No Day: October 28th 1940

October 28th 1940: Greece rejects Mussolini’s ultimatium

On this day in 1940 during World War Two, the Greek government rejected Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s demand that the Greeks allow the Italian army to enter and occupy the country. 

At 3 a.m. the Italian ambassador to Greece, Emanuele Grazzi, delivered Mussolini’s ultimatum to Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas. 

The Prime Minister replied with"Alors, c’est la guerre"  (“Then, it is war”). 

The people of Greece celebrated Metaxas’s defiant “Oxi” (Greek for ‘no’) and resisted when the Italian army crossed the Greek border. 

The Greeks fought valiantly in the subsequent Greco-Italian War and dealt the first victory for the Allies successfully pushing the Italian army back into Albania. 

Greece ultimately fell to the Axis powers, with Nazi Germany assisting Italy in Greece and eventually occupying the country, which delay the invasion of the Soviet Union by six weeks. By having to detour through Greece, Hitler’s Germany lost valuable time in the spring as he had to delay the invasion of Russia until the winter, a decision that proved disastrous for the Axis war effort. 

Although the German invasion of Greece was swift, their forces met fierce resistance on the island of Crete, where the elite Fallschirmjager suffered almost 7,000 casualties. 

These heavy losses eliminated the option of a massive airborne invasion of the Soviet Union and further expansion in the Mediterranean saving Malta, Gibraltar, Cyprus, and the Suez Canal from airborne invasion.

This day is celebrated in Greece as ‘No Day’, and is marked with military parades and displays of patriotism.

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