WWII: Does Italy share blame for the failure of Operation Barbarossa?
Short answer: not really.
(None of the points in this answer should be construed as any kind of support for the Fascist regime in WWII-era Italy.)
It used to be accepted as fact that
- Germanys’ Balkan-Greece-Crete campaign (Marita/Merkur) delayed the start of Barbarossa for some weeks, and
- that this delay gave the Germans too little time to reach their goals, and
- that the Balkan campaign was launched in all haste because of Italy’s failure against the Greeks.
Since both Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin, who were rarely of the same mind and rarely gave away glory, have endorsed this idea, it seemed credible. Hence, Italy’s invasion of Greece was said to have caused Germany to fail in the USSR.
There are some problems with this idea, though, and later war history has mostly abandoned it.
Did it delay the operation?
The Germans weren’t ready to attack until the end of June anyway. Ground conditions (muddy fields, high water and strong currents in rivers) were still unfavourable before that time, and a lot of preparations were still incomplete. Even on June 22, some divisions still hadn’t received their equipment and were insufficiently trained.
Barbarossa wasn’t delayed in order for the Balkan campaign to be completed. The May 15 date given in the Barbarossa directive referred to the deadline for preparation work, after which troops would go into preparedness and await orders to go into readiness.
The essential formations like the 1.Panzergruppe was pulled out from the Balkans early; those divisions that went all the way to Greece and also participated in Barbarossa were released after Barbarossa had started and reached the eastern front later as reinforcements.
Was the alleged delay sufficient to ruin the time table?
If the original German time table had survived (6–8 weeks to break down all resistance, followed by a couple of weeks to seize important targets), even adding some weeks waiting for the Balkans campaign to end wouldn’t have caused a delay into the onset of winter.
For that matter, the onset of winter was a lot less troublesome for the Germans than the late autumn rain-and-mud season was, but the Balkans delay still wouldn’t have brought Barbarossa into that season.
But if the time table was unrealistic, did the delay still hurt the Germans?
As it was, many things combined to bring down the speed of the German advance, but the two major factors were that the Red Army kept resisting it more forcefully than the Germans had expected, and that German logistics broke down. The German advance was costly and slow, and supplies could barely get through. The main reason for the German failure to reach Moscow earlier as planned was lack of capacity to rebuild the attacking forces in Army Group Centre.
And even if the Germans had reached, say, Moscow on schedule, their assessment of the time and forces needed to take well-defended Soviet cities were way off. They might never have taken Moscow anyway, and simply bled out in the battle.
Was the Balkan campaign improvised?
There are signs that point to Hitler deciding to take control over the Balkans to protect his oil import from Romania independently of the Italian actions there. This action might have escalated once it became a direct confrontation between Axis and British Commonwealth troops, but it would still have been a planned move.
So why did Churchill claim that the Balkan campaign caused Barbarossa to fail? The British mishandled their intervention in Greece and as a result lost both in Libya and Greece. Churchill assigning value to the failed campaign could be seen as damage control.
Why did Hitler blame Italy? He was a notorious blame-caster, by design or reflex. Again, as Barbarossa failed, it might have seemed preferable to lay the blame somewhere else than squarely at his own door.
Why did Stalin make the claim? …no idea, actually. One can speculate that by giving credit to the Greeks, he could 1) avoid giving credit to the British, and 2) give some cheap support to the Greek Communists.
The small Italian contingent (the around 62000 strong CSIR, later upgraded to an army, 8.Armee(ita) / ARMIR) that participated in Barbarossa performed reasonably well and didn’t compromise the operation.
