Second World War (Phalanx Pact)

Second World War Location Worldwide Result Allied victory Belligerents Allies Axis Spain and Greece remained neutral to the Second World War from its onset, building up their military strength and fortifying their defences in anticipation of enemy invasion. This neutrality was shattered in October 1940 when Italy declared war on Greece after National Governor Ioannis Metaxas refused to surrender Hellenic ports and airfields to Italy for use as their military bases. The Hellenic Royal Armed Forces, armed with weaponry and military experience developed during the Spanish Civil War, utterly crushed the invading Italian army, retaking all of Epirus within a few weeks and forcing the Germans to intervene. As German tanks and rolled across Hellenic borders under Luftwaffe air cover, King George II of Greece sent an encrypted message requesting military assistance from his counterpart in Spain whilst invoking the Phalanx Pact alliance. The Kingdom of Greece lost Northern Greece and most of Central Greece before Spanish reinforcements arrived by ships and aircraft to halt and reverse the German advance. Meanwhile, Hitler and Mussolini convinced Turkey to join the Axis Powers, prompting Turkey to invade and seize Cyprus from the British as well as Thrace and the Aegean Sea islands from the Greco-Spanish Alliance. As Turkey began to send forces to the North African Theatre, the Germans and Italians invaded Francoist Spain and attacked their shipping routes in an effort to stem their reinforcements and supplies to Greece. They also invaded and occupied British-controlled Gibraltar and the Spanish Republic-controlled Canary Islands and parts of the latter’s colonies, forcing the Phalanx Pact and the Allied Powers, who were former adversaries, to join hands against a common enemy in the Mediterranean campaign. As the war against the Phalanx Pact and the Allied Powers depleted Axis resources, the Axis Powers invaded the financially bankrupt Soviet Union to seize their natural resources and their labour before Soviet Union collapse into anarchy. In response, the Allied Powers sent weapons, food, medicine and money to revive the comatose Soviet Union, to the chagrin of the Phalanx Pact and the Axis Powers. The revival of the Soviet Union forced the Axis Powers to focus more of their forces on the Soviet Front, allowing both the Phalanx Pact and the Allied Powers to regroup. The Portuguese Royal Family and their monarchists supporters, at the beckoning of the Spanish and Hellenic Royal Families and their respective supporters, successfully petitioned the Estado Novo Portugal to come to the aid of the Phalanx Pact. The Portuguese reinforcements, lead by the Portuguese monarchists, allowed Francoist Spain to repeal the Axis invasion of their country, freeing up more Spanish reinforcements and supplies to help Metaxist Greece liberate Thrace, including West Istanbul/Constantinople, and the Aegean Sea islands from the Turks. The Axis submarine and surface raider fleets sent to attack Phalanx Pact and Allied shipping were eventually crippled by the Phalanx Pact and Allied navies with the help of intelligence gleaned from Axis cipher machines and codebooks captured by Phalanx Pact Raiders. Although the intelligence were shared with the Allied Powers, the cryptoanalysis systems developed and used for the cryptoanalysis of the Enigma and Lorentz machines by the Phalanx Pact were not, forcing the Allied Powers to rely on their own scientists to independently develop their own cryptanalysis machines. The Phalanx Pact eventually toppled the Italian Mussolini Regime in August 1943 by inciting and supporting the Italian Royal Family and the monarchist faction of the Italian Fascist Party in staging a coup against Mussolini’s crypto-Republican faction. This also sparked a civil war between the pro-Phalanx Pact factions of the Italian resistance and their pro-Allied Powers counterparts. Cyprus was retaken by the British from the Turkish not long after North Africa was liberated by the Allied Powers. The Canary Islands was liberated from the Axis Powers by the United States in 1944. Gibraltar was liberated by the British not long after. Concurrently, the Allied-led Normandy Landings were underway. As the Allied Powers reached Germany in January 1945, Turkey broke off from the Axis powers in a last ditch effort to ‘side with the winners of history’. The Phalanx Pact’s involvement in the Second World War ended at the surrender of Germany on the 7th of May 1945. Field Marshal Alexandros Papagos and Captain General Juan Vigón represented Greece and Spain, respectively, at the surrender ceremony in Berlin as witnesses.