This is from my June 2009 Alternate History Newsletter

The Italian invasion of Greece was typical Mussolini. It showed off the fascist dictator’s ignorance of logistics and the impact of terrain and weather on military operations. He gave the Italian army two weeks to prepare for an assault that would have taken at least two or three months to prepare properly, launched the attack with half of the twenty divisions it would have taken at minimum, and pushed it in the middle of the October rainy season, making an attack across swollen rivers more difficult and reducing the role Italy’s air force and limited tank force could play.

Mussolini launched the attack as a response to Germany moving troops into Romania without giving Mussolini notice. Italy claimed the Balkans as their sphere of influence and Romania was also the source of most of Italy’s oil.

Let’s say Hitler has a rare attack of diplomatic common sense. He notifies Italy of the Romanian occupation and includes token Italian forces in the occupation. Mussolini doesn’t stop having Balkan fantasies and schemes, but he doesn’t act on them in the fall of 1940. The British attack in North Africa comes on schedule, shattering Italy’s pretense of being a great power, and ending Mussolini’s ability to independently pursue schemes like the invasion of Greece.

How does that affect the rest of the war? Without the Balkan commitments, Italy would probably do somewhat better in North Africa, though Mussolini would probably dissipate much of that advantage by pushing more Italian troops into the Soviet Union.

No Italian invasion of Greece would presumably mean no German Balkan campaign. How would that impact the German invasion of the Soviet Union? Historians have gone back and forth on that one. Initially, several historians asserted that the Balkan campaign delayed the campaign against the Soviet Union just long enough to keep the Germans from reaching Moscow and other key objectives in fall/winter 1941. Later historians have claimed that the delay was not all that significant—that high rivers and mud would have delayed the German invasion until no more than a few weeks before the historic date even without the Balkan campaign.

I suspect that no Balkan campaign would have meant a slightly earlier jump-off date for the German invasion—maybe two or three weeks. Would that have been enough to get the Germans to Moscow before the fall rainy season started in mid-to-late October and bogged down the Germans?

The lack of a Balkan campaign would have several affects on the campaign:

Timing: The timing would have been tight, but when the rains came the Germans were only about 100 miles away from Moscow with only a handful of divisions between them and the capital. Put them in the same position two weeks earlier and they would have probably have taken Moscow. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that the attack would have played out the same way up to that point if it had occurred two or three weeks earlier.

Logistics: In the early war years, the German economy was constrained by shortages of manpower, steel, oil, and quite a few other things. The Germans won their early victories by concentrating their efforts on one set of objectives. In an incredible display of overconfidence, the Germans built up a stockpile of weapons, spare parts, oil, and ammunition they felt was sufficient to defeat the Soviet Union. Then, before the attack even started, they shifted production emphasis to getting ready for the next war—an air/naval war against Britain and possibly the US.

The Balkan war was a walkover, but it did use up spare parts and ammunition that the Germans really could have used in the Soviet Union in the late summer and early fall of 1941. It put hundreds of miles on tanks and flying hours on planes. World War II tanks generally need thorough overhauls after a few hundred miles and the German tanks that participated in the Balkan war probably didn’t get the most thorough going over due to lack of time. Some of them may or may not have been ready for the kickoff for Barbarosa. More on that later.

A delayed German attack in the South? I’ve been trying to nail this down for a couple of years, but I haven’t been able to confirm it. One source claims that two of the four German panzer divisions intended for the southern part of the attack didn’t get back in time for the kickoff. As a result the Germans had to alter their plans from the usual double envelopment to an attempt to trap the Soviets against the Black Sea. It didn’t work. As a result, the Germans made slow progress in the south and eventually had to divert forces south from the drive on Moscow—the famous diversion that lead to a huge Soviet defeat in the south, but probably led to the German failure to take Moscow.

So, is all of that true? I’m not sure. The German attack did develop relatively slowly in the south, and the part of it that came out of Romania jumped off much later than the rest of it. On the other hand, the Soviet commander in the south risked Stalin’s wrath by putting his troops on the alert before the German attack.

Would the German attack have still been a surprise? The Balkan operation provided cover for much of the shift of German forces to the east. Would Stalin still have been fooled without it? If not, how would a German attack on alert Soviet forces have played out?

Posted on March 26, 2010.

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What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA.  POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.