How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

5 THE FATAL TURN TO THE EAST

HITLER HAD ALREADY SWITCHED HIS PRINCIPAL INTEREST AWAY FROM BRITAIN before the air war commenced. This came formally on July 31, 1940, in a conference with his senior military chiefs, when Hitler announced his “resolve to bring about the destruction of the vitality of Russia in the spring of 1941.”

This statement worried a number of German senior officers. They feared leaving Britain and its potential ally the United States as threats in the west, while Germany focused its energy, thoughts, and power on destruction of the Soviet Union.

The top army generals, along with their staffs, amassed arguments to convince Hitler to neutralize Britain before turning on Russia. Perhaps they realized dimly what Winston Churchill had grasped: that Britain’s best chance lay in holding out until Hitler made an irreparable slip, as Napoleon had done when he invaded Russia in 1812.

Only Erich Raeder, the German navy commander, saw the danger clearly enough to press repeatedly and with great conviction for another way to gain Germany’s goals. He demonstrated to Hitler that the victory over France had opened a way to victory—and Hitler would not have to attack the Soviet Union to achieve it.

Major General Alfred Jodl, chief of operations for the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), or armed forces supreme command, felt the same way, though less openly and less forcefully. In a June 30, 1940, memorandum Jodl wrote that if the strike across the Channel did not come off, the Mediterranean offered the best arena to defeat Britain. His recommendation was to seize Egypt and the Suez Canal. Maybe the Italians could do it alone. If not, the Germans could help.

At the time the British had only 36,000 men in Egypt, including a single incomplete armored division under the command of General Sir Archibald Wavell. Moreover, Italy’s entry into the war had closed off Britain’s supply line through the Mediterranean except by means of heavily guarded convoys. The main British route now had to go 12,000 miles around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, and up through the Red Sea.

Even if Britain devoted all its strength to building a strong army in Egypt, it would take months, perhaps a year, to do so. And Britain was not going to undertake such a task because it had to concentrate most of its efforts on defense of the homeland.

Italy, aided by Germany, could get superior forces to Italy’s colony of Libya far more quickly. At this stage, it would be relatively easy to use Luftwaffe bombers to neutralize Malta, a British possession only sixty miles south of Sicily, where aircraft, ships, and submarines constituted a major danger to Italian supply ships and reinforcements moving between Italy and Tripoli in Libya.

Hitler in his July 31 meeting did not wholly exclude a “peripheral strategy” in the Mediterranean, and Generals Walther von Brauchitsch, commander in chief of the army, and Franz Halder, chief of staff in the army high command, Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), proposed sending panzer forces (an “expeditionary corps”) and aircraft to Libya to help the Italians, who were planning an offensive into Egypt.

But Hitler hadn’t responded to Jodl’s memorandum and wouldn’t commit himself to a panzer corps and combat planes in Africa. The only thing in the Mediterranean that excited Hitler was the possibility of capturing the British base of Gibraltar, and thereby closing the western end of the Mediterranean to the Royal Navy. Britain had won this strategic rock from Spain in 1704 and had held it resolutely ever since.

Hitler could think of no way to grab Gibraltar except by direct assault. This meant German forces would have to approach through Spain. The Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, would have to cooperate. Seeing that Hitler was deeply taken with the idea, the senior generals sent Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr—the military counterintelligence service—to Madrid July 20–23 to get Franco’s reaction. Cagily, Franco didn’t reject Spanish help out of hand, but refused to commit.

The Gibraltar plan—the only idea ever considered was a headlong attack on the heavily fortified rock—now became a leitmotiv that ran through most of the discussions that followed. It was an absurd idea, and shows how unrealistic Hitler was.

The plan required Spanish entry into the war, an extremely dangerous move that would benefit Spain little, yet cause dire and immediate consequences. The British would cut off food imports from Argentina and other American countries Spain depended on, and would seize the Spanish Canary Islands off the northwestern coast of Africa. Franco wanted nothing to do with the plan, yet with the Wehrmacht on his border, he didn’t dare say so.

Aside from Gibraltar, Hitler also came up with other nonsensical ideas that demonstrated a profound lack of appreciation of the strategic possibilities that had opened to him. He waxed hugely enthusiastic about seizing two groups of Portuguese islands, the Azores, in the Atlantic 1,200 miles west of Lisbon, and the Cape Verde Islands, in the south Atlantic 150 miles west of Dakar off the coast of Africa. He also studied capture of the Canaries prior to a Gibraltar attack—with the idea of beating the British to the punch.

In theory, all three island groups would be useful as air and sea bases to break up British convoys that moved regularly through the Atlantic. Hitler’s excitement about the Azores, however, rested mainly on hopes of building long-range bombers that could reach the United States. If he could get these aircraft built and stationed on the Azores, he said, the threat would force the United States to concentrate on its own defense, and help Britain less.

The Atlantic islands idea was more absurd than the Gibraltar plan. Only Admiral Raeder dared to tell Hitler so, and even he couched his objections in discreet terms. The German navy could actually seize the islands in surprise moves, Raeder assured Hitler, but it could not protect the sea lanes to them thereafter. The Royal Navy would erect an iron blockade in days. German garrisons would be cut off from supplies, except driblets that might be flown in. Few attacks on British convoys— much less air attacks on the United States—could be mounted, because the Germans could get little fuel to the islands.

Raeder’s logic was overwhelming and should have ended the matter right there. But it didn’t. Hitler continued to agitate for capture of the Atlantic islands on into the fall and beyond.

Since the army generals had been unable to sway the Fuehrer to carry out a Mediterranean strategy, Admiral Raeder weighed in on September 6 and September 26, 1940. At the second conference Raeder cornered Hitler alone and showed him step by step how Germany could defeat Britain elsewhere than over the English Channel. Doing so would put Germany in a commanding position against the Soviet Union.

Raeder, bowing to Hitler’s passions, said the Germans should take Gibraltar and secure the Canary Islands. But his main concern in that part of the world was the great northwestern bulge of Africa, largely controlled by France.

An imponderable regarding Hitler’s thinking is why, when he was negotiating France’s surrender, he did not demand admission of German troops into French North Africa—Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. If the French refused, he could have threatened to occupy all of France and deny the French a government at Vichy. Besides, the French had so few troops in North Africa they couldn’t have prevented a German occupation.

The importance of the region was forced upon him only three days before the September 26 conference: a joint operation of British and Free French forces under Charles de Gaulle had tried to seize Dakar, but had been beaten off by Vichy French guns. This reinforced Raeder’s conviction that the British, supported by the United States, would try to get a foothold in northwest Africa in order to move against the Axis. He urged Germany to team up with Vichy France to secure the region.

But Raeder’s main argument was that the Axis should capture the Suez Canal. After Suez, German panzers could advance quickly through Palestine and Syria as far as Turkey.

“If we reach that point, Turkey will be in our power,” Raeder emphasized. “The Russian problem will then appear in a different light. It is doubtful whether an advance against Russia from the north [that is, Poland and Romania] will be necessary.”

No one realized this truth better than Winston Churchill. In a message to President Roosevelt a few months later, he asserted that if Egypt and the Middle East were lost, continuation of the war “would be a hard, long, and bleak proposition,” even if the United States entered.

But Adolf Hitler had a much more difficult time seeing what was clear to Churchill. According to Raeder, Hitler agreed with his “general trend of thought” but had to talk things over with Mussolini, Franco, and Pétain. This shows Hitler was seeking limited tactical gains in the Mediterranean. Although a drive through Suez would call for an agreement with Mussolini, it would not require concurrence of Franco or Pétain. This indicates Hitler did not grasp that the victory over France had transformed the entire strategic outlook for Germany.

Raeder felt the senior army generals had a “purely continental outlook,” did not understand the war-winning opportunities that had opened up on the south shore of the Mediterranean, and would never counsel Hitler correctly. Although the OKH, the army high command, and the OKW, the armed forces high command, did advise Hitler to send troops to North Africa, their proposals lacked Raeder’s urgency. Never did Brauchitsch, Halder, Jodl, or Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the OKW, express the conviction that the war could be won in the Mediterranean, although Keitel told Benito Mussolini that capture of Cairo was more important than capture of London. Part of their hesitancy lay in the knowledge that Hitler had been fixed for a long time on destroying the Soviet Union and gaining Lebensraum in the east. Their careers depended upon not rocking that boat. However, they never stressed to Hitler, as did Raeder, that victory in the Mediterranean would make it easier to achieve victory over the Soviet Union.

Once Axis forces overran Egypt and the Suez Canal, they would close the eastern Mediterranean to the Royal Navy. The British fleet would immediately retreat into the Red Sea, because it could not be adequately supplied by convoys through the western Mediterranean. Whether or not the Germans seized Gibraltar, Britain would be strategically paralyzed.

The Axis would be able to move at will into the Middle East, for the British had no substantial forces there. This region produced much of the world’s oil, and its capture would provide ample amounts of Germany’s single most-needed strategic material.

An advance on the southern frontier of Turkey would put the Turks in an impossible position. Hitler was already gaining Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria as allies. Therefore, Turkey could be approached both by way of Bulgaria at Istanbul and from northern Iraq and Syria. Turkey would be forced to join the Axis or grant passage for Axis forces and supplies. A defiant stance would result in the swift defeat of the Turkish army and disaster.

Passage through Turkey would reduce the importance of Malta and Gibraltar. This way, both could be eliminated without the active support of Franco and without direct assault.

German forces could occupy French North Africa with or without Vichy France’s cooperation. From French Morocco, they could approach from the south the small strip of Morocco along the Strait of Gibraltar ruled by Spain. Spain would be forced to grant transit rights, or stand aside if German forces occupied the strip without permission. Spain could not resist for fear of a German attack into the heart of Spain from France. Consequently, German airfields and batteries could be set up along the south shore of the strait. This would close it to Britain—without an expensive military assault on the rock of Gibraltar.

Sealing the Strait of Gibraltar would force the British to abandon Malta, because they could not supply it.

With the Royal Navy out of the Mediterranean, it would become an Axis lake. This would permit German forces to occupy all of western Africa, including the French base at Dakar in Senegal. Aircraft, ships, and submarines from Dakar could close down much of Britain’s convoy traffic through the South Atlantic, even without seizure of the Cape Verde islands.

In the Middle East the strategic payoff would be much greater. German forces in Iran would block that country as a route for supplies to the Soviet Union from Britain and the United States. Russia would be left with only the ports of Murmansk on the Barents Sea and Archangel on the White Sea through which goods from the west could be funneled. This would require dangerous passages in atrocious weather, with constant danger of attacks by German ships and aircraft stationed in Norway.

Even more important, the Soviet Union’s major oil fields were in the Caucasus and along the western shore of the Caspian Sea, just north of Iran. Germany could threaten not only an attack directly from Poland and Romania in the west but also from the south through the Caucasus to the Soviet oil fields. This danger of envelopment and quick loss of oil would immobilize Stalin, and obligate him to provide Germany with whatever grain and raw materials it might need. In other words, Germany—without loss of a single soldier—would have the benefits of the Soviet Union’s vast materials storehouse, as well as delivery of tin, rubber, and other goods from Southeast Asia by way of the Trans-Siberian Railway.

A German position in Iran would also pose a huge threat to British control of India, which was agitating for independence under Mohandas K. Gandhi and other leaders. From Iran Germany could reach India through the Khyber and other passes, invasion routes used long before and long after Alexander the Great made the passage in 326 B.C. Germany would not actually have to do a thing. The threat alone would force Britain to commit every possible soldier to defend its crown jewel. Germany, again without the expenditure of a single man, could immobilize Britain.

In possession of the Middle East, all of North and West Africa, and Europe west of Russia, its armed forces virtually intact, its economy able to exploit the resources of three continents, Germany would be virtually invincible. Britain’s defiance on the periphery of Europe would become increasingly irrelevant. Germany would not have to inaugurate an all-out U-boat war against its shipping. Britain’s remaining strength would have to be expended in protecting its empire and the convoys to and from the home islands.

The United States would have no hope of launching an invasion of mainland Europe against an undefeated and waiting German army until it had spent years building a vast navy, army, and air force, not to speak of the transports, landing craft, vehicles, and weapons necessary for such a giant undertaking. It is possible that the United States would take on this task, but the chances for its success would be extremely small. Far more likely, the American people would turn first to counter the expansion of Japan in the Pacific.

Meanwhile Germany could consolidate its empire, bring subject nations into an economic union, and grow more powerful economically, militarily, and politically every day. Before long, the world would become accustomed to the new German Empire and insist on a return to normal international trade.

This at last would give Hitler the opportunity he had dreamed of since the 1920s—seizure of all the Soviet Union west of the Urals. Once a de facto cease-fire had been achieved, Hitler could strike at European Russia from south and west, drive Stalin and the surviving Soviets into Siberia, and get the Lebensraum he coveted.

In the weeks that followed Raeder’s proposal Hitler appeared to be less firmly fixed on war in the east, at least in regard to timing, and looked on the navy commander’s proposals favorably. Senior German officers began to hope for a change in Hitler’s resolve.

Hitler’s ambivalence was based on faith that the Italian offensive into Egypt would have quick success. It had commenced on September 13, 1940, under the command of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani. The Italian army of six divisions was about three times the size of defending British forces. But German fears (and British optimism) began to rise almost at once, as Graziani advanced along the coast with extreme caution against little British resistance. Fifty miles inside Egypt, he stopped at Sidi Barrani, less than halfway to the British position at Mersa Matruh.

Here Graziani established a chain of fortified camps that were too far apart to support one another. Week after week passed with the Italians doing nothing. Meanwhile Wavell received reinforcements, including three armored regiments rushed out on Churchill’s orders from England in three fast merchant ships.

German military leaders had long harbored doubts about the ability of the Italian army to achieve much, and Graziani’s performance fanned these fears. Italian forces had shown only limited interest in war, and had poor or obsolete equipment and few mechanized forces of any kind. However, the German General Staff felt the principal deficiency was not poor weapons, but poor leadership. The Italian officer corps was ill-trained, lived separate from the men, and even had special food. There was little of the easy camaraderie between officers and men that marked the German army, and the high standards and special skills demanded of German officers were little stressed in the Italian military. On the other hand, German generals had great respect for the British army, especially its tenacity.

Consequently, senior German officers offered the panzer corps and aircraft, but Mussolini didn’t respond. He kept hoping Graziani would show some drive, push the British back, and give him and Italy some glory. But it didn’t happen. Even so Mussolini was reluctant to call in the Germans because it would look like an admission of failure. On the other hand, he didn’t want to lose Libya.

With the Italian army sitting at Sidi Barrani in October 1940, the German high command sent a panzer expert, Major General Wilhelm von Thoma, to North Africa to find out whether German forces should help the Italians—and also, unofficially, to look over the Italian army in action (or rather inaction).

Thoma reported back that four German armored divisions could be maintained in Africa and these would be all the force necessary to drive the British out of Egypt and the Suez and open the Middle East to conquest. At the time Germany possessed twenty panzer divisions, none being used.

Hitler called Thoma in to discuss the matter. He told Thoma he could spare only one panzer division, whereupon Thoma replied that it would be better to give up the whole idea. Thoma’s comment angered Hitler. He said his concept of sending German forces to Africa was narrowly political, designed to keep Mussolini from changing sides.

Hitler’s comments to Thoma reveal he didn’t see the road to victory through Suez that Raeder had pointed out to him. If he had, he would have insisted on committing German troops.

Hitler’s interest was focused on keeping Mussolini happy and on wild schemes like assaulting Gibraltar. He had not absorbed Raeder’s strategic insight. His mind remained fixed on Russia. He was hoarding his tanks to use there. That’s why he couldn’t spare more than a single panzer division for Africa.

The denouement in North Africa came swiftly. On December 7, Lieutenant General Sir Richard O’Connor assembled 30,000 British troops with 275 tanks in the Western Desert Force and moved out from Matruh against Sidi Barrani.

Graziani had 80,000 men at the front but only 120 tanks. The Italian infantry had little motor transport and were vulnerable to being surrounded by mobile British columns in the open desert country, where military formations could find little or no cover. Also, the Italian tanks were fourteen-ton M13 models with moderate armor and a low-power 47-millimeter gun. They were not wholly inadequate for the period but they had a bad reputation. Soldiers on both sides referred to them as “self-propelled coffins.” The British on the other hand had fifty heavily armored Matildas impervious to most Italian guns. These played a decisive role in the battles that followed.

O’Connor decided to approach the Italian camps from the rear, since the Italians had mined the spaces in front. On the night of December 8, the British passed through a gap in the enemy’s chain of camps, and early on December 9 stormed Nibeiwa camp from behind, with Matildas leading the way. The garrison, surprised, ran off, leaving 4,000 prisoners. Early in the afternoon the Matildas stormed two other camps to the north, Tummar West and Tummar East, sending these garrisons flying as well. Meanwhile the 7th Armored Division, soon to gain fame as the “Desert Rats,” drove westward, reached the coast road, and got astride the Italians’ line of retreat.

The next day the 4th Indian Division, aided by two tank regiments sent back by 7th Armored, moved north, converged on both sides of camps clustered around Sidi Barrani, and overran the position, taking thousands of prisoners.

On the third day, the reserve brigade of 7th Armored bounded westward twenty-five miles to the coast beyond Buq-Buq, where it intercepted a large column of retreating Italians, and captured 14,000. Within three days, half the Italians in Egypt had surrendered.

The remainder of the Italian army took refuge in the coast fortress of Bardia, just inside the Libyan frontier. The 7th Armored swiftly isolated Bardia by sweeping around to the west. It took until January 3, 1941, to bring up infantry to assault Bardia with twenty-two Matildas leading the way. The whole Italian garrison gave up: 45,000 men and 129 tanks.

The 7th Armored Division immediately rushed west to isolate Tobruk. When Australian infantry attacked on January 21 behind the sixteen Matildas still working, 30,000 Italians surrendered with eighty-seven tanks.

The Italians were offering practically no resistance, and at the rate they were going the British could have continued on to Tripoli. Unfortunately, Churchill decided to hold back British reserves to take advantage of another blunder that Benito Mussolini had made—on October 28 he had invaded Greece from Albania, which he had occupied in 1939. It was an act of strategic lunacy, for it involved Italy in a two-front war when it was having almost insuperable difficulties maintaining a one-front operation in North Africa. Il Duce (the leader), as Mussolini was called, hoped to carve out an Italian empire, but the Greeks resisted fiercely, drove the Italians back into Albania, and were threatening to rout the whole Italian army.

Hitler only learned about the attack after meeting with Mussolini in Florence the day it started. He was furious, because it disrupted all his plans, even his hesitant thinking about sending troops to North Africa.

Hitler had just come from meetings with the Spanish dictator Franco on the French border at Hendaye on October 23, and Pétain the next day at Montoire.

The talks at Hendaye went on for nine hours with no commitment on Franco’s part to enter the war and allow German troops to assault Gibraltar. Hitler departed frustrated and angry, calling Franco a “Jesuit swine.” The meeting with Pétain went better. Pétain agreed to collaborate with Germany to bring Britain to its knees. In return, France would get a high place in the “New Europe” and compensation in Africa for whatever territory France was forced to cede to others.

Churchill pushed the Greeks to accept a British force of tanks and artillery, but General Ioannis Metaxas, head of the Greek government, declined, saying the British would provoke German intervention but would be too weak to stop it. Even so, Churchill held forces in Egypt and ordered Wavell not to give O’Connor any reinforcements.

O’Connor meanwhile pushed on westward. His 7th Armored Division had shrunk to only fifty cruiser tanks. On February 3 he learned from air reconnaissance that the Italians were about to abandon the entire Benghazi corner of northwestern Cyrenaica. O’Connor at once ordered the 7th Armored to move through the desert interior to reach the coast road, Via Balbia, well to the south of Benghazi. Rough going through heavy sand slowed the tanks, and on February 4, Major General Sir Michael Creagh, commanding the division, organized an entirely wheeled force of infantry and artillery and sent it ahead with a group of armored cars. By the afternoon of February 5, this force had set up a barrage or barrier across the enemy’s line of retreat south of Beda Fomm. That evening the division’s twenty-nine still-serviceable cruiser tanks arrived and took up concealed positions.

When the main Italian force came up, it was accompanied by a hundred new cruiser M13 tanks that, combined, could have blasted the British out of the way and opened a clear path to Tripoli. But they approached in packets, not massed. The British tanks overpowered each group as it arrived. By nightfall February 6, sixty Italian tanks had been crippled and forty abandoned. With no armor to protect them, the Italian infantry surrendered—20,000 men. The total British force was only 3,000 men. It was one of the most overwhelming victories in the war, and raised British morale immensely.

There were few Italian troops left in Libya, and O’Connor confidently expected to rush on to Tripoli, where Italian officers were packing their bags for a hasty departure.

On February 6, 1941, the day the last Italian elements were being wiped out at Beda Fomm, Adolf Hitler summoned Erwin Rommel, forty-nine years old, to take command of a German mechanized corps that he had finally decided to send to rescue the Italians. The force was not the four panzer divisions General von Thoma had calculated was needed to seize Suez and conquer the Middle East. Rather it consisted of the single panzer division Hitler said he could spare (the 15th), plus a small tank-equipped motorized division (5th Light).

He had selected Rommel because, next to Heinz Guderian, he was the most famous panzer leader in Germany. Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division had moved so fast and mysteriously in May and June that the French called it the “ghost division.” Rommel’s high visibility made him the ideal choice for Africa, since Hitler was seeking primarily a public relations gesture to support Mussolini, not so much to reach a decision in Africa.

The first elements of Rommel’s new Deutsches Afrika Korps (DAK), or German Africa Corps, began arriving in mid-February 1941, though the whole 5th Light Division couldn’t get to Libya until mid-April, and the 15th Panzer Division would not get there till the end of May. There was still plenty of time, therefore, for the British to push on against minuscule opposition to Tripoli, and evict Italy from North Africa.

Just at that moment Prime Minister Churchill pulled up the reins on Wavell and O’Connor. He directed Wavell to prepare the largest possible force for Greece. This ended the advance on Tripoli. The radical change had occurred after General Metaxas died unexpectedly on January 29, and the new Greek prime minister succumbed to Churchill’s urgings to invite the British in.

Churchill foolishly hoped he could build a coalition of Balkan nations against Germany. The Greeks had thrown back the ill-equipped and unenthusiastic Italians, but the primitive Balkan armies were no match for German panzers. And, with the commitment of British forces to the Continent only months before he planned to attack the Soviet Union, Hitler saw his entire position threatened, particularly since British aircraft in Greece could strike at the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti. Hitler depended upon these for his war machine.

He ordered the army to prepare for an invasion of Greece through Bulgaria. By the third week of February 1941 the Germans had massed 680,000 troops in Romania. Bulgarian leaders, excited by Hitler’s promise to give them Greek territory and access to the Aegean Sea, allowed passage of German troops through the country. On February 28, German units crossed the Danube and took up positions to assault Greece.

The first of 53,000 British troops, mostly motorized forces from Australia and New Zealand, landed in Greece on March 7 and moved forward to help their new Greek allies. Off Cape Matapan south of Greece on March 28, the British fleet destroyed three Italian cruisers in a night battle, thereby ensuring that Mussolini’s battle fleet never dared challenge the Royal Navy again.

The Yugoslavs meanwhile had been under intense pressure to join the Axis. But the Yugoslav people, especially the Serbs, were violently opposed. The Yugoslav premier and foreign minister slipped out of Belgrade by night to avoid hostile demonstrations and signed the Tripartite Pact in the presence of Hitler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Vienna on March 25.

The next night in Belgrade, a popular uprising led by air force officers under General Dusan Simovic overthrew the government and the regent, Prince Paul, who had agreed to join the Axis. They packed Prince Paul off to Greece. Prince Paul had intended to kidnap Prince Peter, the eighteen-year-old heir to the throne, but Peter escaped down a drainpipe, and the rebels at once declared him king.

The coup threw Hitler into a wild rage. He ordered an immediate attack on Yugoslavia from all quarters.

At dawn on April 6, 1941, German armies of overwhelming strength fell on Yugoslavia and Greece. Maximilian von Weichs’s 2nd Army in Austria and Hungary rushed into Yugoslavia from the north and east.

Wilhelm List’s 12th Army in Bulgaria had the crucial task. While its 30th Corps pressed to the Aegean against no opposition near European Turkey, parts of the 18th Mountain Corps smashed against the Metaxas Line, but bounded back in repulse. This was Greece’s main defense in the northeast, held by six divisions.

Meanwhile the motorized 40th Corps under Georg Stumme and Panzer Group 1, five divisions under Ewald von Kleist, drove westward into southern Yugoslavia and split the Yugoslavs from the Greeks. Kleist’s panzers turned north, captured Nish, and raced down the Morava River valley toward Belgrade, meeting Georg Hans Reinhardt’s 41st Panzer Corps pressing on the capital from Romania.

The Yugoslav army in theory had thirty-five divisions. But it was poorly armed, and Yugoslavia was about to rip apart into its separate ethnic groups. Only about half the reservists, mostly Serbs, had answered the call to mobilize. The remainder, largely Croats and Slovenians, had remained at home.

The army command tried to concentrate its scattered Serbian troops around Sarajevo, but the German 41st Panzer Corps cut through Bosnia and forced about 300,000 men to surrender. Simovic and young King Peter flew out, first to Greece, later to Palestine.

Meanwhile, the German 40th Corps pressed into the Vardar River valley, seized Skopje in southern Yugoslavia, then turned through the Monastir Gap into Greece, about seventy-five miles west of Saloniki.

At the same time, parts of the 18th Mountain Corps slipped around Lake Dojran, twelve miles west of the point where the Greek, Yugoslav, and Bulgarian borders joined. Thereby flanking the Metaxas Line, they drove down the Vardar (Axios) valley to the Aegean and seized Saloniki. This isolated the Greeks on the Metaxas Line, and forced them to surrender.

The British expected the Germans to advance directly southward from Saloniki past Mount Olympus and along the Aegean. This is where they placed most of their troops. Instead, the Germans thrust southwestward from the Monastir Gap toward the west coast of Greece, cut off the Greeks in Albania, and turned the western flank of the British. This produced the quick collapse of resistance.

General Wavell, with agreement of London, ordered the expeditionary corps to evacuate. British warships and transports ran into harbors around Athens and the Peloponnisos, to which the British and some Greeks were hurrying, and began taking out troops, leaving most of their weapons behind. The Royal Navy evacuated 51,000 men by the end of April. Around 13,000 British were killed or forced to surrender.

As King George II of Greece, his family, and high officials flew out on British flying boats, German panzers rolled into Athens on April 27 and hoisted the swastika over the Acropolis. Most of the Greek army capitulated.

It had taken the Germans only three weeks to overrun Yugoslavia and Greece and drive the British once more off the Continent. Field Marshal List’s 12th Army alone had captured, in addition to the British, 90,000 Yugoslavs and 270,000 Greeks, at a cost of barely 5,000 killed and wounded.