GENERAL ALEXANDROS PAPAGOS was appointed commander in chief of the struggling Greek army in 1949. The sixty-five-year-old Papagos had been commander in chief during the successful defense of Greece against Italy, but after the German invasion he was interned in a concentration camp. Following the Nazi withdrawal he returned to his home country and resumed his military career. The general’s imperious style and demands for absolute authority made the Greek government reluctant to place him in charge, but the ongoing stalemate left them little choice.
Christopher Woodhouse, an Oxford-educated classicist, soldier, and British diplomat who served in Greece during the Second World War and the early phase of the civil war, wrote in his classic The Struggle for Greece: 1941–1949: “Papagos was a superlative staff officer, impeccable in logistic planning and exact calculation, a master of the politics and diplomacy of war. . . . His chief asset was his seniority: he could impose his own plans and wishes on both the Greek high command and the allied military missions.”
Woodhouse also expressed reservations about Papagos, saying of him that he had “little experience of high command in battle” (a strange observation to make given his success in the Italian war), but still acknowledged that “everyone agreed that his appointment was a decisive contribution to the victory of the National Greek Army.”
Papagos wasted no time in putting his stamp on the army, declaring to his men, “There are no obstacles which cannot be overcome for one who wants and is determined to win,” and bluntly instructing his officers “to shoot on the spot anyone under his command who showed negligence or faintheartedness.” He reorganized the army’s leadership and even fended off a brief attempt by the king to persuade him to become the dictator of Greece. It seemed at last that events were finally aligned for victory.
The Truman Doctrine had been proposed by the president and passed by Congress with remarkable speed. But the implementation of the program took much longer; petty squabbles among American officials in Greece wasted valuable time as the country continued to suffer the ravages of civil war. It took until August 1949, after the infusion of millions in aid, the retreat of Stalin, the guidance of General Van Fleet, the leadership of General Papagos, and the closure of the Yugoslav border, for the Truman Doctrine to finally achieve its aim in Greece. The countless meetings in the State, War, and Navy Building, the painstaking composition of the president’s address to a joint session of Congress, the vast amount of press coverage, the flurry of committee hearings, the hours of debate, and the bill signing in a Kansas City hotel room all came down to a final clash in the mountains of northern Greece: Operation Torch, a three-phased assault launched in August 1949. The Greek National Army had always enjoyed a numerical advantage over the guerrillas, but for Operation Torch they would bring that advantage to bear in an overwhelmingly effective way.
Torch was preceded by a coordinated attack from the air, pounding guerrilla positions in Grammos and Vitsi near the Albanian border. The Greek air force, using British Spitfires, rained napalm, a weapon of liquid fire, on the fighters below, burning and suffocating them. The United States had dropped napalm on Japan during the latter part of World War II, and would do so extensively during the Vietnam War. Besides killing and incapacitating the enemy on direct contact, the sticky, sulfurous substance sucked oxygen from the air.
There were three phases of the operation. Torch A, launched on August 5, was a diversionary assault on the Grammos region from two directions, and resulted in the capture of high ground by the army and the cutting of the rebel territory between Grammos and Vitsi.
Torch B was an attack on Vitsi from the air on August 10, followed by a ground assault that drove the guerrillas to the Yugoslav border, where instead of passing through on their way back to the fighting, they were imprisoned because of Tito’s new policy. Among those who never made it to the border, casualties were high.
Finally, Torch C was an all-out attack on Grammos, where the guerrilla positions had already been weakened by Torch A. This would prove to be the military climax of the war, and among the spectators to this final victory were the king of Greece and General Van Fleet. On August 24, the attack began with a blistering raid by American Helldivers, a fast carrier-based navy dive bomber that came into service in the middle of the Second World War. Manned by Greek pilots, dozens of the bombers swarmed the air space around Grammos. These combined with Spitfires made the aerial assault exceptionally effective and prepared the way for the army’s attack. The guerrillas put up a brave resistance under the circumstances, but were simply overwhelmed by Greek troops funded, trained, and kept in the war by US and British support. The Greek National Army had finally vanquished their enemy.
Van Fleet informed his superiors, “Groups are so broken up that an organization on military lines hardly exists; no mining or harassing activities are engaged in and the omnipresent problems [for the guerrillas] are survival from hunger and cold and escape from searching GNA troops.” The remaining communist fighters began melting away, escaping into neighboring Albania where they faced an indifferent reception. After a decade of brutal conflict, the civil war ended with a radio announcement on October 16, 1949.
Almost eighty thousand people died in the conflict, and nearly a million lost their homes. Greece’s Civil War was every bit as catastrophic for the country as the German occupation had been. Greece had also paid a heavy price for its status as an early battleground in the conflict between America and the USSR. The battered country had become a pawn in an international power struggle involving not only the United States and the Soviet Union, but also of the ever shifting Balkan political landscape. Crushing the communist insurgency had proven to be a more difficult and drawn out enterprise that would have been expected in the heady days following the Americans’ arrival. But while the victory took longer than strategists on both sides of the Atlantic expected, American aid staved off certain defeat, drove Stalin off from his prey, and moved Tito to close his border to rebels seeking sanctuary.
The Truman Doctrine in Greece was an unambiguous American triumph. Its mere declaration by the US president and its passage by Congress had been enough to convince Stalin that Greece was no longer worth his effort, although the Americans would not know that for years. Economic aid helped the Greeks rebuild their infrastructure and begin the process of recovery from years of occupation and civil war. The military contribution was even more substantial, allowing for the growth of the Greek National Army and the use of more advanced weaponry. Together, Generals Van Fleet and Papagos formed an effective team that rallied the spirit of the Greek army. American diplomatic finesse had contained the war and prevented it from spreading into neighboring countries. And the administration’s resolution not to engage in direct military conflict inside of Greece prevented the United States from being drawn into what might have become another quagmire or regional war.
Napoleon Bonaparte famously declared, “I’d rather have lucky generals than good ones,” and there is no doubt Harry Truman was fortunate in the chain of events that unfolded in Greece from 1947 to 1949. The KKE leadership made a disastrous strategic miscalculation when it abandoned guerrilla tactics in favor of conventional warfare and its attempts to hold territory. Even with aid from across the border, the insurgents lacked the manpower and matériel to successfully conduct such operations, while sacraficing their greatest advantage. The split between Tito and Stalin was a further stroke of good fortune, deftly exploited by Washington but caused in large part by internal rivalry inside the communist world.
In the end it was the statesmanship of Harry Truman—a combination of toughness and restraint—that brought victory in Greece and established the United States as a champion of democracy in this new postwar world. For all the imperfections of the Greek government, and other regimes supported by America throughout the Cold War, none remotely compared to the oppressive and brutal nature of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. The Truman Doctrine proved to be a declaration of resistance against the most murderous regime in world history, and while the failures that followed in the wake of Truman’s policy were often tragic and antithetical to American values, anyone who cherishes individual freedom and the expansion of human rights across the world should celebrate its success.