The Greek counter-offensive

At dawn on 14 November 1940, without an artillery preparation that might have given away their intentions, three Greek divisions moved against the Italian positions in the mountains of the Greek–Albanian borderland, facing the Albanian town of Korçë. Two weeks and three days after Italy attacked Greece, the invaded country went over to the attack itself. The Italian offensive, which its authors had promised would give Benito Mussolini the whole of Epirus in ten to fifteen days, had collapsed in the preceding days on the Kalamas river and in the Pindus mountains. Now the Commander-in-Chief of the Greek army, General Alexandros Papagos, decided to exploit the moment when the enemy was exhausted, disorganised and still waiting for reinforcements. Over the next ten days the Greeks drove the Italians from almost all of the strip of Greece they had occupied and carried the war onto Albanian territory.

After the failure of the first offensive

At the beginning of November the initiative slipped from Italian hands. In Epirus General Charalambos Katsimitros’s 8th Infantry Division beat off every attack on the Kalpaki–Kalamas line between 2 and 8 November; only on the coast did the Italians cross the river, take Igoumenitsa and form a bridgehead on the southern bank, but they got no further (the Battle of the Kalamas). At the same time, in the Pindus mountains, the Julia Alpine Division, whose victorious march towards Metsovo had for several days threatened to split the Greek front, was surrounded, lost roughly a fifth of its strength and struggled back to the Konitsa area. On 13 November the Greeks cleared the whole Pindus sector (the Battle of Pindus). The Greek official history ends the first period of the war, the Italian offensive, on that day, and begins the second, the Greek counter-offensive, on 14 November.

The failure of the first offensive led to changes in the command in Rome. On 6 November the General Staff decided to organise the forces in Albania as an army group with two armies: the Ninth Army in the Korçë and Pindus area and the Eleventh Army in Epirus. On 8 or 9 November (sources differ) supreme command in Albania passed from General Sebastiano Visconti Prasca to General Ubaldo Soddu, until then Under-Secretary of State at the War Ministry and Deputy Chief of the General Staff, a man who had never commanded anything larger than a battalion in the field. Visconti Prasca was given the Eleventh Army as a consolation, but as early as 11 November (according to some sources 16 November) he was replaced by General Carlo Geloso, and at the end of the month the luckless author of the invasion plan was retired. Soddu’s first order was to halt the advance and go over to the defensive along the whole front, holding the bridgehead across the Kalamas, until reinforcements arrived. Only with new divisions did he intend to launch an offensive that would decide the war.

The reinforcements, however, arrived slowly and in disorder. On 2 October, when the attack on Greece had been postponed, Mussolini had ordered part of the reservists to be sent home for the winter, and the decision was not revoked when the war began. The divisions sent to Albania therefore had to be hastily brought up to strength with soldiers from other units, and officers took over units they had never seen before. Albania’s two ports, Durrës and Vlorë, had little capacity, so men were also flown in, but heavy equipment, lorries and mules were in short supply. Individual regiments and battalions reached the front and were thrown at once into whichever sector was most hard-pressed.

Greek superiority

On the Greek side things were moving in the opposite direction. The general mobilisation proclaimed on 28 October by the government of Ioannis Metaxas went smoothly, and since Bulgaria had not joined the Italian attack and Turkey had made it clear that it would not stand idle in the event of a Bulgarian attack on Greece (Turkey and the Greco-Italian War), Papagos was able to move divisions from Macedonia and from the reserve to the Albanian front. According to studies based on Greek data, by 12 November he had more than a hundred infantry battalions at the front against fewer than fifty Italian ones. The superiority was one of manpower, not equipment: the Greek army had no tanks and almost no anti-tank weapons, and much of its artillery and many of its rifles dated from the First World War. It did, however, have soldiers used to the mountains, commanders with experience of the Balkan Wars and the war in Anatolia, and above all a morale it had not known for decades.

Three Greek groupings stood at the front. On the coast and in Epirus was I Corps (the 2nd and 8th Divisions, the cavalry division and several independent units). In the Pindus, where the Julia Division had just been routed, stood II Corps with the 1st Division, the 5th Brigade and the cavalry brigade. In western Macedonia, facing Korçë, stood General Georgios Tsolakoglou’s III Corps with the 9th, 10th and 15th Divisions, and more were on their way. II and III Corps were subordinate to General Ioannis Pitsikas’s Army of Western Macedonia. From the first days of November units of III Corps had been making limited attacks, in places already on Albanian territory, and on 6 November the corps submitted a plan for a general offensive. Papagos judged it premature at the time and postponed the date to 14 November.

The blow at Korçë

The main objective was the Korçë plateau, beyond which lay the valley of the Devoll river, the road into the heart of Albania. On the Greek side it was shielded by the Morava and Ivan massifs, held by the Italian Piemonte, Venezia and Parma Infantry Divisions. Korçë was the most important road junction in south-eastern Albania and an air base from which the Regia Aeronautica attacked Greek towns. Under the plan, the 15th Division on the right wing was to advance on the pass between Ivan and Morava, the 9th Division in the centre on the Morava massif, and the 10th Division on the left wing was to slip quietly into the Italian positions and outflank them from the west. Since the Greeks had nothing with which to fight tanks, they decided to keep to the mountain ridges and not descend into the valleys, where Italian armour would have the advantage.

The attack on 14 November took the enemy by surprise. The Italian Ninth Army was still being organised: its designated commander, General Mario Vercellino, had not yet arrived, and General Gabriele Nasci was acting in his place. In the first three days the Greeks broke through the Italian lines at several points. The same day Greek bombers attacked the airfields at Korçë and Gjirokastër. The Italians committed reinforcements as they arrived, including units of the 2nd Alpine Division Tridentina and the Arezzo Division and several dozen tanks of the Centauro Division, but they threw them into battle piecemeal, before they had time to assemble. On 17 November the 13th Division joined III Corps, followed the next day by the 11th Division, which together with the 10th formed a new grouping under General Georgios Kosmas.

The most dangerous moment for the Greeks came on 18 November. During a badly coordinated attack part of the 13th Division panicked, and the division very nearly began to fall back. Its commander was relieved on the spot, and the new one, Major General Sotirios Moutousis, forbade any further withdrawal and restored order. From 19 November the Greeks stormed the peaks of the Morava, and once they had taken them by 21 November, the Italian position on the plateau became untenable. As early as 19 November Soddu decided to withdraw from the Devoll valley to a new defence line, in places 50 kilometres to the rear. The last Italians left Korçë on the night of 21 to 22 November, abandoning much equipment and many stores; the capture of the town itself by the Greek 9th Division on 22 November belongs to the next chapter of this war.

Driving the Italians out of Greece

South of Korçë, in the mountains where the Pindus meets Epirus, II Corps pursued the shattered Italian units into the valley of the Vjosë (in Greek, the Aoos). Facing it was the Bari Division, rushed to Albania to rescue the Julia Division. According to Italian studies, on 15 November it had to abandon the area around Konitsa and withdraw across the border to the bridge over the Vjosë at Perati. On 17–18 November the Greeks attacked the crossing, and on 20 November, after the front had been broken in the neighbouring sector, the defence of the bridge turned into a disorderly flight. The Greeks crossed the border and on 21 November took the small Albanian town of Ersekë – abandoned by its defenders by mistake, according to Italian accounts – and on 22 November Leskovik. The loss of Ersekë exposed the left flank of the Italian Eleventh Army in Epirus.

In Epirus General Geloso could no longer think of holding the bridgehead across the Kalamas. Under pressure from the Greek I Corps and threatened from the mountains, the Italians began to give up the ground they had won in the first days of the war. The Greeks crossed the Kalamas again and entered Thesprotia (PL), the coastal part of Epirus that the Albanians call Chameria and whose “liberation” Italian propaganda had given as one of the reasons for the war. Igoumenitsa, taken by the Italians on 6 November, returned to Greek hands partly destroyed. According to the Greek official history, on which most studies rely, I and II Corps had driven the Italians from the whole of Greek territory by 23 November, and the border as it stood before 28 October was restored along the entire length of the front.

Some chronologies date the expulsion of the Italians from Greek soil to 19 November. The date is not entirely groundless: on that day Soddu issued the order for a general retreat, and in the Konitsa sector the Italians had already left Greek territory a few days earlier. The process, however, was completed only several days later: according to Greek figures the last Italian units in Epirus withdrew across the border by 23 November, and some sources give dates between 21 and 23 November.

Mussolini on the balcony

News from the front was reaching Rome while Mussolini was still publicly promising victory. On 18 November, the fifth anniversary of the sanctions imposed on Italy by the League of Nations over its aggression against Ethiopia, he addressed the provincial secretaries of the Fascist party, summoned to Rome for a “great report”. It was then that he uttered the sentence that passed into the Italian language as an ironic saying: “Spezzeremo le reni alla Grecia” – “We shall break Greece’s back.” He added that it did not matter whether it took two months or twelve, because the war had only just begun. A few days later Mussolini’s words turned against him: before the Greeks took Korçë, all of Europe already knew that the war had gone differently from what he had promised.

Berlin saw the defeat too. On 20 November Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to the Duce in which he bluntly listed the consequences of his venture: the British had occupied bases on Crete and in Greece from which their bombers could reach the Romanian oilfields, and the Balkans, which Germany had wanted to keep quiet, had become a theatre of war. The night attack on Taranto of 11 to 12 November, in which British torpedo bombers had put three Italian battleships out of action, further weakened Italy’s position at sea and in practice put paid to plans for landings on the Greek coast. On 23 November, under pressure from Marshal Pietro Badoglio and General Mario Roatta, Mussolini at last revoked the demobilisation order.

War in the mountains and in winter

The counter-offensive was fought in conditions unlike those on any other front that autumn. The front ran through mountains rising to 1,800–2,500 metres, crossed by few roads, most of which turned to mud after rain. In the Pindus snow had already fallen at the end of October, and in the second half of November winter gripped the whole front. Greek supplies travelled on the backs of mules and of the inhabitants of the mountain villages, women among them, who carried ammunition and food up to the positions. The soldiers fought in uniforms meant for summer and autumn, and cases of frostbite began to rise rapidly. There was not enough transport to evacuate the wounded. The Italians suffered no less: their units had been fighting without a break for three weeks, they were exhausted, and their morale had collapsed after the defeats in the Pindus and on the Kalamas.

The Greek attacks were helped by air power. Greek squadrons, including Polish-designed PZL P.24 fighters, covered the troops over Korçë, and from the beginning of November the first British squadrons of Blenheim bombers were operating in Greece, attacking Albanian ports and airfields among other targets. Even so, the Regia Aeronautica’s superiority in the air was clear, and only the bad weather limited its operations.

Place in the war

The Greek counter-offensive of 14 November determined the character of the war. Mussolini, who a month earlier had decided to attack Greece counting on a quick triumph and prestige in Hitler’s eyes, lost everything he had gained within ten days and had to defend Albania itself. On 22 November the Greeks entered Korçë, a victory that echoed around the world as the first serious defeat of Axis land forces in the war. At the end of November Pogradec on Lake Ohrid fell, and at the beginning of December Sarandë, Delvinë and Gjirokastër. The Greeks shifted the weight of their attack to the left wing, towards Tepelenë and the port of Vlorë, but winter, exhaustion and stiffening Italian resistance halted them at the turn of the year several dozen kilometres beyond the border, in a region they themselves called Northern Epirus.

The defeat shook the Italian high command. At the end of November Badoglio, attacked by the secretary of the Fascist party, Roberto Farinacci, resigned, and on 4 December he was replaced by General Ugo Cavallero, who soon took over effective command in Albania from the broken Soddu. Mussolini’s “parallel war”, waged independently of Germany, proved to be a fiction: in December German Junkers Ju 52s were already flying Italian soldiers to Albania, and Hitler, in a directive of 12 November, had already ordered preparations for an attack on Greece through Bulgaria should it prove necessary; in December it was given the code name Marita, and it was launched in April 1941. Greece paid a high price for its victory: when the Wehrmacht struck, the main forces of its army were in Albania, far from the new front. Yet in the autumn of 1940, when Britain was fighting alone and almost all of continental Europe was under the rule or influence of the Axis powers, Papagos’s counter-offensive was the first proof that the army of a Fascist great power could be not only stopped but beaten.