on the Maginot Line a year earlier, reinforced by a battalion of mountain troops. It failed to take Fort Rupel, held according to Greek figures by a garrison of some 950 men under Major Georgios Douratsos. Ju 87 dive-bombers, their sirens howling as they dived, dropped bombs all day, but the thick roofs held. According to accounts cited in the studies, two German battalions got to within some 180 metres of the fort and were almost wiped out. One company managed to infiltrate to the rear and seize Goliama hill and the village of Klidi, from where over the following days it directed air strikes onto targets.

Further east, on the plateau near Nevrokop, the 72nd Infantry Division attacked forts defended by the Greek 14th and 7th Divisions. It had no pack animals, medium artillery or mountain equipment, and its attack stalled in front of the forts of Perithori, Lise and their neighbours. In Thrace, after taking the Greek frontier posts, the German 164th Infantry Division surrounded Fort Echinos north of Xanthi (PL), and the 50th Division Fort Nymphaia above Komotini. Both forts held out all day. Nymphaia capitulated only late in the evening of 7 April, and the Evros Brigade, in accordance with the pre-war plan, crossed the Turkish border and was disarmed there.

For the Germans, then, the first day ended in failure wherever they attacked the forts head-on, and in success only where they could get round them through the mountains.

Through the Strumica to the Vardar

The fate of Eastern Macedonia, however, was being decided by what was happening west of the forts, on Yugoslav territory. On the morning of 6 April the 2nd Panzer Division crossed the Bulgarian–Yugoslav border and advanced west along the valley of the Strumica river, parallel to the Greek frontier. The incompletely mobilised Yugoslav 20th Bregalnica Division could not stop it. According to the American study, the division reached the town of Strumica, its objective for the first day, that same day, while Greek studies state that it took the town after fighting on 7 April. Beyond Strumica lay the road to the Vardar, to Lake Dojran and to the rear of the entire Metaxas Line. As early as 6 April, in view of the breakthrough in the Beles mountains, General Bakopoulos sent the 19th Motorised Division to defend the sector between Lakes Dojran and Kerkini, and the next day ordered it to extend its front to the Vardar valley as well. For so wide a front its forces were far too weak.

Further north still, the XL Panzer Corps crossed the Yugoslav border at 5.30 in two places west of Kyustendil. The Yugoslavs put up stiff resistance on the mountain roads, but by evening the spearheads of the 9th Panzer Division and the 73rd Infantry Division stood outside Kumanovo and Kočani. The following afternoon German tanks drove into Skopje, and on 8 April units of the SS regiment took Prilep, cutting the Belgrade–Salonika railway. Yugoslavia was cut off from Greece, and the road through Bitola to Florina lay open before the Germans – precisely where Papagos and Wilson had feared the Aliakmon line would be outflanked.

W Force on the first day

For the British corps 6 April was a day of waiting: its troops were not yet in contact with the enemy and could not help the Greeks in the forts, more than a hundred kilometres away. The British air force tried to operate over the front from the first day. Hurricane fighters of No. 33 Squadron RAF, led by Marmaduke Pattle, fought German Messerschmitts over the Rupel Pass and, according to British figures, shot down several of them without loss. During the night of 6–7 April six Wellingtons bombed an ammunition train and railway installations in Sofia, and Blenheims destroyed a railway station some 80 kilometres further south. These were pinpricks against the might of the Luftwaffe.

The night in Piraeus

On the evening of 6 April German bombers flew over Piraeus to lay magnetic mines in the roadstead and the bays around the port and to bomb the ships moored at the quays. In the harbour lay the British freighter Clan Fraser (7,529 GRT), which had arrived with a convoy from Port Said on 4 April and was still unloading. In her holds she carried, depending on the source, between 200 and 350 tons of explosives, which could not be reached without first removing the rest of her mixed cargo. The German naval war chronology by Jürgen Rohwer and Gerhard Hümmelchen attributes the hit to He 111 bombers of Kampfgeschwader 4, which were laying mines in the bay, while the German pilot Hajo Herrmann claimed after the war that it was a bomb from his Ju 88, which had flown in from Sicily, that hit the ship.

Clan Fraser caught fire. At around 3.15 a.m. on 7 April the explosives blew up. In Athens, more than ten kilometres away, windows were shattered. Glowing debris fell on neighbouring ships and harbour buildings, and a second ammunition ship, the City of Roubaix (7,108 GRT), exploded as a result. According to Rohwer and Hümmelchen’s chronology, 13 ships totalling 41,942 GRT were sunk, along with 60 lighters and 25 motor sailing vessels. Other sources speak of eleven ships sunk. Six of Clan Fraser’s crew were killed and nine wounded. The number of casualties among dock workers and the inhabitants of Piraeus is not precisely known.

By morning Greece’s principal port was a smouldering ruin. The British official history states that Piraeus was put almost completely out of action. For the British corps this was a blow no less serious than a lost battle: Piraeus was the only port capable of handling heavy equipment, and W Force’s supplies, which were only just being built up in Greece, depended on it almost entirely. From that night onwards ships from Egypt had to unload at the small ports of Attica and at Volos, which the Luftwaffe also began to bomb and mine.

Place in the war

The forts of Eastern Macedonia held out for another three days. They were lost not in the fight for the fortifications but by being outflanked: on 8 April the 2nd Panzer Division crossed the Greek border near Lake Dojran, smashed the weak 19th Motorised Division and on the morning of 9 April drove into Salonika. The Eastern Macedonia Army Section, cut off from the rest of the country, capitulated, and most of the forts, Rupel among them, laid down their arms only on orders from headquarters. According to many accounts, the Germans allowed their garrisons to march out with the honours of war. In his Reichstag speech of 4 May 1941 Hitler acknowledged that of all the enemies the Reich had fought, it was the Greeks who had fought with the greatest courage.

Meanwhile the XL Panzer Corps entered Greece from the west via Bitola. On 10–12 April its spearheads clashed with Australians, Britons and New Zealanders in the pass at Vevi, and the Aliakmon line, outflanked exactly as had been feared, proved untenable. W Force fell back through Thessaly to Thermopylae, and the Greek army in Albania, cut off from its rear, capitulated on 20–23 April. On 18 April Prime Minister Koryzis took his own life. From 24 April the Royal Navy evacuated the British corps from the beaches of Attica and the Peloponnese; on 27 April the Germans entered Athens, and the King and government sailed for Crete. In May the Germans took Crete too, from the air. The country that in the winter had inflicted the Axis’s first defeat of the war was partitioned between Germany, Italy and Bulgaria. Occupation brought Greece the famine of the winter of 1941–1942, which claimed tens of thousands of victims in Athens and Piraeus alone, and soon afterwards a resistance movement and bloody reprisals.

The attack of 6 April settled the outcome of the Greco-Italian War, in which Greece had defended itself successfully for five months, and buried British hopes of a Balkan front involving Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey. Whether the Balkan campaign delayed the German attack on the Soviet Union is still debated. Some historians believe that it forced Hitler to postpone Operation Barbarossa from mid-May to 22 June; others point out that the date was determined rather by the late, wet spring in Eastern Europe and by delays in equipping the army. What is certain is that from then until the end of the war the Wehrmacht tied down tens of thousands of soldiers in the Balkans fighting partisans.