Two days before the fall of Korce the Greek General Staff
met to discuss air strategy. Present were Metaxas, Papagos, RHAF Operations
Chief Group Captain Stergios Tilios and Group Captain Arthur Willetts on behalf
of the RAF. The meeting came not a moment too soon, as by now it had become
clear that the Greeks and British had worrisomely differing concepts of what
the term ‘air strategy’ meant. To the Greek military, as in all second-string
European countries which had not had combat experience in the 1930s, an air
force was little more than a set of artillery pieces with wings, to send over a
trajectory beyond the visibility of land guns and drop high explosive on the
enemy. True, any officer could perceive the distinction between a bomber and a
fighter operation, but it was seen in simplistic terms as offence (bomber) and
defence (fighter). More sophisticated missions for fighters such as escorting
bomber formations had not yet been thought of. Though Metaxas can take credit
for perceiving the importance of an air force in the first place, Greece could
boast no Douhet or Balbo in the theoretical sphere.
Willetts may or may not have been aware that Air Chief
Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore, the RAF commander in the Middle East, had sent
D’Albiac detailed instructions on how to maintain the relationship with the
Greeks. They read, in part:
You will have the
status of an independent air force command, but, although not under the control
of the Greek General Staff, the conduct of operations of the RAF should, as far
as practicable … conform as closely as possible to the Greek plan for the
defence of the country.
This was a diplomatic way of trying to bridge the
differences, but in case the Greeks didn’t get the message, Longmore was coldly
specific:
You are not to allow
bombers to be used for artillery or to participate in actual land operations
unless the military situation becomes so critical as to justify the temporary
diversion of our bombers from strategic bombing to support of the Greek land
forces … The possibility of a sudden and complete collapse of Greece must not
be lost sight of.
In plain words, helping the Greeks was all very well and
noble, but if it meant frittering away men and aircraft on a cause that may
well be doomed, then that help would be of little use. Britain of course, had
to consider the wider war theatre. In practical terms, that meant that the Greek
request for RAF Hurricane fighters, for example, had to be refused. The old
stringy Gladiators had to suffice for the present. Besides, the Wellingtons and
Blenheim Is of 70 Squadron were deemed quite good enough to hammer the Italians
in Albania.
As a ranking RAF officer in Greece, Willetts must have been
aware of these directives. Morale was high at the meeting, as Korce was about
to fall any day. But a curtain of tension fell when Papagos duly called for
British air support to hit the retreating Italian ground troops. As Prince
Peter recalled later, at that point Metaxas turned to Willetts with the
observation that he knew there was going to be an Italian air attack that day.
Papagos, overhearing the aside, gently reprimanded his own prime minister in Greek
that he had just spilled a secret to the British. For a commander-in-chief, and
in the face of an iron leader such as Metaxas, this was skating dangerously
close to insubordination. It can only be explained by Papagos’ panic that the
RAF might balk at being a Greek flying artillery arm and insist on operating as
it saw fit.
Willetts, though not understanding Greek, guessed what the
muttering was about. Such was the passion of the Greek vengeance against the
Italian aggressors that Papagos wanted RAF planes not only to bomb the Italians
out of their positions, but also to mercilessly strafe them as they retreated.
This didn’t sound right to Willetts, who, encouraged by Metaxas’ observation,
said on the record that the RAF would be better employed in fighting off the
expected Italian air raids. After a lunch break Papagos reiterated his demand
as if nothing had happened. This time D’Albiac was present. After sitting
through a turgid speech by Papagos detailing the string of Greek victories on
the Albanian front D’Albiac reluctantly agreed to send bombers to hasten the
Italian withdrawal somewhat, but he drew the line at machine-gunning the
fleeing enemy.
Papagos alternated between impatience to keep up the
pressure on the Italian army and worry that his logistics setup lagged behind
developments on the front line. Still, Gambier-Parry was quite unprepared for
what he heard on his next visit to Papagos. If the British were to send troops
to help Greece, the Greek C-in-C said casually, ‘they would be welcome’.
British airmen now were not enough; grounds troops would be useful, too.
Gambier-Parry replied that he would officially forward the request to the
proper quarters. There was also the foreign press corps in Athens, demanding
loudly that they be allowed at the front, and Metaxas still had not made up his
mind about whether he wanted them there. To the Greeks, if not to some of the
British, this was still not a ‘journalistic war’.
As Greek forces closed on Korce D’Albiac mostly cooperated
with the Greek air demands. He was loth to run counter to the prevailing spirit
of optimism and didn’t want to be the fly in the ointment of victory. On 21
November Papagos presented a ‘shopping list’ to D’Albiac: the RAF was asked to
bomb not only the Albanian port of Durres but also Bari, Brindisi and Ancona on
the Italian mainland, and, while we’re at it, why not Rome itself? The urgency
was that an Italian army corps was reported about to disembark in Albania and
had to be stopped. D’Albiac agreed, ordering a bombing raid on Durres for that
evening and targeting Bari and Brindisi the following night, ‘weather
permitting’. Rome was, delicately, not mentioned again.
The weather refused to cooperate for the planned raid on
Durres, but on 22 November few cared to quibble about it, for the capital was
consumed with the happy news of the fall of Korce. Yet one of those few was
Papagos, who complained to D’Albiac. The air commodore promised to bomb Durres
that same evening, with some of the twenty-five Blenheim bombers of 211 Squadron
scheduled to arrive from the Middle East that afternoon. Later that day
Willetts told Papagos that three 211 Squadron bombers would be heading for
Durres that night.
‘Papagos jumped from his chair,’ Prince Peter recorded.
‘What?’ he cried. ‘Just three?’ Willetts apologized for not having any more for
that night, but pledged a bigger force for the following night. Willetts also
politely refused to agree to a request by the Greek C-in-C that the RAF bomb
the roads south of Gjirokaster, on the grounds that it would be a ‘tactical’
rather than a strategic strike and thus outside the British remit. The group
captain could stand firm against the weight of Greek brass because that same
day Air Chief Marshal Longmore had arrived in Athens to see for himself what
was being done with his precious planes and crews.
Longmore hit the Greeks like a cold shower. His first
meeting with King George went rather badly. With Prince Peter present, the king
fulsomely praised Britain’s air help to the Greeks and, perhaps unwisely,
mentioned a need for more. The crusty air chief marshal, unimpressed by the
crowned head before him, replied gruffly that the king was wrong in
automatically counting on the RAF’s help as his (Longmore’s) overwhelming
priority was to keep Britain’s air force fighting in the Middle East. In
Longmore’s narrowly functional view the Greek sideshow was nowhere near the
RAF’s prime concern and the Greeks had to be constantly reminded of that.
Essentially, Britain was doing Greece a favour having little to do with
Britain’s prime strategic tasks, and losing young men to boot. The king came
away from the meeting grumbling about Longmore as ‘a very unpleasant man’.
If the Greek king came off the worse from the encounter with
Longmore, Papagos could expect no different. But at least Papagos, an able
officer, put up some sort of spirited response. After being lectured by
Longmore about the secondary nature of the Greek front to Britain’s strategic
concerns, Papagos replied that he saw strategy on a wider scale; in a unified
war effort, he opined, every theatre of war was related to every other. For
example, he said, an effective strategic bombing of Albania would help reduce
the Italian pressure in North Africa. This argument of the interconnectibility
of war fronts appeared to make some impression on the parade-ground Longmore,
who softened even more after encountering the same reasoned arguments from
Metaxas himself.
[Longmore] replied that he agreed, and that despite the
dearth of means which he had at his disposal he promised to do what he could.
He said he would see to it that more British-built and American-built aircraft
became available. Metaxas’ eyes lit up behind his glasses as he saw he had
scored a success with the air chief marshal, and he assured him that with the
help of the RAF and Royal Navy … Greece would stand up to Hitler if the
situation warranted.
Yet the elements are deaf to the concerns of soldiers, and
once more bad weather saved Durres from a British bombing. D’Albiac, to placate
a touchy Papagos, agreed to bomb Tepelene, Gjirokaster and Pogradec, then still
in Italian hands. In support, the RHAF’s Gladiators of 21 Mira would be
stationed at northern Greek airfields in preparation for deployment at the
captured base at Korce. But Papagos continued to fret about Durres, where
Italian reinforcements were, perhaps at that moment, coming off the troopships.
Gambier-Parry, to lighten the atmosphere, brought in a spurious message to the
king from Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary, to the effect that the
Italian military leadership was supposedly on the verge of revolting against
the fascist party.
As the meeting progressed, news arrived that the RAF had
bombed columns of enemy vehicles at Vlore. Orders went out that forward
airfields be activated, in particular one located at the bottom of a gorge-like
valley at Paramythia, a few miles south of the Albanian border. Paramythia
field nestled alongside the bed of the Acheron River, which the ancient Greeks
believed to be the entrance to Hades. The landscape is certainly portentous.
Great crags soar thousands of feet on either side. The pilot of anything as
large as a twin-engined bomber had to be careful to negotiate landings and
climb-outs, which of course could not be done in foggy weather or at night.
After take-off a Blenheim or a Wellington pilot needed to make a series of
tight climbing circles before clearing the peaks. The first British airmen to
use Paramythia were the pilots of 815 Naval Air Squadron, Fleet Air Arm, whose
ancient-looking but agile Fairey Swordfish torpedo-bomber biplanes could
negotiate the approaches with rather more ease. The British quickly dubbed
Paramythia ‘Fairy Tale Valley’, inspired both by the unearthly beauty of the
place and the Greek word paramythia, which actually means fairy tales.
The great merit of Fairy Tale Valley was that the Italian
air force didn’t know about it. The strip was devilishly hard to find by visual
aerial reconnaissance alone. The naval pilots were under strict orders to use
Paramythia as a facility for over-water operations against the Italian fleet
only. The Swordfish could slip in and out from the coast undetected, but 815
NAS was strictly prohibited from tangling with the Regia Aeronautica over
Albania or Greece. If the Italians saw Swordfish in the air they would realize
that the Fleet Air Arm was using a base in Epiros, and Fairy Tale Valley would
be blown.
At the daily air strategy meetings Papagos suggested that
the RAF’s Gladiators move up to the base at Ioannina, as their present base at
Trikala in central Greece was often under cloud and a target of Italian
bombers. Group Captain Tilios, the Senior Greek Air Commander, said he
suspected that security leaks had resulted in the Italians bombing the
airfields at Kozani and Florina. D’Albiac and Willetts nodded in agreement. The
incident with Reuters and the capture of the Greek amphibious commando team in
Albania was having its repercussions in Athens, and the Greek security services
were paranoid. Gambier-Parry, the British Military Mission head, was on the
point of being replaced as lacking experience in the security sphere. The RAF,
on the contrary, was becoming increasingly indispensable to the Greek air war
despite Air Chief Marshal Longmore’s inhibitions.
It was fortunate that Hickey and Pattle and the rest of 80
Squadron were giving excellent accounts of themselves over the front, not only
giving the RHAF priceless tips on air combat but also raising Britain’s
military profile in Greece. By early December the squadron at Ioannina had been
joined by more Gladiators from 112 Squadron. There were regular patrols over
Gjirokaster in southern Albania, which was now in Greek hands and hence a key
Italian bombing target. Pattle, meanwhile, had developed an innovative
technique for dealing with the SM79 in particular. Stalking the three-engined
bomber from the rear, he would deliver a carefully-timed burst of fire –
lasting half a second, no more – into the plane’s fuel tank situated between
the fuselage and the port engine. For the next ten seconds he would stay on the
bomber’s tail while its fuel sprayed out. At the right moment Pattle would fire
a second burst into the fuel cloud, and the SM79 would blow up. It wasn’t long
before all his squadron mates had learned the trick.
For the RHAF, though, the attrition through December was
becoming serious. By now it was easy for the Regia Aeronautica’s bombers to
brush by whatever defences the RHAF could put up. Malakis and his crew, the
ones who had pulverized the Italian military hospital at Permet, were lost
eleven days later. What remained of 1 Army Cooperation (Observation) Mira was
blasted on the ground at Kozani and Florina thanks to a daring raid by 364
Squadriglia led by Captain Edoardo Molinari, an Italian ace, and followed by a
formation of SM81s. A similar fate befell 2 and 4 Army Cooperation
(Observation) Mirai at Florina, which had to be abandoned. The Italians raided
Corfu virtually unopposed, killing at least two hundred civilians.
Reinforcements from the RAF’s 112 Squadron gave the Greek
fliers a bit of a reprieve, and an opportunity to retire a few of the more
battered PZLs. Pattle was always on hand to give the inspiring example, ranging
far and wide out of Ioannina with his spectacular air fighting skills. On 3
December he added to his roster of kills by downing two slow-moving Meridionali
Ro37 observation planes – soft targets, but kills nonetheless. The PZLs
continued their robust works against the Fiat CR42s, but these latter were now
being rapidly superseded in the Albanian theatre by the G50 and the even more
redoubtable Macchi MC200 Saetta. Greece’s own pot-holed airfields were almost
as hazardous as the enemy, writing off about one plane per week. Moreover, with
the Italian army retreating farther into Albania and flying weather worsening,
the RHAF’s remaining warplanes and crews were hard-pressed to maintain their
range and operational endurance.
The RAF’s bombers continued to meet stiff opposition over
Vlore, with the Blenheims of 211 Squadron coming under nightly attack from all
three squadriglie of 150 Gruppo. One of 211 Squadron’s skippers, Flight
Lieutenant George Doudney, got off very lightly indeed when a bullet penetrated
his flying helmet but not the contents. The Gladiators of 80 Squadron gave as
good as they got, but more often than not 150 Gruppo’s Fiats clawed their quota
of RAF bombers regardless. Two of 84 Squadron’s Blenheims were shot down by 365
Squadriglia on 7 December, only one crewmember surviving. A 211 Squadron
Blenheim was sent plunging in to the sea off Sarande on 18 December, killing
the crew. Four days later Major Oscar Molinari of 160 Gruppo disposed of two
Gladiators.
Shortly before Christmas the temperature plummetted so low
at Ptolemais airfield that the oil froze in the engines of the PZLs of 22 and
23 Mirai. To forestall the oil lines rupturing, engineers tried to warm them
over bonfires, but to no avail. Thanks to an old delouser obtained by a
resourceful engineer officer, the engines were steamed into operation, but even
then the snow on the runway was too deep for the fighters to take off. As
squadriglie of Italian CantZ1007s and SM79s droned overhead on their way to
bomb Thessaloniki, the RHAF’s Fighter Chief, Wing Commander Emmanuel Kelaidis,
ordered that the PZLs be dismantled and sent overland to the milder conditions
of Sedes, about 150 miles to the east. In a remarkable feat of determination
that entered Greek air force annals as the ‘Engineers’ Epic’, ground crews
forced their ice-numbed fingers into action to unscrew the wings from
twenty-two PZLs. The semi-dismantled planes were then towed 26km in a blinding
blizzard through wolf-infested hills to the nearest railway station for loading
on flatbeds to Thessaloniki and Sedes. There were three such laborious
processions. Within days the planes had been reassembled to fight again.
Despite such manifestations of an indomitable Greek air
spirit, it was the RAF that now was bearing the brunt of the war in the air.
Longmore’s initial fears of Britain’s becoming over-involved in the Greek
effort had been overtaken by the pressure of events. The Italian aircrews were
well aware of the shift in power. The Greek fliers had been brave enough, but
the RAF’s fighter boys showed their experience. The Gladiators of Hickey and
Pattle regularly engaged the Italians in what they ruefully termed a carosello
infernale, an infernal carousel. On 20 December a formation of six SM79s was
broken up before it could bomb an advancing Greek column. Over Gjirokaster on
23 December the dogfights resumed. Hickey and Pattle dived into 364 Squadriglia
escorting a formation of SM79 and Breda Br20 bombers and scored a couple of
kills in quick succession. The escorting CR42s, however, managed to stay out of
range of the Gladiators’ guns, forcing Pattle and his wingmen to try some
dangerous manoeuvres in a sky filled with flaming tracer. But Hickey that day
ran out of luck. Either Captain Luigi Corsini or Sergeant Major Virgilio
Pongiluppi fired the fatal burst into Hickey’s Gladiator, though the 80
Squadron CO might well have survived had he not been machine-gunned to death as
he drifted down. In a few weeks he would have returned to his wife and children
in Australia. Two other Gladiator pilots were wounded, and five of 80
Squadron’s aircraft seriously damaged.
The Blenheim bombers of 211 Squadron continued their attacks
on enemy targets over Christmas, to be met by 150 Gruppo’s fighters. On Boxing
Day 364 Squadriglia eliminated a Blenheim that was bombing the Vlore-Himare
road, while on New Year’s Eve di Robilant and Sergeant Enrico Micheli downed a
Blenheim flown by Sergeant S. Bennett, killing its crew.
While the bulk of the RHAF was deployed over the Albanian
front and over Greece’s vulnerable towns, its naval cooperation arm was quietly
keeping the Aegean Sea lanes free of enemy submarines. The air force had three maritime
mirai, 11, 12 and 13, the last-named equipped with modern Avro Anson patrol
aircraft. The sinking of the Elli in August, in fact, was the last successful
instance of enemy submarine action in the Aegean Sea until the German conquest
in spring 1941. The Ansons and the ageing Fairey III seaplanes protected many a
shipload of Greek troops as they were transported to the front from Crete and
the islands. Some managed to drop a few bombs on Italian naval installations in
Rhodes and the Dodecanese islands.
Meanwhile, D’Albiac – perhaps with one eye on the publicity
it could entail – decided to send a few RAF planes to drop packets of toys and
sweets for the children of Corfu on Christmas morning. Hardly had the presents
been dropped than the Regia Aeronautica bombed the port of Corfu, killing
eighteen people having their Christmas dinner. D’Albiac, incensed, gathered
together what crews he could from 211 Squadron and sent them off from Tatoi to
plaster Vlore that night. The Blenheims were lucky enough to encounter two
Italian warships just entering the port and raked their decks with machine gun
fire, veering away before the Italian flak crews realized what was happening.
The Italian Christmas Day raid on Corfu left a bitter taste in Greek mouths.
‘The bastards!’ Metaxas scrawled in his diary that night.
The end of December saw more losses in 31 Mira, whose
Blenheim IVs were being decimated. The fighter squadrons weren’t in much better
shape, as bad weather over Albania often prevented them from shooting up the
retreating Italian columns. In a little over two months of war, thirty-one RHAF
aircrew officers had been killed and seven wounded, plus four NCOs killed and
five wounded. Just twenty-eight fighters remained in battleworthy condition,
mostly PZLs and Gladiators, while the number of front-line bombers was down to
seven. Regardless of the successes of the Greek army in Albania, the air force
was on the ropes. The RAF, by default, was about to assume most of the
responsibility for the air defence of Greece. For the Greek leadership this was
not as welcome a prospect as one might think. For, in Metaxas’ mind at least,
it could not help but bring closer the day that Hitler would see Britain
becoming more heavily involved on Greece’s side and decide to make his own ‘big
brother’ move and intervene on Mussolini’s behalf. If that happened, he knew
the game was up. As long as his army was pushing back the Italians in Albania,
Metaxas could gamble that the war would end in some kind of armistice line and
Greece could get its breath back for a widening world conflict whose outcome at
that stage could not be known.
