Dependence and Divergence, 1941–2

Abstract

On 20 April 1941, Greece — having resisted the invasion launched by the Italians in October 1940 and the arrival of the Germans in the spring of the following year — finally capitulated to the Axis. In the days that followed, the Wehrmacht rounded up the remaining British and Colonial soldiers that had been sent to Greece’s defence, taking, by the time of the fall of Kalamata on 29 April, a grand total of 11,000 British POWs. A little over a month later, these were joined by an additional 12,000 of their comrades who, following evacuation from the mainland, had fought on in the subsequent battle for Crete, only to surrender on 1 June. Though the total number of POWs taken in the Greek campaign was less than the intake in Western Europe in 1940, the same problems of transportation, housing and food soon emerged. The two main transit camps in the region — Dulag 183 (Salonika) and the ‘Corinth Cage’ Frontstalag — were ramshackle facilities in which prisoners were beset by dysentery and untreated infections and, in some cases, shot by overzealous guards for such trivialities as attempting to use the open-ditch latrines at night. The experience of capture for Allied prisoners taken in North Africa during the same period was little better. The main transit camp at Benghazi — ‘The Palms’ — was little more than a dust-choked, barbed-wire-ringed enclosure, in which the sanitation was non-existent and the rations consisted of watery macaroni and hard tack biscuits, supplied in measly quantities.