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For months the Germans had been withdrawing their forces that dangled precariously through the Balkans into the Mediterranean islands. By this week the British, moving in after them from the south, had already recovered Greece's Peloponnesus, were working toward Corinth and Athens.

Although they did not announce the new Greek campaign until last week, the British began their operation Sept. 24. Actually it was more an occupation than a full-scale invasion. First, troop carriers dropped parachutists in the northwest corner of the Peloponnesus. Unopposed, they set to work building an airfield, piling up supplies.

Two days later the first ground troops arrived by sea on the west shore, made a de luxe landing. They not only found planes of their own Balkan Air Force operating from airfields ahead of them; they also found supplies and fuel neatly arranged in dumps and not a German in sight. Said one officer: "When those fellows got off the boat on D-day they even had mail waiting for them. . . . The only casualty in the whole operation was one cow."

The British forces were small. They were a section of the newly formed Land Forces of the Adriatic under General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson's Mediterranean command; included paratroopers, commandos, infantrymen, engineers and an R.A.F. regiment. The two Greek guerrilla forces --E.D.E.S. and E.L.A.S. --had promised cooperation. Local commander was the 26-year-old Earl Jellicoe, son of the British commander at Jutland in World War I. Young Jellicoe went in as a major, was promoted to a lieutenant colonel four days later.

His troops marched unopposed until they reached Patras (prewar pop. about 60,000), third largest city of Greece. After four days' fighting with a garrison of about 1,000 Germans, the battle ended when the Greek collaborators surrendered, the Germans took to their Diesel-propelled ferries by night.

The British move into Greece was political rather than military. Greece has long been a British sphere of influence and London was anxious to keep it so after the war. There was poetic justice in the return of the British for the redemption of Greece. In 1941 they had risked Egypt to aid the Greeks, lost 15,000 men in a hopeless, 24-day retreat. But the Greeks, who also fought bravely, have starved and died for three years. Resentment against British political policies has grown. Whether food and medicine would win them back was still uncertain.

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