Originally Posted by Blackdog_kt
(Post 441695)
I'm from Greece. We lost 10% of our population during the axis invasion and subsequent occupation.
Most of these casualties were not the result of initial combat actions, but of the Wermacht stealing the country's entire food production and shipping it to the eastern front, with the end result that during the winter of '41 people were dying in the streets of cities out of starvation.
Also, a compulsory loan was exacted, whereby the occupied Greek state was forced to print money en masse for the occupying troops to use. Essentially, money was printed so the occupation troops could be rich when they were on leave, but it drove inflation sky high, to the point that a few slices of bread on the streets of Athens were priced at 1 billion drachmas during that winter.
Apart from a couple of airstrips constructed or expanded for use by the luftwaffe (the old Athens airport and the currently used Thessaloniki airport), the rest of the country's civilian infrastructure was blown back to the stone age and all means of production either seized or destroyed. Apart from the first two installments that the Nazi government paid back, the rest of the loan was never returned and neither did the Greek state receive any war reparations whatsoever.
Finally, some archeological digs were started and it is somewhat unclear if, what kind of and how many antiquities were stolen and if so, whether they have been returned.
The countryside was a different story. Food shortages were not as pronounced, but the villages were under frequent reprisal raids to discourage aiding the guerrilla fighters.
As a side note, the Greek guerrilla groups had mostly liberated the countryside by as early as 1943, leaving the axis troops to only control the big cities. A few hours to the north Serbian and Yugoslav groups were also successful, to the point that parts of Yugoslavia were the only occupied territories to be declared an active front. In both cases, this was happening at the same time that the guerrilla groups were fighting both the axis and each other in a civil war based on political beliefs (royalists vs communists usually). All of this tied up valuable units that would have been otherwise used on the Eastern Front. In fact, the entire operation Marita (the assault on the Balkans) delayed the start of Barbarossa and possibly made a real difference, if we take into account the fact that the Wermacht was stopped about 20kms outside Moscow.
However, all this came at a high price in lives and a lot of that was civilians and non-combatants. In many cases entire villages were leveled and hundreds of people summarily executed as reprisals. Also, most of these war crimes committed during the occupation were not the work of NSDAP instruments lke the SS and Gestapo, but perpetrated by regular Wermacht troops under the orders of well known high command Generals.
This started as early as the battle on the Bulgarian border, when a machine gunner was captured after inflicting heavy losses to an attacking Wermacht detachment. The Wermacht officer ordered the man to be brought to him, saluted him and then ordered his execution to boost the morale of his own troops. This is the first documented execution.
In Crete, the paratroopers leveled the Cretan village of Kandanos right after the battle, to punish the Cretan civilians for their tenacious defence, leaving behind an inscribed plaque to discourage further resistance actions.
In Athens, unarmed citizens went up in open revolt against the forced worker conscription policy and were fired on by carabinieri. However they succeeded and Greece was the only occupied country that wasn't forced to send workers to the factories building tanks and aircraft for the axis, maybe because they thought they would sabotage everything.
Finally, the villages of Kalavryta and Distomo were leveled, men between the ages of 12 and 60 were executed and other civilians locked into the church and set on fire.
On top of all that, Greece also had 2 squadrons of fighters (335 and 336 sqd) and a light bomber squadron (i think that was 33 sqd, usually operating with mixed crews of Greek officers as pilots/navigators and Commonwealth troops as aircrew/gunners) operating under RAF command in N.Africa and then over Italy (for example, the bombers took part in the battle of Monte Casino shortly after switching from Blenheims to Martin Baltimores, the fighters were active in the battle of El Alamein, etc), ground troops that fought in the Middle East and Italy, a commando detachment that took part in the battle of the Dodecanese along with British troops, as well as numerous warships operating in the Mediterranean and as convoy escorts in the Indian ocean, a Flower class corvette that was part of the D-Day fleet, numerous merchant ships running the U-boat gauntlet and getting sunk in the Atlantic daily, loads of civilian fishing trawlers transporting allied operatives around the occupied Balkans and even a guerrilla held and maintained airport smack in the middle of axis occupied territory (the Serbs had one too and they used it to evacuate 600 downed airmen from the Ploesti raids, with terrible risk of reprisals for their civilians), which was so well camouflaged that JG27's 109s operating from Athens were unable to inflict any serious damage to it despite numerous ground attack sorties. That airport was eventually taken over by axis ground troops and the head of the guard (which was manned by the armed branch of the Greek communist party) stayed back until he exhausted his ammo and got killed, in order to allow the British SOE operatives to escape and plan further actions against the occupying forces.
What am i getting at you'll ask?
Well, if anybody should be feeling bad about flying axis it should be Greeks :-P
Despite all that, i have no problem flying on the Axis team. I fly sims to experience a specific part of history that i like, so that i can further understand and study it. I don't feel guilty at all. If anything, i get an even better appreciation of what our grandpas did back then when i see how superior the 109Fs they faced over El Alamein were against their Hurricane Mk.IICs, or how outclassed their PZL24s would have been against an onslaught of 109Es during that April of '41.
There are a few other posters on this board that i know to be Greek and they also mostly fly axis aircraft. Heck, i was flying blue on IL2:1946 mod maps that had me flying over a scaled down depiction of Greece and i still had no apprehensions about it.
That being said, it doesn't mean it's the same for everyone. Some people will get a more emotional response, so understandably it will be harder for them to fly on the "enemy" team.
By the way, i think it was Krupi on these boards who once commented about a scheduled multiplayer event when the time was adjusted to allow US players an easier participation: "Damn Yanks telling me when i can bomb my homeland, what's next?". I hadn't laughed that hard in quite a while :grin:
For me the answer is simple. Each one should fly what they are comfortable with, understand there is no shame in that and finally, realize that other players might have a different feeling about it all and not judge them negatively. We're here to learn, appreciate the efforts of people on all sides and have fun while doing it, not relive the hatred that caused that mess in the first place ;)
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