Greece Is Assigned to the Mercy of Italy’1

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Chapter One

Axis Ambitions in Europe and Greece 1933-1940: ‘Greece is assigned to the mercy of Italy’1

In the late 1930s Greece was a poor and politically divided country under an unpopular authoritarian regime—a royalist dictatorship led by Gen- eral Ioannis Metaxas, serving under King George II. Its entry into World War II arose from the territorial ambitions of fascist Italy. During the 1930s Greece had faced a continuing and latent threat to its independence from this quarter. The consequences of the fall of France in mid-1940 converted this menace into the reality of an Italian attack on 28 October 1940. The origins of the Italian threat to Greek independence, however, predated the 1930s and can only be understood against the unravelling of the post-World War I peace settlements. The outline that follows will trace those aspects of the diplomatic and military history of Europe’s descent into war in 1939, and the strategic ambitions and calculations of Italy and Germany in par- ticular, which led to the invasion of Greece in 1940. All these issues have been the subject of extensive research and considerable interpretative disputes.2 In the 1930s Britain and France, the powers that maintained the post- World War I peace settlements, faced increasing challenges to that system in Europe and Asia. In the Mediterranean in the 1930s this challenge came from fascist Italy, which aimed to dominate the region as the basis of a revived and extended Italian empire. Italy’s ambitions directly threatened both French and British interests and colonies. British and French policy makers favoured compromise with Italy, as a consequence of their own difficult strategic positions in Europe by the mid-1930s. The British Chiefs of Staff considered that Britain could not meet simultaneous challenges to

1 Mussolini’s view as reported to the German Foreign Ministry by Italian ambassador Attolico: Weizsäcker, Berlin, 14 April 1939, note ‘St.S. Nr. 337’, Das Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts [henceforth PA AA] R 29611. 2 See the overviews by D. C. Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938-1939, Pantheon Books, New York, 1989; Z. Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933-1939, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011, part II, passim; G. Weinberg, A World at Arms. 18 chapter one its empire and interests from Japan, Italy and Germany. Of these powers Italy was judged to pose the least threat and to be the most likely to be satisfied at relatively minor cost. This evaluation was probably accurate so far as many in the Italian armed forces and civil service were concerned, but it failed to take into account the greater opportunities that simultaneous German pressure on the international system offered Italy, and how quickly these opportunities would be grasped by Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini. 3 Until the mid-1930s Italian foreign policy had been driven by a variety of motives—an aspiration to maintain a position as the determining ‘swing’ power in the European system, a desire to compete with Nazi Germany, and to cooperate with it. While Mussolini’s attitude to the junior regime and its dictator, Adolf Hitler, was more ambivalent than appeared to be the case in public, and than Hitler’s attitude to him, ultimately Mussolini could not resist the opportunities Nazi policy offered Italy. In November 1936 the two countries proclaimed the Rome-Berlin Axis, and in November 1937 Italy joined the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern pact. Such interaction with Nazi Germany helped radicalise Italian foreign policy by the late 1930s.4 Meanwhile, the Nazi regime planned a bid for world power based on the conquest of Europe. Hitler was willing to accommodate Italy as an ally in this process for a variety of reasons, including his assessment from the 1920s onwards that alliance with Italy did not run counter to his ultimate strategic aims, ideological affinities between the two regimes, and his per- sonal friendship with Mussolini. Links between the two leaders, and there- fore the two countries, grew stronger when Mussolini relinquished his

3 Knox, Hitler’s Italian Allies, pp. 7-9, 10, 12; A. Kallis, Fascist Ideology: Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922-1945, Routledge, London, 2000, pp. 12, 50-2, 97, 123, 126, 150, 172; Koliopoulos, Greece and the British Connection 1935-1941, pp. 32-3, 34; D. Reynolds, Britannia Overruled: British Policy and World Power in the 20th Century, second edition, Longman, London, 2000, pp. 124-5; R. Salerno, Vital Crossroads: Mediterranean Origins of the Second World War, 1935-1940, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2002, passim; L. Pratt, East of Malta, West of Suez: Britain’s Mediterranean Crisis, 1936-1939, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975, passim. 4 Kallis, Fascist Ideology, Ch. 5 passim; Knox, Hitler’s Italian Allies, p. 3; R. DiNardo, Germany and the Axis Powers: From Coalition to Collapse, University Press of Kansas, Law- rence, 2005, pp. 25-7; P. Hehn, A Low Dishonest Decade: The Great Powers, Eastern Europe, and the Economic Origins of World War II, 1930-1941, Continuum, New York, 2002, Ch. 2; B. Sullivan, ‘“Where one man, and only one man, led.” Italy’s path from non-alignment to non-belligerency to war, 1937-1940’, in N. Wyllie (ed.), European Neutrals and Non-Belliger- ents during the Second World War, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 119-30 [henceforth cited as Sullivan, ‘Italy’]; Steiner, Triumph of the Dark, pp. 157, 240.