Eighty-five years ago today, Greece's resistance to the Nazi invasion may have changed the outcome of World War II. Hitl...

Eighty-five years ago today, Greece's resistance to the Nazi invasion may have changed the outcome of World War II. Hitler's original plan for Operation Barbarossa set May 15, 1941 as the launch date for a three-million-man assault on the Soviet Union, organized into 160 divisions across three army groups. That date never happened, and the reason traces directly back to Greece. When Hitler learned that British troops had landed in the Balkans and were positioned on Crete, he made a costly detour. Starting April 6, 1941, the Wehrmacht committed 29 divisions to the region, sweeping through Yugoslavia and then turning on Greece. It took five weeks of fighting, and the campaign ground down the armor and equipment that Germany desperately needed for its Russian campaign. The tank numbers alone tell the story. Germany had only 19 armored divisions at the time, and six of them were thrown at Greece. Roughly 1,200 of the 3,200 tanks earmarked for Barbarossa were used in that Balkan campaign, arriving in Russia worn and battle-stressed. The Luftwaffe's 8th Air Corps, which would account for 35 percent of all air power in the Russian invasion, was tied up fighting over Greece and above Crete during those critical weeks. The new date Hitler settled on for Barbarossa was June 22, 1941, five weeks and one day late. Historians have long argued that the delay proved fatal. Instead of reaching deep into Soviet territory before winter closed in, German forces found themselves fighting through bitter cold, on snow-covered ground that slowed armor and broke supply lines, fighting soldiers who knew the terrain and the weather. The Russian winter that crushed Napoleon in 1812 repeated itself in 1941, and Greece's stand is part of why. The Greeks had already turned back an Italian invasion in late 1940, one of the first Axis defeats of the war. When the Germans came in the spring, they fought those too. #OxiDay #Greece #WWII