I don’t understand Churchill’s, and the British general staff’s, interest in attacking the Balkans in late 1943. Earlier in the war I understand they were concerned about the German ability to threaten the Suez Canal. But by late 1943 it was clear the Germans had no capacity for offensive action.
I understand arguing for focusing on the Italian campaign, though it seems a mistake since the Alps make it hard to break out of Italy into the rest of Europe. But once you decide to open a second front, western France, which is much closer to England and thus much easier to supply and puts Germany in a vice with invaders coming from two directions, seems like a much better choice than the Balkans. What am I missing?
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Churchill in particular, had several things making an eastern Mediterranean campaign desirable.
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Keep the Russians out of the Balkans. Churchill was a realpolitik game-player like the Victorians who came before him. Churchill believed (as it turned out, with reason) that wherever the Russians conquered they would keep. (“What’s theirs is theirs, what’s ours is negotiable.”). Pushing through Greece north into Central and Eastern Europe was intended to keep Eastern Europe away from the Russians. Yugoslavia, it was thought - with reason - might let an Allied campaign to pass through their country into Southern Europe.
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Keep Turkey from joining the Axis. Churchill still feared that the Turks would join the Axis and threaten the Middle East and oil production by attacking it from the north. Turkey might even cut off southern Russia from Allied supply deliveries through Iran. The Germans were courting Turkey to do exactly that. In 1941 and 1942, they hoped to give Turkey the Crimea in exchange for joining them (to turn the Black Sea into a ‘Turkish lake.’)
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Prove himself right in WWI. Churchill, I think, was still haunted by the failure of his plan to knock Turkey out of the war that culminated in the disastrous Galipoli campaign. A successful campaign through Greece would prove he had the right idea, and was just let down by the British military. That one’s very specifically my opinion.
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Postpone Overlord. As 1943 went on, he became more convinced that the campaign for France should be postponed in favor of his Greek adventure. He is even recorded as extending his realpolitik to defeating Germany, but leaving enough military power in Germany to take on the Russians in an East-vs-West WWIII. The US was loudly uninterested in pushing Overlord to 1945. The US started transferring US divisions from North Africa to England as soon as Churchill started his campaign to use them in the Eastern Med. to keep them out of his hands (Churchill, like Montgomery, was willing to shed any amount of non-British blood to get what they wanted.)
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