Contents
The Mediterranean and the Balkans
June 1940 - June 1941
One difficulty Hitler faced as he contemplated turning east was the mess his ally, Mussolini, had made made since entering the war in June 1940. The Italian forces were sent northward, only to see them repulsed by the French. The subsequent Italian contribution to the Battle of Britain also had been a disaster. At Mussolini's insistence, Italian forces in Libya had cautiously advanced into British-held Egypt in September 1940; only to be ejected and sent reeling towards Tripoli by a few British infantry divisions and tank units in subsequent months.
Doubtless hoping for an easier target, Mussolini launched an invasion of Greece from Albania (occupied since 1939) in October 1940, only to see the Greek army first halt then roll back the Italian force. In November 1940 the Royal Navy scored a singular success when torpedo planes put out of action half the Italian fleet at anchor in Taranto. In North Africa, reinforced British units under the overall command of General Archibald Wavell had, by February 1941, advanced 1,700 miles westward, destroying ten Italian divisions at the cost of a mere 2,000 casualties.
From the perspective of Berlin, if something was not done soon, the Italians might well be ejected from Libya altogether. The British might also use Greece (which had as yet declared war only on Italy) as a base for air operations against the oil fields of Romania that were vital to the German war effort.
Something was done. German plans to invade Greece were formulated as early as October 1940, and in February 1941 the first air and ground units (the beginnings of the famous Afrika Korps) arrived in Libya to prop up the Italians. In April, German forces were allowed to pass through Romania and Bulgaria, and after a brief fight in Yugoslavia these forces invaded Greece. Australian and New Zealand units as well as some RAF aircraft were diverted from the Western Desert to try and shore up Greek resistance, but this action merely weakened Wavell's army just as Rommel began his first offensive in April-May 1941 and did little to help the Greeks. By the end of April the last British forces were being evacuated from Greece; forces that subsequently proved unable, despite fierce resistance, to defeat a German airborne invasion of Crete in May 1941.
By this time, though the Italian Empire in East Africa had fallen and both Iraq and Vichy-run Syria were soon occupied (in a successful effort to forestall Axis moves in the region), Wavell's forces in Libya had been forced to retreat back into Egypt. Efforts to mount a successful counteroffensive in the Western Desert in May and June 1941 ended in failure. Hitler's southern flank was, for the time being, fairly secure.