The concise encyclopedia of world war II 2 volumes (greenwood encyclopedias of modern world wars) ( PDFDrive ) 195

Balkan Pact (1933) but on a much larger scale German intervention in Yugoslavia now broke into the Greek rear, forcing the Greeks to halt their assault on Italian positions and try to fall back out of Albania as well However, hesitation to withdraw allowed the Germans to cut off an entire Greek Army, dividing it from British and Commonwealth forces The British decided to evacuate from beaches at Thermopylae and Athens on April 21 The cut-off Greek army mutinied and surrendered to the Germans later that day The British evacuation began on April 24, with heavy fighting continuing along a contracted perimeter Although most Western Allied troops got out of Greece, the evacuation was no second Dunkirk: it was another bitter and serious British defeat It was also the third time in just over a year that the British Army was thrown off the continent by the Wehrmacht With minimal RAF air cover in the area, the Luftwaffe sank several troopships carrying evacuees to Crete or Egypt A German airborne operation then cut off some troops at Corinth, so that a second evacuation had to be undertaken under heavy shelling and Luftwaffe attack The total removed from Greece by April 30 was nearly 51,000 About 7,000 British troops were left ashore and forced to surrender Others took to the mountains individually or in small groups Some were later killed or captured, but a few eventually made it back to their units with the help of Greek partisans The Greeks lost nearly 13,500 killed in the Balkan campaign and over 42,000 wounded Just under 10,000 Greek soldiers left with the British for Crete, where they fought the Germans again before evacuating from that island to Egypt BALKAN PACT (1933) In 1933 King Alexander of Yugoslavia tried to arrange an accommodation with Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania, and Turkey Bulgaria coveted too much of Macedonia to agree, but the other Balkan states formed an entente that lasted until October 1940, when it was broken by the Italian invasion of Greece Whatever remained of the initiative was destroyed by Adolf Hitler’s aggressive Balkan diplomacy and invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia in April 1941 BALLOONS All types of balloons were used in World War II: blimps, barrage balloons, and Japanese high altitude Fugos Barrage balloons were the most common These large, unmanned, low-floating gas bags were tethered to steel cables tied to ships or pegged near potential ground targets Their function was passive defense: to deter and defend from low-flying bombing or strafing runs by threatening collision with heavy cables British barrage balloons were the most numerous They killed a handful of German aircraft that attacked through them, only to have wings sheered off They also knocked out a fair number of V-1 rockets The Germans used barrage balloons extensively All parties in Europe increasingly employed young women in balloon crews as they felt shortages of men taken into the armed forces The U.S Navy used barrage balloons in the Pacific from late 1943, but abandoned them when it concluded that balloons improved target spotting by the radar-poor Japanese and hence drew the enemy toward the target rather than protecting it The Western Allies flew hundreds of barrage balloons 118