The Italian spring offensive in Albania

At half past six on the morning of 9 March 1941 some three hundred Italian guns opened fire on Greek positions in the mountains of southern Albania, between the rivers Osum and Vjosë. The artillery was followed by bombers, and the bombers by the infantry. So began the offensive that the Italians called the “spring offensive” (offensiva di primavera, Operation Primavera), their last attempt to defeat the Greeks on their own before the Germans entered the war in the Balkans. It was watched from an observation post on a hill above the front by Benito Mussolini himself, who had flown to Albania a week earlier to await victory on the spot. There was no victory. For two weeks Italian divisions stormed the same ridges, above all one modest hill marked on the maps as Height 731, and took almost nothing. It cost them some 12,000 killed and wounded.

Popular chronologies state that the offensive was called off on 20 March. The sources differ over when it ended, however, because the word “end” was understood in different ways. On 14 March General Ugo Cavallero advised Mussolini to break off the attack; on 16 March the main thrust was halted; on 19 March the Italians resumed their attacks on Height 731; and they made their last assault on 24 March. Taken broadly, the operation lasted from 9 to 24 March.

The Duce wants a victory before the Germans

By the winter of 1940–1941 the war that Mussolini had begun on 28 October was being fought no longer in Greece but in Albania. The Greeks had repelled the Italian invasion in Epirus and in the Pindus mountains, gone over to the counter-offensive, taken Korçë and Gjirokastër and held roughly a quarter of the country. On 10 January 1941 they captured the Klisura pass near the small town of Këlcyrë, which opened the road to Berat, and in February, in heavy fighting for the Trebeshinë massif, they came up to Tepelenë. There they got no further. On the snow-covered ridges the front froze some tens of kilometres beyond the old border.

For Mussolini this was a humiliating stalemate. Since December Rome had been asking the Germans for help, and in Libya the British had smashed Marshal Rodolfo Graziani’s army. Everyone expected German intervention in the spring. On 1 March Bulgaria joined the Tripartite Pact, and the next day the German Twelfth Army began crossing the Danube and marching towards the Greek frontier. If Greece was to be defeated by the Wehrmacht, Italy would come out of this war as a state that had needed rescuing. Mussolini wanted to avoid that: he was anxious to win at least one clear victory with his own forces before the Germans arrived, so that he could speak of a shared triumph rather than someone else’s.

The forces for it had been assembled. From December one division and battery after another had been shipped to Albania through the ports of Durrës and Vlorë. On 1 January 1941 the Italians had some 272,000 men there in twenty divisions, and by the end of February, according to Italian studies, 25 divisions – 54 infantry regiments against 42 Greek ones. Some English-language works even speak of 28 divisions. For the first time since the start of the war the Italians in Albania had a clear numerical superiority, more artillery and decisive command of the air. The Greeks, who had fourteen divisions in Albania, larger than the Italian ones but exhausted by the winter, had nothing to relieve them with, and their artillery ammunition was lasting for an ever shorter time.

Cavallero’s plan

Since 30 December 1940 command of the army group in Albania had been held by the Chief of the General Staff, General Ugo Cavallero. He argued over the objective of the offensive with the Under-Secretary of State at the War Ministry, General Alfredo Guzzoni. Guzzoni proposed an attack by the left wing of General Alessandro Pirzio Biroli’s Ninth Army towards Pogradec and on to Korçë, from where the Italians could go to meet the Germans coming from Bulgaria into western Macedonia. Cavallero chose differently. He decided to strike with General Carlo Geloso’s Eleventh Army in the centre of the front, in the valley of the Desnicë (Italian: Val Desnizza), north of Klisura, between the Trebeshinë massif and the Mali Qarishta mountains, and to retake Klisura. Later the attack was to proceed towards Leskovik and Ioannina.

Italian historians, led by Mario Cervi, judged the plan harshly. It attacked the strongest sector of the Greek defence rather than the weakest. Klisura and the hills to the north of it formed a projecting wedge, but instead of cutting it off at its base and isolating the units defending it, the Italians intended to strike head-on at its tip. Even complete success would have changed little strategically: it would have pushed the Greeks back from Tepelenë and Vlorë, but it would not have opened the road into Greece, which the Germans were soon to enter anyway.

The main thrust, on a front of about 30 kilometres, was entrusted to VIII Corps under General Gastone Gambara, who had taken over this command in February. In the first wave were the Cagliari, Puglie and Pinerolo infantry divisions, together with two battalions of Fascist militia (“Blackshirts”) from the 26th Legion. In the second wave stood the Sforzesca, Bari, Siena and Lupi di Toscana divisions, and in reserve the Centauro armoured division and the Piemonte infantry division. On the flanks the attack was supported by XXV Corps from the south-west and IV Corps from the north-east. According to Italian studies, about twelve divisions took part in the operation, counting supporting units. Some three hundred guns were assembled, and several hundred aircraft of the Regia Aeronautica were to fly from airfields in Albania and Italy.

The offensive was also prepared by propaganda. Mussolini ordered the most militant Fascist activists, and even ministers and senior dignitaries of the regime, to be sent to front-line units to raise the soldiers’ morale. On 2 March he flew to Tirana, at the controls of the aircraft according to Italian accounts, and Italian radio announced that the Duce would lead the attack in person. In reality the operation was directed by Cavallero. The attack, planned for the first days of March, was put back to 9 March because of the difficulty of deploying troops in the mountains.

The Greek command on the eve of the attack

The Greeks were expecting an Italian blow. For weeks the troops in the Klisura sector had been ordered to dig trenches and dugouts. Facing VIII Corps stood the Greek II Corps with five divisions (the 17th, 5th, 1st, 15th and 11th), with three regiments in army reserve and the 4th Division ready to support them. All had been fighting since the autumn and were badly depleted, but they held positions on ridges they knew by heart.

In the last days before the offensive, however, the Greek command in Albania underwent abrupt changes. When, after the death of Ioannis Metaxas, the government of Alexandros Koryzis agreed to accept a British expeditionary corps, some of the front-line generals considered this a mistake. In their view a few British divisions could not defend Greece against the Germans, but they could give Hitler a pretext to attack. They also preferred to think about ending the war with Italy rather than starting a new one with Germany. At a conference in Athens on 5 March the commander of II Corps, General Dimitrios Papadopoulos, and two generals from I Corps voiced this opposition openly. The Commander-in-Chief, General Alexandros Papagos, responded with dismissals. On 6 March the commander of the Army of Epirus, General Markos Drakos, who had also complained of fruitless and bloody attacks on Tepelenë, was replaced by General Ioannis Pitsikas, whose Army of Western Macedonia passed to General Georgios Tsolakoglou. II Corps was taken over by General Georgios Bakos, a mere four days before the Italian attack.

Meanwhile, on 7 March, the first ships carrying General Henry Maitland Wilson’s British troops arrived at Piraeus. They were not intended for the Albanian front. Together with a few Greek divisions, they were to defend the Haliacmon line against the Germans. The Albanian war with Italy remained the Greeks’ own affair.

9 March: the blow in the Val Desnizza

The offensive opened at dawn on 9 March. Mussolini watched its start from a post on Komarit hill, in the company of Cavallero and staff officers. The artillery fire and the bombs fell chiefly on the sector of the Greek 1st Division, between the Trebeshinë massif and the Bubës area, and most heavily on Heights 717 and 731, taken by the Greeks in January. According to Greek studies, more than a hundred thousand shells fell on this division’s six-kilometre sector in the first days. The bombardment churned up the earth and felled the trees, but the well-prepared trenches protected the defenders better than the Italians had expected, and the Greek artillery could not be knocked out.

When the fire lifted, the infantry of the Puglie and Cagliari divisions went in. The Greeks, though stunned, came out of their trenches and met the attackers with fire, grenades and bayonets. In many places the fighting turned into hand-to-hand combat. By evening the Italians had taken only a few positions, some of which they lost that same night to Greek counter-attacks. The same happened on 10 March. On 11 March an attempt by the Blackshirt battalions of the 26th Legion to outflank Height 731 also failed.

The Italian command, as in the battles of the Isonzo in the previous war, answered failure with further assaults on the same spot. On the night of 12–13 March the bled-white Puglie division was relieved by the Bari division, but its attacks up to 15 March failed as well. In the fighting of 13–14 March the commander of its 140th Infantry Regiment, Colonel Luigi Biasucci, was killed; he was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of Military Valour. On 12 March, according to a Greek account, Mussolini, seeing that the attack was getting nowhere, ordered it to be continued with all available forces. On 14 March, however, Cavallero concluded that the offensive had essentially failed and advised the Duce to break it off.

Height 731

The fiercest fighting was for Height 731, which the Italians also called Monastero, after the ruins of an old monastery. It lay about 20 kilometres north of Klisura, at the foot of Trebeshinë, in the Hani Ballaban area, and was the key to the whole Greek sector: from its summit the Greeks commanded the road running up the valley towards the pass. It was defended by the 2nd Battalion of the 5th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Division, made up mainly of men from Thessaly, from around Trikala and Karditsa. It was commanded by Major Dimitrios Kaslas, who after the first bombardment ordered every soldier to hold his post at all costs and, according to accounts, threatened to shoot personally anyone who tried to fall back.

Kaslas’s battalion held out for four days. When its losses became too heavy, it was relieved on the afternoon and night of 12 March by the 19th Infantry Regiment, and the Height 731 sector was taken over by Captain Panagiotis Koutridis’s battalion, which held it until the end of the fighting. The Italians attacked the hill day after day, preceding their assaults with heavy artillery barrages. According to Greek and Italian studies they made at least eighteen assaults on it, and about twenty if all are counted. The shelling was so violent that it is believed to have lowered the summit by two metres: present-day maps give a height of 729 metres.

Between 16 and 18 March the Italian attack died down. The Italians regrouped and reconnoitred the ground, while the Greeks brought up reserves and began relieving the exhausted 1st Division with the 17th. On 15 March Gambara had decided to take the hill by a bold stroke with tanks. At six in the morning on 19 March, after a night-time artillery barrage, a company of arditi, the assault troops of the 31st Infantry Regiment of the Siena division, went in, supported by a platoon of volunteers from the tank crews of the Centauro armoured division and five M13/40 medium tanks. For the first and only time the Italians broke through to the summit. But Greek artillery and machine guns pinned down the infantry of the Bari division, which was to follow in the second wave and hold the captured positions. A Greek bayonet counter-attack retook the hill. The arditi company, which had lost all its officers, ceased to exist: according to Italian accounts more than a hundred of its men were killed and more than twenty taken prisoner. In the days that followed, the Italians attacked with less impetus. The last assault on Height 731 – the twentieth, according to Italian studies – was beaten off on 24 March.

When did the offensive end?

Because the initial attack and the attacks of 19–24 March formed a single operation with a pause of several days, studies date its end differently. English-language works and some Italian ones state that the offensive lasted from 9 to 16 March, because on 16 March Mussolini and Cavallero, following their conversation of 14 March, halted VIII Corps’ main thrust. Italian literature on the campaign also speaks of the attack being stopped on 19 March by “unanimous decision” of the senior commanders. Greek official historiography and studies of the fighting for Height 731 end the operation on 24 March – in some accounts 25 March – with the last assault beaten off. Some studies, in turn, give the period 9–20 March, which is probably the origin of the date of 20 March in popular chronologies. All these dates describe the same fact: in the second half of March the Italians resigned themselves to the fact that they would not recover Klisura.

Mussolini, who spent nearly three weeks in Albania touring the units, finally admitted that the result of the offensive “amounts to zero”, and according to most accounts he returned to Rome on 21 March. According to people around him, he blamed the failure on the soldiers themselves, complaining that the “human material” at his disposal was worthless. Cavallero began preparing a further attack, in the same sector and in the Ninth Army’s sector near Pogradec, planned for the last days of March, but the coup d’état in Belgrade on 27 March meant that all forces had to be turned against Yugoslavia, and the offensive was cancelled.

Losses

According to the most frequently cited figures, the Italians lost some 12,000 killed and wounded in the offensive. English-language studies give “over 11,800” killed and wounded. Greek losses according to official Greek figures were 1,243 killed, 4,016 wounded and 42 missing. Given such a disparity in losses, the fighting for Height 731 was called the “new Thermopylae” in Greece, and in the literature also “the Verdun of the Greco-Italian War”.

Place in the war

The spring offensive was Mussolini’s last attempt to win the war with Greece on his own, and its failure finally settled that Greece’s fate would be decided by the Germans. The Italians had more men, guns and aircraft in Albania than ever before, and yet they could not break the defences of an army exhausted by the winter. Italian and Greek historians attribute this to a flawed plan, frontal assaults on the strongest sector, inept use of artillery and the high morale of the Greek soldiers, who, on ground they knew, defended themselves actively and counter-attacked at every opportunity.

But the victory cost the Greeks too. The defence consumed the last of their reserves and ammunition. By the end of March, according to British estimates, the Greek army had artillery shells for about a month’s fighting, and the British, who were only just bringing their own corps over to Greece, could not quickly supply the millions of shells and tens of millions of rounds that Athens was asking for. Fourteen Greek divisions remained tied down on the Albanian front, hundreds of kilometres from the Bulgarian frontier, and neither Papagos nor the front-line commanders could bring themselves to retreat before the beaten Italians.

When on 6 April 1941 the Wehrmacht attacked Yugoslavia and, from Bulgarian territory, Greece, it was precisely this situation that determined the speed of the German victory. German panzer divisions outflanked the Greek armies in Albania from the east, and these, beginning their retreat along the mountain roads of Epirus only on 12 April, capitulated on 20 April and finally on 23 April. On 17 April the Italians entered Klisura, which they had failed to take in March, without a fight. Hitler later said that the German attack had been made easier by the fighting in which the Italians had tied down and bled most of the Greek army.

After the occupation of Greece the Italians declared the area of Heights 717 and 731 a “sacred zone” and erected a memorial to the fallen there, and Fascist propaganda presented the fighting for Monastero as the battle that had paved the way for victory over Greece. After the war Italian and Greek historians alike judged Operation Primavera one of the most senseless slaughters of the campaign. For Mussolini it was the final proof that his “parallel war”, waged independently of Germany, was over: from then on Italy fought in the Balkans, as in North Africa, as the junior partner of the Third Reich.