Fantasque Time Line (France Fights On) - English Translation

[Wings]

June 27th, 1941

Athens - The Greek government and the King leave the Greek capital for Heraklion. Athens is an easy target - and the allied fighters have to give up covering it. It is severely bombed and fires break out near the Acropolis, raising the rage of the population against the new conquerors. Many recall that the Persians too, had burned Athens...

 

[Wings]

June 27th, 1941

Berlin - Since the day before, Heinrich Himmler has been living a nightmare, still without news about the fate of his right-hand man. His death would of course be a great loss to the SS, for he was a zealous and formidable organizer - some in the Black Order claim that "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich" (Himmler's brain is called Heydrich), which suggests much to think about. But if he falls alive into the hands of the Allies, it is a real disaster. With the amount of information he has, Heydrich is worth his weight in gold to the Allies.
Now Himmler has to go to the chancellery to tell his Führer. He already feverishly apprehends the latter's reaction...

 

[Wings]

June 28th, 1941

Rome - Mussolini, never stingy with big words and promises, receives with great pomp, in his gigantic office in the Palazzo di Venezia, the entire Iranian legation in Rome - that is
four diplomats. He proclaims that he hods the Shah Reza as "a privileged partner of fascism" and asserts his willingness to provide him without delay with "all the help that has been requested, and much more, because Italy knows how to recognize its true friends!" He specifies that he has given orders in this sense to the services of the Comando Supremo, which must coordinate the next day with the Reich, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey to organize the necessary transfers and transports.
The Duce, in this case, forgot - or pretended to forget - that the government of Ismet Inönü, scalded by the expeditious manner in which the Allies ended the Iraq affair, has made it known to Rome and Berlin that it does not intend to give up, at least for the time being, and the balance of power in the Middle East being what it is, its attitude of strict neutrality: there is no question of Ankara taking the risk of clashing with London or Algiers - even if it means tolerating that one or other of the secret services which abound in Turkey* interpret this neutrality at its convenience...

* Twelve, thirteen, even fifteen, during the Second World War, depending on whether or not historians consider various emanations of the Ankara Police and Gendarmerie as authentic secret services...

 

[Wings]

June 28th, 1941

Arctic, 300 nautical miles northeast of Jan Mayen Island - On indication of Bletchley Park, the Royal Navy does it again. The victim is the Lauenburg (a converted trawler, like the München of the previous May 7th). Chased by the cruiser Nigeria and the destroyers Tartar, Jupiter and Bedouin, the ship is quickly evacuated by its crew. The Tartar then boards the trawler in order to seize the cryptographic equipment. This task accomplished, the destroyer opens fire and sinks the ship (really this time).
.........
After the close losses of the München and Lauenburg, the operations of the Kriegsmarine in the Arctic will take a break. Why, indeed, continue to suffer losses when there are no plans to send new surface units to the Atlantic and when repatriating the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (currently stuck in Brest) via the North Atlantic seems uncertain...

 

[Wings]

June 28th, 1941

Tonkin - For the second consecutive day, unemployed workers demonstrated in the streets of Hanoi and Haiphong. This demonstration becomes openly anti-Japanese and the
residence of the Japanese consul is stoned before the police can (or decides to) intervene.
From Algiers, Georges Mandel, who is in charge of the government until Paul Reynaud's return from Washington, orders the High Commissioner to authorize one train a week between Hanoi and Kunming from July 1st, instead of suspending the traffic entirely.

 

[Wings]

June 28th, 1941

Heraklion - Papagos, Wilson and Giraud order the general evacuation of continental Greece towards the Peloponnese and Crete. All civilian ships, including fishing boats and coasters, are requisitioned to participate in this evacuation. The grouping and embarkation zones (at night) are now the large beaches of the Peloponnese, in the bay of Nafplio or in Kalamata and, for a few more nights, in Megara.
In the afternoon, the last allied planes leave their airfields in the Athens area and fly to Crete or to Molai and the improvised airfields in the Peloponnese.

"It was on nine wheels that we reached Crete, which at first seemed to us like a haven of rest. There, a happy surprise: three of our wounded, healed, and two new recruits from the Ecole de Chasse had been waiting for us since the day before. This restored our morale - we were going to need it (morale and reinforcements) in the following weeks."
(Jean-Pierre Leparc, op. cit.)

In the evening, the Courbet group enters the bay of Piraeus. The old battleship shells for two hours with 305mm shells the German columns heading towards Athens on the coastal roads, then withdraws towards Heraklion.

 

[Wings]

June 28th, 1941

From Delphi to Athens - Rommel's forces, driven by their leader, who is always at the vanguard, take the city of Delphi and, in their momentum, begin to break through the Allied defenses around Thebes.
During the night, the vanguard of the Skandenberg Korps meets near Thebes the first elements of the troops coming from Lamia via Thermopylae. The leaders of these units note without pleasure that Rommel had beaten them and is about to enter Athens first.

 

[Wings]

June 28th, 1941

Berlin - The Reichsführer's face, which had been greenish since his meeting the day before with a furious Hitler upon learning that Heydrich was missing, regains more normal colors. Indeed, Heydrich was recovered safe and sound on the Greek front. He was able to hide for forty-eight hours until the German troops reached him. He was quickly flown back to Berlin by a specially chartered aircraft.
Horrified at the idea that the head of the RSHA could have ended up in a prison camp, Hitler himself formally forbids him to return to the front. R. Heydrich's career in the Luftwaffe ends as it had begun: with a whimper. As a consolation, the presumptuous SS man is awarded the Iron Cross 1st class.

 

[Wings]

June 28th, 1941

Jerusalem - The young King Peter II of Yugoslavia would have liked to make the Holy City the seat of his government in exile. It is said that the Serbian patriarch Gavrilo Dozic (Gavrilo V) had recommended this destination to him before his departure from Ohrid*. The city of Christ Pantocrator, although under English mandate, is indeed above the temporal considerations. And, notes the general Carton de Wiart, "it is a good place to practice to resurrect".
Speaking of resurrection, Peter II pays this day homage to the holy king Lazarus, killed in the battle of Kosovo against the Turks in 1389 - a most solemn day for the Serbian Church.

* Gavrilo V showed such firmness against the occupiers that he was imprisoned and sent to Dachau. He will survive and will take back his seat after the war.

 

[Wings]

June 29th, 1941

Brazil - Three new Italian ships set sail for a French port On the 28th, the cargo ship Monbaldo (6,214 GRT, 11 knots) weighed anchor from Parà for Bordeaux. On the 29th, it was the turn of the freighters Butterfly (4,983 GRT) and XXIV Maggio (5,388 GRT, 11 knots): they leave Recife, the first for Saint-Nazaire, the second for Bordeaux. All three will reach their destination, respectively on July 14th, 29th and 27th.

 

[Wings]

June 29th, 1941

Between Tenerife (Canary Islands) and Faial (Azores) - Leaving from Las Palmas to try to get to Bordeaux with a stopover in Horta (island of Faial), the Italian steamer Ernani (6 526 GRT, 13 knots), which is sailing camouflaged as a Dutch cargo ship, is sunk at about one o'clock in the morning by the...German submarine U-103 (KrvKpt. Victor Schütze).

 

[Wings]

June 29th, 1941

Tokyo - The Japanese government officially protests against the "unjustifiable aggression suffered in Hanoi by Japanese interests". Tokyo threatens to "send troops to protect Japanese interests and the peaceful civilian population against demonstrators visibly manipulated by the communists". This note is duly rejected by the French government.

Washington - In the late afternoon (East Coast time), the Hon. Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, summons the Japanese ambassador to warn him that any military action against Indochina would have "dramatic and most negative" consequences for U.S.-Japan relations.

 

[Wings]

June 29th, 1941

Athens - The first German troops enter the capital. Symbol of the Greek resistance present and to come, the evzone which guards the Greek flag floating at the topof the Parthenon wraps himself in the flag and throws himself into the void rather than letting the German soldiers take it...
This does not prevent the German photographers, a moment later, from portraying at leisure Rommel in front of the same Parthenon. Rommel, hero and winner of the Greek campaign with his Skandenberg Korps, this is enough to arouse the resentment of the Italians, with whom he had been fighting for almost two months, to irritate enormously (some would say "to drive mad"), his immediate superior, Geloso, but also to provoke the bitterness of the Prussian Junkers of the Heer (List, Boehme, Crüwell...), who will all consider that he has stolen their victory. The only one to rejoice in this beautiful propaganda image will be in the end...Hitler, delighted to see his favorite general once again in the limelight, whom he presents as the archetype of the Nazi officer!
.........
Megara - At the beginning of the morning, the motorized columns coming from Thebes try to take the city by storm, but they are stopped by the Tunisian riflemen who have been in place for five days and who are solidly entrenched, rested and even reinforced (thanks to heavy weapons recovered from the evacuated troops). The battle rages all day long in the city, the French trying to keep the road to Corinth open for the troops and the numerous civilians who fled Athens and Piraeus towards the Peloponnese.
After nightfall, covered by a naval bombardment carried out by Force A of the Aegean Sea Squadron (2 CL and 4 DD), the defenders abandon Megara and cross the Corinthian canal. The bridge, spared by the Luftwaffe at the request of Rommel, who hoped his tanks would be able to use it, is then carefully destroyed...but no photographer is there to capture on film the disappointment of the first German soldiers who arrive in front of the debris of the bridge.

 

[Wings]

June 29th, 1941

Aegean Sea - As the threat of the Luftwaffe increases, all Allied ships of any importance leave Heraklion and Suda Bay for Rhodes.

Ionian Sea - Italian troops transported by torpedo boats and speedboats land at Lefkada, Cephalonia and Zanthe (three islands along the western coast of mainland Greece and the Peloponnese).

 

[Wings]

June 29th, 1941

Benghazi - Arrival of HMS Thrasher (Lt. P.J. Cowell), replacement for the Triton.

 

[Wings]

June 30th, 1941

Moscow - Lavrenti Beria informs Stalin that the information obtained by the NKVD gives the certainty that the British projects concerning Iran are in no way directed against the USSR, quite the contrary. According to NKVD sources* , Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden explained to the other members of the War Cabinet that the joint occupation of Iranian territory by Great Britain and the Soviet Union would make it possible to facilitate the links between the two countries if, by chance, the need arose.
Churchill, though not very suspicious of sympathies for Bolshevism, would have evoked in his own terms, presenting it more as a certainty than as a hypothesis, the possibility that the two countries would one day soon have to "act more or less like allies". Beria, a seasoned practitioner of Marxist-Leninist cant (if his faith in the destiny of communism seems questionable to some, in the CPSU or elsewhere), translates Churchill's words for Stalin as "being in a situation of objective alliance". His Majesty's Prime Minister himself would probably admit, if he were aware of it, that this interpretation is not wrong in spirit, if not in letter.

* We will learn, decades later, that the NKVD, in this case as in many others, had been informed at first hand by Guy Burgess - one of the Cambridge Five, whom the Soviet services had recruited at the university during the 1930s, along with Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross and Donald MacLean, in addition to the hypothetical sixth man who was never officially identified.

 

[Wings]

June 30th, 1941

Corinth Canal - At dawn, German troops cross the Gulf of Patras on light boats and try to establish two bridgeheads in the Peloponnese. Near Patras, the landed units are thrown back into the sea by the Greek forces, but on the west coast, north of Pyrgos, they hold on, despite repeated bombardments by some Blenheims and Marylands. Without any heavy equipment and without any armor, the Greeks can only limit the size of the bridgehead.

 

[Wings]

Allied losses
HMS Kimberley (K-class destroyer), damaged by the MM Scirocco during the Naval Battle of Corfu, scuttled later (OTL survived the war decom. 1949)
MN Valmy (Guépard-class destroyer), sunk by Italian MAS in the Corfu Channel (OTL scuttled at Toulon in 1942)
RHS Vasilefs Georgios (G-class destroyer), sunk by German bombers in the Ionian Sea (OTL scuttled at Salamis, refloated and scuttled in Tunisia in 1943)
MN La Sibylle (Diane-class submarine), sunk by the MM Brin off Brindisi (OTL sunk off Casablanca in 1942)
MN Lion (Guépard-class destroyer), damaged by German bombers, grounded on Limnos, declared lost (OTL scuttled at Toulon, refloated and scuttled again at La Spezia in 1943)
MN Poncelet (Redoutable-class submarine), sunk by the U-48 off Bergen (OTL sunk off Gabon in 1940)
HMS Bonaventure (Dido-class light cruiser), sunk by the MM Dagabur off Astakos (OTL torpedoed in late March 1941)
HMS Griffin (G-class destroyer), sunk by the MM Malachite off Astakos (OTL survived the war, decom. 1946)
HMS Calcutta (C-class light cruiser), sunk by SM.79 bombers off Corfu (OTL sunk off Alexandria in early June)
MN La Vestale (Argonaute-class submarine), sunk by the MM Generale Achille Papa off Brindisi (OTL damaged in collision with English destroyer, decom. 1944)
RHS Lemnos (Mississippi-class battleship), sunk by German bombers off Piraeus (OTL sunk at Salamis in April 1941)

Axis losses
MM Bari (Pillau-class light cruiser), sunk by French SBD-1 of the HMS Eagle at the Southern tip of Corfu (OTL sunk at Livorno in 1943)

 

[Wings]

July 1st, 1941

Berlin - Georges Scapini is received by Joachim von Ribbentrop, who shows a friendliness that borders on obsequiousness. "To think," wrote the new Sonderbotschafter in his report to Pierre Laval, "that he had champagne to sell me."
Nevertheless, the Reich Minister indicates to Scapini - although he is "ambassador to the exiled", that he is forbidden to reside permanently on German territory, and that he would have to apply for a visa for himself and his collaborators before each of his tours in Germany. He is also only allowed to visit prison camps that have been expressly designated by the OKW.
This does not prevent Scapini from stating in no uncertain terms to Laval: "You can see that, Mr. President, that my mission began under the best of auspices."

 

[Wings]

July 1st, 1941

Continental Greece - German troops regroup between Piraeus, Athens and Megara to prepare to cross the Corinth Canal and attack the eastern coast of the Peloponnese.

Peloponnese - An Italian convoy leaves Otranto in the night and reaches the bridgehead of Pyrgos, in the west of the Peloponnese, where it brings reinforcements and supplies to the troops besieged on a narrow strip of land. During the day, it disembarks Italian infantry under the air cover provided by the whole Xth FliegerKorps and numerous units of the Regia Aeronautica, which made an intense effort to bomb the area between Pyrgos and Patras. This air support allows the Axis troops to repel the Greek attacks. However, due to the lack of suitable means of disembarkation, the landing of the equipment is delayed and the commander of the convoy prefers to withdraw at dusk, fearing a night counter-attack by the Allied fleet.

Eastern Mediterranean - In the morning, the Main Force of the Mediterranean Fleet sets sail from Alexandria to support the Allied forces fighting in the Peloponnese with the battleships Barham and Queen Elizabeth, the aircraft carrier Eagle, the heavy cruiser York, the AA cruisers Carlisle and Coventry and the destroyers Hasty, Hereward, Nubian, Vendetta and Voyager. But after a few hours, the Eagle suffers from machinery problems that force her to return to Alexandria. The rest of the squadron continues towards Crete, but Cunningham decides that it would not enter the Ionian Sea during the day.

Crete - With the exception of 15 Stirlings, the Allied heavy bombers based on the airfields in Crete will redeploy to Rhodes and Karpathos. In these islands, engineering units coming from Syria and Egypt start to enlarge the airfields.