Sioned-Mair Richards

October 28, 1940. At three in the morning, the Italian ambassador wakes the Greek prime minister in his home and hands him an ultimatum: let Italian troops march into Greece and occupy it, or face war. The Greek leader, Metaxas, answers in a single phrase, and Greece's answer becomes a national legend. The country then does something almost no one expected: it not only fights, it wins, handing the Axis its first land defeat of the war. Mussolini was behind it, and his motives were vanity as much as strategy. He was jealous of Hitler's string of conquests and wanted glories of his own, a parallel war to show that Italy was a great power in its own right. Greece looked like an easy victim. So in the small hours of the 28th, the Italian ambassador delivered an ultimatum demanding that Greece allow Italian forces to occupy strategic points across the country, in effect to surrender without a fight, with only a few hours to answer. The Greek prime minister, Ioannis Metaxas, himself an authoritarian ruler, gave his reply. The popular memory is that he said simply "Ohi," "No," and that is the name the day carries, Oxi Day. What he actually said, in French, the language of diplomacy, was "Alors, c'est la guerre," "Then it is war." The meaning was the same. Greece would not submit. And when the news spread that morning, the Greek people poured into the streets, not in fear but in defiance, shouting that same word, "Ohi," No, embracing the war rather than the surrender. Italian troops attacked that same day, pouring across the border from Italian-occupied Albania, expecting a quick walkover. They got a shock. The Greeks, fighting in their own rugged mountains, outnumbered and outgunned, not only held but counterattacked, and then they did the unthinkable. They drove the Italians back. They threw the invaders out of Greece and advanced into Albania, seizing a large chunk of it, humiliating Mussolini's army, which proved badly led and poorly supplied for a mountain winter war. Through the winter of 1940 into 1941, little Greece was beating a great fascist power in the field. It was the first time any Axis land offensive had been defeated, a tremendous boost to Allied morale at a moment when Britain stood nearly alone and the news was almost all bad. The gallant Greeks became heroes across the free world, proof that the dictators were not invincible. Churchill is often quoted as saying that henceforth it would not be said that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks. But the defiance came at a terrible price, and it reshaped the war in ways that rippled outward. Mussolini's failure forced Hitler to come to his rescue. The Germans could not have the British using Greece as a base on their southern flank, and they could not leave Mussolini humiliated, so in the spring of 1941 Hitler invaded Greece and Yugoslavia with overwhelming force. The Germans overran Greece in a matter of weeks, and the country fell into a brutal occupation that brought famine and horror, and a fierce resistance. And there is a famous, much-debated consequence. Hitler's intervention in the Balkans, forced in part by the Greek defiance and the need to secure his southern flank, is argued by many historians to have delayed the invasion of the Soviet Union by several crucial weeks, weeks that might have made the difference before the Russian winter stopped the Germans short of Moscow. If so, then the stubborn "No" of a small nation in October 1940 may have helped, in a roundabout way, to save Moscow and doom Hitler in the east. That is why some call Oxi Day a turning point of the whole war. Whatever the truth of that argument, the 28th is a day Greeks still celebrate with fierce pride, the day their country said no to an empire and then beat its army in the mountains. It was defiance in its purest form, a small nation choosing war over submission, and winning, at least for a season, against the odds.