The Greeks take the Klisura Pass

On 10 January 1941 units of the Greek II Corps seized the Klisura Pass, the gorge through which the Vjosa (Aoös) cuts through the mountains of southern Albania near the small town of Këlcyrë. Whoever held this defile controlled the road linking the Vjosa valley with the valley of the Osum and the town of Berat, and beyond it the whole rear of the Italian front in Albania. The attack began in the freezing, snowy days of early January, and after four days of fighting in the mountains above the gorge the Italian defence collapsed. A division thrown in to restore the situation, re-formed in haste after demobilisation in the autumn and sent to the front without artillery, ceased to exist as a fighting unit within a week. The capture of Klisura was the Greek army’s last great success in the war with Italy, and there was something symbolic about it: in the winter of 1941, when no one in occupied Europe was winning against the Axis powers, little Greece was still advancing.

The place appears in the sources under several names. The Greeks speak of Klisura (Κλεισούρα, literally “gorge” or “defile”), the Italians wrote Clisura or Klisura, while for the Albanians it is Këlcyrë and the gorge is called Gryka e Këlcyrës. The form “Klissoura” is also found.

The front at the beginning of January

After the capture of Korçë in November and of Gjirokastër on 8 December 1940, the Greek army held roughly a quarter of Albania. The front ran from the coast north of Himarë across the approaches to Tepelenë and Klisura, the Tomorr massif and the mountains west of the Korçë plateau to Lake Ohrid. In the centre of this line, in the mountains between the Vjosa and the Osum, General Dimitrios Papadopoulos’s II Corps was attacking. At the end of December it came close to the pass but did not take it, and on Christmas Day its advance halted on the bank of the swollen river.

As early as the council of war of 5 December the Commander-in-Chief, General Alexandros Papagos, was pressing for the advance to be speeded up, because he feared that sooner or later the Germans would come to the Italians’ aid. The army commanders, Generals Ioannis Pitsikas and Georgios Tsolakoglou, proposed a direct blow at Klisura, but Papagos preferred to straighten the front line first. When winter came, and with every kilometre deeper into Albania supplies reached the front ever more slowly, on 28 December the Greek high command decided to suspend large-scale operations. From 6 January 1941 the army was to conduct only attacks with limited objectives, to improve its positions. Klisura was the most important of these objectives: the pass covered the right flank of the Greek forces advancing down the Drino valley on Tepelenë, and its capture opened the road to Berat.

On the other side of the front, command had since 30 December been exercised in person by General Ugo Cavallero, Chief of the General Staff, who had replaced General Ubaldo Soddu in Albania. Since December Rome had been asking the Germans for help, and in the meantime the Italians were massing ever larger forces in Albania. According to Italian documents, on 1 January 1941 they had 10,616 officers and 261,850 men there, 7,563 vehicles and more than 32,000 pack animals – some twenty divisions in all. Many of them, however, had been decimated in the autumn fighting or, like the reinforcements arriving from Italy, went into action piecemeal, without their transport and heavy weapons. Cavallero was planning a counter-offensive of his own, but the Greeks forestalled him.

The attack (6–10 January)

Chronologies and Greek historiography date the operation to 6–11 January 1941, which explains the entry sometimes found under 6 January that the Greeks were “advancing towards the Klisura Pass”. On 6 January a new phase of operations began, and II Corps regrouped and brought its units up to their start lines. The attack proper, according to concurring Greek and Italian accounts, began on the morning of 8 January. The 1st Division struck on the left wing, Colonel Agamemnon Metaxas’s 15th Division on the right, with the 11th Division following it. The fighting took place in deep snow and hard frost, on the ridges and peaks rising above the gorge, such as Mali i Taronit (Taronine) and Mali Topojanit. The Greek battalions, without tanks and with little artillery, kept to the ridges as they had throughout the campaign and outflanked the Italian positions through the mountains rather than descending into the valley.

The 15th Division’s main opponent was the Italian 3rd Alpine Division “Julia”, the same division that had been surrounded in the Pindus mountains in November and had then lost a large part of its strength. From 23 to 31 December the Alpini had repulsed successive Greek attacks and had already fallen back once to new positions. On 8 January the attack fell on them again, and after heavy fighting, costly for the Greeks as well, the “Julia” had to give way. On 9 January it withdrew further north, and according to Greek accounts that morning the Greeks took the village of Suka and several hundred prisoners. By 21 January all that remained of the division was one regiment with three under-strength battalions. According to some studies the Italians also committed M13/40 medium tanks from the “Centauro” Armoured Division, much more dangerous than the light tankettes they had fought with in the autumn. In the mountains and on the narrow valley road, however, they became easy targets for the Greek artillery.

According to most studies, on 10 January, after four days of fighting counting from 6 January, the Greeks took the pass and the gorge, and the 11th Division, following the 15th, entered Klisura. Some accounts give 9 January, because the fate of the pass had already been sealed that day, but 10 January is generally accepted as the day of its capture. According to the figures usually cited, the Italians lost about 300 killed and about 350 prisoners, including 25 officers, in this fighting. Greek losses were not given as a total, but they were considerable, and on top of the killed and wounded came the men suffering from frostbite, whose numbers grew by the day.

The defeat of the “Wolves of Tuscany”

Cavallero ordered the pass to be retaken at once. For the counter-attack he assigned the remnants of the “Julia” and the newly arrived 7th Infantry Division “Lupi di Toscana” (Wolves of Tuscany). This division had returned to Italy in the autumn of 1940 and had been largely demobilised; now, hastily re-formed with recalled reservists, it was shipped to Albania. It reached the front with only two infantry regiments, without artillery or rear services and, according to Italian accounts, also without maps or knowledge of the terrain, and went into battle straight off the march. According to the history of its 78th Regiment, as early as 10 January it passed through the lines of the “Julia” in the area of Mali i Taronit and attacked, even reaching some of its objectives.

In the longer run, however, it stood no chance. The Greeks, who according to some studies had only four battalions in this sector, beat off the attacks and in the following days went over to the offensive themselves. According to Greek accounts the 90th Infantry Regiment of the 15th Division, losing 42 killed, including a battalion commander, and 161 wounded, took the summit of Mali i Taronit and captured most of the Italian 77th Infantry Regiment together with its commander and staff. From 12 January the “Lupi di Toscana” Division began to disintegrate; on 15 January one of its regiments was surrounded and destroyed, and on 16 January, according to Italian studies, the whole division broke up, having lost some 2,200 men. Its commander, General Ottavio Bollea, was replaced on 18 January by Brigadier General Lauro Riviera. The survivors fell back on 18–21 January towards the Bubës pass, and on 26 January the division was withdrawn from the front to be rebuilt. Italian regimental chronicles write that in the Klisura sector the division lost almost half its strength “at the cost of unspeakable sacrifices” but checked the Greek momentum. The Greeks remembered it differently: for them the fate of the “Wolves of Tuscany” became a symbol of the helplessness of an army that threw men into battle without weapons, maps or winter equipment.

Winter at Klisura

After taking the pass, II Corps pressed on to the north and north-west, towards the mountains above the Osum valley and the Trebeshinë massif, which dominated the road from Klisura to Tepelenë. In the second half of January the Greeks took further heights north of Klisura, among them, according to Greek accounts, the so-called Monastery and Hills 717 and 731 on 22–24 January, which in March were to become the bloodiest spots of the whole war. Around 25 January the weather brought the advance to a halt. From 26 January the Italians counter-attacked, with heavy air support, but by 29–30 January the Greeks had repulsed these attacks. II Corps, reinforced by the Cretan 5th Division, attacked the Trebeshinë massif in February and took it in heavy fighting by the middle of the month, but did not capture Tepelenë itself. The advance on it, and further on Vlorë, supported by RAF bombers, bogged down in mid-February in snowstorms and in the face of mounting resistance from Italian reinforcements.

That winter both armies fought in conditions the soldiers later remembered better than the battles themselves. At altitudes of 1,500–2,000 metres the snow lay deep, and at night there was hard frost. The Greeks had no winter uniforms or enough boots, and ammunition and food were carried up on the backs of mules and of porters, including women from the villages of Epirus. Cases of frostbite ran into the thousands, and many soldiers had to have their feet amputated. The Italians, though closer to their own ports, suffered no less. Lorries and guns counted for little in these mountains; what mattered were regiments able to hold out on a ridge.

The victory at Klisura resonated widely on the Allied side. The Commander-in-Chief of British forces in the Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, sent Papagos a telegram of congratulations. A few days later he came to Athens to discuss British aid. British aircraft and small auxiliary services had been operating in Greece since November (British aid to Greece), but in mid-January Ioannis Metaxas rejected an offer to send a small British land contingent to Macedonia. He considered it too small to stop the Germans but large enough to give them a pretext to attack. The Greeks wanted to fight the Italians, not the Germans, and hoped that Hitler would leave them alone as long as no British divisions appeared on their soil.

Place in the war

Klisura was the high point of Greek success in Albania. After it the front moved only a few kilometres in the fighting for Trebeshinë, and neither Tepelenë, nor Berat, nor Vlorë was taken. By the spring the Italians had assembled twenty-odd divisions in Albania, while the Greeks, who had fourteen divisions there, had nothing with which to relieve them. In February, after Metaxas’s death on 29 January, the new government in Athens agreed to accept a British expeditionary force, since the concentration of German troops in Romania left no room for illusions.

Mussolini wanted to avenge the defeat. His spring offensive, launched on 9 March 1941 in the presence of the Duce himself, who had come to Albania, was above all meant to recover Klisura. Hill 731 north of the pass was attacked more than a dozen times, but the Greeks held on, and after two weeks the offensive collapsed with heavy losses. The Italians returned to Klisura only on 17 April, when, after the German invasion of 6 April, the Greek army was withdrawing from Albania; a few days later it capitulated.

In Greek memory Klisura, alongside Korçë and Gjirokastër, ranks among the most important places of the “Epic of 1940”. In the gorge there is a Greek war cemetery to which, since 2018, under a Greek–Albanian agreement, the exhumed and identified remains of Greek soldiers, buried hastily in the mountains in the winter of 1940–1941, have been transferred.