The Greeks take Gjirokastër

On the morning of 8 December 1940 soldiers of the Greek 4th Infantry Division from the Peloponnese marched into Gjirokastër, the stone town above the valley of the Drino. The Italian Eleventh Army had abandoned the town without a fight, falling back to a new, shorter defensive line closer to Tepelenë. Three days earlier the Greeks had taken Delvinë, and on 6 December the port of Sarandë, renamed Porto Edda by the Italians. In the first week of December the whole of southern Albania, from the Ionian coast to the mountains above Përmet, passed into the hands of an army that Benito Mussolini had intended, as recently as October, to crush in two weeks. For the Greeks, Gjirokastër – Argyrokastro in Greek – was no ordinary enemy town: in 1914 it had been the capital of the short-lived Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus, and in December 1940 the Athens press wrote of its “liberation”. The Albanians saw in this victory a portent of Greek claims to their land.

After Korçë

When the Greeks took Korçë on 22 November and by 23 November had driven the Italians out of the whole of Greek territory, the Commander-in-Chief of the Greek army, General Alexandros Papagos, had to decide where to take the counter-offensive launched on 14 November next. He could advance from the Korçë plateau into the interior of Albania, towards Elbasan, or shift the weight of the attack to the left wing and push along the Drino valley towards Tepelenë and on to Vlorë, one of the two large ports through which the Italians supplied their army in Albania. He chose the second option. The loss of Vlorë would leave the Italians only Durrës, and the Drino valley was the only route along which an army without motor vehicles or tanks could advance.

The task fell to the Greek I Corps under General Panagiotis Demestichas, which was to advance northwards along the axis Gjirokastër–Tepelenë–Vlorë. II Corps under General Dimitrios Papadopoulos, advancing through the mountains between the Vjosë and Osum rivers, was to keep level with it and cover its right flank, while the forces at Korçë – General Ioannis Pitsikas’s Army of Western Macedonia with General Georgios Tsolakoglou’s III Corps – were henceforth only to maintain the pressure. At the end of November I Corps was reinforced with the 3rd Division, and II Corps with the 11th Division and the Cavalry Division. From 24 November units of I Corps were crossing the border and advancing up the Drino valley.

On the Italian side, Epirus and southern Albania were held by General Carlo Geloso’s Eleventh Army, part of the army group commanded in Albania since 9 November by General Ubaldo Soddu. It was an army shattered in the offensive of late October and early November and replenished with regiments and battalions rushed over from Italy, which were thrown into battle as soon as they were unloaded, often without artillery or transport. For weeks Geloso had been asking Soddu for permission to fall back to a shorter, more defensible line around Tepelenë. Soddu refused, since this meant giving up a large slice of Albania without a fight, but Greek pressure was pushing the Eleventh Army northwards step by step anyway.

The first week of December

Some chronologies attribute the capture of Pogradec, Sarandë and Gjirokastër to the period 1–8 December. The last two towns did indeed fall in those days, but the Greeks had taken Pogradec on Lake Ohrid back in November: according to the Greek official history the 13th Division entered it without a fight on 30 November, according to some Italian studies as early as 28 November. In December III Corps – reinforced on 1 December by the 17th Division, which relieved the exhausted 13th – merely took the Kamia massif around the town and dug in north of Pogradec. From then on the Greek right wing was essentially to stand still. On 2 December Papagos visited the front together with the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Paul. Generals Pitsikas and Tsolakoglou then urged an immediate attack on the strategic Klisura pass, without waiting for I and II Corps to draw level with them, but the Commander-in-Chief refused and ordered them to stick to the plan. This decision was later criticised, because when winter came the Greek right wing was stuck in the mountains for many weeks.

The main fighting of the first days of December took place in the south. On 1–4 December the 2nd Division captured the Suhë pass above the Drino valley after fierce fighting, while the 8th Division – the same that at the beginning of November had halted the Italians on the Kalamas – repeatedly attacked the heights around the Kakavia pass on the Greek–Albanian border. On the night of 4–5 December the Italians withdrew from these positions. According to Greek figures, the division, which itself suffered serious losses, took more than 1,500 prisoners there, several guns and thirty tanks. On 2 December, on the neighbouring sector, II Corps broke through the front at Përmet and took the town on 4 December, opening the way along the Vjosë valley towards Klisura.

The collapse of the defence on the Drino and at Përmet sealed the fate of the entire Italian left wing. On 5 December units of I Corps took Delvinë, a district centre lying between the Drino valley and the coast. The next day, 6 December, Colonel Lioumbas’s detachment, formed for operations on the coastal flank, entered Sarandë. This small port opposite Corfu, known to the Greeks as Agioi Saranta and to the Italians as Santi Quaranta, had been renamed Porto Edda after the occupation of Albania in 1939, in honour of the Duce’s eldest daughter, Edda Ciano, wife of the Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano. The loss of the port, through which the Italian units on the coast were supplied, hurt doubly in Rome, since its name was directly associated with Mussolini’s family.

8 December

The 4th Division, brought up in November from the Peloponnese via Kalabaka and Ioannina, was approaching Gjirokastër from the south-east. On 7 December its 8th Infantry Regiment seized a bridgehead in front of the village of Derviçan in the Drino valley, and on the morning of 8 December the division went into the attack in three columns along the surrounding ridges. Meanwhile a detachment formed by I Corps headquarters at the Kakavia pass – an infantry battalion with artillery under Colonel Ioannis Papathanasiou – was advancing along the valley. At around eleven in the morning the Greeks learned that the enemy had left the town. According to Greek studies based on the official history, the Italians had withdrawn from it as early as the night of 5–6 December. The first to enter Gjirokastër was Colonel Ioannis Koudounas’s 11th Infantry Regiment from Tripoli. The Greeks took up positions a few kilometres north and north-west of the town, on the Suha stream, while the Italians held a bridge about ten kilometres further on.

There was no street fighting, and the town survived intact. Large stores left behind by the Italians fell into Greek hands. The Greek part of the population, numerous in Gjirokastër and in the surrounding villages of the Drino valley, in the area known as Dropull, welcomed the soldiers enthusiastically: the streets were decorated with Greek flags, and a thanksgiving service was held in the church, led by the Metropolitan of Ioannina, Spyridon, who at the time of the Balkan Wars and the struggle for autonomy in 1914 had been one of the advocates of the cause of Northern Epirus. Muslim and Orthodox Albanians looked on with mixed feelings.

8 December was an important day for the Italians too. On that day the Eleventh Army completed its withdrawal to the new line Geloso had long been pressing for. In this way it shortened its front, measured in a straight line, from 140 to 75 kilometres – but at the cost of surrendering the whole of southern Albania with its two towns and its port.

A town of stone

Gjirokastër lies on a mountainside above the Drino valley, some twenty kilometres from the Greek border. Above the old town, built of stone houses roofed with slate, rises the castle, enlarged in the 19th century by Ali Pasha of Tepelenë. In Ottoman times it was one of the principal towns of southern Albania, inhabited by Muslim Albanians, while a large Greek population lived in the surrounding area, especially in the Drino valley. The town was the birthplace in 1908 of Enver Hoxha – in 1940 a dismissed teacher running a tobacco shop in Tirana, later Albania’s communist dictator – and in 1936 of the writer Ismail Kadare. Years later, in his novel Chronicle in Stone, Kadare described through the eyes of a child the war years of his native town, in which Italians, Greeks and Germans came and went like the seasons.

It was here that the dispute the Greeks called the question of Northern Epirus was concentrated. During the Balkan Wars, in the spring of 1913, the Greek army occupied Gjirokastër, but the great powers awarded the whole area, with Korçë and Sarandë, to the newly created Albanian state. As the Greek troops withdrew, the local Greeks proclaimed in Gjirokastër, at the beginning of 1914, the Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus under Georgios Christakis-Zografos. The Protocol of Corfu of May 1914 granted the region autonomy within Albania but never came into force. During the First World War the region was occupied in turn by the Greek and Italian armies, and in 1920–1921 its belonging to Albania was finally confirmed. Greece did not abandon its claims, and in the inter-war period it presented them as concern for the Greek minority, whose rights Albania had undertaken to respect on joining the League of Nations in 1921. The size of this minority was disputed: the government in Tirana spoke of some fifteen thousand people, the League of Nations estimated it at 35,000–40,000, and the Greek side gave much higher figures.

The war with Italy revived these hopes. Officially the government of Ioannis Metaxas maintained that Greece was fighting Italy, not Albania, and Athens did not announce the annexation of the occupied lands. The Greek military administration on the whole respected international law: Albanian civil authorities and courts continued to function, and historians record no crimes against the civilian population. At the same time, however, Athens rejected offers from Albanian émigrés who wanted to fight the Italians as volunteers, and in Korçë a town council was set up in which Greeks had a clear majority. The Athens press wrote of the “liberation” of Northern Epirus, and for many Greeks the capture of Argyrokastro and Agioi Saranta was the fulfilment of the dream of 1913 and 1914. The Albanians, who had lived under Italian occupation since 1939, did not usually fight on the Italian side with any conviction, but neither did they have any reason to see the Greeks as liberators. They feared that after the war the south of their country would go to Greece – and some of the great powers shared those fears.

Crisis in the Italian high command

The collapse of the front in Epirus and the Drino valley coincided with the gravest crisis in the Italian high command since the start of the war. On 26 November Marshal Pietro Badoglio, attacked in the press by Roberto Farinacci, resigned as Chief of the General Staff, and on 4 December Mussolini accepted his resignation and appointed General Ugo Cavallero to the post. That same day Soddu, whose nerves had failed him after the breakthrough at Përmet, said in a telephone conversation with the Under-Secretary of State at the War Ministry, General Alfredo Guzzoni, that it was necessary “to bring about a political solution to the conflict”. It is not clear whether he was thinking of an armistice with the Greeks or of calling on the Germans for help. Mussolini, to whom these words were reported, immediately sent Cavallero to Albania. According to some accounts the Duce himself went through a bout of depression in these days and again considered asking for an armistice through Berlin, but in the end he ordered a defence at all costs, convinced that the Greeks, who “have no war industry”, would eventually exhaust themselves.

For the following weeks Albania was ruled by a peculiar “dual power”: Soddu formally commanded the army group, but alongside him Cavallero acted as Chief of the General Staff and Mussolini’s representative. Only on 29 December was Soddu recalled to Rome, and on 30 December Cavallero assumed direct command in Albania, combining it with the post of Chief of Staff. The most urgent task was to halt the Greeks in front of the so-called “central Albanian redoubt”, the area containing Vlorë, Durrës and Tirana, which could not be lost without losing the whole country. Reinforcements came through ports that could barely keep up with unloading, so more and more soldiers were flown in. An important role in this was played by German Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft – according to Italian studies, 65 machines that the Germans placed at their ally’s disposal and that flew from airfields in southern Italy from December. Over the whole campaign some 48,000 men were carried by air. By 1 January 1941 the Italians had assembled more than 270,000 soldiers in about twenty divisions in Albania, and only then, according to Italian figures, did they reach numerical parity with the Greeks.

Winter in the mountains

The capture of Gjirokastër and Sarandë was the last great success of the Greek offensive in 1940. In December winter gripped the whole front. Deep snow fell in the mountains of southern Albania, which rise to 1,500–2,500 metres, and the frosts were severe. The Greek soldier fought in a uniform of thin cloth, often in worn-out boots, and supplies reached the front on the backs of mules and of porters, including women from the villages of Epirus. The number of cases of frostbite rose week by week, and many of the frostbitten had to have toes or feet amputated. The Italians suffered no less: their units, cobbled together from random sub-units, arrived at the front without winter equipment, and in some formations, even those considered elite, there was panic and flight from positions. The Greeks were supported by the British air force sent to Greece in November (British aid to Greece), but its bombers could take off only on the few days of good weather, and the Regia Aeronautica still held the upper hand in the air.

Even so, I Corps, now made up of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Divisions, pressed on northwards. The 8th Division and the Lioumbas detachment were sent to the reserve, and on 11 December General Demestichas moved to command the newly formed V Corps. On the coast, the disorganisation of part of the Italian Siena Division allowed the Greek 3rd Division to take the coastal town of Himarë on 22 December, another town with a large Greek population. II Corps, advancing between the Vjosë and the Osum, reached the vicinity of the Klisura pass but did not take it, and according to Italian studies the Greek advance halted on Christmas Day on the bank of the swollen Osum. On 28 December the Greek high command decided to suspend large-scale operations and, from 6 January 1941, to conduct only local attacks. In his memoirs Papagos regarded that day as the end of the second, offensive period of the war. In six weeks the Greeks had occupied roughly a quarter of Albania.

Place in the war

The capture of Gjirokastër, Sarandë and Delvinë completed the defeat that Italy had suffered in the war begun on 28 October. The army that was to occupy Epirus in a fortnight or so was, six weeks later, on the defensive in central Albania – a country Mussolini had seized a year and a half earlier and regarded as part of his empire. The news from Albania reached Rome in the same days as the British offensive against Marshal Rodolfo Graziani’s army began in Egypt on 9 December, while a month earlier the fleet had lost half its battleships at Taranto. Defeat on three fronts ended Mussolini’s “parallel war”. At the end of December Italy asked Germany for military help, and Adolf Hitler, who had already issued Directive No. 20 on Operation Marita on 13 December, was preparing an attack on Greece from Bulgaria.

Winter and Italian reinforcements halted the Greeks on a line running from Himarë past the approaches to Tepelenë and Klisura to the mountains north of Pogradec. In January 1941 they did take the Klisura pass, but they never reached Vlorë. When Germany attacked Greece on 6 April 1941, the best Greek divisions were still standing in Albania, and Papagos delayed the order to retreat for too long. On 18 April the Italians returned to Gjirokastër, and a few days later the Greek armies in Epirus surrendered. Greek administration in Northern Epirus had lasted less than five months.

For the Greeks the capture of Argyrokastro and Agioi Saranta remained part of the “Epic of 1940”, commemorated every year on 28 October, and for many of them also the last moment at which the dream of Northern Epirus seemed close to fulfilment. After the war Greece laid claim to southern Albania at the Paris Peace Conference of 1946, without success. The region remained within Albania, where power was seized by the Gjirokastër-born Enver Hoxha, and the Greek minority lived there for decades under his dictatorship. The state of war declared by Greece in 1940 was formally lifted only in August 1987, and Athens regarded the question of Northern Epirus as closed with the treaty of friendship with Albania of 1996. Gjirokastër, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2005, has remained, alongside Sarandë, one of the two main centres of the Greek minority in Albania.