Even the breakneck speed of the German advance, now that Blitzkrieg in Poland and France had accustomed the world to the Wehrmacht’s methods, seemed rather a revelation of the developing pattern of modern warfare than a further instalment of the military revolution that Hitler’s generals had instituted. Indeed, it had been less revolutionary than the victory of 1940. The sheer disparity in quality between the Wehrmacht and its Balkan opponents, who had furthermore brought defeat upon themselves by the perverse ineptitude of their defensive arrangements, was all the explanation necessary for the catastrophe which had overcome them. The Balkan campaign might have ended on that note, with the hoisting of the swastika flag over the Acropolis in Athens on 27 April as a fitting symbol of a triumph of the strong over the weak. But it did not: even as the cost of the campaign was counted – 12,000 British casualties (of whom 9000 were prisoners), uncounted Yugoslav and Greek dead, against a mere 5000 German killed, wounded or missing – and its spoils were divided – Yugoslav Bosnia, Dalmatia and Montenegro given to Italy, South Serbia and Greek Thrace to Bulgaria, the Vojvodina to Hungary, Croatia to the puppet Croatians of the Ustashi movement – Hitler was lending an ear to those in his circle who argued that the Balkan campaign was incomplete and urged that Germany’s victory should be crowned by a descent upon Crete by the one largely untried instrument of Blitzkrieg, Germany’s airborne army.
