Axis Greece

My entry to the Random Bouts in Cartography contest over on AH.com. It's a fairly low-key/casual contest, which is always nice. As usual, this is a work of speculative fiction, and does not represent my opinions in any way, shape, or form.

The idea behind this is basically that Eleftherios Venizelos is assassinated by an anarchist in late 1915, leading Greece to be neutral through WWI, though the Entente repeatedly violates their territorial sovereignty throughout the war, angering the Greek populace and largely turning them against the Entente. This anger eventually boils over into an early takeover by OTL dictator Ioannis Metaxas, who ITTL is much more overtly fascist. Like Mussolini, Metaxas does not overthrow King Constantine, instead making him into an effectively ceremonial figurehead. Metaxas begins a war with a Turkey that, ITTL, is much more fractured and whose civil war has been going on for much longer. This, and the lack of mid-war purges/conflict at home, allow the Greek state to secure large amounts of Western Anatolia.

A deal is made between the Italians and the Greeks wherein the Italians aid the Greeks in the Greco-Turkish war as well as turn over possession of the island of Rhodes, and in return the Greeks allow the Italians to annex all of Albania. This is Greece's first entry into alliances with other Fascist states; it will not be its last. Greece joins the Second World War on the side of the Axis after the Fall of France in 1940, and uses its modernized armored forces to annex the remainder of Turkey, turning the eastern third into a puppet state of Armenia, which, like Vichy France, is technically neutral in the conflict. This neutrality means that the Greeks do not join in the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.

However, it does not stop the British from extending the Syria-Lebanon Campaign of June 1941 into a new front: the Anatolian Front. Fighting rages along this front throughout the war (mostly because the Allies are not willing to commit large forces to what they consider a low-priority theatre), but the lands east of the newly renamed/ethnically cleansed Constantinople are secured by the time 1943 rolls around. There is a Balkan Campaign ITTL, but it is largely overshadowed by the Italian Campaign and later, the Normandy landings, enough so that it is still mostly the Soviet Union that ends up in control of the Balkans.