Ohi Day, October 28, 1940: The Greek No and the Battle of the Pindus

"Alors, c'est la guerre." Well then, it is war. That is how Ohi Day begins, the Day of No, one of Greece's great national holidays. And it begins with a sentence in French. Not one word of Greek. Ioannis Metaxas spoke it, and the Italian ambassador, Emmanuele Grazzi, wrote it down in his memoirs. It was just after three in the morning on the twenty-eighth of October, nineteen forty. Grazzi had rung the doorbell of a house in Kifissia, and the prime minister of Greece appeared in a woolen dressing gown over a plain cotton nightshirt. He read the paper he was handed, and he answered. The "no" that Greeks celebrate every year, with flags and parades, came later, and other people shouted it. Who? To understand, we must first see what was written on that paper, and why someone wanted so badly to send it.

The ultimatum asked Greece to let the Italian army pass freely and occupy "strategic points" on Greek soil, without saying which. The deadline was six in the morning, three hours away. Metaxas pointed out, coldly, that an ultimatum which gives you three hours, in the middle of the night, leaves no room for an answer, and so amounts to a declaration of war. "Very well then, we have war," he is reported to have said at the end, in the Greek accounts of the conversation. But not even those three hours were respected. At half past five, half an hour before the deadline, Italian units were already crossing the border from Albania. The war had been decided long before that doorbell rang, and the decision had not been taken in Athens. It had been taken in Rome.

In Rome, Mussolini wanted a war of his own. Hitler had conquered half of Europe, and the first fascist dictator saw himself standing in the shadow of his younger ally. In early October, German troops moved into Romania, near the oil fields of Ploiești, without telling the Italians. Mussolini was furious. On the twelfth of October he told his son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Ciano, that he would attack Greece within the month. "Hitler always puts me in front of a fait accompli," he explained. "This time he will learn from the newspapers that I have occupied Greece." The attack began, in the end, on the twenty-eighth, the anniversary of the March on Rome, the march with which the fascists had seized power in nineteen twenty-two.

The meeting where the plan was settled took place at the Palazzo Venezia, on the fifteenth of October, and there was almost no dissent. General Sebastiano Visconti Prasca, the commander of the Italian forces in Albania, promised that he would wipe out the Greek army in Epirus and reach the port of Preveza in ten to fifteen days. Only Marshal Badoglio, the chief of the general staff, disagreed: to conquer all of Greece, he said, would take twenty divisions and three months. Nobody backed him. The British historian Ian Kershaw later called that discussion one of the most superficial ever recorded for such a dangerous operation. On paper, though, the Italians had reason to feel confident. In Albania they had around eighty-seven thousand men and dozens of light tanks, while the Greek army had none.

Greece, for its part, knew that something was coming. Mussolini had seized Albania on the seventh of April, nineteen thirty-nine, and six days later Britain and France declared that they would support Greece if its independence were threatened. On the fifteenth of August, nineteen forty, the feast day of the Virgin Mary, the day of the great pilgrimage to the island of Tinos, an Italian submarine torpedoed the Greek cruiser Elli in the island's harbor. That was two and a half months before the ultimatum. Grazzi later wrote that the attack united a deeply divided people and gave it the determination to resist. Mussolini had tried to frighten an opponent, and had succeeded only in uniting him.

And the man who was about to lead that resistance was an unlikely hero. Metaxas was a career officer, born on the island of Ithaca in eighteen seventy-one, who had studied at the War Academy in Berlin. Since the fourth of August, nineteen thirty-six, he had ruled Greece as a dictator, with censorship, and with prisons and exile for his political opponents. Now one dictator had to say "no" to another dictator. That contradiction would follow the memory of that day for decades. But the image that remained from that morning was not the prime minister. It was the crowd.

That morning, the General Staff announced that the enemy was attacking on the border and that Greek forces were defending the homeland. Then Metaxas spoke, in an address to the nation. He did not promise an easy victory. He spoke of a "struggle for existence," and he closed with a line from Aeschylus's play The Persians, the cry of the Greeks at the battle of Salamis: "Now the struggle is for everything." And then something happened that no ultimatum had calculated. People poured into the streets, all over the country, shouting "Ohi!", the Greek word for no: supporters of the regime and its opponents, all with the same word. From there, from those streets, begins the "no" that Greece has kept.

But some people were missing from that crowd: the ones who could not walk out of their cells. Communist prisoners in the Acronafplia prison wrote letters in the first days of the war, asking to be sent to the front. The leader of the Communist Party, Nikos Zachariadis, wrote an open letter to the people from a prison on Corfu, dated the thirty-first of October. It said that Mussolini's fascism had struck Greece in the back, and that every rock, every ravine and every village must become a fortress. The regime's answer was that anyone who wanted to fight had first to sign a declaration of repentance. So from the very first week, the "no" had two claimants who were not speaking to each other, and a third, much larger, who did not ask anyone's permission: the soldiers who were already climbing into the mountains.

And the odds, on paper, were uneven. The Italian army had the tanks, the guns and the aircraft. The Greek army had the mountains. Epirus and western Macedonia are a maze of peaks and gorges, and that autumn the rain turned everything to mud. The Greeks had been partially mobilized since August, with divisions larger than the Italian ones. At Kalpaki, General Charalambos Katsimitros had chosen his line of defense so that the marshes of the Kalamas river would stop the tanks. And the Italians had a problem that did not show on any map: of the seventeen hundred and fifty trucks they had planned to send, only one hundred and seven had arrived. The first great victory, however, was decided high up, in the Pindus mountains.

In the central sector advanced the Julia, an Alpini division, one of the elite units of the Italian army: about ten thousand eight hundred men, trained to fight in mountains exactly like these. Their objective was Metsovo, the pass that leads from Epirus into Thessaly. Facing them stood a detachment of two thousand men and four guns, under Colonel Konstantinos Davakis. Davakis, born in Laconia around eighteen ninety-seven, was an old soldier: he had fought in the First World War and in Asia Minor, and had written books on military history. He had to cover a thirty-kilometer front with that handful of men. Head-on, he could hardly have stopped them. What his detachment did, in the end, was let the Italians advance deep into the mountains, and close the door behind them.

For a few days it looked as if the Italians would get through. They advanced about forty kilometers in rain and mud, as far as the villages of Vovousa and Samarina. But Greek units had slipped along the slopes around them, and on the third of November the Italian spearhead found itself surrounded. In those same days Davakis was badly wounded in the lung and fell into a coma for two days. When he woke, his men were already retaking Vovousa and Samarina. The Julia was finally defeated on the eighth of November. In the Battle of the Pindus, Italian losses reached about five thousand men, and the rest withdrew toward Korçë, in Albania. Davakis's detachment, which had started with two thousand, had been reinforced by the thirteenth of November to thirty-two thousand men.

The same week, farther west, the second battle was being decided. At Kalpaki, from the second to the eighth of November, the Italians threw in everything they had: aircraft, artillery, infantry, and the light tanks of the Centauro division. On the fifth they managed to cross the Kalamas and establish a bridgehead, but the Greeks held. The mud, the minefields and the stubbornness of the defenders stopped the attack. The general who had promised to be in Preveza in ten to fifteen days was replaced on the eighth of November, eleven days after the war began, by Ubaldo Soddu. The great Italian offensive was over, and Preveza was still very far away.

In the Pindus, though, the battle was not won by soldiers alone. There were no roads for trucks there. Ammunition, food and pieces of artillery reached the trenches on the backs of men and mules, and the men were often women. Women from the villages of Zagori and the Pindus climbed for hours through mud and snow, along paths where not even a mule could pass. Some climbed with ropes tied around their waists. Argyris Balatsos noted in his war diary a woman of eighty-eight carrying ammunition. They did not need a proclamation to understand what "no" means. They said it with every step.

On the fourteenth of November the Greek army went over to the counter-offensive. Eight days later, on the twenty-second, it entered Korçë, the Albanian city the Italians used as their base. Twenty-five days had passed since Grazzi rang that doorbell. In places, the Italian retreat became a genuine collapse. At the Perati bridge, on the border, Italian units tried to hold the crossing, and on the twentieth of November their defense dissolved into disorderly flight. An Alpini song, "On the Bridge of Perati," keeps the memory of that day alive to this day. For the Italian soldiers it was the price of a war that nobody had properly prepared.

In Rome, the defeat became a political problem. Badoglio, who had warned them, resigned at the end of November. In Albania the Greeks pressed on. On the sixth of December they entered Agioi Saranta, on the eighth Argyrokastro, shortly before Christmas Himara, and on the tenth of January, nineteen forty-one, they took the Klisura pass. That war was not cheap for anyone. On each side the dead exceeded thirteen thousand, and thousands of soldiers suffered from frostbite: about twenty-five thousand Greeks and twelve thousand Italians. More than twenty-one thousand Italians were taken prisoner. The Greeks lost fewer than two thousand that way. For a Europe that until then had watched the Axis win, it was a surprise. The historian Mark Mazower has called it the first setback of the Axis in the whole war.

Metaxas did not live to see the end. He died on the twenty-ninth of January, nineteen forty-one, three months after the ultimatum, of an infection. In March, Italy tried to take its revenge with a spring offensive, which failed. But the Greek army was exhausted, short of ammunition, and unable to rotate its units at the front. Most of it was still in Albania when Hitler decided to rescue his ally and drive the British out of Greece. On the sixth of April, German troops invaded from Bulgaria. Within about two weeks Greece signed a surrender, and the country was divided into zones of occupation among Germans, Italians and Bulgarians. The "no" had won a great battle, but not the war.

One story from those years shows how harsh the epilogue was. Davakis, the officer who had stopped the Alpini in the Pindus, survived his lung wound. In December nineteen forty-two, the Italian occupation authorities arrested him, and on the twentieth of January, nineteen forty-three, they put him aboard the ship Città di Genova, bound for Italy, together with other hostages: a hundred and fifty-two Greek officers in all. The next day a British submarine, the Tigris, torpedoed the ship off the coast of Albania. Seventy-one of the hostages drowned, Davakis among them. The man who stopped the Italians in the Pindus died more than two years later, from a torpedo fired by his own allies, aboard a ship that was carrying him into captivity in Italy.

And yet, during the occupation, the memory of that day began to be built. On the twenty-eighth of October, nineteen forty-one, a year after the ultimatum and with the Germans in Athens, students gathered in the main building of the University of Athens and celebrated the first anniversary. At the second, in nineteen forty-two, the gathering took place in Syntagma Square, on the initiative of two youth resistance organizations, EPON and PEAN. The first official celebration, with a military parade before Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou, was held in nineteen forty-four, after the liberation, exactly four years after the ultimatum.

Since then, everyone has tried to find themselves in that day. For some, the "no" was Metaxas and the decision of that night. For others, it was the prisoners who asked to fight, and the Resistance that followed. The truth has room for both, and for more: a sentence in French, a word the streets shouted, and a war decided on mountains and footpaths. The decision not to accept the ultimatum was Metaxas's. But the refusal was the work of many.

Metaxas said in French that it was war. The "no" was said by the others: the people in the streets, the soldiers of the Pindus, the women who climbed the mountains with loads on their backs. And every year, on the twenty-eighth of October, Greeks say it again, in their own language, as if it were theirs. Because it is. It belongs to everyone who said it without knowing whether they would live long enough to see a whole country celebrate it.