CHAPTER 1
Island in Revolt: Britain’s War against EOKA during the Cyprus Emergency, 1955–59
So we are faced with a duel enemy—the immediate anti-British elements, of whatever origin, and the Russians in the background, seeking how best to exploit them.1
The 1955–59 struggle was a hard, determined, persistent struggle fought on many fronts. It was a war fought in hideouts, in ambush, in the detention centres against the cruelty of the interrogators, on the gallows which the freedom fighters faced with a song and smile on their lips, in the towns with the curfews, the pamphlets and the militant demonstrations.2
INTRODUCTION
On April 1, 1955, the island of Cyprus, Britain’s strategic hub in the eastern Mediterranean, was rocked by a series of raids and explosions at key infrastructural sites, including the Cyprus Broadcasting Service transmitters, police stations in Limassol, the police headquarters in Larnaca, and Wolseley Barracks in Nicosia. The Greek Cypriot terrorist group EOKA (its full title being Ethnikí Orgánosis Kipriakoú Agónos or National Organization of Cypriot Struggle) under the command of Colonel George Grivas,3 a former Greek army officer who had fought alongside the Allies in World War II, announced its ambitious mission to dislodge the British from the island in spectacular fashion. Grivas was secretly backed by Greece and had been planning a guerrilla campaign for two years before setting foot on the island in 1954. When EOKA’s armed campaign began, it was interpreted by the British as a direct challenge to their colonial authority. With the deterioration in the security situation throughout 1955, the Conservative government in London requested the assistance of Field Marshal Sir John Harding, the outgoing chief of the imperial general staff (CIGS).4 He accepted the challenge, somewhat reluctantly, and was immediately appointed governor by Prime Minister Anthony Eden and given a brief to restore law and order on the island.5 By October 1955 Harding had arrived and set about assembling a massive security force6 of 4,500 policemen and 20,000 troops.7 Their objective, Harding announced on Cypriot radio, was to “eliminate terrorism and intimidation so that men and women everywhere can go about their daily business without fear or favour.”8
Shootings, bombings, intimidation, and civil disturbances became an everyday occurrence and were played out in the full glare of the world’s press. At stake was Britain’s alliance with Turkey and Greece in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the key security instrument by which Western powers planned to contain the threat posed by Soviet Communism and its satellites in the newly formed Warsaw Pact Organization. Also at stake was British prestige, already threatened by the rising tide of Arab nationalism elsewhere in the Middle East. It was in this context that the British government was exercised to ensure the EOKA insurgency then under way in Cyprus was brought to heel as quickly as possible.
THE ROOTS OF CONFLICT
Cyprus had been under Ottoman rule since the sixteenth century when it was forcibly removed from the hands of the Venetians.9 Although it had always been home to a small Muslim community, this was dwarfed by the Orthodox Greek community. The census of 1881 estimated the population to number 136,629 Greeks, 46,389 Turks, 691 English, and 2,400 other.10 Importantly, the growth of nationalism on the island had predated the emergence of the small island state almost 100 years earlier. Ironically the roots of enosis (union with Greece) were planted by British statesman William Gladstone in the late 1880s and in the early 1900s by Winston Churchill.11 Cyprus was annexed by Britain in the Lausanne Conference, which culminated in the signing of a treaty between Britain and Turkey in July 1923.12 However, the presence of a minority Turkish Cypriot community on the island and a much larger Greek Cypriot population made any further political movement toward either enosis or partition certain to be problematic.13 As Oliver Richmond has argued:
The Cyprus conflict is rooted in a conceptual conflict between the norms of territorial sovereignty and the rights of ethnic minorities and communities vis-à-vis identity. British colonial rule brought about a general increase in ethno-nationalist sentiment through its policy of “divide and rule” in response to a growing Greek Cypriot anti-colonial sentiment. However, it was not until the late 1950s that one could talk about an ethno-national struggle in Cyprus.14
Unsurprisingly, Cyprus was beset by fault lines of conflict between the two rival ethnonationalist communities, which superimposed the broader conflict between Greek Hellenistic nationalism and British imperialism, a three-way antagonism that continues in one form or another to this day. One critic, Adamantia Pollis, has gone further than Richmond and articulated the argument that the British basically “redefined the nature of group identity from Muslim and Christian to Turk and Greek and further segregated the two communities.” Most damning of all, writes Pollis, British imperialism facilitated the “formation of an apartheid mentality that precluded the perception of similarities or commonalities even where they existed, while making differences separating the two groups psychologically relevant.”15 It was within these parameters of difference that the threat posed by EOKA terrorism exacerbated antagonism between Greeks and Turks, particularly since EOKA was focused principally on appealing directly to the Greek Cypriot people “to throw off the English yoke and be worthy of the Greek fighters” from their Hellenistic past.16
COLONIAL INSECURITY AND THE EMERGENCE OF EOKA
In the mid-1950s Britain’s imperial power was slowly beginning to diminish. It was a few years before former U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson made his famous remarks on how London had “lost empire but not yet found a role in the world.”17 Nevertheless, the 1950s were a time of great turbulence and witnessed skirmishes between Britain’s armed forces in the large conflict on the Korean peninsula between 1950 and 1953 and the small wars of Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus throughout the 1950s. The Suez Crisis of 1956—in which President Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, prompting intervention from Britain, France, and Israel against the United States’ and United Nations’ wishes—is often regarded as the high tide of British colonialism.18 It was in the twilight of Britain’s empire that military commanders were often the people who thought most about grand strategy, a concept that seemed to elude the top political echelons of government in Whitehall who were geared primarily toward short-term political decision making.19
For Britain’s incoming CIGS, General Sir Gerald Templer, Britain faced a number of challenges that required it to lodge an insurance premium to guard against unforeseen circumstances. Templer was acutely aware of the financial restrictions under which Britain strove to prop up its ailing empire. In line with other European nations, the United Kingdom had accrued a massive debt in World War II and was beholden to the United States through its sizable debt repayments. Yet as Templer argued, security “will cost money, but this must, as in the case of intelligence, be regarded as the premium to be paid for insurance.”20 Templer made the case that intelligence matters remained central to success in Britain’s postwar small wars. So crucial to the defense of the realm was intelligence, he observed, that nothing short of a complete overhaul of security machinery at home and abroad was needed to ensure the continuation of effective monitoring of the internal security aspects of the British Empire,21 especially in Africa, Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean. In preparing his Report on Colonial Security Templer had visited Cyprus and Uganda and also drew on his intimate knowledge of Palestine and Malaya, where he had served distinguished terms as a senior soldier and administrator.22 In his view colonial security was about more than improving the intelligence situation and this could only really come about in line with other measures, such as an improvement in communications and coordinating activities between London and the colonies:
Improving economic conditions do not always mean political tranquillity; on the contrary, the desire to see improvement accelerated is a potent source of unrest. In the process of evolution, the development of welfare must not allow the preserving of public order—a primary function of the government—to go neglected.23
Within the context of stringent measures undertaken by government, Templer remained in little doubt that the government could not have everything its way. As he continued:
The pace has been set, the race for “independence” is on, and all we can do now is to make what sense of it we can. The only way to do this, paradoxically enough, is to make the pace for the first stage of hand-over quicker still. Instead of trying to hang on to the native regiments for as long as possible on the perfectly sensible ground that their governments are not fit to take them over, we should hand them over as soon as ever is practicable, on the equally sensible and far more cogent ground that the longer their future owners have to run them in under our supervision, the less mess are they likely to make of them in the end.24
Templer’s report was, above all, strategic in conception and looked forward to the kinds of future challenges Britain could expect to see emerge in the longer term. Interestingly, it was his views on the operational aspects of policing and the security services’ role in colonial security—not that of the military—that proved to have real purchase as soon as this report was printed:
In this study we suggest that special attention should be given to the possibility of strengthening Colonial police and security services. These are the front line of defence against subversion and we are informed that recent experience has revealed defects in their organisation. Efficient police forces and Intelligence Services are the best way of smelling out and suppressing subversive movements at an early stage, and may save heavy expenditure on military reinforcements. They are an insurance we cannot afford to neglect.25
Templer’s report had not even been circulated when the first explosions rocked the tiny Mediterranean island of Cyprus, the one place Templer had visited during the preparation of his report and where he found an intelligence apparatus creaking to the point of collapse.
One cannot underestimate the tendency of British colonial officials to overinflate the importance of Communist subversion in the 1950s. Calder Walton highlights how they directed a disproportionate amount of resources toward discovering plots and Communism as the force fomenting trouble in the colonies.26 However, there is also evidence to suggest that senior soldiers did not fully embrace this narrative and instead outlined the need to remain flexible in countering subversion without the guiding hand of Communism behind it. Templer outlined his thinking clearly in his report on colonial security:
Our enemy in the cold war is of course Communism. But in the Colonies this threat is for the most part indirect and intangible; it operates, if at all, through the medium of other anti-British manifestations which would be present even if the Communist Party had never been invented. Such manifestations are created by a wide variety of irritants, of which some of the most obvious are nationalism, racialism, religion, frustration, corruption and poverty. It is with these factors that we must chiefly do battle today. In Malaya, it is true, the fight is to keep a frontier against Communism. But in the other colonies its immediate impact is small or non-existent. In Africa, for example, the Northern Rhodesian copper-belt should be, according to Marxian theory, the imperialists’ weak spot; but in fact our troops are fighting reactionary tribalism in Kenya, and may next be fighting outraged nationalism in Somaliland. So we are faced with a duel enemy—the immediate anti-British elements, of whatever origin, and the Russians in the background, seeking how best to exploit them.27
It was against this backdrop of colonial insecurity that one must see the glacial pace by which Cyprus moved to counter a right-wing, nationalist-inspired terrorist campaign that relied on its close alignment to the indigenous Greek Cypriot population who were motivated by a deep anticolonization just as much as their left-leaning AKEL (Progressive Party of Working People—i.e., Communist Party of Cyprus) compatriots.
PUSHING THE BRITISH IMPERIALISTS INTO THE SEA?
Events moved quickly after the initial April Fool’s Day attacks. By the end of May Grivas’s fighters had made an attempt on the life of the governor of Cyprus, Sir Richard Armitage, after which it became increasingly likely that he would either be assassinated by Grivas’s fighters or pushed from office by the prime minister, Anthony Eden. It was accepted that he had been a “suitable Governor in time of peace, but a man who compared the Cypriote [sic] devotion to Hellenism to the Welsh attachment to their language was ill-equipped to deal with the situation which had arisen.”28 Eden and Macmillan kept him in place until an agreed replacement was found. In the meantime, EOKA had also begun its propaganda war, issuing its first leaflets calling on British troops to lay down their weapons and go home:
British soldiers. What we did up to now was JUST A WARNING. You will receive much harder and pitiless blows if you keep obeying your officers’ orders who apply in Cyprus Hitler’s and Mussolini’s methods. Cyprus will become a big British graveyard. NO POWER IN THE WORLD CAN SUPPRESS OUR MOVEMENT. We are all determined to die for our cause. We shall push the British imperialists into the sea!29
There could now be no doubting the serious intent behind EOKA’s carefully choreographed armed propaganda exercise. It meant business and in Grivas’s words worked to a “general strategy carefully thought out in advance” in contrast to the British who showed “no sign of clear thought.”30 After the EOKA’s murder of Detective Constable Poullis and Detective Constable Kotsiopoulos (two Greek Cypriots) in Ledra Street, Nicosia,31 the police commissioner, George Robbins, admitted that his force was under severe pressure and could buckle with a further upsurge in violence.32 It was around this time that Macmillan recommended a changing of the guard at Government House in Nicosia. After a visit by outgoing CIGS Field Marshal Sir John Harding—and his follow-up briefing of Eden’s cabinet in London—the prime minister convinced his cabinet colleagues that Harding would be the man to turn around the ailing security situation and promptly announced his new appointment to the press in September 1955.33
Harding’s arrival on the island on October 3, 1955, was greeted with much fanfare. Although he had a glittering career involving service in World Wars I and II, his expertise in small wars was untested, despite having approved the top-level budget and backed key generals like Gerald Templer and George Erskine in their counterinsurgency campaigns in Malaya and Kenya, respectively. As CIGS Harding had, however, gained a reputation as having made friends cross Whitehall, and he proved to be willing and able to steer a difficult course between the competing interests of the War Office, Colonial Office, and Foreign Office. At a grand strategic level there really were no equals, but what the Cyprus Emergency required was an individual who understood the demands of the military situation at the operational level. Much depended on how Harding chose to reorganize the security forces in the fight against EOKA. Ultimately, though, this security would prevail by creating the necessary political conditions. As Harding’s biographer, Michael Carver, makes clear:
Harding believed in recognising realities. He knew that military action alone would not solve the problem, and that if the Cypriot people were to be persuaded not to support EOKA there must be signs of political progress in the direction of their aspirations.34
Harding immediately set up negotiations with the leader of the Cypriot Orthodox Church, Archbishop Makarios III, aimed at a political resolution to the conflict, for without this none of the security forces’ attempts to bring the insurgency to heel would be successful.
In security terms, the New Year opened as it had closed, with considerable EOKA activity now in evidence across the island. A ship had been captured off the coast of Paphos in January 1956 trying to smuggle arms and 10,000 sticks of dynamite to Grivas’s fighters. It appeared from weapons caches uncovered that the Greek Cypriot group had been building up its stockpiles over many years.35 Indeed, many weapons were found to have been smuggled in through the mail. The Greek government was accused of turning a blind eye, and its foreign minister, Stephanopoulos, was directly implicated in the funding of EOKA.36 Athens Radio became the principal instrument through which the vitriolic wave of anticolonial nationalism was transmitted for the benefit of the Greek Cypriots. Radios became an essential commodity that embattled EOKA fighters carried with them into their hides dotted across the hardened terrain of this ancient island. As Grivas explained:
Good intelligence and courier services were a first essential. Our early system was rudimentary and the couriers broke every rule of security. I had to make superhuman efforts to train them up to my standards but finally I succeeded, and our ultimate victory was due in no small effort to their efficiency. I never tried to use radio, telephone or any scientific means of communication which might give our positions away.37
Large-scale sweeps (known as “cordon-and-search” operations) pushed EOKA fighters onto the defensive, despite the difficult terrain in which the leading members (including, famously, Grivas) were able to evade capture even when acting on accurate intelligence, which pointed security forces in the right direction.38 Despite the ability of the British to try to counter the problem by introducing very substantial numbers of troops into the island, it also posed a dilemma for Harding. As his chief nemesis, Grivas, later pointed out in his memoirs:
The British answer to our methods was to flood the island with troops. It was the wrong answer. Numbers have little meaning in guerrilla warfare. From the guerrillas’ point of view, it is positively dangerous to increase the size of groups beyond a certain point. I call this the “saturation point.” It is determined by the nature of the terrain, the skill of the fighters, their requirements in food and supplies, the tactics employed and the need to keep down casualties. Any given area can usefully absorb a certain number of men; in mountainous country, where peaks and ravines are dead ground,39 the figure is only a fraction of the numbers required elsewhere. I myself, when I joined the andartes in the mountains, always felt uneasy if there were more than a dozen of us together. Even in the plains the saturation point is lower than one might suppose: for example, to use more than five or six men for a village attack would serve no purpose, for the more numerous the attackers, the more difficult it is for them to escape after the action.40
There was no doubting Grivas’s capability as a shrewd tactical commander. He foresaw problems whenever British forces were forced to adapt their tactical abilities beyond their standard operating procedures (SOPs).
However, what he could also do well was keep his focus on the strategic prize, entirely appreciating the limitations placed upon guerrilla actions without a favorable political context within which EOKA could operate:
My resources were meagre and I could not hope to win a military victory; it was rather a question of raising a force and keeping it in being no matter what the enemy did to destroy it. This, and more, was achieved in the first six months. Our intention was to focus the eyes of the world on Cyprus and force the British to fulfil their promises.41
Grivas—operating under the nom de guerre “Digenis”—worked closely with Makarios, who provided political leadership to the Greek Cypriots while Grivas was left to run the military campaign.
EOKA depended on the rule of fear to ensure his fighters did not talk and give away secrets to the British, with Grivas willing to “eliminate individuals at the slightest suggestion of their unreliability.”42 Crucially, he built up a bottom tier of school children to act as couriers and spotters as more experienced and older men (mainly in their 20s and 30s) carried out deadly attacks against the police and army. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the British began to arrest and detain a cross section of Greek Cypriots they accused of helping EOKA. Many of these people were subjected to coercion and, occasionally, brute force during long hours of interrogation. As military historian Colonel David Benest suggests:
Allegations of brutality against EOKA detainees in Camp K detention camp were followed by the murder of two British soldiers. A further two murders resulted in the rounding up of 1,000 youths in Famagusta, 100 of whom required medical attention. The murder of two army wives led to the detention of 1,000 Cypriots at Karalois camp, with 256 injured in custody and two killed, one following the fracture of seven ribs by his interrogators and the other from head injuries.43
Although implying unbridled brutality, this was certainly not characteristic of military operations. Petros Petrides was one of those youths detained and mistreated by the British in Famagusta. He recalled how his torturers were not the soldiers of the Royal Ulster Rifles but police officers who pressed him for weeks about his knowledge of other EOKA fighters. The young Petrides was held in a small dungeon and threatened throughout his ordeal. As he told reporter Ian Cobain:
I was taken from the cell, along a corridor and into the second room on the right, the interrogation room. It was completely spattered in blood—the walls, ceiling, floor and the bed frame in the middle of the room were all covered in blood. To help myself get through it, I told myself that they probably slaughtered a chicken and sprayed the blood around the room, but I didn’t really know.44
Petrides also recalled considerable detail of his ordeal at the hands of a specialist team of interrogators in Famagusta Police Station:
The interrogators were British Special Branch officers. No Turks were involved in my torture. They were men in their forties, stocky and well-dressed, in shirt and trousers. They were calm, they were never angry. They knew what they were doing. They were very good at their jobs. They spoke broken Greek. One of them was half Maltese. At one point he said: “I swear on the life of my Maltese mother I’m going to kill you.”45
That detainees were subjected to “conveyor belt interrogation methods” appears to have been common knowledge among journalists at the time.46 Nevertheless, the harsh methods employed to secure information seem to have been more acute in the ranks of the police than among the military. Petros suggested that the people of Famagusta enjoyed a cordial relationship with the Irish soldiers from the Royal Ulster Rifles,47 something later placed under enormous strain by events in early September in the village of Liopetri on the edge of Famagusta District in the southeast of the island.
By 1957 Harding was tired of the pressure under which he labored in Government House. He longed for a rest after many years of fighting and privately looked for a way to step down and allow an experienced member of the colonial or diplomatic service to take his place. As Robert Holland has written, the “appointment of a ‘career’ colonial administrator to replace a Field Marshal brought things full circle. Sir Hugh Foot, however, was no ordinary governor. … He was a highly political animal”48 and both his personal and professional backgrounds blended together to ensure he would exercise his own independent judgment as governor. As the search for a political settlement continued, ordinary soldiers on the ground were still engaged in a violent confrontation with EOKA and the danger of the Turks becoming embroiled in the situation eventually came to pass.
EOKA’S SECOND FRONT
One of the most successful strategies initiated by Grivas was the systematic targeting of Greek Cypriot police officers, particularly those in the thinning ranks of the Special Branch who were given the unenviable task of building up an intelligence picture of the 300-strong EOKA force now harassing the British from within the Cypriot population. The statistics were startling. Within one year EOKA managed to initiate a pendulum swing in the percentages of Greek Orthodox and Turkish Muslim officers serving in the ranks of the police.49 This also posed a problem for Grivas, who knew that any targeting of Turkish officers would inevitably draw heavy criticism of an ethnic motivation behind EOKA’s armed campaign (Table 1.1).
Religious Background of Cypriot Police Officers
Not long afterward the assassinations of Turkish Cypriots began, these incidents were met publicly with assurances from Archbishop Makarios that they would be afforded more protection. By 1958 he was even starting to announce “the need to grant the Turkish community special minority rights.” However, rioting soon broke out in Turkish Cypriot areas in Nicosia and Famagusta as Hugh Foot replaced Harding at Government House. Tiring of the Turkish Cypriot protests Makarios recommended to Grivas in private that a grenade be thrown in their general direction. Grivas ignored the repeated calls for violent action, but events soon overtook EOKA’s understanding of the precarious situation of the minority community, and an organization known as Volkan (under the command of Rauf Denktash) emerged and quickly spawned an armed wing called the Türk Müdafaa Teşkilatı (TMT or Turkish Defense Organization), which served to reassure the Turkish Cypriot community. Inevitably it led to clashes with the authorities, and with the placing of a bomb outside Turkey’s information office in Nicosia hundreds of Turks took to the streets to call for “Partition or Death.”50 Throughout the summer of 1958 intercommunal clashes intensified and Grivas was drawn into the fight. By July he had authorized attacks against Turkish Cypriots, only relaxed when responding to international pressure to call a cease-fire in August 1958. The cease-fire held only briefly, and British troops returned to the hunt for Grivas and EOKA with a renewed sense of purpose.
CLASH AT LIOPETRI
The tiny village of Liopetri near Famagusta was the scene of one of the most intense gun battles between EOKA fighters and the men from the 1st Battalion, Royal Ulster Rifles, who were forced to take repressive measures when they were fired upon by four men holed up in a barn. Prior to their deployment, the troops were provided with an intelligence summary from the Special Branch based in Famagusta town:
The village consists of approximately 90 men, including people of all ages. There are a large number of dangerously political discussions continually taking place on anything and everything which has any political angle at all.
Although there has only been one incident here the people are a very violent lot and have a very bad civil record with the police, who also suspect persons of this village to operate as terrorists in the surrounding villages and to be behind a number of ambushes, etc, noted in this document.
Politically the village is about 80% right-wing and has two wanted men from it—Xanehos Samaras who has five brothers who all resemble one another and … Kymak Kyrianos Marios, a one-eyed fisherman of whom very little is known.51
In a bid to catch suspected insurgents by surprise, the battalion was to conduct a cordon and search of the village in the early hours of the morning of September 1, 1958.
Accordingly, at 2 a.m. on that day, men of the 1st Battalion, Royal Ulster Rifles, prepped their equipment, cleaned and checked their rifles, and boarded 3-ton vehicles as they moved out of their camp at Golden Sands and into their area of operations. It was a clear night, the moon was high, and the pulsating Mediterranean heat was dying down, but not by much. As they passed houses along the way there were no signs of life, with the exception of a few dogs on the streets. At 3 a.m. the soldiers stopped short of Liopetri after encountering a vehicle carrying several men attempting to leave the village. As they neared the center of the village, a car with its headlamps turned off drove past them at speed, closely followed by a small group of men. They called on the men to stop, but they refused, thereby necessitating the firing of warning shots at the car. After pursing the car the soldiers captured one man who agreed to lead them to the main arms cache in the village. At first light the troops moved into the village and began a rummage (search) of the area around a thick stone barn. The walls of the barn were made of brick and straw and were complete with a tiled roof. One officer, Lieutenant Donald Boyd, gave the following statement to the police about what he saw next:
Whilst digging in the chaff in the barn, fire was opened up on us from above and Rfn. [Rifleman] Bolger was hit on the shoulder. I gave covering fire whilst the others got out of the barn. We then threw grenades into the barn but they had little effect and all that time we were being fired at with automatic weapons. A Company had arrived on the scene to strengthen the cordon. An interpreter, Corporal Fleet shouted to the men in Greek to come out. But each time he was answered by shots from automatic weapons. After we had used several types of grenades we used rocket bombs which had little effect and on the pre-arranged plan with my company commander, I went in after the last salvo with a section of my platoon. We got to the porch where I saw the dead body of a Cypriot. I was waiting on the porch when a man came to the doorway firing an automatic weapon at us. I returned fire but was hit in the knee and the finger and fell to the ground. The man kept firing at us all the time and others of my section were hit. I don’t remember much more but saw Corporal Shaughnessy pull me clear into the house. Meanwhile shots were still being exchanged with other soldiers on the porch. I was then evacuated through holes in the walls of the building.52
The operational record for B Company, 1 RUR, recorded what happened next:
1 September 1958
It was apparent that the occupants of the building were prepared to fight it out and had no intention of allowing themselves to be apprehended, so the building was attacked with hand grenades which had little effect on the thick stone structure and were muffled by the quantity of “chaff” inside the barn.
I saw a man with a camouflage net over his head crouching and running from the barn to the house and I opened fire at him because he was firing on us as he came out. He dropped to the ground and appeared to be dead.53
In an incredibly brave act of selflessness, a soldier, Rifleman Patrick Joseph Shaughnessy, a 21-year-old Cork man, ran to the veranda under sustained fire and rescued his platoon commander from certain death. He later told the police:
I ran to the porch and pulled Mr Boyd halfway through the living room door and I grabbed Mr Boyd’s sterling [submachine] gun and fired into the doorway. I ran out of ammunition and a man appeared in the doorway with an automatic weapon firing and shouting. I picked up a brick and threw it at him and knocked him down. The others grabbed the wounded and dragged them into the house. I looked at the terrorist who was just pulling himself up and I grabbed his gun and shot him. I dashed out and handed the weapon to a plain clothes policeman who was standing nearby and shouted for it.54
Shaughnessy was awarded the Military Medal for his actions in saving the life of Lieutenant Boyd, who was wounded in the leg. His comrade Rifleman Kinsella, however, was fatally wounded when a bullet fired from inside the barn pierced his skull.
After the initial skirmish the officers decided to attack the barn. They were soon joined by CID officers from Famagusta and hatched the following plan:
It was then decided to attack the building from the roof to save further casualties amongst the Security Forces. I collected two tins of petrol and took them on the roof where a hole had been made into the room below. Petrol was poured down the hole, a saturated bedsheet was lowered and ignited. Whilst this was going on, heavy firing was still coming from the building.55
Realizing that they had nowhere else to hide the EOKA fighters made a dash from the barn from the front porch and a wooden door at the rear but were cut down in an unrelenting hail of bullets from the Ulstermen.
The troops and local police lost little sleep over the actions on that day. A police report subsequently concluded that “PITTAS and KARIOS were both known members of EOKA, having both been detained in Pyla Detention Camp from which they escaped in March of this year.” Xanthos was suspected of being a member in 1955, but he absconded. Nothing was known about Papakyriakou, and “he was not suspected of any offence whatsoever.”56 1 RUR recovered from the scene one .45-caliber submachine carbine M-3, one 9-mm caliber submachine carbine, one French MAT49 submachine gun, a .30 British Service rifle and ammunition, two shotguns, one 12-bore caliber Police Special (Greener Gun), a .45 Colt automatic pistol, and magazines for submachine carbines. It was clear that the EOKA fighters had no intention of running away and were heavily armed at the time of their deaths.
Grivas and other members of EOKA were incensed by the outcome of the fighting at Liopetri. In a statement released at the time, the armed group declared:
And they, the British, have repeated again the same cowardice, as they have shown before; they have burnt with petrol the refuge when they had fled! Because the soldiers of tyranny were tired after a four hour battle and were not able to stand any more. … And when the Englishman met with a difficult situation he had neither chivalry nor humanity. The disgusting means in action and the petrol was near to hand which they used.
Long live our immortal heroes!
Long live the glorious EOKA
Curse and anathema to the tyrants
3 September 1958 EOKA
By now, Grivas noted, the “climacteric of the struggle was approaching with grim inevitability against a background of twittering pleas from Athens for a continuation of the cease-fire no matter what was done by the British Government, army and interrogators.”57 EOKA, however, were not prepared to back down, despite ongoing negotiations around the so-called Macmillan Plan in London, Athens, and Ankara.58
It was against this backdrop of political progress that the British military on the island remained galvanized by the success in engaging insurgents head on, something that Grivas knew only too well would expose EOKA’s weaknesses. The general officer commanding (GOC), Major General Kendrew, issued a new directive to his military units in the weeks after the action at Liopetri, claiming that:
We have now launched an all out attack on EOKA and this had been decided by H[is] E[xcellency] the Governor after exhaustive efforts to bring sense and stability back to the island when H[er] M[ajesty’s] G[overnment] has produced a workable plan.
It is plain to you that until we bring EOKA to its knees, and stop the intimidation of the Greek and Turkish Cypriots, no constitutional plan can go forward.
Motto “Firmness with Courtesy”59
The British military were now in a position to learn lessons from its engagement with EOKA fighters and not simply the advantages accruing to local fighters in laying roadside ambushes. One report published in the aftermath of the Liopetri encounter noted how:
The most important lesson in many ways is the fact that without information the terrorists might well have got away scot free. At about 1100hrs on 1 September when nothing of any great value had been found it was decided to keep the cordon on in the hope that information might subsequently be forthcoming.60
Praise was reserved for the professionalism of 1 RUR’s officers and NCOs in the operation, and several senior officers visited the commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Wheeler, in the days after the action.
To keep up the offensive on EOKA, Colonel Wheeler ordered the men of B Company, 1 RUR, to press home their advantage by saturating the main troublespots in Famagusta. Thus, as EOKA activists ambushed an RAF convoy south of Paralimni, the British responded swiftly by imposing curfews and withdrawing, before returning in force to cordon and search the area. EOKA responded by blowing up tractors and other farm equipment in Dherinia and exploding time bombs inside one local security forces camp. Undeterred, Colonel Wheeler and his company commanders responded by upping the ante and mounting operations designed to frustrate their enemy, establishing roadblocks, and dispatching vehicle patrols commencing before dawn and continuing all day. Posters and leaflets were erected in a number of villages, and the soldiers arrested youths seen carrying weapons. For the next few weeks British troops worked according to a solid routine of continuous patrolling on foot and in vehicles. They imposed curfews on those villages and towns found to have been supportive of EOKA and rounded up thousands of men who breached curfew orders or who were suspected of being EOKA fighters. The violence naturally intensified, and the RAF routinely reported bombs on main routes and attacks on convoys. Ambushes typically consisted of a mine detonated at the side of a road, with the occupants of vehicles pinned down by sustained fire. By the New Year 1959, the headquarters of British forces in Cyprus moved to de-escalate military operations. One order made it clear how “Due to the political situation operations in the immediate future are to be very limited. Routine checks in rural areas will continue, also the use of O.P.s [Obervations Posts] and the plotting of Ops for future operations.” This new directive pointed to the new reality that political negotiations were working toward a settlement and that the armed forces would come to play their part by adopting a lower profile.
Few held out hope that the talks would lead to a quick end to the armed conflict. Although Field Marshal Harding had attempted to negotiate with Makarios within a few months of his arrival in Cyprus, the talks were unsuccessful. The archbishop refused to condemn EOKA violence and was sent into exile in the Seychelles. Now, as a political agreement looked likely, he was permitted to return to Cyprus. In the intervening years, Harold Macmillan had replaced Anthony Eden, who resigned in the wake of the Suez Crisis of 1956. In a speech roundly supported by British politicians, Macmillan informed the House of Commons in February 1959 about the outcome of the government’s talks with Greece and Turkey, setting the scene for how the armed conflict would be finally de-escalated:
From the outset, Her Majesty’s Government gave their full support to this initiative. We made clear to the other two Governments that, provided our military requirements were met, in a manner which could not be challenged, by the retention of bases under British sovereignty, together with the provision of the necessary rights and facilities for their operation, we were prepared to consider the transfer of sovereignty by Her Majesty’s Government over the rest of the island.61
As news of the political agreement filtered down to the operational level in Cyprus, it had already been decided to suspend all military operations to provide the deal the best possible chance of success. As a matter of course, villages were to be avoided, except if passed through during training, and all military maneuvers were to be carried out only with explicit brigade-level direction. For the remainder of 1959, the military dimension of the conflict between Britain and EOKA gradually wound down.
But for Greek Cypriots, the struggle was far from over. Although Makarios ended his exile on March 1, 1959, and returned to Nicosia, Grivas was incensed by the deal and ensured that EOKA took no part in his Nicosia reception. “I did not even send a representative to bid him welcome,” he later wrote in his memoirs. A question mark now hung over the EOKA struggle—would Grivas continue the fight or bow to political pressure? He explained his thinking at this juncture:
The time had come for my decision: should it be peace or war? Was I to consider the struggle ended or should it be carried into another and still wider stage? To fight the British and the Turks as well was nothing new for EOKA, but since Makarios had signed the agreement he would turn against us if we renewed the struggle, taking with him part of the population, large or small. The Greek Government would also try to turn the Greek public against EOKA as well as withdrawing all diplomatic support from us. The prospect of civil war among the Greek Cypriots was a nightmare; yet if Cyprus had offered more space for manoeuvre and easier communication with the outside world for arms supplies I would have seriously considered turning Greek against Greek in the confidence that I should quickly master the situation.62
The reality was that EOKA had been dealt a body blow by Harding’s continued exertion of pressure; moreover, reorganization of the security forces under Kendrew would have sustained the British position in the event of a failure of the political process.
At meetings in Zurich and London in 1959, members of the British, Turkish, and Greek governments agreed a mechanism for ending the emergency. Though Makarios expressed his misgivings about the newly agreed constitution adopted at the Lancaster House Conference earlier that year, he was persuaded by the Greeks to endorse the settlement. As Greek foreign minister Averoff made clear at the time: “I think we have arrived at a solution, an agreement in which the principles of democracy and of modern humanity are upheld and also the fundamental principles of everyone.”63 Notwithstanding this political agreement, Greek Cypriots were not deterred from continuing to oppose British imperialist designs and Turkish interference and sought refuge in the comfort of Hellenic blood sacrifice. As one of EOKA’s more poetic fighters put it in a message to his people from the commanding heights of the gallows:
When we had run out of hope
With telegrams and embassies,
We folded up our little lives in an envelope
Small enough to fit in a schoolgirl’s fist,
On a bicycle lamp, on a book’s spine
And with red ink addressed it:
To the Greek-Cypriot People
Freedom or Death Street, Towns and Villages
of Cyprus64
These were words that were to resonate with his comrades long into the future. By the mid-1960s trouble had broken out between Greek and Turkish Cypriots and led to the establishment of a UN peacekeeping mission that remains on the island over half a century later. The road had been a long one, littered with dead, injured, and traumatized people. There is a sense today that many people in Britain have forgotten this conflict, including interestingly the British Army, which has yet to undertake a comprehensive “lessons learned” process from any of its postwar counterinsurgency and counterterrorist campaigns.65
CONCLUSION
The EOKA struggle was characterized by unrelenting guerrilla attacks and a robust response from the British security forces. There can be no doubt that it would have ended much sooner than even Grivas could have expected if his fighters had not received the active support of politicians and military officers in Greece, from the Greek Orthodox Church on the island, as well as from the Greek Cypriot people. Indeed, it could be argued that it ended when it did because that support could be sustained only in the absence of a political deal. By early 1959, however, it became apparent that Makarios’s acquiescence to a deal between Athens, London, and Ankara had cleared the way for a settlement. Although this displeased Colonel Grivas, it could not forestall the emergence of conditions that rendered further violence unsustainable. In this respect it appears to support the hypothesis that insurgent campaigns utilizing tactics such as murder, subversion, sabotage, and street protests cannot hope to sustain such a level of violence without broader political direction, sympathy, and support. On the other hand, it also meant that the coercive response from Britain could be sustained only until the culminating point when politics overcame the need to fight. In the end the British response may have been slow and lacking a clear strategy—one that linked policy in London with the tactics that were being employed by the police and military on the ground in Cyprus—but, by 1959, Britain could not avoid the reality that the duel between EOKA and British security forces ended in an honorable compromise, with both sides able to claim victory.
NOTES
1. Imperial War Museum (IWM), Erskine Papers, 75/134/4, Templer, General Sir Gerald, Secret: Report on Colonial Security, April 23, 1955, 9.
2. EOKA Museum, Nicosia, The Liberation Struggle 1955–59, 1st April 1955 (Nicosia: Government Printing Office, 2014).
3. Colonel George Grivas (aka “Digenis”): born in Trikomo, Famagusta, in 1898; fought in both World Wars; became a colonel in the Greek army; landed secretly in Paphos, November 1954; launched EOKA campaign, April 1, 1955; called a ceasefire in 1959; exiled to Greece; promoted to general; plotted to overthrow the military junta; returned to Cyprus where he plotted to overthrow President Makarios; died in hiding at Limassol, January 1974.
4. Field Marshal Sir John Harding: joined the territorial army in May 1914; fought in World War I; transferred to the Regulars in 1917; commanding officer of the Somerset Light Infantry; distinguished service in World War II (DSO + bar, MID, MC); commanded 7 Armoured Division; C-in-C Far East Land Forces during the Malayan Emergency; CIGS, 1952–55; governor of Cyprus, 1955–57; created Baron Harding, 1958; died in Dorset in 1989, aged 92.
5. Imperial War Museum, Private Papers of Harding of Petherton, Anthony Eden to Sir John Harding, September 24, 1955.
6. Aaron Edwards, Defending the Realm? The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars since 1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 133.
7. H. D. Purcell, Cyprus (London: Ernest Benn, 1969), 265.
8. Edwards, Defending the Realm?, 131.
9. Purcell, Cyprus, 166.
10. Doros Alastos, Cyprus in History (London, 1955), 321. Cited in Adamantia Pollis, “Intergroup Conflict and British Colonial Policy: The Case of Cyprus,” Comparative Politics 5, no. 4 (July 1973): 582.
11. Oliver Richmond, “Decolonisation and Post-Independence Causes of Conflict: The Case of Cyprus,” Civil Wars 5, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 172.
12. The Treaty of Lausanne saw the Turkish government officially recognize the annexation of Cyprus by Britain in November 1914. The Times (London), July 25, 1923; The Times, July 20, 1956.
13. Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash has written that EOKA’s terror campaign was at its core a struggle for ethnonationalist-basedenosis (union with Greece) and, therefore, enabled the group to accuse “the Turkish community of siding with the colonial power and opposing their freedom fighters, that is to say EOKA terrorists. This was a deliberate distortion of both EOKA’s purpose and the Turkish community’s attitude.” R. R. Denktask, The Cyprus Triangle (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982), 23.
14. Denktask, Cyprus Triangle, 184.
15. Pollis, “Intergroup Conflict and British Colonial Policy,” 590.
16. George Grivas, The Memoirs of General Grivas, ed. Charles Foley (London: Longmans, 1964), 32.
17. Dean Acheson, “Our Atlantic Alliance: The Political and Economic Strands,” speech delivered at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York, December 5, 1962. Cited in Douglas Brinkley, “Dean Acheson and the ‘Special Relationship’: The West Point Speech of December 1962,” The Historical Journal 33, no. 3 (September 1990): 599–608.
18. Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (London: Penguin, 2011), 303.
19. For more discussion on this point see Edwards, Defending the Realm?
20. The National Archives (TNA), CAB 21/2925, Gerald Templer, “Report on Colonial Security,” April 23, 1955.
21. Rory Cormac, “Organizing Intelligence: An Introduction to the 1955 Report on Colonial Security,” Intelligence and National Security 25, no. 6 (2010): 811.
22. Templer, “Report on Colonial Security.”
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Commonwealth Secretary’s Report on Defence (C. 54), November 2, 1954 cited in Ibid.
26. Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (London: Harper Press, 2013), 222.
27. Walton, Empire of Secrets, 222.
28. Purcell, Cyprus, 280.
29. Charles Foley, Island in Revolt (London: Longmans, 1962), 24.
30. Grivas, Memoirs, 46.
31. The Cyprian Chronicle, August 29, 1955.
32. Georgina Sinclair, At the End of the Line: Colonial Policing and the Imperial Endgame, 1945–80 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 118.
33. Michael Carver, Harding of Petherton: Field Marshal (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), 196.
34. Carver, Harding of Petherton, 205.
35. Nancy Crawshaw, “Restoring Order in Cyprus,” The World Today 12, no. 4 (April 1956): 145.
36. Purcell, Cyprus, 255.
37. Grivas, Memoirs, 28.
38. Simon Robbins alerts us to the fact that Harding dedicated much of 1956 to rebuilding intelligence. See Simon Robbins, “The British Counter-Insurgency in Cyprus,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 23, no. 4–5 (2012): 725.
39. In military terms, this denotes terrain that by its nature reduces or altogether obscures one’s visibility to the enemy. Thus, troops seeking cover or concealment appreciate the benefits of “dead ground.”
40. Grivas, Memoirs, 46–47.
41. Ibid, 47.
42. Robert Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–1959 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 50.
43. David Benest, “A Liberal Democratic State and COIN: The Case of Britain, or Why Atrocities Can Still Happen,” Civil Wars 14, no. 1 (March 2011): 41. By December 1957 there were 127 adults and 147 prisoners under the age of 21 detained in the Central Prison in Nicosia for emergency-related offenses. HMSO (Her Majesty’s Printing Office), Cyprus: Report for the Year 1957 (London: HMSO, 1958), 65.
44. Ian Cobain, Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture (London: Portobello Books, 2012), 96.
45. Ibid., 96–97.
46. Robbins, “The British Counter-insurgency in Cyprus,” 731.
47. Interview with Petros Petrides, Limassol, January 20, 2014.
48. Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 213–14.
49. Statistics adapted from Andrew R. Novo, “Friend or Foe? The Cyprus Police Force and the EOKA Insurgency,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 23, no. 3 (2012): 414–31.
50. Purcell, Cyprus, 294.
51. RUR Museum, Cyprus Files, Famagusta Special Branch Intsum (Intelligence Summary).
52. RUR, Cyprus Files, “Statement Given of Kenneth Donald Boy 20 Years. Army Officer of Royal Ulster Rifles, Karalagh Camp, Famagusta. Statement Taken 10.30 Hours, 5th September 1958.”
53. Royal Ulster Rifles Museum, Belfast (hereafter RUR), Cyprus Files, “Statement of Patrick Joseph Shaughnessy, 21 Years, Royal Ulster Rifles, Golden Sands Camp, Famagusta, Statement Taken 12.30 Hours 4 September 1958.”
54. RUR Museum, Cyprus Files, “Statement by Lieutenant Donald Boyd, 3 September 1958.”
55. RUR, Cyprus Files, “Statement by D.S. H. Jacobs, CID Famagusta.”
56. RUR, Cyprus Files, Covering Report of D/S Uden, Dated September 9, 1958.
57. Grivas, Memoirs, 159.
58. The Macmillan Plan was devised in the summer of 1958 as an initiative by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to increase Cypriot self-governance by reaching a political settlement with the various parties in conflict. The plan ultimately failed, but it did point the way toward the terms of reference that would lead to Cypriot independence in 1960.
59. RUR, Cyprus Files, “Director of Ops. Kendrew to all Unit Commanders. 22 July 1958.”
60. RUR Museum, Cyprus Files, “Lessons Learned Pamphlet (n.d.)”
61. House of Commons Debates (Hansard), February 19, 1959, vol. 600, Col. 618.
62. Grivas, Memoirs, 198–99.
63. Cited in Purcell, Cyprus, 306.
64. Pamphlet in the EOKA Museum, Nicosia: The Liberation Struggle 1955–59.
65. Captain J. D. Moss, “The Cyprus Emergency (1955–1960): An Effective COIN Campaign? Part Two,” British Army Review 160 (Spring/Summer 2014): 68–77.