Concentration of force and effort were not dominant
characteristics of Hitler’s Reich. The Führer had initially reacted to Italy’s
debacle in North Africa and its frustrated invasion of Greece with the amused
malice the Germans call Schadenfreude. His interests in the Mediterranean
involved encouraging support for Germany’s Atlantic ambitions on the part of
Vichy France and Falangist Spain, and attracting Balkan support for the
developing attack on the Soviet Union. Neither end was best served by
Italian-initiated upheavals that challenged the status quo by open-ended claims
to enlarged spheres of influence. They were served even worse, however, by
open-ended military catastrophe.
The Italian defeat in Greece created opportunities for
Britain to negotiate a Balkan front of its own, supporting it by stationing
planes on Greek bases. The oil fields of Romania were only the most obvious
potential target. If the Italians were driven from North Africa, the stresses
on British shipping would be reduced by the reopening of the Mediterranean. The
French North African colonies might reconsider their allegiance to Vichy. An
Italy subject to air and naval strikes would face the consequences of a loss of
prestige that could potentially lead to the collapse of the Fascist system
itself.
Hitler grew correspondingly determined to take action. As
early as July 1940, the High Command had suggested dispatching a panzer
division to North Africa. Spanish veteran Wilhelm von Thoma, sent to evaluate
the situation, reported any serious mobile operations would require at least
four divisions for an indefinite basis. In the run-up to Barbarossa, that
proposal had no chance. As the Italian situation continued to deteriorate, the
commitment of ground forces in the Mediterranean basin nevertheless seemed
necessary.
The General Staff responded by projecting a large-scale
mechanized offensive in the Balkans, to be mounted in the spring of 1941—quick
in, quick out. Hitler entertained hopes that its threat would be sufficient:
that the Greek government would reject British support and Yugoslavia would
align itself with the Axis. Hitler sweetened the latter prospect by offering to
exchange Yugoslavia’s copper, zinc, and lead for modern weapons. The former
prospect grew increasingly remote, particularly as Greece observed the steady
movement of German planning missions and combat aircraft—specifically the
ground-support specialists of VIII Air Corps—into Bulgaria and Romania. When
Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia formally joined the Axis in November 1940,
allowing German troops transit rights across their territory, the question
regarding war became not if but when. Even then it was not until the first
arrival of British ground troops in Greece on March 7 that the German
redeployment began in earnest.
From the beginning, the Balkan operation had been planned
around the panzers. This flew in the face of Great War experience, of
unpromising terrain, limited road networks, undeveloped infrastructures, and
just about every other common-sense reservation that prudent staff officers
could conceive. In another context, however, the projected force structure
reflected, more clearly than at any time since the occupation of Austria,
Hitler’s conception of the ideal relationship between diplomacy and force. He
sought to expand the basis for war in the eastern Mediterranean, to secure the
southern flank of his forthcoming attack on the USSR, and to sequester Balkan
economic resources for German use. None of those ends was best achieved by the
use of force as a first option, and Hitler was correspondingly willing to keep
talking. But time was an enemy when wasted. Even at the last minute, the panzer
divisions could be turned loose to crush both local opposition and the
burgeoning British presence in Greece—immediately and unmistakably, not least
to discourage intervention by the Soviet Union, perhaps Turkey as well.
The actual deployment underwent a series of changes that
both illustrated German skill in operational planning and reinforced confidence
in the skill’s applicability to the wider Russian stage. The final dispositions
put a worked-in command and staff team on the Greek frontier: List’s 12th Army
and Kleist’s renamed Panzer Group 1. With three panzer divisions and two
motorized ones plus Grossdeutschland and two similarly configured claimants to
elite status, the SS Leibstandarte and the Luftwaffe’s Hermann Göring Brigade,
Kleist was expected to overrun Greece from a standing start.
On March 27 the
situation changed utterly. A coup deposed the Yugoslav government. Hitler
responded with Operation Punishment: the destruction of Yugoslavia with
“merciless harshness.” Kleist swung his
group 90 degrees and, beginning on April 8 as the Luftwaffe eviscerated Belgrade,
drove into Yugoslavia’s side with the force of a knife thrust. Breaking through
initially stubborn resistance and scattering two Yugoslav armies, the group
drove north as another panzer corps came south from Hungary into Croatia.
Belgrade was the objective. What remained of it capitulated on April 12. The
Yugoslav army, its morale shaken by recent political events, divided along
ethnic lines. Lacking modern equipment, it never had much of a chance. In a
week the panzers had shattered its fighting spirit and its fighting power alike
by speed and shock, in terrain regarded as less suitable even than the Ardennes
for mobile warfare, and without breaking a military sweat. The major challenge
to the rear echelons was coping with the thousands of Yugoslavs trying to
surrender. On April 14 the Yugoslav government called for terms.
A country was dismembered; a stage was set for more than a
half century of civil war; and the panzers were responsible. Kleist’s divisions
were pulled into reserve as quickly as possible for redeployment to the Russian
frontier, with a collective sense of a job well done that suggested favorable
prospects for the future. The new divisions and the new commanders had
performed well compared to the standards of 1940. A continuing tendency to
outrun the infantry had no significant tactical consequences; the tanks alone
spread demoralization wherever they went. Logistics posed occasional problems,
but the fighting ended before they metastasized. Total German casualties were
150 dead, 400 wounded, and 15 missing. Nothing emerging from Yugoslavia, in
short, inspired any last-minute second thoughts about another operation against
a Slavic army and culture.
Kleist’s turn to Yugoslavia left a suddenly diminished 12th
Army the task of dealing with Greece. The initial German commitment to a Balkan
blitz is indicated by an order of battle that even without the panzer group
included a motorized corps headquarters, the first-rate 2nd and 9th Panzer
Divisions, and the Leibstandarte motorized brigade of the Waffen SS—with
Richthofen’s Stukas flying close support. The Viennese tankers overran a Greek
motorized division, seized Salonika, and took 60,000 prisoners, all in four
days. The 9th Panzer Division, the Leibstandarte, and the Stukas on the
Germans’ other flank scattered an entire Yugoslav army, and then turned south
into the plains of Thessaly. It took until April 12 to break through Greek,
Australian, and New Zealand resistance and the British 1st Armored Brigade and
cut off the strong Greek forces reluctant to retreat from Albania. But yet again,
once through the forward defenses, the panzers set the pace. Never out-fought,
the Greek army was increasingly overmatched. On April 21 the British decided to
evacuate.
From the perspective of the Anzacs and the tankers, the rest
of the campaign was a long fighting retreat, enduring constant air attack and
bloodying the Germans where they could. For the panzers it was more of a
mop-up, with the lead role played by 5th Panzer Division. Transferred from
Kleist’s group after the fall of Yugoslavia, it was bloodied at Thermopylae
where a rear guard knocked out 20 of its tanks as they moved through the still-
narrow pass. Recovering, the division pursued the British south, crossed the
Isthmus of Corinth, and took more than 7,000 prisoners on the beaches of
Kalamata, men left behind when the ships were withdrawn.
