page_title: History of the Cyclades
section_title: World War II: famine and guerrilla war
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Cyclades / The Cyclades in 19th- and 20th-century Greece / World War II: famine and guerrilla war
caption_attribution_description: English: Map of the 1941-1944 Axis Occupation of Greece. Depicted are the three occupation zones, plus the geographic regions and major urban centres.
context_page_description: The Cyclades are Greek islands located in the southern part of the Aegean Sea. The archipelago contains some 2,200 islands, islets and rocks; just 33 islands are inhabited. For the ancients, they formed a circle around the sacred island of Delos, hence the name of the archipelago. The best-known are, from north to south and from east to west: Andros, Tinos, Mykonos, Naxos, Amorgos, Syros, Paros and Antiparos, Ios, Santorini, Anafi, Kea, Kythnos, Serifos, Sifnos, Folegandros and Sikinos, Milos and Kimolos; to these can be added the little Cyclades: Irakleia, Schoinoussa, Koufonisi, Keros and Donoussa, as well as Makronisos between Kea and Attica, Gyaros, which lies before Andros, and Polyaigos to the east of Kimolos and Thirassia, before Santorini. At times they were also called by the generic name of Archipelago.
  The islands are located at the crossroads between Europe and Asia Minor and the Near East as well as between Europe and Africa. In antiquity, when navigation consisted only of cabotage and sailors sought never to lose sight of land, they played an essential role as a stopover. Into the 20th century, this situation made their fortune and their misfortune.
context_section_description: The Italian attack on Greece had been preceded by the torpedoing of the cruiser Elli, a symbolic ship for Greece, in the bay of Tinos on 15 August 1940. The Italians wanted to create an Italian "Provincia delle Cicladi" after the war's end. A process of "Italianization" was started in summer 1941, mainly in the catholic areas: it was partially successful in the city of Ano Syros.
  The German attack of April 1941 led to a total defeat and the occupation of Greece from the end of that month. However, the Cyclades were occupied late and more by Italian than by German troops. The first occupation forces appeared on 9 May 1941: Syros, Andros, Tinos and Kythnos were occupied by Italians and Germans took Milos. This delay allowed the islands to serve as a stopover for politicians heading to Egypt to continue the struggle. George Papandreou and Konstantinos Karamanlis thus stopped on Tinos before meeting in Alexandria.
  Following the Italian surrender, on 8 September 1943 the OKW ordered commanders of units in the Mediterranean sector to neutralize, by force if necessary, Italian units. On 1 October 1943, Hitler ordered his army to occupy all islands in the Aegean controlled by the Italians.
  At the time, Churchill’s objective in the eastern Mediterranean was to take the Italian-occupied Dodecanese so as to pressure neutral Turkey and tip it over into the Allied camp. Thus, British troops took control of this archipelago little by little (see Dodecanese Campaign). The German counter-attack was spectacular. General Müller left continental Greece on 5 November 1943 and moved from island to island, occupying each, until he reached Leros on 12 November and fought off the British. Thus the Cyclades were, for the time being, under definitive German occupation.
  Like the rest of the country, the Cyclades would suffer from the Great Famine organised by the German occupier. Moreover, on the islands, caïques no longer had authorization to go out and fish. Thus, on Tinos, it is considered that 327 persons in the town of Tinos and around 900 in the region of Panormos died of hunger during the conflict. Pre-war Naxos depended on Athens for a third of its supplies, transported by six caiques. During the war, as people were dying of hunger in the capital, the island could no longer depend on this contribution and four of its ships had been sunk by the Germans. On Syros, the number of deaths went from 435 in 1939 to 2,290 in 1942, and a birth deficit was also noticeable: 52 excess births in 1939, 964 excess births in 1942.
  Resistance was organised on each island, but due to their isolation, the Resistance forces could not mount the kind of guerrilla warfare that occurred on the mainland. However, in spring 1944, the islands became a scene of fighting as the Greek Sacred Band special forces unit and British commandos raided the German garrisons. Thus, on 24 April 1944 the SBS raided Santorini; on 14 May 1944, the Sacred Band attacked the aerodrome built on Paros by the Germans and seized it as well as its commander; on 24 May 1944, the German garrison of Naxos was attacked, and again on 12 October, leading to the island's liberation on the 15th. In Mykonos a squad of 26 men attacked a munitions depot, killing six German soldiers and finally forcing the Germans to evacuate the island on 25 September 1944. Although nearly all of Greece was evacuated in September 1944, a few garrisons remained, such as that on Milos, which did not surrender to the island's sacred band until 7 May 1945.
caption: The Greek occupation zones: the Cyclades were under Italian control (until 1943) except Milos and Amorgos occupied by the Germans.
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