In our time-line Italy initially stayed out of the war because it simply wasn’t ready for war. In June of 1940, with the fall of France imminent, Italy finally entered the war. They entered based on the false assumption that the fall of France meant the end of the war. Mussolini didn’t expect to have to fight. He just wanted to insure Italy a place at the peace table. The Italians ended up fighting in the North Africa, the Balkans, in the Soviet Union, and even in the Battle of Britain.

That leaves Greece. Britain did extend a guarantee to Greece in the wake of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. That may or may not be a factor depending on how occupied the western allies are elsewhere. Preparations for a Greek invasion should at least keep Mussolini focused on the Balkans and hopefully out of more dangerous waters.

A Balkan adventure actually fits fairly well with Mussolini’s mindset. He wants the Italians in a war, but he doesn’t want to operate as Hitler’s junior partner. In our history, he tried to present Italy’s fight as a “parallel war”. The Italians gear up for an attack on Greece.

The Italians would like to attack when the attention of the rest of the world is focused elsewhere. Ideally the attack should start during a major German offensive. Unfortunately, the Italians don’t know when the Germans are going to launch their offensive. The Italians settle on a target date of mid-April 1940. They spend the next several months building up forces in Italian-controlled Albania. Even given that amount of time, it isn’t an easy process. Albanian harbor facilities are limited. The rest of the Albanian infrastructure is also primitive. The Italians need to build or expand roads and airports. They need to build structures to house the growing number of Italian divisions in Albania.

A buildup like this can’t be totally concealed and both Greece and Yugoslavia become increasingly alarmed. The French and English have mixed emotions about the growing possibility of an Italian invasion of Greece. The French are happy to see Italian divisions going where they won’t be available for an Italian attack on France or the French possessions in North Africa. They aren’t thrilled by the prospect of an Italian attack somewhere in the Balkans, but they have more important things to worry about with operations in Norway going badly, and with a German attack through Belgium increasingly likely. The Chamberlain government regrets its guarantee to Greece. From a strategic point of view, war with Italy in spring or early summer of 1940 is very unattractive to the western allies.

Mussolini vacillates. He wants a Greek invasion, but he also wants to go after Yugoslavia, and wants to play a role elsewhere in the world. For example, he tries to send fighter aircraft to Finland during the Winter War, just as he did in our time-line. Those changes of emphasis have some impact on the planning for the Greek offensive. The Italian start date slips a little bit to late April or early May.

Mussolini is only part of the problem. Inter-service rivalries, logistics problems, and to some extent the weather all play a role too. The Italians are working hard to isolate the Greeks, but the Chamberlain government can’t afford the political fallout of giving the Italians a clear signal that their guarantee is no longer operative. Mussolini is impatient to go, especially as the western allies do poorly in responding to the German attacks on Denmark and Norway. In mid April he demands that the Italian army be ready to go on a week’s notice. By the end of April that drops to four days notice.

The German offensive in the west begins on schedule on May 10, 1940. On May 11, news of the German capture of the Belgian fort at Eben Emael convinces Mussolini and enough of the other Italian power holders that the time is right. The invasion is on for May 15. Italian troops move into position and the Italian government finishes the diplomatic groundwork for the attack.

The Italian offensive against Greece begins on May 15.. The western allies dither a bit on a response. There is the little matter of a British commitment to Greece. On the other hand, by May 15 the Germans have broken French lines and are headed toward the sea with essentially nothing to stop them. It is hardly the time to take on a new enemy. Also, the western powers have most of their mobile forces tied up in Norway, so there is a limit to what can be done in the short term militarily to help the Greeks.

The western allies confine themselves to words of condemnation, and keeping an eye on the Italian fleet. Italians attacking Greece is bad but it is not a strategic danger for the allies. On the other hand, an Italian occupation of Crete could have a major impact on the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean. That’s something the British would rather not allow. In mid-May they have the power to prevent it.

The Greeks spent a great deal of money in the late 1930s building a formidable set of defenses called the Metaxas line. Unfortunately, that line faces the Bulgarian frontier, not the Albanian one that the Italians will be attacking from. Defenses on the Albanian frontier are mainly field works.

The Italians have had time to build up a lot, though there is a limit to the size of the force that can be supplied through Albania’s harbor facilities. Historically the Italians attacked with roughly nine weak divisions after two weeks of preparation. Incredibly, they attacked an enemy that when fully mobilized was numerically superior locally They attacked in late fall at the start of a rainy season that left streams swollen and made air support difficult. In this scenario they have around twenty divisions available in Albania for the attack, and two more keeping an eye on the Yugoslav border. Three divisions in Italy are standing by to be deployed against Greek islands or landed at some point along the coast if the British don’t interfere and if the Italians can find enough shipping to move them and keep them supplied.

The Italian armed forces of May 1940 are not particularly formidable in the context of war with a great power. In the context of a war with Greece, they are formidable. In terms of divisions, the Italians have a numeric superiority—around 5 to 1 initially, though that drops below 2 to 1 when the Greeks mobilize and get their troops in position.

The Italians have a big edge in armor, though it isn’t high quality armor. They have two armored divisions. Those divisions have a couple hundred machine-gun armed tankettes between the two of them, along with a few worn-out Fiat 3000s—improved copies of the French World War I Renault FT17. The only reasonably modern tanks are 60 M11/39s—most of the M11/39s they’ve produced so far. The M11/39s are awkward-looking tanks, with a 37mm gun mounted in the hull and machine guns mounted in the turret. The Greeks have only a motley collection of armor—a couple of French tanks dating from the 1920’s, a couple of British 6-ton tanks purchased for evaluation, and a few armored cars useful mainly for internal security. The Italians also have superior artillery, though most of their guns are old.

The balance in the air is initially surprisingly close to even. The Italians are concerned enough about British and French intervention that they keep most of their modern planes in Italy or North Africa. The Greek invasion is initially supported by a little over a hundred fighter bi-planes, about equally divided between the early 1930s era Cr-32 and the more modern Cr-42. The Italians also have a little over a hundred reasonably good three-engine S79 bombers. In a pinch the Italians can pull in more of the roughly 200 Cr-42s that they have in service, or even some of the 100 to 150 low-wing monoplanes like the Fiat G.50s or Machi Mc200s that are starting to enter Italian service. The Italians do bring in a squadron or two of each of those fighters to give them a combat trial.

The Greeks counter with around 45 fighter planes, most of them Polish-built PZL-P24f and P24g. They also have 9 French-built Bloch 151s, a faster and somewhat modern design. The Polish-built planes are high-wing monoplanes of a slightly more recent vintage than the Cr-32s. They are about 35 miles per hour faster and better armed than the older Italian Cr-32 fighters, but not as maneuverable. Unfortunately for the Greeks, the Pzl-24s are 30 miles per hour slower than the Italian S79 bombers. The Greeks don’t have radar, and rely on a primitive spotter system to intercept Italian bombers. Given the small number of Greek fighters and their lack of speed, the Greeks have limited success in downing Italian bombers.

A war isn’t decided just by the material available to the opposing armies. Morale, unit cohesion, and especially training are key factors. Some of the Italian soldiers have combat experience from the Spanish civil war or from the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. On the other hand Italian training standards are abysmal, especially for the army. Italian logistics are bad—barely able to sustain a unit in a static position, and incapable of dealing with one in motion. The Italians have a lot of men with rifles, but they are very deficient in the bread-and-butter items of 1940s combat. They have few trucks and even fewer radios.

Italian leadership is bad from the top down, though not uniformly so. From Mussolini’s erratic decision-making to cowardly division commanders to scarce and poorly trained NCOs, the Italian soldiers have to deal with a leadership prone to putting them in untenable situations. Italian soldiers themselves are a mixed bag, quite capable of hard, stubborn defensive fighting when properly led, but usually not very effective on the offensive. There is no history of major rivalry between Greece and Italy, so Italian troops have difficulty understanding why they are being sent into this war.

The Greeks have a major advantage in morale. They also have a major advantage in terrain. Italy is invading on a narrow front through a very tough mountainous area, that the Greeks know intimately. On the other hand, the Italians are relying heavily on Alpine divisions--elite mountain troops like the ones in the Julia division. Those troops are tough fighters--respected even by people who look down at the bulk of the Italian army.

What happens when the Italian attack? Does the attack result in the same type of fiasco that happened in their attack in October 1940 in our time-line but on an even larger scale? Are they able to roll over the outnumbered defenders? Do outside powers get drawn into the battle? How do England and France react? How does Yugoslavia react? How does Hitler react to this complication in the Balkans during the Battle for France?

The British make it clear that Crete is off-limits, moving a battleship and its escorts off the coast of Crete. The Italian navy doesn’t challenge that move for the moment, though the Italians have plans for an eventual attack on Crete. The Italian navy is too busy for the moment trying to help an amphibious assault take the island of Corfu.

The Italian advance slows over the next two weeks as the Greeks mobilize and the Italian logistics system fallx apart. Italian troops run out of gas, food, water, and ammunition. That is in stark contrast to the German offensive in the west, which has sliced through to the English Channel, cutting off the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force and the most mobile part of the French army.

Mussolini looks at the German successes and wonders if he hasn’t made a mistake in getting tied down in Greece. He orders the Italian army to prepare to take advantage of a possible French collapse. That becomes more difficult when the Greeks launch a major counter-offensive on the Albanian front, starting at the end of May. Julia Division is temporarily cut off in early June, as are some smaller units.

The Greek offensive laps into Albania itself, and by the second week of June the Greeks briefly threaten to take Korce, the main town of southeastern Albania. A fuming Mussolini is forced to rush more airpower and more divisions into the area. Italian airpower, superior firepower, and numbers stop the Greek counteroffensive by the end of June. Most of Julia division fights its way back into contact with the front lines, though the Greeks overrun several smaller units.

Mussolini sacks several of the worst Italian commanders, along with others that happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. By this time France has fallen. It looks as though the war in west is over. Mussolini thinks he has missed a major opportunity by not being able to take part in the the fall of France. There is still a chance of salvaging something though. Several French colonial governors are toying with the idea of continuing the fight from North Africa. The fact that Italian forces are tied down in Greece makes that somewhat more feasible. Also, the British are still holding out, though it doesn’t look as though that will continue for long.

Mussolini wants to quickly liquidate the Greek adventure, then build up Italian forces in North Africa where they will be available for any opportunity that might arise there. Hitler isn’t interested in having the Italians join the war at the moment. He doesn’t need them and he is afraid that they will complicate the process of reaching a settlement with Britain. Britain suddenly becomes much more accommodating to the Italians. Crete is important, but it isn’t as important as the home islands, or the communication lines to the British empire that are vulnerable to Italian attack.

The Italians make an amphibious landing on Crete in early July of 1940. They almost get pushed back into the sea, but Italian warships break up the Greek assault at the last minute with their heavy guns. It takes over a month, but the Italians eventually take Crete.

On the Albanian front, the Italians are back on the offensive by mid-July. They push the Greeks back out of the pockets of Albanian territory that they had captured and push a little ways into Greece.  Italian control of the seas around Greece cuts the Greeks off from many of its imports. It also threatens possible amphibious landings along the coasts, pulling Greek troops away from the Albanian front. Bulgaria is quietly building up forces on sections of its border with Greece, looking for an opportunity to rewrite disputed borders. That also saps Greek strength on the Albanian front.

The fall of France and the loss of Crete have had a major impact on Greek morale. Greek dictator Metaxas knows that if the war goes on eventually Greece will run out of munitions or troops or both. They are already running out of airplanes. All of the French-built fighters have either been shot down or run out of spare parts. The Greeks keep a handful of Polish-built PZL P.24 in the air by cannibalizing the rest of the fleet.

Hitler wants the Greek/Italian war to stop. He doesn’t mind seeing Mussolini cut down to size, but he needs raw materials that are either from or pass through the Balkans. He may eventually need Italy for the war against England, though the Italian performance in Greece makes that unlikely.

The Germans put heavy pressure on both Greece and Italy to come to some sort of face-saving settlement. After the German performance against France, the Germans are in a position to twist arms very persuasively. The Greeks initially resist the arm-twisting. Hitler ups the ante a little. He applies economic pressure. The Germans take nearly 40 percent of Greek exports and provide nearly 30 percent of their imports, so German economic power is a formidable weapon. Hitler also passes 150 captured French R35s to the Italians. In a Great Power context those tanks would be trivial, but they more than double Italy’s stock of cannon-armed tanks. They also make Italian logistics more complicated in the long run. In the short-term the increase in combat power makes them worth it, even in the less than ideal tank country of the Albanian/Greek front. The Greeks don’t have much that can stop an R35.

The Italian offensive grinds on through July and early August, with progress often measured in yards rather than miles. In mid-August, the two sides agree to a settlement. Italy keeps Crete, some other Greek islands, and not much more than enough Greek territory on the mainland to bury the Italian dead. Neither side is particularly happy about the settlement, but Mussolini wants to free up Italian troops for the scramble for the British empire that he is pretty sure will erupt once the Germans launch Operation Sea Lion. The Greeks know that they can barely take on the Italians. They want no part of a war with the Germans.

There were several other important and avoidable Italian mistakes. The army that invaded Greece historically had less than half the roughly twenty divisions that the Italian army felt that they needed to conquer Greece. Those divisions were given two weeks to prepare for the offensive.

To make matters worse, at the beginning of October 1940, the Italians de-mobilized 600,000 men of the 1.2 million men that they had under arms in Italy. Those men were desperately needed for the harvest in the still largely peasant Italian economy, but demobilizing them meant that the Italian army had few complete and coherent units with which to respond to any emergency. To make matters worse, when the situation in Albania became desperate the Italians didn’t remobilize the recently released men. Instead they brought in new men, often poorly trained even by Italian standards, and sent them to Albania piecemeal. Unit cohesion was often non-existent as parts of divisions arrived intermingled and without their heavy equipment.

In this scenario the Italians avoid those mistakes for the most part due to the timing of the invasion. Given the nature of the Fascist regime they would make other mistakes, but those mistakes are unlikely to be as disastrous.

Mussolini hasn’t given up on expanding his empire. He has the Italian armed forces building up to invade Egypt and the Sudan, with that invasion hopefully coming during operation Sea Lion. Mussolini is also building up to seize Corsica and parts of North Africa from the Vichy French—something he historically toyed with doing in late 1940.

The Battle of Britain comes and goes. Sea Lion is postponed indefinitely. Mussolini prudently decides to wait until spring for his next moment of glory.

The Italian bargaining position versus the Germans improves substantially in the fall of 1940. Hitler is toying with the idea of a “peripheral strategy” against Britain. If he can’t take the island directly he may be able to destroy the lines of communications. For that he needs the Italians, the Japanese, and probably the Soviets. Unfortunately for the Germans, all of those powers have their own agendas, and those agendas tend to boil down to having the Germans do most of the heavy fighting while someone else gets most of the booty. As happened historically, Hitler decides to head east.

On the other hand, the German drive into the Balkans may have had more subtle affects on Barbarossa. It had to consume a certain amount of oil, and put a certain amount of wear and tear on trucks, tanks, and planes. The German assault on Crete used up the German airborne capability, along with a large number of transport planes. The Germans lost over 200 planes in that attack. The airborne capability would probably have been of some use to the Germans in Barbarossa, and the transport planes would have certainly been useful. Rommel and the men who in our time-line became Africa Korp would be running around in the Soviet Union. That might make some difference, but probably not that much.

There is some indication that that operations in the Balkans slowed down German operations on the southern part of the front with the Soviet Union. Certainly the German offensive didn’t progress as well in the south as it did elsewhere, but that may or may not have been tied to the Balkan offensive.

My gut feeling is that the Germans would have gotten a little further in the Soviet Union given this scenario, but the difference would not have been decisive. I suspect that the Soviet Union would survive at least the initial assault unless Stalin lost his nerve, which is possible. On the other hand, even another week of good campaigning weather in mid-October 1941 would have made the Soviet position in front of Moscow much more serious. The fate of the Soviet Union is vital to the course of the time-line but unknowable.

Italy would probably have stayed out of the war for the most part. Once it became obvious that Britain was not going to fold easily, the Italians had little choice but to wait for a more favorable moment. They would wait until the spring of 1941 and a renewed Battle of Britain. When that didn’t materialize they would wait until the Soviet Union collapsed. Chances are that Mussolini would send 3 or 4 divisions of “volunteers” to the eastern front to help the German invasion. As it became obvious that the Soviets were not going to fold easily, the Italians would inch away from the Germans and toward a genuinely neutral stance.

Britain would be in a much stronger position in some ways in this scenario. The lack of an immediate threat to Egypt would give the British more flexibility in allocating forces between the Middle East and the Far East. That would make a Japanese assault on British Far Eastern possessions less likely. The fact that the Mediterranean was open for routine shipping would ease the shipping shortage a great deal by eliminating the need to go around Africa. Also, without a continuing series of British setbacks the Congress party in India might have avoided the “Quit India” campaign that disrupted the British effort.

On the other hand, the lack of an active front in North Africa means that the British would not have an opportunity to learn the many lessons on how to fight a war that Rommel taught them. When the British did fight again, they would have to learn those lessons in a less forgiving setting. They might learn some of them by large scale raids on the French and Norwegian coasts, but that wouldn’t teach them the art of maneuvering on the strategic level.

By late 1941, the unknowable factors start to pile up. Would Japan still go south against a much stronger Britain, or would it attack the Soviet Union? Would the Germans still fail in front of Moscow? If they did fail, would it be in way that left them stronger or weaker in the spring than they were historically? Would Italy stay out of the war entirely and emerge as a slightly bigger equivalent of Franco’s Spain? What would happen to its empire if it survives the war intact? This scenario could actually lead to a world where both the Italian fascist regime and the Japanese militarists survive World War II as reasonably major powers, but the German Nazis do not. That’s probably not the most likely outcome, but it could happen and it would be an interesting twist. Where do you think things would go from here?