Italy asks Germany for help

On 28 December 1940, two months after Italy attacked Greece, the Greek high command decided to halt large-scale offensive operations in Albania. Greek troops by then stood several dozen kilometres inside Albania, from where the Italian invasion had come, and held, by an estimate repeated ever since, roughly a quarter of Albanian territory. That same day in Berlin the Italian military attaché, General Efisio Marras, set before the Chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, a picture of the situation that, coming from a representative of Benito Mussolini, would have been unthinkable only a few months earlier: Italy could not hold its positions on its own and without German help might lose the whole of North Africa.

Yet Italy’s appeal to Germany for help was not a single act of 28 December. Requests flowed from Rome throughout December, through various channels and with growing urgency: from Mussolini’s desperate telephone call to his ambassador in Berlin at the beginning of the month, through the urgent request of 19 December from the new Chief of the General Staff, General Ugo Cavallero, to Marras’s conversation with Keitel. They concerned both Albania and, increasingly, Libya, where since 9 December the British had been smashing the army of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani. The end of 1940 thus marked the end of the “parallel war” that Mussolini had intended to wage alongside Germany but without it.

The front at the end of December

The Greek counter-offensive, launched in mid-November, achieved more in six weeks than anyone had expected. On 22 November the Greeks took Korçë, at the end of the month Pogradec on Lake Ohrid, and in the first week of December Delvinë, the port of Sarandë, which the Italians had renamed Porto Edda, and, on 8 December, Gjirokastër, the chief town of southern Albania. Over the following weeks the Greek divisions pressed on northwards in ever worsening conditions. On 19 December the Italian Siena Division gave way on the coast, and on 22 December the Greeks took the coastal town of Himarë, which opened the way towards Vlorë, the second great port, after Durrës, through which the Italian forces were supplied. In the centre of the front, II Corps advanced between the Vjosë and Osum rivers to the vicinity of the Klisura pass near the small town of Këlcyrë, beyond which lay the valley leading to Berat, and further north-east General Georgios Kosmas’s group reached the slopes of Mount Tomorr. On the right wing, around Korçë and Pogradec, III Corps remained on the defensive.

By the end of December, then, the front line ran roughly 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 the shores of Lake Ohrid. Behind it, in Greek hands, lay the whole belt of southern and south-eastern Albania, 50–60 kilometres deep: the districts of Sarandë, Delvinë, Gjirokastër, Përmet, Kolonjë, Korçë and Pogradec. Albania covers just under 29,000 square kilometres, so the estimate that the Greeks occupied about a quarter of the country is approximate, but it conveys the scale of what had happened well. A small army that in October was supposed to be crushed in two weeks had carried the war onto the enemy’s territory. In Greece these lands were called Northern Epirus, and part of the Athens press wrote of their “liberation”. The government of Ioannis Metaxas officially insisted that it was fighting Italy, not Albania, but Greek claims to these lands were well known, and the Albanians received the Greek soldiers with considerable reserve.

The advance, however, was losing momentum. Winter came early and was exceptionally severe. Greek soldiers fought in the mountains in knee-deep snow, often in summer uniforms and worn-out boots, and supplies were carried up on mules and on the backs of local women. Thousands of men on both sides suffered frostbite. Greece had no armaments industry, no lorries and no stocks of ammunition for a long war, and the further the army moved from the border, the harder it was to supply. The Italians, meanwhile, ever closer to their own ports, received more reinforcements with every week. On 28 December, therefore, the Commander-in-Chief, General Alexandros Papagos, decided that from 6 January 1941 the army would conduct only limited attacks to improve its positions. In his memoirs Papagos dated to 28 December the end of the second stage of the Greco-Italian War, the stage of the Greek counter-offensive.

A December of crisis

For Italy, December 1940 was the blackest month since it had entered the war. The defeats in Albania caused a crisis at the very top of the state. On 26 November Marshal Pietro Badoglio, attacked in the press by Roberto Farinacci and blamed by Mussolini for the failure, resigned as Chief of the General Staff. On 4 December Mussolini accepted his resignation and appointed General Cavallero in his place, who, according to the Italian biographical dictionary, formally took up the post on 6 December. Soon afterwards two others departed: the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, blamed for the disaster at Taranto, who was replaced on 8 December by Admiral Arturo Riccardi; and the Governor of the Dodecanese, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, one of the most ardent advocates of the attack on Greece.

On 4 December, when news reached Rome of the loss of Pogradec and the breaking of the front, the commander of the forces in Albania, General Ubaldo Soddu, reported that further military operations had become impossible and that the situation would have to be resolved “by political means”. According to the diary of the Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini, more dejected than ever before, then told him: “There is nothing else to be done. It is grotesque and absurd, but it is a fact. We must ask for a truce through Hitler.” Ciano replied that he would rather shoot himself than telephone Ribbentrop with such a request. Later that same day the news from Albania turned out to be somewhat better, and the Duce regained his composure and ordered resistance at all costs. Cavallero went to Albania, where for the following weeks he supervised Soddu as Mussolini’s representative.

The new chief of staff was a born optimist, but the Greeks kept advancing. On 17 December, after a further retreat towards Klisura and Tepelenë, Mussolini sent Cavallero a sharp letter ordering the troops to die at their posts, because “this is more than my order, it is the order of the fatherland”. On 18 December Cavallero, briefly back from the front, assured Ciano that the worst was over and that by 1 February he would have an offensive ready to recapture Korçë. The next day the Greeks routed the Siena Division on the coast and threatened Vlorë. By the end of the month, as Ciano recorded, the Duce no longer believed a single word Cavallero said and likened his optimism to whistling in the dark. On 29 December Soddu, whose moods changed from day to day and who, according to Ciano, spent his evenings even in Albania composing film music, was recalled to Rome, and from 30 December Cavallero combined the post of Chief of the General Staff with direct command in Albania. In Rome his place was taken by General Alfredo Guzzoni.

At the same time the front in Africa was collapsing. On 9 December General Richard O’Connor’s British Western Desert Force launched Operation Compass, which within a few days overran the Italian camps at Sidi Barrani, and on 16 December the British entered Libya and occupied Fort Capuzzo. By the end of the month the remnants of the Italian forces from Egypt were holding out in the encircled fortress of Bardia. To make matters worse, strict food rationing had been introduced in Italy at the beginning of December, and in a radio broadcast to the Italian people on 23 December Winston Churchill argued that it was “one man”, Mussolini, who had dragged them into war with Britain against their will. The prestige of the regime, built for years on the promise of restoring the greatness of Rome, sank to its lowest point since the crisis that followed the murder of Matteotti.

Appeals for help

As late as October Mussolini had not wanted to hear of German help. In his mind the attack on Greece was a response to Adolf Hitler repeatedly presenting him with faits accomplis, and the Germans were to learn of the Italian attack from the newspapers. When Hitler, in a letter of 20 November, listed the damage the failed venture had done, Mussolini in his reply of 29 November blamed bad weather, the desertion of Albanian units and the passivity of Bulgaria, which had allowed the Greeks to move divisions from the Bulgarian border to Albania. But he did not yet ask for troops.

The first appeals came from Albania itself. According to General Soddu’s papers, published years later by historians, the commander of the Italian forces in Albania called for German help as early as 24 November and again on 17 December. When on 4 December he spoke of a “political solution”, he meant, as the Lieutenant-General of Albania, Francesco Jacomoni, later explained to Ciano, a diversion on the Greek flank – for instance an intervention by Germany or Yugoslavia. In the first days of December, at the worst moment of the crisis, Mussolini telephoned his ambassador in Berlin, Dino Alfieri, and told him to ask for any help the Germans could give at once. According to Alfieri’s own account, first Ribbentrop and then Hitler lectured him on how the Italians had ignored German warnings against attacking Greece. Hitler is said to have advised Mussolini to restore discipline in the army by means of courts martial and executions. He did, however, agree to place Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft at Italy’s disposal. Ciano noted on 5 December that the Germans had provided fifty machines; Italian studies speak of 65. They flew from airfields in Apulia, above all Foggia, carrying to Albania soldiers who could not be fitted through the crowded ports.

Later requests no longer concerned Albania alone. After the defeat at Sidi Barrani, on 19 December, General Cavallero, on Mussolini’s instructions, made an urgent request for military help to the German general accredited to the headquarters of the Italian armed forces, General Enno von Rintelen. In the autumn Rome had given a cool reception to a German offer to send armoured units to Libya, because Mussolini wanted to conquer Egypt on his own, and in November, after the Italian attack on Greece, Hitler had shelved the offer. Now the Italians themselves were asking for it. On 28 December General Marras, for many years military attaché in Berlin, admitted to Keitel, according to German studies, that the Italians would not be able to hold Cyrenaica and without the Reich’s support would lose the whole of North Africa. At the same time Rome was discussing with the Germans help for the forces in Albania: further air transport, equipment, and German units that might strengthen the front.

The often repeated statement that on 28 December Italy asked Germany for help against the Greeks is therefore a simplification. There was no single formal request on that day. There was a succession of démarches in which, from week to week, the issue was ever more clearly the rescue of Libya and not just Albania. Marras’s conversation with Keitel closed that succession and carried particular weight, because for the first time a representative of the Italian high command openly admitted that Italy was losing on both fronts at once.

Berlin’s calculation

Hitler did not help his ally out of sympathy. He regarded the attack on Greece as a blunder that had drawn the British into the Balkans: since November the RAF had been operating in Greece, and from Greek airfields its bombers could reach the Romanian oilfields at Ploiești, protected since October by a German military mission. Romanian oil was indispensable to the Reich, and Hitler was already preparing war against the Soviet Union: on 18 December he signed Directive No. 21, ordering preparations for an attack on the USSR by May 1941. Before such a war the southern flank in the Balkans had to be secure, and Italy could not be allowed to collapse, because defeat in Africa and Albania might topple Mussolini and open the Italian peninsula to the British.

German plans in the Mediterranean changed in those same weeks. When Franco refused to enter the war, Hitler on 11 December called off Operation Felix, the attack on Gibraltar, and German preparations focused on Greece. On 13 December he issued Directive No. 20, Operation Marita: 24 German divisions were to be gradually assembled in Romania and in March, when the weather improved, were to advance through Bulgaria and occupy the northern coast of the Aegean and, if necessary, the whole of mainland Greece. The justification given was “the uncertain situation in Albania” and the need to frustrate British attempts to establish air bases in Greece. The same directive gave the Luftwaffe the task of helping to stabilise the Albanian front by flying some 30,000 soldiers and large quantities of equipment over from Italy. In December the decision was also taken to move X Air Corps (X. Fliegerkorps), which specialised in anti-shipping operations, from Norway to Sicily and southern Italy. Its first units arrived at the turn of the year.

German help came at a price, though no one in Rome said so aloud. From then on Hitler decided where, when and with what forces the Axis would fight in the Mediterranean, and the Italian high command had to fit its plans to Germany’s. Mussolini, who in October had wanted to show Hitler that Italy pursued its own policy, was in December forced to ask him for aircraft, for tanks for Libya and for help for his army in Albania.

Place in the war

Berlin’s answer came at the turn of the year. On 11 January 1941 Hitler signed Directive No. 22 on German participation in the fighting in the Mediterranean. It provided for sending a blocking armoured force to Tripolitania and, to Albania, a corps that was to support the Italians and enable them to go over to the offensive again. The plan to send troops to Albania, called Operation Alpenveilchen, was never put into effect: Albanian ports and roads could not supply both the Italian and the German armies at once, and after Hitler’s talks with Mussolini at the Berghof on 19–20 January the Italians themselves asked for it to be dropped. Help for Libya came quickly: on 10 January aircraft of X Air Corps badly damaged the British aircraft carrier Illustrious in the Mediterranean, and in February the first units of the German expeditionary corps, soon to be known as the Afrika Korps, arrived in Tripoli under the command of General Erwin Rommel.

The front in Albania stayed where it was for another three months. In January 1941 the Greeks took the Klisura pass, but the advance on Tepelenë and Vlorë stalled. The Italian spring offensive, which Mussolini prepared in March in order to win a victory with his own forces before the Germans arrived, broke down after a fortnight or so. The issue was decided only by the Balkan campaign: on 6 April 1941 the Wehrmacht attacked Greece and Yugoslavia from Bulgaria, and the Greek army, cut off in Albania, capitulated two weeks later.

December 1940 thus closed the first, independent period of Italy’s war. Defeat in Albania, the crippling of the fleet at Taranto and the catastrophe of Graziani’s army in Egypt and Cyrenaica made Italy an increasingly dependent partner within the Axis. German aircraft, tanks and generals saved Libya and Albania for Mussolini, but in return Italy lost its freedom of decision, and in society and within the Fascist Party itself the conviction grew that the war into which the Duce had dragged the country was being fought for Germany. For Greece, in turn, the success of December 1940 proved to be a victory that could not last. The army that had occupied a quarter of Albania had neither the strength nor the supplies to face the Germans, and the German intervention, hastened by the Italian appeals, brought the country occupation, famine and years of war.