On this day in 1940, Adolf Hitler meets with
Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano over Mussolini's disastrous invasion of
Greece.
Mussolini surprised everyone
with a move against Greece; his ally, Hitler, was caught off guard, especially
since the Duce had led Hitler to believe he had no such intention. Even
Mussolini's own chief of army staff found out about the invasion only after the
fact!
Despite being warned off an
invasion of Greece by his own generals, despite the lack of preparedness on the
part of his military, despite that it would mean getting bogged down in a
mountainous country during the rainy season against an army willing to fight
tooth and nail to defend its autonomy, Mussolini moved ahead out of sheer
hubris, convinced he could defeat the inferior Greeks in a matter of days. He
also knew a secret, that millions of lire had been put aside to bribe Greek
politicians and generals not to resist the Italian invasion. Whether the money
ever made it past the Italian fascist agents delegated with the responsibility
is unclear; if it did, it clearly made no difference whatsoever—the Greeks
succeeded in pushing the Italian invaders back into Albania after just one
week. The Axis power spent the next three months fighting for its life in a
defensive battle. To make matters worse, virtually half the Italian fleet at
Taranto had been crippled by a British carrier-based attack.
At their meeting in
Obersalzberg, Hitler excoriated Ciano for opening an opportunity for the
British to enter Greece and establish an airbase in Athens, putting the Brits
within striking distance of valuable oil reserves in Romania, which Hitler
relied upon for his war machine. It also meant that Hitler would have to divert
forces from North Africa, a high strategic priority, to Greece in order to bail
Mussolini out. Hitler considered leaving the Italians to fight their own way
out of this debacle—possibly even making peace with the Greeks as a way of
forestalling an Allied intervention. But Germany would eventually invade, in
April 1941, adding Greece to its list of conquests.
Taken from: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hitler-furious-over-italys-debacle-in-greece [18.11.2014]
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