An Italian version of Mussolini's Invasion of the Balkans

This book by Massimiliano Afiero has a particular resonance with me personally as my mother and her two sisters grew up with my grandmother Olympia on the Albanian border and had vivid memories of the war. My eldest aunt, Athanasia, used to tell stories about hiding in the valley near the town where they grew up, Skalohori. So I was hoping for a good account of this campaign which had a significant impact on the larger war.

Unfortunately, what Afiero presents is a completely one-sided history based solely on Italian language sources. He fails to use the two volumes of the Greek Official Staff Studies for which there is no excuse as they have been translated into English, nor does he use excellent British and New Zealand Official Histories for the campaign. Thus, while there are detailed accounts of small Italian Army unit actions, the Greek Army is never depicted below the division level.

This results in the reader having little idea how the Greeks defeated the Italian Army in 1940 except that the Greeks had a larger force in the initial battles. The heroism of Greek soldiers in very harsh environmental conditions is ignored, as is the smart staff work of the Greeks in planning and executing a very successful counteroffensive that began to turn the tide in November 1940. In addition there are not enough maps to follow the actions described in the text.

Furthermore, Afiero has chosen to insert in full the Fascist text of important medal winners in the war, which leads to turgid Fascist Propaganda Prose like the following:

“Wounded, he continued his action arriving first at the enemy positions. Clinging to rocks with his Alpine men, he tenaciously resisted the enemy’s repeated attacks, preventing him from advancing even one metre, until he was struck again and found a glorious death. A magnificent figure of an intrepid and reckless young commander, a shining example of courage, abnegation and spirit of sacrifice pushed to the point of holocaust.”

The failure and bias of this book cannot only be laid at the feet of the author, as an editor should have caught the problems I saw and insisted they be corrected or assign a co-author who could deal with the non-Italian sources. It’s very disappointing to see Helion, who has consistently put out high-quality military history, put out such a work. Cannot recommended it.

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Our Reviewer: Dr. Stavropoulos received his Ph.D. in History from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2013. Currently an Adjunct Professor at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, his previous reviews include Prelude to Waterloo: Quatre Bras: The French Perspective, Braddock's Defeat: The Battle of the Monongahela and the Road to Revolution, Italy 1636: Cemetery of Armies, In the Name of Lykourgos, The Other Face of Battle, The Bulgarian Contract, Napoleon’s Stolen Army, In the Words of Wellington’s Fighting Cocks, Chasing the Great Retreat, Athens, City of Wisdom: A History, Commanding Petty Despots, Writing Battles: New Perspectives on Warfare and Memory in Medieval Europe, SOG Kontum, Simply Murder, Soldiers from Experience, July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta, New York’s War of 1812, The Philadelphia Campaign, 1777, The Spear, the Scroll, and the Pebble, The Killing Ground, The Hill: The Brutal Fight for Hill 107 in the Battle of Crete, The Lion at Dawn: Forging British Strategy in the Age of the French Revolution, Stalin's Revenge: Operation Bagration and the Annihilation of Army Group Centre, The Farthest Valley, The Soldier's Reward, The Traitor of Arnhem, and Che Guevara's Final Adventure.

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