of the local Greeks and provided self-government under nominal Albanian sovereignty. The Republic, however, was short-lived, as when World War I broke out, Albania collapsed, and northern Epirus was alternately controlled by Greece, Italy and France at various intervals. Although short-lived, this state managed to leave behind a number of historical records of its existence, including its own postage stamps; see Postage stamps and postal history of Epirus. Although the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 awarded Northern Epirus to Greece, developments such as the Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish War and, crucially, Italian lobbying in favor of Albania meant that Greece would not keep Northern Epirus. In 1924, the area was again ceded to Albania. In 1939, Italy occupied Albania, and in 1940 invaded Greece. The Italians were driven back into Albania, however, and Greek forces again took control of northern Epirus. The conflict marked the first tactical victory of the Allies in World War II. Benito Mussolini himself supervised the massive counter-attack of his divisions in spring 1941, only to be decisively defeated again by the poorly equipped, but determined, Greeks. Nazi Germany then intervened in April 1941 to avert an embarrassing, wholesale Italian defeat. The German military performed rapid military maneuvers through Yugoslavia and forced the encircled Greek forces of the Epirus front to surrender. The whole of Epirus was then placed under Italian occupation until 1943, when the Germans took over following the Italian surrender to the Allies. Due to the extensive activity of the anti-Nazi Greek resistance (mainly under EDES), the Germans carried out large scaled anti-partisan sweeps, making wide use of Nazi-collaborationist bands of Cham Albanians, who committed numerous atrocities against the civilian population. To deal with the situation, the Allied Military Mission in the Axis-occupied Greece (under Colonel C. M. Woodhouse), gave EDES partisans direct orders to counter-attack and chase out of their villages those units that used them as bases and local strongholds. Helped by Allied war material transferred from the recently liberated southern Italy, EDES forces succeeded and as a result several thousands of Muslim Cham Albanians fled the area and took refuge in nearby Albania. With the liberation of Greece and the start of the first round of the Greek Civil War at the end of 1944, the highlands of Epirus became a major theater of guerrilla warfare between the leftist Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS) and the right-wing National Republican