The Greeks take Korçë

On 22 November 1940 units of the Greek 9th Infantry Division entered Korçë, the largest town in south-eastern Albania, known to the Greeks as Korytsa (Κορυτσά) and to the Italians as Corizza or Coriza. The previous night, after a week of hard fighting for the border massifs of Morava and Ivan, the Italian Ninth Army had abandoned the Korçë plateau and fallen back to the north. Barely three and a half weeks earlier Italy had attacked Greece from Albanian territory, and Benito Mussolini had expected his troops to occupy Epirus within two weeks. Now it was the Greeks who stood in Albania, and the town that had been the main base of the Italian air force on this front was in their hands. In Greece and in the countries fighting the Axis, the capture of Korçë was hailed as the first serious land victory over the army of an Axis power in this war.

A town on a plateau

Korçë lies in a basin more than 850 metres above sea level, a dozen or so kilometres from the Greek border, at the foot of the Morava mountains. In 1940 it was a busy commercial centre, the seat of an Orthodox bishopric and one of the country’s principal towns. Its inhabitants were Albanians, both Muslim and Orthodox, as well as Aromanians and a small group of Greeks, but Athens had long regarded the whole area as part of Northern Epirus, lands inhabited by an Orthodox population to which Greece laid claim. Greek troops had occupied Korçë during the Balkan Wars in 1912 and again in 1914, and during the First World War the town came under French administration. In 1920 it finally remained within Albania’s borders. Orthodox Albanians from Korçë had in fact played an important part in the Albanian national revival: it was here, in 1887, that the first school teaching in Albanian was opened.

After the Italian invasion of Albania in April 1939, Korçë became one of the pillars of the Italian presence in the country. Aircraft of the Regia Aeronautica were stationed at its airfield and from 28 October had been bombing Greek towns and positions in western Macedonia. Roads linking Albania with Greece and Yugoslavia crossed the plateau, and the valley of the Devoll river led into the interior of Albania, towards Elbasan. Whoever controlled the Korçë plateau held the key to central Albania.

In the first weeks of the war the Italian XXVI Corps, deployed around the town, was to remain on the defensive while the main thrust went through Epirus and the Pindus mountains. After that offensive failed on the Kalamas and in the Pindus, the Italians regrouped: on 6 November an army group was formed in Albania, and the corps at Korçë became the nucleus of the Ninth Army. Its designated commander, General Mario Vercellino, had not yet taken up his post, so it was temporarily led by the former corps commander, General Gabriele Nasci. The front was covered by the infantry divisions Venezia, Piemonte and Parma, with the Arezzo Division in reserve.

The battle for Morava and Ivan

The Greek plan for an attack on Korçë had been drawn up before the war, in September 1940, when after the sinking of the cruiser Elli nobody in Athens any longer doubted that the Italians would attack. The staff assumed that in western Macedonia the Greek forces would first dig in and then, once reinforcements arrived, go over to the attack. As early as the first days of November the III Corps of General Georgios Tsolakoglou, part of General Ioannis Pitsikas’s Army of Western Macedonia, carried out several limited raids and crossed the Albanian border at a few points. On 6 November the corps submitted a plan for a general offensive, but the Commander-in-Chief, General Alexandros Papagos, judged it premature and postponed the attack to 14 November, by which time further divisions had arrived from the Bulgarian border and from the interior. Because Bulgaria remained passive and Turkey let it be understood that it would not stay indifferent to a Bulgarian attack, the Greeks were able to bring most of their army to the Albanian front. By mid-November Papagos had more than a hundred infantry battalions there against fewer than fifty Italian ones.

Between the two sides’ positions ran the valley of the upper Devoll. North of it rose the Morava massif, reaching some 1,800 metres, behind which lay the Korçë plateau, with Mount Ivan further north. Between them a pass near the village of Cangonj carried a metalled road straight to the town. The terrain favoured the defenders but had one flaw: it lacked depth. If the Italians lost the ridges of Morava, they would have nowhere to stop before Korçë and would have to give up the whole plateau.

The Greek counter-offensive in western Macedonia began on the morning of 14 November. III Corps attacked with the 9th, 10th and 15th Divisions along converging axes towards Korçë, dispensing with an artillery preparation in order to achieve surprise. The Greeks had no tanks or anti-tank weapons, so they kept to the mountain ridges and avoided the valleys, where the Italians could use the few dozen tanks of the Centauro Division. The main effort was directed not at the Cangonj pass but on the left wing, along a mountain road through the village of Darza, where the 10th Division was to outflank the Italian positions on Morava. That day the Greek air force bombed the airfields at Korçë and Gjirokastër.

The Italians were taken by surprise, and in the first three days the Greeks forced several breaches in their line. Nasci, who was receiving reinforcements, including battalions of the 2nd Alpine Division Tridentina, threw them into battle piecemeal, straight off ships and aircraft, and could not reverse the situation. On 17 November III Corps was reinforced by the 13th Division, and the following day by the 11th Division, which together with the 10th formed a new grouping, General Georgios Kosmas’s Division Group K. 18 November was the hardest day for the Greeks: part of the 13th Division panicked during a poorly coordinated attack, and the unit nearly abandoned its positions. Its commander was immediately recalled, his successor forbade any retreat, and the situation was brought under control. On 19–21 November the Greeks took the summit of Morava.

Meanwhile, to the south, II Corps, advancing from the Pindus area, crossed the border and on 21 November took Ersekë, the centre of the mountain district of Kolonjë – abandoned, according to Italian accounts, by mistake. This opened the way to the rear and left flank of the Ninth Army. As early as 19 November General Ubaldo Soddu, who since 9 November had commanded the Italian forces in Albania in place of General Sebastiano Visconti Prasca, decided to withdraw from the Devoll valley to a new defensive line, in places as much as 50 kilometres behind the existing positions. He feared that the troops at Korçë would be surrounded and cut off. The withdrawal was carried out in reasonably good order, but much equipment had to be abandoned, and some of the Albanian units, which had fought half-heartedly alongside the Italians, scattered to their homes.

22 November

On the night of 21–22 November the last Italian units left the town, and on the morning of 22 November troops of the Greek 9th Division marched in. There was no street fighting. The Orthodox part of the population greeted the Greeks enthusiastically, as the Athens press did not fail to stress. The attitude of Muslim and Orthodox Albanians was more reserved: officially Greece insisted that it was fighting Italy, not Albania, but Greek claims to Northern Epirus were well known, and many Albanians feared that one occupation would merely be replaced by another.

The same day Greek Henschel Hs 126 reconnaissance aircraft spotted a column of retreating Italian troops several kilometres long on the road from Korçë to Pogradec. According to Greek studies, a dozen or so bombers, including Potez 63s, Blenheims and Fairey Battles, attacked it and inflicted heavy losses. The Greeks, however, had no lorries or tanks and could not pursue the enemy into the interior, so the main body of the Ninth Army escaped encirclement and took up new positions in the mountains north and west of the plateau.

The booty was nonetheless considerable. On 25 November the daily Kathimerini reported 1,500 prisoners taken at Korçë and large quantities of equipment. Some studies repeat a figure of about 2,000 prisoners, 135 guns and 600 machine guns, but it is not well documented. For the poor Greek army, fighting with First World War weapons, every captured gun, lorry and case of ammunition was of great value, and the Italian depots in Korçë eased its supply shortages for a time. By 27 November the Greeks controlled the whole Korçë plateau. According to the Greek official history, the Army of Western Macedonia lost 624 killed and 2,348 wounded in this fighting.

The echo of victory

The news from Korçë set off an outburst of joy in Greece. On 23 November Kathimerini wrote on its front page of the “glorious triumph of the Greek army” and of the inhabitants who had enthusiastically welcomed their “liberators”. There were celebrations in Athens and other cities, and the name of Korytsa long held a place in Greek memory of the war of 1940 alongside the Pindus and Kalpaki. For Greeks who had lived in suspense since 28 October, the capture of the town was proof that a small army could defeat a great power, and Ioannis Metaxas, a dictator until then tolerated rather than loved, enjoyed moments of genuine popularity.

Abroad, the capture of Korçë resonated widely. In Britain, which had been fighting Germany alone since the fall of France and had not yet won any major victory on land, an ally’s success was the first good news from the front in months. The American New York Times wrote that the Greeks had inflicted the first real defeat on the land forces of the Axis. According to reports from those days, tributes to the Greek army came from Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Greek success also emboldened the Axis’s opponents in the Middle East, where since September the forces of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani had stood on Egyptian soil, and in occupied Europe it was taken as proof that Fascist armies could be beaten. It was not a victory over the Germans, only over their weaker ally, but after the string of defeats of 1940 it had enormous psychological significance.

For Mussolini the moment was especially humiliating. On 18 November, the fifth anniversary of the League of Nations sanctions imposed on Italy for its attack on Ethiopia, he addressed the Fascist party leaders gathered in Rome at the Palazzo Venezia, in a speech broadcast by radio. He announced that the Italians would “break Greece’s back” (spezzeremo le reni alla Grecia), whether in two months or in twelve. Four days later the Greeks entered Korçë, and the Duce’s words long remained an ironic saying in Italy. Adolf Hitler, too, no longer hid his displeasure: in a letter to Mussolini of 20 November he listed the political and military consequences of the failed expedition, above all the fact that the British had gained airfields in Greece from which their bombers could reach the Romanian oilfields. The Germans were already preparing their own intervention in the Balkans, and in those same days Berlin was drawing further states of the region into the Tripartite Pact.

Crisis in Rome

The loss of Korçë hastened a crisis in the Italian high command. On 23 November, under pressure from Marshal Pietro Badoglio and General Mario Roatta, Mussolini at last rescinded his order of early October releasing soldiers to go home for the winter. The demobilisation, carried out in parallel with the war, had disorganised the army: divisions sent to Albania were hastily made up from different units, and battalions went into battle piecemeal, often without artillery or transport. The ports of Durrës and Vlorë could not keep up with unloading, so men were also flown in, including by German Junkers Ju 52s.

Mussolini looked for scapegoats. On the same day, 23 November, Roberto Farinacci, secretary of the Fascist party in the 1920s, attacked the Supreme General Staff in his newspaper Regime Fascista, blaming it for the defeat. Many historians believe that the article was inspired from within the Duce’s own circle. Badoglio, who before the war had warned against an overhasty attack, demanded a correction and, when he did not receive one, resigned on 26 November. He was probably counting on King Victor Emmanuel III to intervene, but the monarch remained silent. On 4 December Mussolini accepted the resignation and appointed General Ugo Cavallero Chief of the General Staff. Soon afterwards the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, blamed for the disaster at Taranto, and the Governor of the Dodecanese, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, also lost their posts. According to some accounts, Mussolini went through a period of depression in these weeks and, on hearing of further setbacks, even considered asking for an armistice through German mediation.

Place in the war

The capture of Korçë closed the first stage of the Greek counter-offensive. By 23 November the Greek forces had driven the Italians out of the whole of the country’s territory in Epirus as well, and on 22 November II Corps took the Albanian town of Leskovik. The Greek high command now had to choose the direction of the further advance: from Korçë towards Elbasan, into the interior of Albania, or with its left wing along the Drino valley towards Tepelenë and the port of Vlorë. Papagos chose the second option, because the loss of Vlorë would leave the Italians with only one large port in Albania. The forces at Korçë were henceforth only to maintain the pressure. On 24 November the 10th Division took Voskopojë (PL) (Moscopole), a former centre of Aromanian culture, and at the end of the month the Greeks entered Pogradec on Lake Ohrid without a fight. Greek sources give 30 November, some Italian ones 28 November. In December Sarandë, Gjirokastër and Himarë fell, and in January 1941 the Klisura pass.

There the offensive ran out of steam. Winter, the lack of transport and growing Italian reinforcements halted the Greeks a few dozen kilometres inside Albania. The war that Mussolini had begun to show Hitler that Italy pursued its own policy ended with a call for German help. As early as November Hitler ordered an attack on Greece from Bulgaria to be prepared, and in April 1941 the Wehrmacht invaded Yugoslavia and Greece. The main Greek forces, still standing in Albania, were cut off, and on 14 April 1941 the Italians returned to Korçë. General Tsolakoglou, whose corps had taken the town, surrendered to the Germans on his own initiative on 20 April and later headed the collaborationist government in Athens.

Yet Korçë in Greek hands was more than an episode. It showed that the army of one of the Axis powers could be beaten in open battle, undermined Mussolini’s prestige in Italy and in Berlin, and opened the way to Italy’s complete dependence on Germany. For the Greeks it became a symbol of the “Epic of 1940”, commemorated every year on 28 October; for the Albanians, a reminder that the war of foreign armies had been fought on their land and over their land. After the war Korçë remained in Albania; for decades Greece formally maintained that the state of war with Albania dating from 1940 was still in force, and lifted it only in 1987.