ON A COOL spring night in 1946, thirty-three communist guerrillas descended from their hideout atop Mount Olympus, the highest mountain in Greece and the mythological home of the gods. Down its rocky sides they scrambled, ready to wreak havoc on the towns below. The communist insurgents’ timing was not random: a general election was to be held the following day, and the guerrillas had pledged to overthrow the government in Athens through a campaign of violence and terror. Given the chance to participate in the democratic process, the communists chose violence instead despite the fact—at the same time—Italy’s communist party was contending for elective office. But in Greece bullets were chosen instead of ballots, and disastrous results would follow.
The communist force ran down silent streets and attacked without mercy. Orange flames filled the night skies, and the stars over Greece were obscured by smoke, as guerrillas set fire to several buildings and shot anyone who got in their way. As had happened in Greece so many times over the past several years small villages paid the price for national political quarrels. This communist attack was just the latest chapter in the country’s long bout with civil unrest.
This was the opening scene in the latest phase of the Greek Civil War, a bloody internecine conflict that had begun while the Second World War was still raging and would continue intermittenly for decades to come.
This Greek Civil War would prove to be much more than a mere regional struggle. By an accident of history and geography, it became a flash point between the world’s most powerful nations, the United States and the Soviet Union. The streets once roamed by philosopher kings and the first architects of Western Civilization would soon become the first theater in the Cold War between the capitalist West and communist East.
The wild landscape of northern Greece was ideal terrain for guerrilla warfare. For hundreds of miles, along the borders of Albania, Macedonia, and Bulgaria, the region offered endless opportunities for ambush. The guerrillas could easily move across the borders, and on either side win new converts to their cause. Since the days of the Ottoman Empire, bandits had roamed freely, preying on travelers foolhardy enough to venture there. No occupying force—not the Turks, not the Germans—found it possible to police such wild and inhospitable land, and the communist insurgents were proving themselves to be a tough and resilient force fired by ideological zeal and focused on the overthrow of the existing political order. Of course, what they proposed in terms of replacement would prove to be far more oppressive than even the current chaotic situation.
The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) had one crucial advantage over its royalist and nationalist political rivals: like the communists in France, it had been one of the prime enablers of resistance to the German occupation. It sponsored the powerful National Liberation Front (EAM), the most important organization devoted to fighting the Germans, cleverly camouflaging its communist goals with nationalist rhetoric. The EAM in turn created a military force known as the People’s Liberation Army. While there were other noncommunist resistance groups, none were as resolute in their anti-Nazi activities. Even during the Second World War, the EAM moved ruthlessly to crush competing groups engaged in the struggle against the Germans. So merciless were its tactics that some resistance fighters even decided to throw in their lot with the Nazis.
But the communists had more than just terror and violence as a tactical advantage. The ravages of war and the resulting privation and despair increased the appeal of the EAM’s ideology. The Nazi occupiers had had little regard for the well-being of the Greek people. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring had exhorted military commanders in Greece and elsewhere to “get hold of as much as you can so that the German people can live. . . . I could not care less when you say that people under your administration are dying of hunger. Let them perish so long as no German starves.” While the EAM led violent campaigns, it also fed the population, founded schools, and provided other services that the government in Athens could no longer offer. This combination of ruthless force and public philanthropy made the communists a force to be reckoned with, and in the wild and remote mountains of northern Greece, they were quite literally a law unto themselves. One of the commanders declared, “This is a revolution. And things have to be done—even if a few innocents are killed, it won’t matter in the long run.”
While the Germans had invaded Greece in April 1941, Italian troops had already invaded Albania on Good Friday, 1939. The campaign lasted only a few days, and the Albanian king Zog and his family fled south to Greece. Eager to follow the example of his ally Adolf Hitler, and hungry for more territory, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini resolved to take Greece as well. In meetings with his ministers, Il Duce brooked no dissent, and despite having made no detailed plans for the invasion, he sent his Albanian-based forces into Greece on October 28, 1940.
But Mussolini’s scattershot plan proved to be no blitzkrieg. The Italian army lacked the dash and deadly efficiency of the Germans, and in the mountains of northern Greece it met tenacious resistance from the Greek army. Rather than taking new territory, the Italians found themselves forced back into Albania little more than two months after the campaign began. The Greek National Army had proven to be resolute under the most dire of conditions.
MUSSOLINI’S FAILED INVASION made a national hero of Greece’s reviled dictator, General Ioannis Metaxas, who had seized power in 1936 and outlawed all political parties. When the Italian minister to Greece delivered formal notice of the invasion to Metaxas, the Greek leader famously (if perhaps apocryphally) pounded his desk and shouted, “Ochi!” (“No!”) This soon became a rallying cry for the Greek people.
However impressive its performance, the Greek army remained badly outnumbered and low on supplies. The government called upon the United Kingdom for help, and British troops arrived there in March 1941. “I felt more like a bridegroom than a soldier with my truck decorated with sprigs of peach blossom and my buttonhole with violets,” said one British officer of the lavish reception granted him and his comrades by the civilian population.
The Germans soon ended that short Greek honeymoon. Hitler, frustrated by his flailing fascist ally but unwilling to risk an Axis reversal before his planned invasion of the Soviet Union, sent an invading force to Greece through Bulgaria on April 6, the ferocity of which was undiminished by the fact that the Germans attacked Yugoslavia at the same time. Other than to reverse Mussolini’s embarrassing performance, Hitler had no interest in a Greek campaign and forbade the Luftwaffe from bombing Athens. But no such restraint was applied to the mountains of northern Greece; the air was soon thick with German Stukas.
The Greek army fared even worse against the German onslaught than had French forces the year before; Greece swiftly capitulated. The British began a ragged and undignified retreat on April 20. Within three weeks, the Germans entered Athens in triumph and soon after occupied Crete.
The Acropolis, an ancient hilltop citadel designed by Pericles, was defaced by a swastika flying overhead, and the German occupiers proved to be so ruthless in their policy of plunder that one hundred thousand Greeks died in the coming winter. The king of Greece, George II, fled to Cairo with his government. Like so many displaced royals during the war, he ruled his country from abroad under British supervision. That supervision was tinged with condescension, notwithstanding the familial connections between the Greek royal family and the British aristocracy. (Not long after the war, in yet another example of this intermingling, George II’s first cousin, Philip, prince of Greece and Denmark, would wed Princess Elizabeth, the future queen of England, and come to be known as the Duke of Edinburgh.) Winston Churchill’s intent was to restore the Greek king to his throne once the war was won.
American military strategists such as army chief of staff George C. Marshall were keen on a cross-channel invasion as early as 1942, but Churchill and Marshall’s British counterpart, General Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, wished to postpone a frontal assault until the Germans could be harried at the margins and Allied troops had gained more experience. This led to strained arguments at Allied conferences, but Churchill’s view eventually prevailed. Churchill had often been accused of fighting peripheral battles rather than taking on the enemy directly. But in the case of Greece, it is arguable that the British presence during the German invasion slowed the pace of Hitler’s troops just enough to delay their surprise invasion of Russia until June 22, late enough that the Russian winter later helped contribute to the disastrous German defeat there.
Churchill’s relevance to Greece’s fate didn’t end with that strategic decision. His tactics deployed in a brief meeting with Joseph Stalin was to have enormous implications for the postwar world. On a visit to Moscow in October 1944, Churchill met with Stalin to stress the vital importance of Greece to Britain. This was an example of the individual diplomatic course taken by both Roosevelt and Churchill during the war; they may have been the closest of allies but their strategic priorities were far from being in alignment. Churchill had declared in 1942 that he had “not become the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” and in his discussions with Stalin he showed his willingness to pay a price to avoid that unhappy fate. Acknowledging that “the Americans might be shocked” by their conversation, Churchill pressed Stalin for a guarantee that he would not interfere in any Greek postwar settlement, in exchange for giving the Soviets a free hand in Romania. Notes of the meeting record that Churchill “then produced what he called a ‘naughty document’ showing a list of Balkan countries and the proportion of interest in them of the Great Powers.” As Churchill later recalled, he wrote on a “half sheet of paper” his proposal:
| Roumania | ||
| Russia | 90% | |
| The others | 10% | |
| Greece | ||
| Great Britain (in accord with USA) | 90% | |
| Russia | 10% | |
| Yugoslavia | 50–50% | |
| Hungary | 50–50% | |
| Bulgaria | ||
| Russia | 75% | |
| The others | 25% | |
Churchill remembered later that after he gave the slip of paper to Stalin,
There was a slight pause. Then he took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. . . .
After this there was a long silence. The pencilled paper lay in the centre of the table. At length I said, “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.”
“No, you keep it,” said Stalin.
The “Man of Steel” could afford to appear magnanimous (if magnanimity meant agreeing to be the dictator of millions). He knew as well as anyone how precarious were Britain’s finances, and how tenuous was her hold on various dominions. Therefore he honored this squalid but necessary bargain with Churchill, knowing that he could strike later once the British government was no longer capable of enforcing the deal. And besides, the communist guerrillas of Greece were more than capable of maintaining their campaign against the government without direct Soviet help. Guns and terror proved to be cheap commodities for the communists.
It was important to Britain that Greece remain democratic, a fact further underscored by Churchill’s visit to Athens in December 1944. The war was still ongoing in both Europe and the Pacific, but the Germans had withdrawn from Greece in October, leaving its citizens to pick up the pieces amid a blasted political and physical landscape. The extreme ideological polarization caused by the occupation and the nature of the resistance left the government heavily dominated by right-wing forces as brutal as many of the communists they were now fighting.
Skirmishes had broken out between the British-backed government and communist insurgents who had been a part of the anti-German resistance. Churchill left his family to celebrate Christmas without him, and he and the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, flew to the Greek capital on a mission to prevent a communist victory.
The prime minister convened a meeting of the leaders of both sides in the conflict, urging them to come to a compromise while reminding them that British troops would intervene if necessary. The results were mixed: fighting continued after his departure, but all sides accepted the appointment of Archbishop Damaskinos as regent, a holding action until the Greek people decided whether they wished to restore the exiled King George II to the throne.
The British wanted a friendly and stable Greece, but Churchill was clear that the political details were up to the Greeks, who would be “at liberty to choose by free elections the sort of constitution and government they desired.” This was not a right they would be granted were the communists to prevail.
Perhaps because of their disdain for democracy, the communists decided not to contest the March 1946 elections but instead to resort to terror and violence to discredit the rightist government. Their strategy backfired and had the effect of strengthening the right while further marginalizing the communists. Left unconstrained, the right’s hold over Greek politics led to the government arresting and executing large numbers of communists, while virtually ignoring the wartime collaborators still in their midst. This brutal display would create complications for Truman the following year as he tried to convince Congress that supporting the Greek government would be in the national interest. Their opponents would be able to claim, with some justification, that by backing the Athens government the United States would be propping up a regime every bit as brutal as any communist regime that might supplant it.
In October 1946, the ragged bands of communist guerrillas who had escaped government reprisals were united to form the Democratic Army of Greece (DAG), under the leadership of Markos Vafiadis. The DAG combined traditional guerrilla tactics with slightly more conventional command structures, and the roving bands of the earlier phase of the conflict increased in size by a factor of ten.
The DAG used training camps in Yugoslavia to prepare their troops for battle and provide constant indoctrination to fire their ideological zeal. This foreign interference made it even more difficult for the Greek government to squash the insurgency, for the guerrillas could retreat across the border much faster than the official Greek army could infiltrate the mountains.
The government looked to the United Nations for help, with results that would help propel the events described later in this book. The UN, then only in the second year of its existence, formed a commission to investigate the situation. Predictably, the commission produced a lengthy report that promptly began gathering dust in UN archives. Russian representation on the commission—unavoidable because Russia was a member of the Security Council—did not prevent the commission from acknowledging that Greece’s neighbors to the north were acting aggressively toward the sovereign nation. But the Russians and their Polish puppets ensured that nothing would be done to stop their activities.
NO LONGER SIMPLY a relic of the classical past, dotted with splendid ruins and surrounded by sparkling blue seas, Greece was now ground zero in the contemporary clash of empires. The Cold War was about to begin in Athens.
The British Labour government that had swept Winston Churchill from power in the stunning general election of 1945 was determined to decolonize the vast British Empire, and within two years had granted independence to Jordan and India, long considered the jewel in the British crown. But even Labour, at the urging of Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, Prime Minister Clement Attlee was determined to keep Greece within Britain’s orbit.
Britain was now faced with a difficult choice. Then as now, it was heavily dependent on the Middle East for oil, and Greece was the strategic key to that vital region. The British government was run by left-wing leaders determined to implement a socialist program that had been overwhelmingly endorsed by the electorate, but who had no sympathy for the ideological, expansionist aims of the Soviet Union.
But the economic realities facing an exhausted postwar Britain had made its path clear and unavoidable. Attlee knew he had no choice but to back away from long-standing commitments and instead tend to Britain’s own domestic affairs. The British government could now do little more than hope its wartime ally across the Atlantic would embrace a newly expansive and unprecedented role throughout the world. The former colonies, which had won their freedom from the British Empire 170 years earlier, would now be asked to fulfill their former masters’ global obligations. Legend has it that after their defeat at Yorktown, the British fifes and drums played “The World Turned Upside Down.” Clement Attlee and his cabinet might have had the same tune on their minds as the British once again retreated to America’s benefit.
The signs of that British retreat had long been apparent, and American diplomats in Moscow, Athens, and Istanbul had been increasingly concerned about the dangers of Soviet influence in Greece and Turkey. General Walter Bedell Smith, the American ambassador to Russia, had warned: “Turkey has little hope of independent survival unless it is assured of solid long term American and British support.”
America was now required to take over where Britain left off. In a preview of things to come, the United States—through its Export-Import Bank—granted $25 million in aid to Greece at the beginning of 1946.
America’s ambassador to Greece, Lincoln MacVeagh, sent a steady stream of cables to the State Department in the winter of 1947 describing the grim situation. His cable of February 20 arrived on the eve of Britain’s dramatic announcement to the Americans that it could no longer provide for Greece’s security. In his cable, the ambassador warned that the situation was “critical,” and continued: “Impossible to say how soon collapse may be anticipated, but we believe that to regard it as anything but imminent would be highly unsafe.” The economic and military crises were challenging enough, but “deteriorating morale” due in part to “exploitation by international Communists” made the situation even more acute.
General George C. Marshall, who had been installed as secretary of state on January 21, summed up the situation in a cable to the ambassador: “Many former adherents of liberal and center parties, alarmed at presence of communists or condonement of communism, seem to have gravitated towards extreme right while others shocked at reactionary attitude of rightists have gone over to groups controlled or contaminated by communists.” It was now left to Truman, Marshall, and the United States Congress to contain the rising tide of political chaos that was now overtaking Greece and threatening to sweep across the rest of Europe.