Greece and Crete

From my perspective:
a) the duration of the war in the Balkans was so short
b) the British evacuation was so quick and disorganized that most official records were lost or deliberately destroyed.
c) some official records were obtained by Italians who at one point had put some of them on the internet, but the website has since gone down (perhaps he passed away) and it appears no one (including me) had the IQ to copy them while they were available.

70 years later, a few bits are finally starting to appear on the internet. See lists of links here on the forum at:
http://www.ww2f.com/information-req...n-raf-africa-greece-1940-41-a.html#post581896 and
http://www.ww2f.com/new-member-forum/51780-new-member-looking-information.html

 

From my perspective, I believe the Greek Campaign gets overlooked because:
a. it was a defeat,
b. the underpinning 'good idea' from Churchill was flawed (ie to start a second front, was optimistic at best... if not unrealistic)
c. other events quickly overtook the Greek campaign. (eg Rommel in North Africa)

I think the battle for Crete has overshadowed the fight on mainland Greece. Largely because it is more 'dramatic'... desperate Commonwealth Forces fighting elite German Fallschirmjager! The mainland campaign was a limited number of actions followed by a steady withdrawal.

For the NZ history see"
New Zealand Electronic Text Centre

For the Australian history see:

The Australian War Memorial:
The Official History (Gavin Long's "Greece, Crete and Syria") Australia in the War of 1939
The War Diaries for HQs and infantry have been digitised and are available. https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/records/awm52/

 

In addition to the above, there have been quite a few excellent - and wide circulation - books published in English on Crete.

Beevor's been mentioned, which I personally don't like - but there's also Callum MacDonald's quite excellent Crete: The Lost Battle. There's also the much older The Fall Of Crete by Alan Clark, which I find very readable....but is regarded as "dated" because it doesn't mention ULTRA and the role it played. However, it DOES therefore concentrate more on the major deficiencies of some of the Commonwealth senior officers in an attempt to expalin some of the strange and bad decisions...

For the naval war, there's the unbeatable Crete 1941: The Battle At Sea by David Thomas from 1972, and reprinted MANY times since....and a plethora of meoirs including Cunningham's own from 1946! It plays a major part in Roy Farran's Winged Dagger as well...

There's also quite a canon of books relating to the post-Invasion resistance and SOE liaison in Crete, mostly in the form of memoirs - Billy Moss' own Ill Met By Moonlight (and a second by him, A War of Shadows, covering his later trip to the island which I've never found), Xan Fielding's The Stronghold and Hide and Seek, both recalling his wartime years there, Sandy Rendell's The White Mountains, and of course George Psycoundakis' The Cretan Runner.

 

The most I have come across in my own reading, are stories of the air battle over Greece by the RAF against the Italians and Germans. Book about the Hurricane, Gladiator, and CR.42 will usually cover the airwar aspect. Struggle for the Middle Sea covers the naval war around Greece to a decent extent, but over all, I haven't found a good "all inclusive" volume for the Battle of Greece. Long overdue I think. Greirr Haarr's books about Norway filled in that period so well, I keep hoping something similar about Greece in WWII turns up in English.

 

It depends on what language one is looking. For example there is no good book (or very few) about the Polish campaign in english but there seems to be a very rich literature in polish. Similarly when one talks about the fighting in Greece one has to look for Greek and Italian books first.

To my knowledge there is no complete history in any language regarding the Italo-Greek war, although there is a Greek official history of several volumes (of which 6 are campaign narratives from October '40 to May '41) published in the late '50s and early '60s, which incorporates some info from then-available Italian sources. There is an Italian less extensive official history of three volumes (of which one is campaign narrative), published in the '80s, which presumably incorporates info from the official Greek history.

The German invasion of Greece, as well as that of Yugoslavia, is less well covered in terms of detail, since there seems to be no German "official" history, although there's a number of decent German monographies, which however relate mostly to the German operations. Naturally there are the Greek official histories (2 volumes for April '41), which incorporate much information from the english language sources, which involve the BEF. Infromation about the Germans was harder to find, but it exists to some detail. The big victim in this perior are the Italians, who are downplayed or even ignored in every history I've read, yet their role in the April fighting and the Greek capitulation -at least, for I have little knowledge about the Yugoslav operations- was central. The Italians suffered heavier casualties than the Germans in the operations of April 1941 (c. 8,000 to 5,000).

English language histories on the fighting in Greece are incomplete and centered around the British operations. It's telling that member Martin Bull above thinks that the fighting in Greece was largely about UK/Commonwealth against the Axis!

EDIT: One promising-looking title is the German-language "Der Fall Griechenlands 1941" by Karl-Heinz Golla, a ret. Col. of the Bundeswehr, published in 2007. I haven't read it but I read a good review.

 

Not a bad presentation at all. I learned a lot Start at the 10 minute mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_PSG5TyiTQ

 

persist,
you certainly find someone who is interested on!!!

posted by www.kartengruppe.it

 

I was looking for books and articles about the operations of the Italo-Greek war but I couldn't find anything except for articles about the political aspects, and a series of articles about the orders of battle. But no detailed description and analysis of the campaign involving the Italian army, only about the German invasion in April. It was not a minor campaign, it lasted six months and over 40 divisions were involved from both sides on the Albanian front. Balkan Battles by R. Tarnstrom dedicates a few pages to it but it's a part of the war that is definitively overlooked, at least in its military aspects. It seems that Italian and Greek armies aren't considered interesting by military historians.