They would have only 20 days to prepare for the assault on this distant, unfamiliar island. The elite airborne forces commanded by General Kurt Student were placed on alert on May 1, 1941. Operations in Greece and Crete had to be concluded successfully before the invasion of the Soviet Union could be undertaken with prospects for a speedy victory before winter. Royal Air Force bombers based on Crete could also reach the vital Romanian oil fields, which fueled the German war machine, and Crete might even provide a staging area for an Allied invasion of Southern Europe.įor the Germans, time was of the essence. Britain’s presence there gave the Allies an invaluable base for their air and sea fleets to threaten supplies and reinforcements destined for Axis forces in North Africa. It was a foregone conclusion that the Germans would target the big island next. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill then sent units of the Royal Navy into the eastern portion of the Mediterranean in anticipation of a German invasion of Crete, the largest of the Greek isles, off the southeastern coast of the Greek mainland. German armies surged into and subdued the Balkans, saving Mussolini and securing the south - most of it.
Undertaken at the wrong time of year, the offensive quickly bogged down in the autumn rains, and when the Greeks counterattacked on November 5, they drove il Duce‘s forces back to their starting point on the Albanian frontier.īritish forces were fighting alongside the Greeks, and Hitler was forced to intervene lest his enemies establish a foothold on his southern flank.
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His timetable was thrown off, however, by a series of unexpected developments in the south.Ĭhagrined over his own lack of conquests while Hitler’s forces were overrunning most of Western Europe, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini invaded Greece on October 28, 1940. But when news reached Hitler in 1940 that the Soviets were busily training an entire new officer corps, the Führer began to worry again and ordered his generals to draw up plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Word of the Soviet dictator’s paranoid purges of his military’s high command in the late 1930s had been reassuring news to the German Führer in Berlin. In the fall of 1940, Adolf Hitler was certain that Josef Stalin was preparing to attack him.