9

Meltdown

1940–1949

The sequel took almost everyone by surprise – and none more so than the Italian dictator. Two weeks before the ultimatum was delivered, Mussolini had outlined to his chiefs of staff his plan to occupy Greece, in the same way that he had previously occupied Albania, virtually unopposed. With German arms triumphant in northern Europe, it was time for the southern component of the Axis to flex its muscles and make conquests of its own. Hitler was not consulted. Victory should be easy.

Instead, the Greek army in Epiros, under the command of General Alexandros Papagos, halted the initial Italian advance into Greece in a matter of days. On 14 November 1940 it was the turn of Greek forces to go on the offensive. The ‘Albanian campaign’, as it has been called ever afterwards in Greek, was experienced at the time and is still remembered as an ‘epic’.

During the winter of 1940–41, Greeks spoke with one voice. They acted and fought as one. Venizelists of lower rank were at last welcomed back into the units they had been forced to leave after the failed coup attempt of 1935. Even now, the spirit of reconciliation did not extend to their superiors. But many of the excluded officers volunteered anyway, and were able to contribute their bravery and expertise in humbler capacities. For once, the overmanning of the officer corps, which had proved such a deadly legacy of the civil war of 1916, may actually have done the country some good. By 10 January 1941, Papagos had secured gains right across the southern part of Albania, stretching some thirty miles into Italian-occupied territory.

It has justifiably been called Greece’s ‘finest hour’, echoing Churchill’s much-quoted words in Parliament on the eve of the Battle of Britain.¹ It had been achieved by the same spirit of unity and self-sacrifice that Britain’s wartime leader had called for then. And it had been achieved, just as victory in the Battle of Britain would be achieved, by one country fighting alone for its survival against overwhelming odds. For once, the bitter lesson of 1897, which Metaxas had taken to heart and which had guided his entire career, had been overturned.

Or had it?

The first thing that Metaxas did, that October morning, after he dismissed the Italian ambassador, is recorded telegraphically in his diary: ‘Call Palairet and seek help from Britain.’ It was not yet dawn when the British Minister arrived. The cabinet had not yet met.² From that moment on, all the time that the Greek army was winning its victories in Albania, Metaxas and his government were walking a diplomatic tightrope. As late as January 1941, Metaxas still dared not accept an offer of British reinforcements when it was finally on the table. Hitler would be bound to see their presence as a provocation. And the numbers offered would be nothing like enough to protect Greece against the might of the Third Reich. Greek journalists, throughout that winter, were not allowed to say that their country was fighting against Fascism, ‘since we, too, are a fascist state’. Officially, Greece was at war only with ‘the armed forces of Italy’.³ But with pressure increasing from both Britain and Germany, how long could that last?

Metaxas would have been seventy that April. His health had been giving concern for some time. The last entry in his diary is dated 17 January 1941. He died of pneumonia on 29 January, leaving the ever more urgent dilemma unresolved. Sir Michael Palairet, the British Minister, paid a fulsome tribute, in his report to the Foreign Office three days later, to one of ‘the great men of Greece and, indeed, of Europe, whose actions and personality have vitally influenced the course of the war’. Palairet believed wholly in the dictator’s ‘goodwill and friendliness towards Great Britain’ and was satisfied that Metaxas at the time of his death had been ‘determined to pursue the war, side by side with us, not only against Italy, but also against Germany’.⁴

Metaxas himself saw it differently. In a long diary entry dated less than a month before his death, he railed against the treachery of Hitler and Mussolini. The Führer and the Duce had ended up betraying their own ideological principles. ‘Greece has become since the Fourth of August an anti-communist state, an anti-parliamentary state, a totalitarian state,’ he wrote – and these, for Metaxas, were matters for congratulation, not censure. If Hitler and Mussolini had been sincere, he went on:

they ought to have supported Greece in everything with all their might. They could even have made allowances if short-term interests or necessity, based on its geographical position, brought Greece close to Britain. In fact, the opposite: Greece kept Britain at arm’s length – apart from indispensable and in any case necessary friendly relations. Greece has never given or promised any help to Britain.⁵

Metaxas died a fascist, committed to the very ideology whose advance his troops, for the first time anywhere in the world, had turned to flight. In his final months he had given his people the leadership that enabled them to overcome the divisions of a quarter of a century. During those months not much was heard of the ‘New State’, still less of the ‘Third Greek Civilization’, to say nothing of the threat of Communism, which had been the excuse for imposing and maintaining the regime in the first place. The painstaking and sometimes obsessive rebuilding of the Greek state and its institutions, which had begun after the catastrophe of 1922, received its final vindication in the united front put up against the Italian invaders between November 1940 and March 1941.

The sudden and total collapse of that state was just around the corner. The cause of the collapse would be Hitler. But the process of dissolution began with the death of Ioannis Metaxas on 29 January 1941.

STATE COLLAPSE

It began at the very top. The Regime of the Fourth of August had no constitutional legitimacy. There was no mechanism for replacing the ‘dictator for life’ that Metaxas had become. King George was now presented with the first of several opportunities to undo the dictatorial regime at a stroke, and replace it with a broad coalition of political talents and interests. Allowing for the difference that in Greece there was no parliament and no possibility in the circumstances of electing one, this would have followed the example of Churchill’s war cabinet that had taken office in Great Britain the previous summer. Instead, the king turned to the director of the National Bank of Greece. Alexandros Koryzis, who had only limited experience of government, became the new prime minister. The rest of the machinery of the regime stayed in place.

The dilemma that had tormented Metaxas during the last weeks of his life would not be resolved until late February. During a visit by the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and General Wavell, in command of British forces in the Middle East, it was finally agreed that British troops would be sent to Greece. British, Australian and New Zealand units began disembarking at Piraeus at the beginning of March. At the same time, Bulgaria declared for the Axis. German forces immediately began to build up there. Hitler, we now know, had made up his mind as far back as December to invade Greece.

The attack came on 6 April 1941. German divisions simultaneously attacked both Yugoslavia and Greece. The first assault, from Bulgaria, was over in a matter of days. Salonica was occupied on 9 April. A week later the Germans had forced their way through the whole length of Yugoslavia and were pushing into Greece through western Macedonia. This made the British, Australian and New Zealand positions impossible to hold for long. At the same time, the bulk of Greek land forces, which had only recently driven back a renewed assault by the Italians on the Albanian front, suddenly found themselves all but surrounded. Exhausted by almost six months of fighting in the blizzards and sub-zero temperatures of the mountains, few among either officers or men had morale left to face a fresh, and by reputation far more deadly, adversary to their rear. Within days, discipline began to break down. Without proper orders from Athens, local commanders on their own initiative sued for terms.

By this stage, it was a moot point who, in Athens, would have had the authority to issue an order anyway. On the afternoon of 18 April, Orthodox Good Friday, the cabinet met at Command Headquarters in the Grande Bretagne Hotel, with the king presiding. News had already leaked that the government was preparing to be evacuated to the relative safety of Crete. Morale everywhere was collapsing, not least within the cabinet itself. Some members were urging capitulation. The hapless banker Alexandros Koryzis, who by rights should have been chairing the meeting, begged the king to accept his resignation the moment it was over. When the king refused, Koryzis went home and shot himself. Greece had no army and no government. Half the country was already in enemy hands.

A last stand was made by British, Australian and New Zealand troops at Thermopylae, the site of one of the most famous battles of antiquity, between 22 and 25 April. But, just like the action of Leonidas and his Three Hundred in 480 BCE, this was no more than a holding operation. Its purpose was to cover the evacuation of the government and personnel judged by the British to be essential. On 27 April the first armoured columns of the Wehrmacht entered Athens. The swastika was raised on the Acropolis. For most Greeks, the Occupation had begun.

For the second time, with the suicide of Koryzis, King George had the opportunity to create a broadly based administration, even if by this time its effect would have been little more than symbolic. After three chaotic days, when the king took charge himself, the choice of prime minister fell on another banker. Emmanuel Tsouderos would prove to have more staying power than his predecessor. He had other qualifications, too, which would be no less essential now that the government was transferring itself to Crete. This was the homeland of Venizelos, where opposition to Metaxas had always been strongest. Tsouderos was a Cretan by birth and had supported the Venizelists in the past. But with that one concession, the Greek government that fled Athens at the end of April 1941 was still the unreconstructed and not much lamented Fourth of August Regime. Tsouderos would last for almost exactly three years, making him one of the longest continuously serving prime ministers of those turbulent times, but without contesting an election or ever having to win a parliamentary vote of confidence.

The government’s sojourn in Crete lasted less than a month. On Tuesday, 20 May the Germans began landing paratroopers at strategic points across the island. Defence was in the hands of New Zealand, Australian and British troops. All available fighting men among the Cretans had been drafted to the Albanian front the previous autumn, and were now being demobbed after the surrender of their commanders to the Germans. Even so, resistance to the invaders by armed Cretan civilians greatly increased their casualties, and would soon lead to brutal reprisals. Meanwhile, King George, his government and the last of their civil servants had to be hustled across the White Mountains to be taken by sea to the safety of Egypt. The Battle of Crete was over in ten days. Festung Kreta (Fortress Crete) would remain a German military outpost until the very end of the war.

What was now a government in exile, headed by King George and his prime minister, Tsouderos, slowly made its way, under British protection, via Alexandria and Cape Town to London, only to wind up two years later in the Egyptian capital, Cairo. It would not be until February 1942 that the Regime of the Fourth of August would finally be laid to rest – by which time in most parts of Greece the dissolution of the state would be all but complete.

Greece had been defeated and occupied by the armed forces of Germany alone. But Hitler only ever took a passing interest in his new conquest. Unlike other conquered countries, Greece seems to have been viewed by the Nazis as booty to be plundered and picked clean, rather than as a going concern to be nurtured and maintained in their own interest. This soon became apparent when Hitler handed over control of most of the country to those allies who happened to be most conveniently placed to exercise it: the Bulgarians and the Italians.

Most of western Thrace and all of eastern Macedonia were given to Bulgaria to administer. At once the ‘ethnic cleansing’ that had been pursued by both sides during the Balkan wars and the First World War resumed. The Germans kept control only of the most strategically sensitive areas: the islands and mainland closest to neutral Turkey, the greater part of Macedonia adjoining Yugoslavia, including Salonica, most of Crete, and a small area around Athens and Piraeus. For all the rest, the Italians would be responsible.

A puppet Greek government was sworn in, headed by Georgios Tsolakoglou, one of the senior army commanders who had forced the capitulation in Epiros. Real power lay with the plenipotentiaries of the occupying powers and their different, and often competing, agendas. Civil administration soon began to fragment. The Axis powers requisitioned foodstuffs for the military and to supply their own people back home. The yield from the first summer’s harvest was much reduced because of the fighting earlier in the year. Then the normal mechanisms for distribution and supply broke down. As often as not, farmers and shepherds refused to hand over their produce. Rations for civilians had to be reduced progressively, until they dipped below subsistence levels. Prices rose and the value of the drachma plummeted. In the first year of the Occupation the price of bread rose from 70 drachmas per unit to 2,350. By 1944 it would reach two million.

Even in the best of times, Greece had never been self-sufficient in cereals. The surpluses of products such as tobacco, currants, citrus fruit and olive oil, which traditionally would be exported to pay for the necessary imports, were now being siphoned off by the occupiers. The British still had naval supremacy and were able to enforce a strict blockade. This was exactly the nightmare that had been foreseen by Metaxas and others, as long ago as 1914, when they insisted that Greece, as a maritime country, could not survive a war in which the other side had command of the sea. Now, the Greeks had no choice. They starved, literally.

During the first winter of the Occupation, as many as forty thousand civilians may have died from starvation in Athens and Piraeus alone. Between 1941 and 1943 the victims of famine are estimated to have reached a quarter of a million, close to 5 per cent of the total population. Conditions were worst in the cities and best in places where people could live on what they produced themselves. It was a sudden and brutal return to the subsistence economy that had been the inheritance of the Ottoman Empire and the Byzantine before it. Athens, Piraeus and Salonica, and many of the larger towns, had grown to sizes that could not be supported without the relatively sophisticated systems of exchange that had now broken down. Eventually, thanks to efforts by the Red Cross, some limited relief would be allowed through the blockade. The first winter was the worst. But throughout the Occupation almost everyone depended for survival on a black market that had largely replaced the legitimate economy. And if the danger of death by starvation to some extent receded, it would soon be replaced by others, as violence took hold all over the country.

DESCENT INTO VIOLENCE

Extreme violence came to Greece with the invaders. This, too, started from the top. By the third year of a brutalizing Occupation its corrosive effects had spread right through Greek society, pitting Greek against Greek. Nothing like it had happened since the Revolution of the 1820s.

Right from the beginning, any overt sign of opposition to the occupying forces could lead to summary imprisonment, torture or execution. Soon mass executions and the destruction of whole villages would become common practice. By the time the Occupation came to an end, ‘over a thousand villages had been razed. One million Greeks had seen their homes looted and burned down … More than 20,000 civilians had been killed or wounded, shot, hanged or beaten by Wehrmacht troops.’⁶ Those numbers exclude the victims of similar actions by the Italians (far less benign in reality than in the fictional portrayal by Louis de Bernières in the best-selling novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin) and Bulgarians. They also exclude action by Greeks against other Greeks.

The Occupation’s deliberate murder of up to eighty thousand Greek citizens could not even claim the pretext of disobedience or resistance. The only offence of these eighty thousand was to be Jewish. In the spring of 1943 the entire Sephardic population of Salonica was rounded up and deported by train, crammed into goods trucks. ‘Almost all were destined for Auschwitz. The records of Auschwitz-Birkenau show that 48,974 Jews arrived there from northern Greece; of these, 37,386 were immediately gassed. Hardly any of the remainder returned home.’ Not the least chilling aspect of these numbers is their precision – something that cannot be said of most of the atrocities committed in Greece in the 1940s. Later, the smaller Jewish communities of Athens, the Ionian islands, Ioannina and Crete would suffer the same fate. It has been estimated that overall ‘as many as 90 per cent of Greek Jews were killed’, one of the highest percentages anywhere in Europe.⁷

The full horror of the Holocaust would not be known until after the war was over. But the culture of violence that had come with the invaders was quick to spread. The first serious plans to organize resistance and retaliate in kind were drawn up in Athens in the autumn of 1941. It would not be long before the centre of operations moved out of the city, and the bitterly fought process of piecemeal liberation of the country began. Greece is after all a country of mountains. Going back several centuries, if not much longer, whenever the central authority was weak, the mountains of the mainland and the hinterland of the larger islands would become a refuge and a breeding ground for brigands, local militias and guerrilla fighters. Although theoretically quite distinct from one another, throughout Greek history the boundaries between these types of activity have often been blurred. In 1821 it had been small-scale, locally based guerrilla action that had liberated the greater part of the country, while the Ottomans had held out in towns and coastal fortresses. The pattern would be repeated throughout the 1940s.

Much of the information that became available about these guerrilla groups immediately after the war, and for a long time afterwards, came from officers of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and later the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Altogether, some four hundred British and two hundred Americans were dropped by parachute into occupied Greece to work alongside them. Among the British, the figure of C. M. (Christopher Montague) Woodhouse stands out. Known in English as ‘Monty’ and in Greek as ‘Kris’, Woodhouse spent more than two years in the mountains of central Greece, latterly as head of the Allied Military Mission to the Greek guerrillas. Like George Finlay more than a century before him, Woodhouse would devote much of the rest of his life to writing the history of the events he had witnessed, and placing them within the longer story of Greece and Greeks in medieval and modern times. Like Finlay, too, Woodhouse developed a deep and sincere love for the Greek people, as well as a sharply critical eye for the foibles and political weaknesses of those who presumed to lead them. Also like the philhellenes of that earlier time, Woodhouse and his fellow officers played a part in determining the outcome of the struggle that they witnessed (exactly what part is still contested by historians to this day). And inevitably, again like the philhellenes but for different reasons, they were at some degree of cross-purposes with those in Greece whom they were there to help.

From the point of view of SOE, there were very specific wartime objectives to be met. At first, this was to sabotage German supply lines to Field Marshal Rommel’s troops in North Africa. The destruction of the railway viaduct over the Gorgopotamos ravine, in the mountains above Lamia, has been much celebrated ever since, though it came too late to affect the outcome of the North Africa campaign. That was in November 1942. For the next eight months the objective was to deceive the Germans and Italians into believing that the new front to be opened up in Europe would be in Greece. This required a continuing campaign of sabotage against military targets, and apparently achieved some success. After the Allies in fact invaded Sicily in July 1943, and Italy capitulated, SOE in Greece was ordered to keep up the pressure by harassing the occupying forces, while doing its best to keep the peace among the Greek guerrilla groups until such time as the Germans withdrew.

The story of SOE, and latterly also of OSS, in Greece has been told many times, from varying points of view. It is a story of hardiness, bravery, frustration, and often of deep empathy with the sorely tried Greek people alongside whom the officers worked. But it inevitably skews the reality of what the Greeks were fighting for. This is not to say, as some have done, that the British were cynically exploiting the Greek Resistance for their own political ends. It was simply that they had different priorities.

For the Greeks who risked their lives by taking to the mountains, supply lines to Rommel’s forces in North Africa could be of only the most abstract interest. ‘Operation Animals’, as the campaign of deception in 1943 was code-named, would have appealed to them even less, had they been allowed to know of it, as of course they were not. What they did know, all too well, was that acts of sabotage, of the kind that the British were constantly urging on them, would only lead to mass reprisals against the civilian population. British and American officers were constantly irked by what they saw as the unwillingness of the guerrilla bands to engage directly with the enemy, and an opportunistic obsession with securing advantage for themselves in the future, when the Occupation would be over. But this was to miss precisely the point of resistance activity.

For those Greeks who participated in it, the overriding purpose of resistance was to extend their group’s control over as much territory and as many resources as possible, while avoiding pitched battles, unnecessary casualties or enemy reprisals. In the mountains, between 1942 and 1944, life was a matter of daily survival. ‘Liberation’ was not, as it would be in many other countries occupied during the Second World War, a future event to be brought about by great armies, by kings and generals. It was happening day by day, inch by inch, in the mountains of what by the summer of 1943 had come to be known as ‘Free Greece’.

The first effective moves were made by the Communist Party, the KKE. Many communists held in the country’s jails by the Metaxas regime had been set free by the occupying forces when they arrived. After all, at the time Hitler had still been bound to Stalin’s Soviet Union by a non-aggression pact. But Nikos Zachariadis, the hard-line leader of the party, remained in prison. Zachariadis would spend the greater part of the war in the Dachau concentration camp. In Greece, an interim leadership soon formed. This was the group that in September 1941 established the National Liberation Front, known by its Greek acronym EAM. The organization of EAM was built from the ground up. As its name suggests, it was designed to appeal to a broad base of national solidarity, rather than to supporters of any particular party. But the early success of EAM owed much to the experience gained by communist cadres in underground political activity. Among the leaders of EAM throughout the Occupation were Georgios Siantos, the acting General Secretary in Zachariadis’s absence, and Ioannis Ioannidis, with whom he informally shared the leadership of the KKE. Of Siantos, a former tobacco worker, Woodhouse later wrote, ‘Ruthless and ambitious though he was, [he] had a simple bonhomie and good humour.’⁸

The aims of the new organization were set out, a year after its founding, in a manifesto signed by the well-known communist intellectual and campaigner for the demotic language Dimitris Glinos. This first manifesto invokes the precedents of Rigas Velestinlis and the Friendly Society that had paved the way for the Revolution of 1821. It calls on all social classes to come together in what it calls a ‘national struggle’. A short passage sets out only very broad objectives for what will follow, ‘as soon as the People have expelled the foreign conquerors’. These include freedom of speech, of the press and of assembly (all constitutional rights that had been suspended by the Metaxas regime), and elections for a Constituent Assembly.⁹

By the time this manifesto began to circulate, EAM had already created its military offshoot, the Hellenic Popular Liberation Army. Its acronym in Greek, ELAS, sounds the same as the official name of the state, Hellas. From modest beginnings, with two thousand men under arms in February 1943, the size of ELAS grew exponentially, to reach twelve thousand in June. After the Italians capitulated in September of that year, and the Germans took over direct control of the entire country except for the Bulgarian-held northeast, that number doubled again. Captured Italian weapons greatly added to the arsenal available in the mountains. By the time of the German withdrawal in the autumn of 1944, ELAS had an estimated fifty thousand men under its command.

During the years of Occupation, EAM and ELAS together achieved something without precedent in Greek political history. They created a mass movement, independently of the leadership of any one charismatic individual or clearly defined group. Deliberately, the communists who retained control kept in the shadows. Most of those who took up arms with ELAS were not communists. Of those who were, one recruiting officer is reported to have commented, ‘I doubt whether some of those knew what communism is.’ This is a theme that will surface again and again during those years.¹⁰ On the other hand, EAM and ELAS brought huge political changes to the villages and, latterly, the towns that they liberated. Woodhouse, who thoroughly distrusted their leadership and its motives, saw the effects of these changes at first hand and paid this tribute shortly afterwards:

Having acquired control of almost the whole country, except the principal communications used by the Germans, they had given it things that it had never known before. Communications in the mountains, by wireless, courier, and telephone, have never been so good before or since; even motor roads were mended and used by EAM/ELAS … The benefits of civilisation and culture trickled into the mountains for the first time. Schools, local government, law-courts and public utilities, which the war had ended, worked again. Theatres, factories, parliamentary assemblies began for the first time.¹¹

So far, so rosy. Out of the chaos of Occupation and famine, the apparatus of a functioning state was being recreated in the mountains. People were being empowered who had never been empowered before. This was particularly true of women, who ‘were given the vote for the first time in Greece’s history, and their help … enlisted in numerous ways’.¹² For the first time since independence, public notices, announcements and newspapers were written in a language that everyone could understand, demotic Greek. But all this was only one side of the coin. There was another, much darker side.

There is a already a clear hint of this in the manifesto of EAM circulated at the end of 1942. A surprising amount of attention is given there to internal enemies. The king and the ‘old political parties’ are expected targets. More ominous is the warning that anyone who ‘takes up arms against, or undermines, or frustrates by whatever means the unity of the national-liberation struggle … is a collaborator with the foreign conquerors, [and consequently, is] voluntarily or involuntarily, a traitor’. A whole paragraph threatens women who enter into sexual relationships with the enemy. Near the end comes the order to ‘hunt down and stigmatize all informers, traitors, stool-pigeons, collaborators’. The peroration promises to ‘frustrate all the schemes of the barbarian conquerors and homegrown traitors’.¹³

At the same time that EAM and ELAS were attracting willing and enthusiastic recruits all over Greece, they were alienating almost as many others. ‘Traitors’, in the sense of people who willingly supported the ideology and actions of the occupying powers, would have been hard to find in late 1942 – even among the demoralized city police and rural gendarmerie, whom ELAS from the beginning targeted as stooges of the puppet regime that employed them. This language and these tactics ensured that, for all their effective organization, their patriotic appeal and firmness of purpose, EAM and ELAS would never manage to gain a monopoly of resistance activity during the Occupation.

Former military officers and, increasingly, politicians preferred to take advantage of smugglers’ routes out of Greece, to wind up, by way of neutral Turkey, in the Middle East. There they took service under the government in exile – and before long would have exported the dissensions of their homeland. For the great majority, who had no opportunity to leave the country, the only alternative to passivity was to ‘take to the mountains’, as the traditional Greek expression has it. But by no means all who took that route opted to join ELAS. Regional and local loyalties, or the charisma of a leader known to them and their families, often seemed to offer a more reliable sense of solidarity in a dangerous enterprise than the grandiose public pronouncements and intentionally invisible leadership of EAM and ELAS.

Of these groups the most significant were known by the Greek acronyms EDES (National Republican Hellenic League) and EKKA (National and Social Liberation). Both were led by former Venizelist army officers who had been cashiered after the coup attempt of 1935: respectively, the flamboyant Napoleon Zervas and Colonel Dimitrios Psarros, who in particular earned the respect of the British commandos who worked with him. Zervas operated from a power base in Epiros, Psarros in southern Roumeli. There is no reason to doubt that these and many other, smaller organizations, in different parts of the country, were formed with very similar aims to EAM and ELAS, at least as far as the occupying powers were concerned. When the first British commandos arrived in Greece at the end of September 1942 and discovered the existence of competing guerrilla bands in the mountains, they reasonably enough took it upon themselves to try to persuade them to work together in a common cause.

But the leadership of EAM and ELAS had other ideas. The unity of the entire Greek people, urged in the manifesto of EAM and repeated in thousands of proclamations, had nothing to do with consensus, persuasion or cooperation. The occupying forces had already set a benchmark for brutality. ELAS and its security arm, the Organization for the Protection of Popular Combatants, known by the acronym OPLA (which spells the word for ‘weapons’ in Greek), were prepared to match them in atrocities. Practices not seen in these mountains since the Revolution returned during the 1940s: summary executions, torture and mutilation both before and after death, the display of severed heads. No group had a monopoly of such horrors, though eyewitnesses and historians down to the present day have often been selective in which ones they choose to report in detail.¹⁴

EDES had a strength of about four thousand in October 1943. In that month, ELAS went on the offensive against it. Most of its men were either killed or forced to enrol in the ranks of ELAS. A year later, thanks to British support, EDES had recouped its losses and its strength had risen to seven thousand. Membership of EKKA seems never to have topped eight hundred.¹⁵ This organization was twice attacked and dissolved by ELAS during 1943. Many of its members were induced to change allegiance, including its deputy leader, Colonel Evripidis Bakirtzis, who would later briefly become a leading figure in EAM. Then, in defiance of a truce brokered by the British, EKKA was finally attacked and disbanded by a much larger ELAS force in April 1944. Up to a quarter of the organization’s members may have been killed on that occasion, with as many again being hunted down in the purge of the surrounding villages that followed. Among the dead, murdered after capture and in some cases also tortured, was its leader, the widely respected Psarros. Even Siantos, the acting General Secretary of the KKE, would concede later that this action had been a propaganda disaster for EAM. Elsewhere in the country, other rival resistance groups were similarly mopped up between mid-1943 and the end of 1944.

Prominent in these acts of extreme violence was a former student of agriculture from Lamia, who had been imprisoned under Metaxas for communist activities, and was now in overall command of guerrilla activities for ELAS. His real name was Athanasios Klaras, but he achieved almost mythical fame and notoriety under the nom de guerre of Aris Velouchiotis, meaning ‘Ares of Velouchi’. The name combines the ancient Greek god of war with one of the mountain peaks in central Greece that had been the symbolic habitat of the klefts of old, and now, once again, were home to these new guerrilla bands. By all accounts a charismatic leader, bearded and wearing the conspicuous cartridge belt and dagger of the kapetanios, or band leader, Aris has been described as softly spoken, a compelling orator – and a ‘sadistically violent man’.¹⁶ In 1945, denounced by the communist leadership for refusing to accept the truce that had been signed in February of that year, and surrounded by government forces, Aris preferred to die rather than surrender. The severed heads of Aris and a comrade would be exhibited hanging from a lamp post in Trikala. It was an end, like his deeds, very much in keeping with the heroes celebrated in the traditional songs of the klefts. Aris was not quite forty years old when he died.

It is often supposed by historians that the choice facing the Greek people during the Occupation was between the forces of progress or of reaction.¹⁷ This was certainly how EAM itself and its supporters liked to present it. But what was happening in Greece during those years was far more complex. It was the logic of violence, more often than of political choice, that determined how people behaved under the extreme conditions of the time. In the 1940s, just as during the 1820s, people acted as they did, not for abstract political or even, necessarily, for rational reasons at all, but in order to stay alive and to protect their families and their livelihoods, in conditions that at the time must have appeared set to continue without end. It was the very methods used by ELAS to crush all competitors that drove others to take up arms against it. This in turn ensured that the country would be split among ‘at least two political actors who enjoy partial and/or overlapping monopolies of violence’ – which is a sociologist’s way of defining civil war.¹⁸

How else to explain a phenomenon that made no sense to outside observers at the time and has embarrassed Greek historians ever since? As ELAS grew in strength towards the end of 1943, so did armed resistance to the Resistance. This, too, began with a political initiative in Athens. In April, Ioannis Rallis, an ‘old’ politician of right-wing and royalist convictions, was induced by the Axis authorities to take charge of the puppet Greek government. He did so on one condition: his government must be allowed to arm and recruit Greek forces to hunt down the communists in the mountains. Recruitment to what would become known as the Security Battalions was slow at first, and relied on coercion. But by the autumn, after the successes of ELAS, not just against the occupiers but against other resistance groups, men began to volunteer for service in bands that might be locally commanded by fellow Greeks but ultimately were under orders from the Nazis. Once the scene of their operations, too, moved out to the mountains, the Security Battalions and other collaborationist militias entered the vicious circle of fighting for local dominance among competing guerrilla groups. This happened all over the country.

Skirmishing and mutual atrocities against civilians were particularly intense in the Peloponnese, where the power of ELAS had previously been unchallenged except by the occupying forces. The total number of collaborationists in arms in early 1944 is estimated to have been about seven thousand, the same number as EDES could field at the same time. By the time of the German withdrawal that autumn, it had risen to a staggering twenty-five to thirty thousand, not far short of the total manpower achieved by ELAS.

It is inconceivable that so many people who had never previously shown the slightest sympathy for Hitler or Mussolini, still less for the brutal occupation their country was enduring, could have been suddenly converted to Nazi ideology at the very time when Italy had capitulated and the armies of the Third Reich were in retreat. What was happening in the Peloponnese and elsewhere was a return to a practice that had been common during the Revolution. Then, armed militias competing for local control had made temporary accommodations with whatever outside forces they could, in order to survive and protect their dependants and their livelihoods. Fear of communism was the key, and was no less easy to whip up than the finger-pointing of EAM/ELAS against ‘fascists’ and ‘traitors’. As one informant put it, a volunteer who had taken part in atrocities committed by the Security Battalions against ELAS members in the southern Peloponnese in 1944, ‘We knew they were Communists. But we didn’t know what communism was.’ In northern Greece, particularly in areas where the scars of religious and ethnic conflict earlier in the century had not yet healed, the dynamics of civil war were even more complex – and have only begun to be disentangled by historians more than half a century later.¹⁹

During the final year of the Occupation, the same vicious struggle of Greek against Greek was going on in the streets of Athens. A regular event in the poorer neighbourhoods and the shanty-towns that housed the refugees from Asia Minor was the blocco:

The sleeping inhabitants were abruptly woken by the sound of megaphones ordering all males in the neighbourhood to make their way immediately to the main square. Gendarmes and [Security] battalion men began house-to-house searches, with orders to shoot anyone they found hiding. In the cold grey light of early morning, thousands of men sat on the ground, while hooded informers picked out EAM sympathisers …²⁰

Those picked out would be either shot immediately or taken to the notorious Chaidari prison camp on the outskirts of the city. There they might be tortured, sent to Germany for forced labour or kept in readiness to be executed the next time a reprisal killing was called for. Looting and street fighting between armed gangs loyal to the Rallis government and to ELAS became daily occurrences in the city.

Against this background, EAM succeeded in establishing a Provisional Government in the mountains of ‘Free Greece’ in March 1944. Styled the Political Committee for National Liberation (PEEA), this included non-communists as well as communists. During the final months of Occupation, Greece had no fewer than three governments: the government in exile, now in Cairo, which was controlled by the British; the puppet government led by Rallis in Athens, controlled by the Germans; and PEEA, controlled by the KKE. The reality was that the country had no government at all. When the Germans left, as they began to do during September, no one knew what would come next. None of the competing Greek organizations, inside and outside the country, could claim a legitimacy that all would accept. The only question was whether any one of them would prove able to command sufficient force to impose its will upon the rest.

The stage was set for violence to breed more violence, until a new actor entered the scene, towards the end of the decade. As 1944 drew to a close, and the end of the Second World War was at last in sight, in Greece there could be no prospect of a resolution any time soon.

THE NEW FAULT LINE

During October 1944 the Germans were in full retreat from Greece. With the exception of a few garrisons still holding out, and now marooned, in Crete and some smaller islands, the last of the occupying forces departed on 4 November. Once again, the fate of Greece was being decided by events far beyond the country’s borders. To the north the Red Army was advancing steadily into the Balkans. In the west, British and American forces were making progress through Italy and France. The Third Reich needed to concentrate all its efforts nearer home, before its divisions in Greece were completely cut off. After some particularly horrific destructions of villages and massacres of their inhabitants, the three-and-a-half-year Occupation was over.

It was time for normal political life to take hold once more, and fill the suddenly created vacuum. If only.

Preparations had been going on for some months. The lead had been taken by the British, and channelled through their ambassador to the official Greek government in exile in Cairo, Reginald (Rex) Leeper. It was very much at British insistence that King George was induced first to dismiss his prime minister, Tsouderos, and then to appoint in his place a figure of a very different stamp. Georgios Papandreou had fortuitously arrived in Cairo from occupied Greece in time to take office at the end of April 1944. Papandreou has been described as ‘tall, gaunt, imperious in his ways and a brilliant conversationalist’, though one, admittedly jaundiced, observer at the time found him a pompous windbag.²¹ Papandreou had been one of the few rising stars of the old Liberal Party during the 1920s. More left of centre than Venizelos had ever been, he was at the same time vehemently anti-communist. Leeper and the British authorities in Cairo decided that Papandreou would do.

Under Papandreou’s leadership, and overseen at every stage by Leeper, the Greek government in exile had discarded the last vestiges of the Fourth of August regime, to reinvent itself as a ‘Government of National Unity’. Under precarious agreements reached in a village outside Beirut in May, and then in September at the Italian town of Caserta, where the exiled government had temporarily been shunted in the meantime, the Provisional Government of ‘Free Greece’ effectively merged with it. EAM was beginning to look like a minority party in a wide-ranging coalition. That, at least, seems to have been the intention. But of course EAM had never been a political party in the traditional sense – how could it, given the circumstances of its birth? Together with its armed wing, ELAS, EAM controlled some 90 per cent of occupied Greece. On the other side, Winston Churchill had determined, and the British Foreign Office laid it down, that the only source of legitimacy for a future Greek government lay in the monarchy and the person of King George II. This was blatantly to ignore, as no Greek could be expected to do, the inconvenient fact that the king had been the chief architect and backer of the Metaxas regime. However one looked at it, the auguries for the restoration of a fully functioning, pluralist parliamentary democracy in newly liberated Greece could hardly have been worse. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that EAM agreed to cooperate with Papandreou at all. There were many on both sides who thought it could not last. And events would prove them right.

In the cities the hiatus left by the end of the Occupation passed off peacefully. In Athens there was a brief outpouring of popular rejoicing in the streets. Six whole days would pass between the departure of the Germans on 12 October and the arrival of Papandreou, the Government of National Unity and the six thousand British troops that had been judged necessary to underpin their authority. During that time the atmosphere was already turning brittle. ‘I had the feeling it would only need a match for Athens to burst into flames like a can of petrol,’ wrote the novelist Giorgos Theotokas in his diary, on the second day.²² In Salonica, in defiance of an agreement, ELAS columns paraded through the city on 30 October, the first day of liberation. They then handed over without incident to a British peace-keeping force. But the city’s mayor was replaced by a ‘Municipal Authority’ controlled by EAM.

Beyond the cities, wherever EAM and ELAS did not already enjoy full control, the collapse into chaos only intensified. This was particularly the case in the Peloponnese and in parts of Macedonia, where some of the most vicious reprisals and counter-reprisals between ELAS and its local rivals took place in the first months after liberation. In Epiros, Zervas and EDES were for the time being in control. The authority of Papandreou and the government of ‘National Unity’ barely reached beyond the urban centres of Athens and Piraeus, Salonica and Patras.

Politically, the issue that would soon turn into a lit fuse was how to reconstitute the country’s armed forces. In the last months of 1944, the whole of Greece was awash with weapons. But at the time of liberation the owners of these weapons were about evenly divided between those loyal to EAM/ELAS and those opposed to it. The British now found themselves in a distasteful position, not wholly dissimilar from that of the previous occupiers. Most supporters of EAM and ELAS seem to have viewed them, albeit with varying degrees of distrust, as allies and liberators. After all, Great Britain was still fighting a world war shoulder to shoulder with Stalin’s Soviet Union. But EDES and the remaining non-communist resistance groups in the north were also relying on the British to protect them from annihilation by ELAS. So, more embarrassingly, did the demoralized city police and rural gendarmerie, and all those who had been armed by the Germans against ELAS and were now being targeted as collaborators. Once again it was the dynamics of the internal division within Greece, rather than political choice, that drew both the British and the Papandreou government to rely on the armed force of some of those who until recently had been acting on the orders of the enemy.

By the end of November 1944, negotiations had reached an impasse. The government had decreed that ELAS must be disbanded, along with all other irregular military formations. A final deadline was set for 10 December. All ranks were to be recruited into a new national army. To ELAS and its supporters it looked as though they were about to be put under the command of monarchists and former collaborators. This, for EAM, ELAS and the Communist Party, would be a step too far.

During the last week of November, ELAS units went on the offensive in parts of the Peloponnese and Macedonia. On 1 December there were even skirmishes on the outskirts of the capital. In Athens, the communist daily Rizospastis predicted outright civil war unless the government changed its mind. It was to prove a self-fulfilling prophecy. The next day, Saturday, in the early hours, the six ministers who represented EAM in the Government of National Unity resigned their portfolios. By this time the Communist Party of Greece, which had been outlawed for almost a decade, had moved into one of the buildings on Syntagma Square in the centre of Athens, facing the headquarters of the city police on one corner of the square, and the command HQ of the British in the Grande Bretagne Hotel on another. Photographs show the initials ‘KKE’ mounted on top of the building against the skyline in letters that must have stood twenty feet high.

The battle lines had now been drawn in the capital. On one side were the communists, the fighters of ELAS, the supporters of EAM and all who sympathized with them, including the great majority of those who had risked their lives to take up arms against the Axis. Against them stood a government that had just lost its paper-thin claim to ‘national unity’, a British force that would soon prove far too small to defend even the capital, let alone the entire country, one small Greek unit that had been battle-hardened in conventional warfare against the Axis in North Africa and Italy, and a much larger conglomeration of armed groups and individuals tainted, to varying degrees, by the stain of collaboration.

In hindsight it seems extraordinary, given the extent of mutual distrust, that neither side was prepared for what happened next, or even had any serious plan of action. Immediately after the resignation of its ministers from the government, EAM announced a general strike for the next working day, Monday, 4 December, to be preceded by a mass demonstration in Syntagma Square on the Sunday morning. Rather touchingly, in view of what happened later, EAM even filed a request with the authorities for the demonstration to go ahead, in accordance with regulations. At first this was granted. Then within hours the government panicked. Permission was revoked. This was late on Saturday evening, but still in time that news of the change could be featured prominently in all the newspapers next morning – all except Rizospastis. The front page of the Communist Party daily made no mention of the ban. Instead, it called on all its readers to gather in Syntagma Square at 11 o’clock. One eyewitness estimated the number of the demonstrators who turned up at sixty thousand.²³

They converged on the square from several directions. At the entrances their way was blocked by lines of armed police. As a precaution, further lines of police had been drawn up inside the square, in front of Police Headquarters and the Grande Bretagne Hotel. The great majority of those who turned out to demonstrate that day seem to have been women and children. But among them were communist cadres, and some of those were armed. And of course there is no way of knowing what firearms individuals might have brought along with them, in the circumstances of the time. Shortly before 11 o’clock one group of demonstrators, blocked from entering the square, turned aside to lay siege to the house where Papandreou was living. Two grenades were thrown from the crowd, and a guard opened fire, killing one civilian. By this time, there had been scuffles between demonstrators and police at other entrances to the square. It appears that sheer force of numbers pushing from behind overwhelmed the cordons. By 11 o’clock Syntagma Square was full of people, waving Greek and Allied flags, some of them chanting slogans against the government.

Within minutes of the sound of the grenades going off outside Papandreou’s house, shooting started in the square itself. The most reliable explanation of what happened suggests that it began with jittery policemen firing from the first-floor windows of their headquarters. Within minutes, shooting was coming from several directions at once. People hit the ground in heaps, to save themselves. By the time the shocked crowds had managed to make their way out of the square, they left behind at least seven dead, and perhaps as many as twenty-two. Given the confusion at the time, it has never been possible to establish the exact number. At least sixty-six were wounded. And this was only the start.

Almost at once, ELAS units began to attack police stations throughout the city, arresting and murdering ‘traitors’. At the same time, in those parts of the country that they did not yet control, ELAS units intensified their efforts against their rivals. In Epiros, a renewed assault finally drove out EDES. Zervas and the surviving members of his organization would soon be evacuated by the British to the safety of Corfu. Historians trying to make sense of these events, long afterwards, have disagreed on how far the response by ELAS to the events of Sunday 3 December in Athens was spontaneous or the result of a coordinated strategy.²⁴ It was both, and neither. The vicious war of the mountains had come to the capital, complete with all its practices of horrific violence that had been handed down from Ottoman times and the Revolution of the 1820s. Here and in the provinces, the ELAS command, no less than the rank and file, was driven by the mentality of revenge and disproportionate reprisal that was the legacy of the Occupation. A calculated bid to seize power would have had to be more discriminating, and might even have succeeded.

It was entirely characteristic that, to begin with, all the violence was Greek on Greek. The leadership of EAM and ELAS showed extreme reluctance to take on the British. This, too, seems to confirm how limited were their objectives – as though the outsiders could be relied upon to sit on the sidelines while the Greeks settled scores among themselves. But here they underestimated the determination of Winston Churchill. He had taken a close personal interest in Greece ever since he had been charmed by Venizelos, in London, back in 1912. The prime minister of Great Britain was not going to be browbeaten by those he called ‘miserable Greek banditti’, at the very time when the Allies were finally closing in on Nazi Germany, ready for the kill. Another leader might have dismissed events in Greece as a sideshow, not worthy of his attention at such a time. Not so Churchill.

Churchill’s orders to General Ronald Scobie, commanding British forces in Greece, on 5 December have become notorious: ‘Do not … hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress … We have to hold and dominate Athens.’²⁵ The gloves were off. This was the moment when the internal fault line that had burst through the surface to fracture Greek society during the Occupation became fully aligned with the geopolitical split between the communist East and the capitalist West that would divide Europe and the world for the next forty-five years, and become known as the Cold War.

The fighting lasted for a month. The monuments of the Acropolis, which had been spared by the retreating Germans, were effectively held hostage when Scobie’s men talked ELAS down from their fortified positions there, only to set up machine-gun positions themselves and dare the insurgents to attack their own heritage. The British had to bring in substantial reinforcements, by air and sea from Italy, and a new commander-in-chief, before they could win the battle. Most accounts agree that it was a close-run thing.

George Seferis, the diplomat and poet whose day job took him the short walk from his home in Plaka to the Foreign Ministry next to Syntagma Square, found himself living on the front line. He wrote in his diary, when the conflict was only four days old: ‘As I woke up today I was thinking that idyllic Plaka has become the site of the first battle between the British Empire and Soviet Russia.’²⁶ During the decades that followed, the ‘battle for Athens’ would often be presented in this way, as a hot proxy for the Cold War that had not yet begun.

We now know that it was not. The phenomenon that was EAM and ELAS was homegrown. For all the close ideological dependence of the KKE leadership on Moscow, the Greek Resistance had been almost entirely cut off from communication with the Soviet Union throughout the Occupation. When channels had first opened between Moscow and the Provisional Government in the mountains (PEEA), as late as May 1944, it seems that Siantos and his comrades were instructed to cooperate with the British and Papandreou. By that time, soundings between the British and the Soviets had already begun. Soon these would culminate in the so-called ‘percentages agreement’, drawn up informally between Churchill and Stalin in Moscow on 9 October – just three days before the last German troops evacuated Athens. The agreement was a first stab at the more formal division of the post-war spoils that would emerge when Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met together at Yalta in the Crimea four months later. Although it would not become public knowledge until long afterwards, Stalin agreed in October 1944 to allow Great Britain a 90 per cent stake in Greece after the war – in effect in return for a free hand for himself in the rest of the Balkans.

Many commentators have expressed surprise that ‘Uncle Joe’, who was not otherwise famous for making concessions or for keeping his word, should have done so in this case. But all the evidence indicates that he did. In the summer and early autumn of 1944 no one could tell where the advance of the Red Army would stop. By September, Romania and Bulgaria had been occupied. Bulgaria now had a communist government. If Stalin had ordered his troops southwards into Greece, they could have been assured of a welcome at least as warm as in countries that only a few years previously had signed up to join the Axis. Instead, as part of the embryonic ‘percentages agreement’, Churchill demanded the withdrawal of all Bulgarian troops still in Greece. Stalin gave the order at once. It is a little-remembered fact, but this is how the hated Bulgarian occupation of the Greek provinces of eastern Macedonia and western Thrace came to an end, in October 1944.

Soon afterwards, the continued Soviet advance into the rest of the Balkans and eastern Europe would lead to the establishment of the ‘Iron Curtain’ and become one of the causes of the Cold War, in which Greece was destined to become a front-line state. But for all the hopes of the Greek communists and their many supporters in the country, there was never any serious prospect that Stalin would lend more than token, and ambiguous, support to the embattled communists in Greece. The reason has nothing to do with ideology, and everything to do with geopolitics. Metaxas and the long-dead king he had served during the previous world war would have understood. Stalin chose not to antagonize the British, or later the Americans, over Greece for exactly the same reason that Tsar Nicholas I had chosen not to antagonize the western European powers by supporting the aims of Kolokotronis and the ‘Russian party’ a hundred years before. Events had shown, again and again, that control over Greece depended on a strong naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean. Except very briefly, during the 1770s, Russia had never been in that position, and certainly was not in 1944. Russia’s strategic priorities in the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries (and indeed now, with the Soviet Union long gone, in the twenty-first century) have been entirely consistent.

Once EAM and ELAS found themselves proscribed by the British and turned on them, almost two weeks after the start of hostilities, in mid-December 1944, they were on their own. In the long run, unless Stalin were to change his mind, they could only lose. But from now on, the shape of the fault line dividing Greece down the middle would become fixed for as long as the Cold War lasted.

And the division of Europe into mutually antagonistic communist and anti-communist ‘blocs’ would be mirrored in Greek society for the duration. This would be the legacy of December 1944.

A FIGHT TO THE FINISH

By the third week of December, with further reinforcements arriving from Italy by air and sea, it was clear that the British were gaining the upper hand in Athens. Churchill himself descended like a deus ex machina, on a whim flying to Greece with his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, on Christmas Day. Carrying his own pistol, Churchill was driven in a convoy of armoured cars to the centre of Athens the next day. During a tense three days of talks, the basis for a new settlement was hammered out. The politically explosive question of the return of King George II was shelved. In the meantime, a regent was to be appointed, to oversee a referendum on the future of the monarchy. After that, the first parliamentary elections in a decade would be held.

The man chosen to be regent was the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece. Archbishop Damaskinos was in poor health, but he impressed Churchill on their first meeting as ‘an enormous tall figure in the robes and high hat of a dignitary of the Greek Church’.²⁷ Damaskinos had been widely admired for the courage and dignity he had shown during the Occupation. The Papandreou government was already in tatters. Papandreou would have resigned at the beginning of the conflict, but Churchill would have none of it. Now he was allowed to depart.

The choice of interim prime minister fell on a most unexpected figure. This was General Nikolaos Plastiras, the prime mover of one successful military coup (1922) and two failed ones (1933 and 1935). Fleeing for his life after the last of these had brought the long-running ‘Schism’ once again to the brink of civil war, Plastiras had served since 1942 as the titular head of the republican and anti-communist resistance movement EDES. Since EDES was at that moment being mopped up by ELAS in the mountains of Epiros, the choice of prime minister could hardly have been a more uncompromising statement of intent, though at least no one could have accused Plastiras of being a royalist. It would prove to be the last, brief fling of the old republican right. Even so, the chequered political career of this veteran of all Greece’s wars between 1912 and 1922 was not quite over.

By the beginning of January 1945, ELAS had been forced onto the defensive. Even while Churchill had been on his way to Greece, its units were beginning a massive round-up of hostages from the civilian population. As they withdrew from the city over the next two weeks, long columns of starved and beaten men, women and children were forced to stagger along the roads with them. Stragglers were executed. Many were later killed in cold blood. Their bodies would be found, still roped together, tipped into mass graves some weeks later. Up to that time, public opinion in the free world had favoured the insurgents. Churchill had had a hard time justifying his actions in Greece to the House of Commons. But the taking and murder of so many innocent civilians as hostages would turn the tide the other way. It was a desperate measure, and would do irreversible damage to the cause of EAM and ELAS in the court of international opinion. The tactic was yet another reversion to the norms of disproportionate and indiscriminate reprisal that had been handed down from the years of the Occupation, and had even deeper roots in the Ottoman period and the Revolution of the 1820s.

Hostilities ended formally at one minute past midnight on 15 January 1945. The final peace agreement was signed between the representatives of the ‘Hellenic Government’ and the ‘Central Committee of EAM’, in the Athens seaside suburb of Varkiza on 12 February. ELAS was to be disbanded after all. Its members were to surrender their weapons. There would be no immunity from prosecution for those accused of common crimes. And although this did not need to be spelt out, the opportunity for EAM to participate in the government of the country had gone for good. Within a year, a referendum was to be held on the monarchy, and elections held for a new Constituent Assembly. These last were the only significant concessions to the losing side, and they only confirmed what Churchill had already set out at the end of December. Not all communists were prepared to accept these terms. Among those who did not was Aris Velouchiotis, soon to be killed in a guerrilla action against government forces. For many on the left, ever since, ‘Varkiza’ has been remembered, regretted and deplored as an unforgivable act of surrender by the communist leadership at a time when EAM and ELAS still held most of Greece under their control.

The return to political life was slow. Throughout 1945 and into the following year, real political direction came not from unelected and unstable Greek governments but from the British. With peace once again established, however precariously, even more pressing than political and constitutional issues was the need to feed a population that was still living at barely subsistence levels. The country’s infrastructure had been wrecked and would take time and investment to rebuild. Hyperinflation during the Occupation had destroyed the currency. Back in November 1944 a ‘new drachma’ had been introduced, with a conversion rate of fifty billion old drachmas to one new one. This indicates the scale of the problem. It would not begin to be solved until 1946. In the meantime, the black market continued to flourish and the new currency was losing value too. Much-needed emergency measures to provide food were organized by the recently formed United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, known by the initials UNRRA.

Slowly, during the year that followed the Varkiza agreement, control over the provinces drifted back towards the government. More often than not, the agents of this change were unofficial local militias, the successors to those that had fought against ELAS during the Occupation or had suffered at its hands. These were now tolerated or encouraged by the local representatives of the official state, particularly the rural gendarmerie. Although ELAS itself had been officially disbanded, many of its former members sought protection by regrouping into small-scale bands. Violence and intimidation became the norm once again. But this time, everywhere, the victims were those who had been associated with the wartime resistance that had been led by EAM. It was enough to be related, even distantly, to someone identified as a ‘communist’, for you to be beaten up, arrested, imprisoned or even killed. In the narrative of the Greek left, the year after Varkiza has always been known as the ‘White Terror’. The term has now been uncontroversially adopted by most historians of the period. As usual, precise numbers are hard to come by. But there is no doubting the scale of the persecution.

The British found themselves powerless to stop it. Their forces in Greece were limited and concentrated close to the cities and main towns. The reconstituted political parties that jockeyed for position in the interim government were either pale shadows of their pre-1936 selves (the Liberals and the People’s Party, each clinging to a dynastic descendant of its former leader) or new, short-lived splinter groups. By the time the first parliamentary election was held, in the event ahead of the promised referendum on the monarchy, the political ground had become deeply polarized. On one side was the communist left. On the other, an anti-communist right had increasingly coalesced around support for the monarchy as the only guarantee of the established order. The kind of centre-right republicanism that had long been associated with the name of Venizelos became hopelessly squeezed between these two extremes.

The death blow to the moderate, republican legacy of Venizelos, as an alternative to these extremes, was delivered by the return of another political leader who had not been seen in public for ten years. This was Nikos Zachariadis, the Secretary General of the KKE. Zachariadis had been Stalin’s personal appointee back in 1931. He had spent most of the previous ten years in prison, latterly in the Dachau concentration camp. It was the British who brought Zachariadis back to Greece, on an RAF transport plane, in May 1945. The KKE was now under new management.

The first Greek parliamentary election in a decade was announced for 31 March 1946. Ten years had passed since the KKE had last been in a position to test its electoral strength. Then, it had come out holding the balance of power. Zachariadis could not have known this, but the next opportunity would not come until 1974. Overruling many in his own party who disagreed with him, and in defiance of an explicit directive from Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, the normally obedient and doctrinaire Stalinist Zachariadis ordered a boycott. It was a practice with a long history in Greek politics, and its effects had invariably been disastrous for those who tried it. So it would prove once again.

With the communists (and some minor republican parties) out of it, and conducted under conditions of intimidation, the election of 31 March could only give a very distorted reflection of the true state of public opinion. Victory for the monarchist right was a foregone conclusion. In some ways more revealing than the actual result of the election are indications of what might have been. These suggest that, if there had been no boycott, the combined vote for the communists and republicans would have topped the poll. Certainly the 20 per cent that foreign observers expected the KKE to win, if it had participated, would have marked an all-time high in the party’s long history. Supposing that Themistocles Sophoulis, the veteran leader of the Liberals, had been able to form a government with communist support, ‘Such a government,’ it has been suggested, ‘by claiming to represent the wishes of the majority of the people, and by virtue of its composition, would have offered Greece the best opportunity to solve its internal problems.’²⁸

But it was not to be. The KKE, under Zachariadis’s leadership, and driven into a corner by the continuing ‘White Terror’, was already stumbling towards the only alternative to the ballot box, if it was to continue to exist at all: armed struggle. On the night before the election, a band of KKE supporters ambushed a police post at the foot of Mount Olympos and killed twelve gendarmes. This event has usually been considered as the start of the third, and bloodiest, round of a three-stage civil war. That the worst was still to come is true. But the reality is that Greece had been in a state of civil war continuously since the summer of 1943. The ‘third round’ is better understood as the prolonged, and bitter, endgame to a conflict that had begun under the conditions of disintegration brought on by the Axis Occupation.

After March 1946, there were only two political positions left. Either you were a communist or you were not. If you were not, you must be for the king. For many Greeks it must have been an unpalatable choice, to say the least. Thousands would suffer violence, torture or death, through being identified with one side or the other, regardless of what they actually thought or believed. Under conditions of blatant intimidation, the long-promised and long-delayed referendum on the monarchy was held on 1 September, overseen by a government in which monarchists held all the power. The result was a foregone conclusion. Before the month was out, King George II, now aged fifty-six, and as it would turn out with only half a year to live, duly returned to Greece from his second period of exile. He came not as the saviour of his people, and with no prospect, and seemingly with no intention, of uniting them. This unloved, unbending and ultimately egotistical figure was accepted back on his throne as the lesser of two very considerable evils.

By this time, any political will for compromise that there had ever been was long gone. The divisions now ran so deep that neither side had any interest in reconciliation. No less now than during the civil wars of the Revolution, Greece’s future direction could only lie on one side or other of the fault line. Reginald Leeper, the British ambassador who had been all but running the Greek government since before the liberation, declared in his final report in February 1946: ‘too much blood has been shed and there is too much hatred for the two sides to live together peacefully or for anybody to mediate between them’.²⁹

It was far from clear that either side could win. There was nothing for it but to slug it out to the end.

The prime minister after the election of March 1946 was Konstantinos Tsaldaris, nephew of the pre-war leader of the same party that now returned to office, the People’s Party. The younger Tsaldaris has been described as ‘a small-minded mediocrity’.³⁰ Under this unpromising (and uncompromising) leadership the ‘White Terror’ became in effect official government policy. New security legislation permitted arbitrary arrest. Courts martial could hand down sentences of internal exile or even death. The number of political executions by the end of 1946 stood at 116, and would increase significantly during the following years. At the local level, in many parts of the country, and particularly in the Peloponnese, there was as before only a thin line separating the official organs of the state from privately run militias or even outright banditry.

The result was that, while an increasingly authoritarian government was tightening its control over the cities and towns, in the countryside and particularly in the mountains of mainland Greece the chaos of the Occupation returned. Historians minutely scrutinize the utterances and try to probe the motivations of the Communist Party leadership at this time. But it was only gradually, during 1946 and the first months of 1947, that the KKE came to assume control over all the disparate guerrilla groups that opposed the representatives of the official state. That it could do so at all must have been in large measure the consequence of actions perpetrated or tolerated by the government. The remnants of a disbanded ELAS came together during the last months of 1946, though its successor would never reach more than half the strength of ELAS at its peak. The formation of a new Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) was announced in December. In command was a former ELAS guerrilla leader, Markos Vapheiadis. A further year would go by before the Communist Party was ready to revive the Political Committee for National Liberation (PEEA). This had been the name of the alternative government established in ‘Free Greece’ for six months during 1944. Now, with Vapheiadis as prime minister, it held sway over the mountainous parts of northern and central Greece – much the same territory as had been liberated by EAM and ELAS during the Occupation. It was not until the end of 1947 that the four-year-old civil war became formalized into a contest between opposing political administrations, each supported by a regularly constituted army.

The decisive events that would do more than anything else to determine the outcome took place, as so often before in Greek history, far away – this time in London and in Washington DC. By the beginning of 1947, the British Labour government that had come to power at the end of the Second World War had embarked on the process of disengagement around the world that over the next two decades would see the transformation of the British Empire into the Commonwealth. The Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, announced that British forces would be withdrawn from Greece at the end of March. Just three weeks before that deadline, on 12 March, President Truman in a famous speech to both houses of Congress announced what has been known ever since as the ‘Truman Doctrine’. For some time the American government had feared the spread of Soviet Communism throughout the world. The doctrine stated that massive economic and military aid from the United States would be made available to any state that was threatened with a communist takeover. It would be tried out first in Greece and Turkey. But it was in Greece where the need was most pressing.

American logistical support for the Greek government began arriving almost immediately. The Americans did not send any combat troops to Greece. This was no Korea or Vietnam – though it has been suggested that the success of the Truman Doctrine in Greece would become the blueprint for both these later interventions.³¹ But the support in weapons, money and foodstuffs that came to Greece from the United States during the last years of the 1940s was hugely asymmetrical with the limited aid that could be afforded to the other side by the new communist regimes in Greece’s northern neighbours: Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. All three countries were as impoverished as Greece. And despite slightly more belligerent rhetoric on the subject, Stalin and the USSR were no more prepared to help their fellow communists in Greece than they had been before. Had the Truman Doctrine been based on a complete miscalculation? Or might Stalin have changed his mind and intervened after all, had it not been for this massive show of American strength?

Even with the dice so heavily loaded in their favour, the Greek government and its American backers had their work cut out. At the time when the British handed over their responsibilities to the Americans and the Truman Doctrine swung into action, it seemed to many observers that the guerrillas were ‘bound to win’.³² A year later, it was far from evident that much had changed. The blow-by-blow account of botched campaigns, repeated atrocities and strategic blunders on both sides makes depressing reading. Both sides removed large numbers of vulnerable children from combat zones, and subjected them to systematic indoctrination, respectively in special camps in government-controlled areas of Greece or in communist Eastern Europe. Much has been written on this practice, particularly as carried out by the communists. Government propaganda presented the insurgents as reviving the traditionally detested Ottoman levy of young children to form the elite janissary corps. But it was successive Greek governments that prevented the return of these children from the communist bloc, where most of them would remain until the 1980s.

During the last year of the war, the government forcibly evacuated whole villages in the mountain areas that were within its reach, so as to prevent their menfolk from being recruited or conscripted into the Democratic Army. As many as seven hundred thousand people, or 10 per cent of the total population, may have been displaced in this way. By the end of the conflict, both sides were relying overwhelmingly on unwilling conscripts. The government held thousands of political prisoners under brutal conditions on semi-barren islands. The most notorious of these was Makronisos, just off the east coast of Attica. In these prison camps indoctrination was extended to adults. The practice of extorting recantations under torture, which had begun under the Metaxas regime, reached new heights. Many of those held would not be released until years after the end of the conflict.

By the spring of 1949 the communists had been driven northwards until all their forces were concentrated on two mountain ranges close to the frontiers with Albania and Yugoslavia: Vitsi and Grammos. Vicious fighting at close range, and the use of a new destructive American weapon delivered from the air, napalm, gave the Greek army and air force the upper hand. While the final siege of Grammos was going on, in July, the Yugoslav leader Tito closed his country’s frontier with Greece, a consequence of his rift with Stalin. Zachariadis and the last of his comrades withdrew to the safety of communist Albania on the night of 29–30 August. Six weeks later, on 16 October, from its exile behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, the KKE announced that the armed struggle was over. Sporadic instances of violence continued until January 1950, by which time the Civil War was definitively at an end.

It has been called by Greek historians writing in the twenty-first century a ‘completely meaningless war’, and one that ‘could have been avoided’.³³ It had been far more destructive of lives and property than any previous conflict since the Revolution of the 1820s, including both world wars. According to one estimate, the total population of Greece in 1951 was 11 per cent lower than it would have been after a decade of peace. As many as two hundred thousand Greeks either lost their lives or went into long-term exile. The number of those killed by other Greeks ‘is likely to have exceeded 60,000’. The country’s infrastructure had barely begun to be rebuilt.³⁴ The new political and cultural fault line, between Communism and anti-Communism, between ‘East’ and ‘West’, as these terms had been newly defined by the Cold War, would continue to divide Greece down the middle for two more generations.

What had they been fighting for?

To begin with, the appeal of EAM and the KKE, during the Occupation, had been based on a return to the spirit of 1821. Under the extreme conditions of the 1940s, here was an opportunity to complete the process towards full national self-determination that had been lost in the compromises of state-building under foreign patronage ever since. This was a simple message, and it resonated. The essence of the appeal of EAM, managed with some skill but not necessarily cynically by its communist leadership, was to the integrity of a nation that was being dismembered by the Axis. It was not difficult to find other enemies to line up alongside the occupiers in the same camp. All foreigners, so the narrative went, ever since independence, had been conspiring to prevent the Greek people from achieving the total freedom that had been their first and only true goal. Now they had the chance to go out and win it for themselves. It was in many ways the message of Theodoros Kolokotronis and the warlords during the 1820s. And just like Kolokotronis and the ‘Russian party’ during the decade after independence, the leadership of EAM excluded Russia from the list of the Greeks’ foreign adversaries.

A famous speech by Aris Velouchiotis, delivered in his home town of Lamia just after the liberation in October 1944, begins, in the speaker’s own words, ‘like a fairy tale’:

Once upon a time this corner of the earth where we are walking now and that we call Hellas was glorious and happy and had a civilization that for two and half thousand years continues to be admired by the entire world … We have proved our Hellenicity. It is a fact that our country rose up again and was reborn, free once more [in 1821].

‘Hellenicity’ was a term much beloved by Metaxas and the architects of the ‘New State’ of the late 1930s. Aris’s reassuring ‘fairy tale’ is the narrative of Greek identity that had been established by Spyridon Zambelios and Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos during the 1850s. No change there. Later, the speech continues: ‘Are we going to flay the hides off priests? What would we do that for? We can see for ourselves that thousands of priests today are in the vanguard of our movement.’³⁵ This was true. Many village priests joined up with the Resistance in the mountains. In Athens, on the first day of liberation, Giorgos Theotokas watched ELAS parade through the streets, headed by ‘priests chanting, “People’s rule!”’. A British soldier, during the street fighting in the city two months later, thought there must be some mistake when he saw a sniper on the other side repeatedly making the Orthodox sign of the Cross between shots.³⁶ This, too, repeated a pattern that went back to the Revolution, when the traditional figure of the ‘gunpowder priest’ had first gained a place in the popular imagination. In the 1940s many lower-ranking clergy, and a conspicuous few among the bishops, aligned themselves with the revolutionaries among their flocks, just as their predecessors had done during the 1820s, while the highest ranks remained loyal to the status quo.

Something that its opponents have probably never understood, or often have never even been willing to understand, is how deeply the mindset of the great majority of supporters of the Greek left has been infused with a profound, even reverent, sense of their shared identity as Greeks.

True, during the final stage of the conflict, the communist leadership declared itself willing to cede territory to Greece’s northern neighbours. It was the price of the logistical support that by this time was keeping the Democratic Army in the field. This had always been the weakest spot in the propaganda armoury of the KKE, going all the way back to the 1920s. Long before these concessions were announced at the beginning of 1949, it had been standard practice for the government to label its opponents as ‘EAM-Bulgars’, traitors bent on handing back Greek territory, won with great sacrifice during the Balkan wars, to enemies that included now-communist Bulgaria.

These labels had stuck – as they still do, to some extent, today. But neither side possessed a monopoly of patriotism. And the patriotism of both was compromised. The same royalist governments that denounced communist concessions to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria over frontiers were willing to concede much of their own sovereignty first to the British, then to the Americans – again as the price of the firepower needed to defeat their enemies at home. When it came down to it, the side that could field the most powerful outside backer came out on top. But there is no good reason to doubt that most people on both sides were fighting for a version of their own Greek identity that they could relate to, one in which they could imagine a place for their own lives and futures.

Some historians have wondered whether the Greek Communist Party, if it had won, would have developed along democratic lines in common with communist parties in Western Europe, or would have established an authoritarian one-party state, on the model of either the Soviet Union or Tito’s Yugoslavia.³⁷ A communist Greece could hardly have remained non-aligned in the late 1940s. So the chances are that the kind of ideal self-determination dreamed of by EAM members in the mountains during the Occupation was never going to happen. The attempt by the Greek left to create a new type of society in the mountains of ‘Free Greece’ has been hailed, from the vantage point of our own century, as nothing less than an ‘undeclared social revolution’.³⁸ But viewed against the broader sweep of late twentieth-century history, it was perhaps always unrealizable.

The disintegration of the 1940s did not lead to a radically new birth, as the Revolution of the 1820s had done.