The Italo-Greek War in Context

The Italo-Greek war has been one of the most ignored events of the second world war, even though Mussolini and Ciano were obsessed with it throughout the early months of 1941, and it revealed the difficulties that Italy had in setting strategic priorities and controlling military costs.' The war was crucial to the Italian war effort, not only because it put a strain on Italy's slender resources at a crucial point in the conflict, but also because it set Rome against Berlin. The conflict also eroded public confidence in the fascist regime, undermined the Fascist Party, depressed Mussolini and alienated him from his military leaders and his own son-in-law, threatened to destroy the morale of the armed forces and played havoc with Italian diplomacy. If not as serious a blunder as Hitler's failure to invade Britain and his later invasion of Russia, the Italo-Greek war still undermined Italy's war effort in 1940-1.2 Long before setbacks in Greece, Mussolini had been confronted with a predatory German ally intent on appropriating Italy's spheres of influence; and Berlin's annoyance with Italy's attack on Greece seems to have been a compound of resentment at Rome's demand for equal status as an ally and its check to German efforts to appropriate the Balkans.3 It is thus all the stranger that writers have justified German anger with Italy by arguing that Mussolini had upset German plans to control the Balkans 'peacefully' and have insisted that a 'parallel war' ceased to exist in 1941 only because of Italian errors.4

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