GREECE IN WW II - INTRODUCTION
Greece, an independent kingdom with a population of 7,345,000 (1940), was
drawn into the Second World War as a result of the Italian invasion launched from Albanian territory on 28 October 1940.This begun the
Balkan campaign and was followed by a German invasion in April 1941, the exile of the king, George II (1890-1947), and the Axis occupation of the country.Athens, the capital was liberated on 18 October 1944 by a British Expeditionary Force and the rest of Greece soon afterwards, but
the travails of war, resistance, and occupation were to be prolonged by a savagely fought civil war from 1946 to 1949.Just as Greece had been on a war footing for much of the period between the outbreak of the First Balkan War in October 1912 and the defeat in Asia Minor of its forces by the Turkish nationalists in September 1922, so the entire decade of the 1940s was to be blighted by the war and its bitter aftermath.
R.Clogg,
Oxford Companion to the Second World War (1995), p.504