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Military history of Greece during World War II



American 1942 poster supporting Greece.
Greece entered World War II on 28 October 1940, when the Italian army invaded from Albania. The Greek army dealt the first victory for the Allies by defeating the invasion and pushing Mussolini's forces back into Albania.[1] Hitler was reluctantly forced to send his own forces to overcome Greece in April 1941, and delay the invasion of the Soviet Union by six weeks. This is considered by some historians as the first turning point of the war, since the delay proved disastrous to the German invasion, with the onset of the Russian winter and the strong resistance of the Soviet armed forces halting it before the gates of Moscow.[2] Although the German invasion of Greece was swift, their forces met fierce resistance on the island of Crete, where the elite Fallschirmjäger suffered almost 7,000 casualties.[3] These heavy losses eliminated the option of a massive airborne invasion of the Soviet Union and further expansion in the Mediterranean saving Malta, Gibraltar, Cyprus, and the Suez Canal from airborne invasion.
After Greece was occupied and divided between the Axis powers, a large-scale Resistance movement developed in the country, which tied down a large number of Axis divisions. However, political tensions between the Resistance groups resulted in the outbreak of a civil conflict among them in late 1943, which continued until the spring of 1944. The exiled Greek government also formed armed forces of its own, which served and fought alongside the British in the Middle East, North Africa and Italy. The contribution of the Greek War and the Merchant navies in particular was of special importance to the Allied cause.
Mainland Greece was liberated in October 1944 with the German withdrawal in the face of the advancing Red Army, while German garrisons continued to hold out in the Aegean Islands until after the war's end. The country was devastated by war and occupation, its economy and infrastructure lay in ruins. Greece suffered more than 300,000 casualties during the occupation, and the country's Jewish minority was almost completely exterminated in the Holocaust. Soon, however, a vicious civil war erupted between the British and American-sponsored conservative government and leftist guerrillas, which would last until 1949.