Description
BREAKTHROUGH AT THE PINIOS GORGE. On April 6, 1941, the Germans invaded Greece, the beginning of a Blitzkrieg operation which would end with the hasty and ignominious evacuation of Allied forces from mainland Greece little more than three weeks later. One of the most-decisive actions of this campaign occurred near the town of Platamon, on the eastern shore of Central Macedonia, when a combat group of the German 2. Panzer-Division managed to push through a narrow defile along the coast and then along the eight-kilometre-long narrow gorge of the Pinios river, thus reaching the open tank country of the Thessaly plain. The Allied commanders had considered the Platamon gap unsuitable for tank warfare and were thus completely unsettled by the German penetration of it. For the small New Zealand force defending the Platamon ridge and later, with Australian units, the Pinios gorge was a frustrating defeat. Jeffrey Plowman tells us the story.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.