Whilst in the spirit of national pride, here's my small contribution which has an interesting twist relating to the German/Soviet arena:
The following paragraphs are excerpts from a Telegraph (UK) article ...
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At the end of December in 1940, the victorious Greek army had not only repulsed the Italian invasion, but had gone on to push the Italian forces out of the southern one third of Albania completely. On December 28th, Mussolini had to acknowledge that his grandiose vision to show Hitler how Italy could easily conquer Greece was a complete failure and he asked for German military assistance. This amazing Greek victory over the Italians became known as The Epic of 1940 to the Greeks and to the rest of the world as the
first defeat of the Axis powers that gave them reason to hope that the aggression could be halted.
The final battle of the German invasion of Greece was the airborne assault on the island of Crete. ... The German paratroopers suffered about 50% casualties (with almost 4,000 dead) out of 14,000 troops used in this final battle. So heavy were the losses that Hitler decided never to launch an airborne invasion again. General Kurt Student would later say, "Crete was the grave of the German parachutists". (My addition ... Thanks Mom!)
At the end of the war, the German officers on trial at Nuremberg had commented that if the invasion of Russia had taken place on schedule early in the spring of 1941, instead of at the end of June, they would have succeeded in capturing Moscow and conquering the Soviet Union before the winter of 1941, which proved to be the only thing capable of stopping the German advance. Field Marshall Keitel, who was Chief of Staff of the German Army, was very bitter when he said that "The unbelievable strong resistance of the Greeks delayed by two or more vital months the German attack against Russia; if we did not have this long delay, the outcome of the war would have been different in the eastern front and in the war in general, and others would have been accused and would be occupying this seat as defendants todayâ€.
After the war there were 10% fewer Greeks alive than when the war started and the overall devastation of the country took years to recover from, but this small country showed the world at a time when it mattered the most that freedom is worth fighting for. The sacrifices made by the Greek nation ultimately changed the course of history and contributed in preventing the evils of Fascism and Nazism from dominating the world.
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The whole article:
Telegraph article. We still celebrate the 28th of October as a public holiday - it is the day of 'NO' (the day in 1940 we said 'NO - eff off' when demanded to surrender to the Axis powers).
