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Most Anglo-American historians have paid scant attention to the Italo-Greek conflict of October 1940-April 1941, perhaps because the British played a minor role in Greece and the Americans none at all. Nonetheless, to ignore the struggle between Greece and Italy is to perpetuate the myth that Britain stood alone from the fall of France until the U.S. entry into the war; to distort the roles of the major belligerents, who included Italy as well as Germany and Britain in late 1940 and early 1941; and to misunderstand why World War II took the course that it did.(1) It is therefore worth examining the literature on the Italo-Greek conflict available to the reader of English.
Most monographs and translations available in English discount the Italian role and place the conflict in a German or British, rather than an Italian or Greek, context, and by doing so reinforce the Anglo-German bias that permeates historical works in English.(2) Over the past decade, only John Bitzes and Macgregor Knox have published studies on the Italo-Greek war, but Bitzes is interested primarily in examining the Greek war effort and Knox's discussion is flawed by a strong antifascist bias.(3) Consequently, although Mario Cervi's study was published well before the official history and many of the diplomatic documents were released, it is one of the few Italian works dealing with the war to have been translated into English and remains the best account of Italian military operations available to English readers.(4)
Typical of the offhand way in which the Italo-Greek conflict has been treated is the first official history of British operations in Greece by Christopher Buckley. While Buckley understandably focused his attention on Imperial units, he also belittled the Italian role and, despite some mandatory remarks about Hellenic heroism, he deprecated the Greeks, thereby reinforcing the impression that only German and British forces mattered in what was essentially an Italo-Greek theater.(5) More balanced is the later, multivolume official history of the Mediterranean and Middle East theaters by Playfair, who discussed Italian strategy and operations in some detail. But he still conveyed the impression that what really mattered were British and German operations. According to Playfair, the Greeks were able to repulse Italian counterattacks in early 1941 "without great difficulty," evidently because...