Italians Did Not Expect Resistance

Manawatu Times, Volume 65, Issue 259, 1 November 1940, Page 7

Italians Did Not Expect Resistance

UNPREPARED NESS O ITERS CHANCE TO ALLIES LONDON, Oct. 30. The Athens correspondent of The Times says that General Staff communiques ,in conjunction with official proclamations warning the public against ovsr-optimistic rumours, justify the conjecture that the Italians must have made some sort of vanguard movement. This is evidently confined to the Italian right flank, beemun* to-day’s Greek communique referred to heavy Italian pressure in Epirus but added that the situation was unchanged in Western Macedonia, which is separated from the Epirus sector by the Flndus mountains. The general purpose of the Italian operations is still obscure, the correspondent adds. The drive along the ooast might be aimed at securing positions from which Corfu, the strategic Greek island at the mouth of the Adriatic, could be attacked from the mainland, but the essential fact is that Greece has been allowed to make her principal dispositions without interference from the enemy by land or air. This surprising fact has led to the theory that the Italians never seriously expected to find the Greeks resisting. The Axis hope of some sort of a Fifth Column capitulation in Greece was demonstrated by yesterday’s Greek broadcast from Berlin. “Greece,” it said, “is still free. She still can range herself on the side of the Axis, which would mean enduring peace for her.” The Greek Press is not publishing anything anti-German, because Greece is not at war against Germany, but the German attitude is clearly of first-class importance. The highest Greek quarters sympathetically understand the Yugoslav decision to remain neutjal, because Yugoslavia would presumably draw the weight of the German attack against herself by intervening on the Greek side. It is widely felt in Athens that the present campaign bears the signs of Italian Unpreparedness and give* the Allies an excellent opportunity. Bulgarian sources report the arrival of five German divisions in Albania, ready for a lightning attack across Northern Greece at the moment the Italians pass the frontier defences.