The Greek Civil War
The Greek Civil war was one of the most crucial early stages of the Cold War and yet gets often very little attention. It embodied the start of post-WW2 tensions between America/the UK and the USSR and paved the way for the creation of Greek politics as it is today.
Greece had had a history even before the Civil War of flipping between forms of government and there had been tensions for decades between the left and the right. Pictured above is King George II, the right-wing king of Greece from 1922 to 1924 (when the monarchy was briefly abolished) and again from 1935 to 1947. In between his rules there was an extremely unstable republic which caused 23 changes of government, 13 coups and a dictatorship to taking place in about 12 years. So when he came back into power in 1935 a monarchist government seemed favourable and more stable. This is important to bear in ind as we look at the main causes leading up to the Greek Civil War.
1. AXIS OCCUPATION
The first key cause of the Greek Civil War was the Axis Occupation from 1941-1944. Axis was a military alliance between Nazi Germany, the Empire of Japan, the Kingdom of Italy and their affiliate states.
Mussolini’s Italy had attempted to invade Greece in October 1940; however, with the help of her British allies Greece was able to push the Italians out on a day the Greeks still celebrate: 28 October — Όχι Day (literally “no” day).
After the unsuccessful attempted invasion, Nazi Germany, Italy’s ally, launched a major Blitzkrieg campaign from April to June 1941, after which Greece was defeated and the Greek government then went into exile in Cairo. Meanwhile, an Axis-collaborationist puppet government was established in Greece whose territory was divided up between Axis states with Germany taking control of the most important areas such as Athens, Thessaloniki and some strategic Aegean islands.
The occupation was devastating for Greece.
In retaliation against the occupying forces, the Greek Resistance formed which was one of the most successful resistances in Europe at this time. They launched major guerrilla attacks against Axis, set up large espionage networks and fought against the Security Battalions set up by the Germans. Despite being highly impactful in fighting the Axis powers, by late 1943 the individual resistance groups were distracted and began to fight each other as they disagreed on ideologies above all else. This meant that by the time liberation from Axis came in 1944, Greece was in a state of extreme political polarisation with a power vacuum in the middle as the Greek government was still in exile in Cairo. Greece hence became a breeding ground for cold war tension.
2. WHITE TERROR
The second cause of the Greek Civil War was the “White Terror” attacks against the left-wing citizens of Greece. This came after a period of a few months of high tensions amongst resistance groups and involving the government-in-exile.
The poster reads:
Gerasimos Maltezos (Tzoumerkiotis) [the author's name]
E.A.M.-E.L.A.S.
(Memories and strategic and tactical questions)
[The penultimate line is unclear]
[Published] 1987
The main two resistance groups were the National Liberation Front (EAM) and the military branch of the Greek Communist Party, the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS). These two groups united after the liberation of Greece from the Axis powers.
In May 1944 the Lebanon Conference took place. Here it was ordered that all non-collaborationist groups in Greece would participate in a new Unity Government. In October that same year, a few weeks before the Germans withdrew, another agreement ordered that members of Greek resistance groups would be part of the new Greek Army and all collaborationist forces would be tried and punished accordingly. So everyone who had affiliated themselves with Axis or with the Nazis were going to be tried and if they were found guilty they would be punished.
This sounded like a great clean start for Greece to recover after the devastating Axis occupation and it did actually function for a couple of months. EAM-ELAS ran 4/5 of Greece and had widespread support.
By 1st December, however, things were already starting to go pear-shaped. On this day, a British Army officer named Ronald Scobie ordered the unilateral disarmament of the EAM-ELAS group (because they were left-wing and at this time a big portion of the western world was terrified of communism, especially Britain (under Churchill) and America (under Roosevelt, although admittedly he was not as concerned by Soviet expansionism as Churchill or as his successor President Truman).
On the 2nd December, all EAM ministers resigned and called for a rally to take place in Athens the next day in retaliation against the Scobie order.
200,000 Greeks showed up at this rally.
It was peaceful to start with until the Greek Police and Gendarmerie shot at EAM-ELAS and their fellow leftists at the rally, killing 28 and wounding almost 150. This catalysed a series of armed conflicts between leftist groups and the Greek government-in-exile (and eventually involving the British military) which was called the Dekemvriana — the things that happened in December. The Dekemvriana ended with the defeat of EAM-ELAS which was followed by a period of “White Terror” against the left.
“White Terror” was the term allocated by the Greeks for the period of time in which EAM-ELAS and their fellow leftists faced extreme persecution by right-wing groups in retaliation for what they called the “Red Terror” which was essentially just EAM-ELAS running the country. As a result of the White Terror, at this point most of the prisoners in Greece were leftists whereas in the rest of Europe they were arresting right-wing Nazis and Nazi sympathisers. Between 1945 and 1946, anticommunist gangs killed almost 1200 communist civilians and tortured many others. The White Terror was another cause of the radical political polarisation of Greece and therefore also the Civil War.
The communist leadership decided in February 1946 to go forward with organisation of a new armed struggle against the Monarcho-Fascist regime. As part of this struggle, the leftists boycotted the March 1946 elections, which were won by the monarchist United Nationalist Party. In September, a referendum favoured the retention of the monarchy, but the leftists claimed that it had been rigged. King George returned to Athens and the British influence strengthened. In the two years following the election there were six changes of prime minister which again shows how unstable this was. To put that into context, remember in the 12 years between King George’s rules there were 23 changes of government.
The fighting resumed in March 1946. By late 1946, the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE), set up by the communists, was able to deploy about 16,000 partisans.
Rural peasants were caught in the crossfire between the DSE and the National Army. When DSE partisans entered a village asking for supplies, citizens were supportive or at least didn’t resist which meant that when government troops arrived at those same villages later they denounced all the citizens as communist sympathisers and imprisoned or exiled them. Rural areas also suffered as a result of tactics dictated to the National Army by US advisers which involved evacuating villagers under the pretext that they were under the direct threat of communist attack. In truth the government troops were trying to get rid of everyone who could supply the communists with supplies and recruits. In the Vietnam War America used a similar tactic and called it the Strategic Hamlet Programme.
By early 1947, however, Britain had spent ₤85 million in Greece and couldn’t afford to fund or contribute to the monarchist efforts anymore. Instead, U.S. President Truman stepped in to support the Greek government against the Communists under his new Truman Doctrine which was the pledge that America would do whatever they could to contain communism.
Throughout 1947 the scale of fighting increased as a result of American involvement. The DSE started launching large-scale attacks which provoked massive counteroffensives by the US-backed National Army. The DSE, which was far weaker, started melting away into the mountains in the north along the border of Greece. This map shows the organisation of military bases and routes they could take in and out of the country:
In September 1947 communist leaders decided to move from guerrilla tactics to full-scale conventional war so in December they announced the formation of a Provisional Democratic Government. The Athenian government banned them and no foreign power recognised them. The new strategy led the DSE into costly attempts to seize a major town as its seat of government. Later that month 1200 DSE fighters were killed in one battle. The strategy also forced the government to increase the size of its army and to crack down on communists and communist sympathisers, many of whom they ended up imprisoning on the island of Makronisos (fun fact: this literally translates as “long island” which is convenient because it actually is a long island).
Despite Monarcho-Fascist efforts, the DSE reached the height of its power in 1948 and extended its operations to Attica, within 20 km of Athens. It drew on more than 20,000 fighters, both men and women, and a network of sympathisers and informants in every village and suburb. One Division controlled 70% of the Peloponnese politically and militarily. Battalions named after ELAS were active in northwestern Greece and on several islands. Meanwhile, Western Allies were pouring funds and equipment into the country for the government’s army to use and launched a series of major offensives in the mountains of central Greece. These mostly defeated the DSE.
COMMUNIST EVACUATION OF THE CHILDREN
Evacuating children aged 4—14 from Greece during the civil war was a sensitive issue for both sides of the conflict.
About 30,000 children were forcibly removed from their homes by the DSE and taken to countries of the Eastern Bloc which were countries under Soviet influence. This map shows the distribution of Greek refugees after the civil war:
The communist leadership claimed that children were being gathered to be evacuated from Greece at the request of popular organisations and parents but one study claimed that they were sending children to indoctrination camps where they’d be almost conditioned into loving communism which non-communist sources agreed was the case. Over time it’s surfaced that many children returned to Greece between 1975 and 1990 with varied views and attitudes toward the communist faction which indicates that it is unlikely that they were conditioned as children.
About 12,000 other children were moved for protection to special camps which were the brain child of Queen Frederica who was married to the new king, King Paul.
During the war, more than 25,000 children, most with parents in the DSE, were also placed in 30 “child towns” under the immediate control of Queen Frederica. After 50 years, some of these children who’d been given up for adoption to American families were retracing their family background in Greece.
The civil war seemed to lose a lot of momentum in 1949. The end was nigh.
One of the main reasons the leftists of Greece lost momentum was due to the Stalin-Tito split. Stalin was leader of the USSR and Tito was president of Yugoslavia. They had been BFFs for a while but there was some beef which led to Stalin expelling Yugoslavia from the Communist Information Bureau — Cominform for short — in June 1948, which was basically his squad of communist countries under Soviet influence.
So in short, Stalin didn’t support the communist movement in Greece because he thought it was a wasted effort. According to Stalin, the UK and America would never let the Greeks fall to communism because that would cut off their trade with the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, Tito had been a big fan of the Greek communists since day 1. The time came in 1949 for the Greek Communist Party and its affiliates to choose between its loyalty to the USSR and its relations with its closest ally, Yugoslavia, because of Yugoslavia’s expulsion from Cominform. They picked the USSR which meant that Tito got quite upset and cut off the transport routes from Greece across the border into Yugoslavia and disbanding the DSE camps there.
The DSE started losing battles left, right and centre. In a camp along the northern border of Greece the DSE ran out of supplies so the National Army came at them with 80,000 troops to battle their poorly-supplies 20,000 and the DSE obviously lost that fight. The National Army now also had the leadership of one of the Army officers who had been partly responsible for the Greek success in fighting off the Italians in 1940 which made the National Army even more successful.
Also, in an attempt to deter communist sympathisers, the National Army started to decapitate dead DSE soldiers and hang up their heads in the squares.
Most leftist resistance groups started to leave Greece by September 1949 while the main part of the DSE and its HQ stayed behind to enter talks with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Following these discussions, the DSE HQ moved to military encampments in the capital city of Uzbekistan and stayed there for three years. Older soldiers or injured soldiers and women and children were relocated to communist or socialist European countries. On 16th October, the leader of the DSE announced a “temporary ceasefire to prevent the complete annihilation of Greece.” This was actually the end of the Greek Civil War.
Almost 100,000 ELAS fighters and Communist sympathisers were imprisoned, exiled or executed.
Capitalist nations counted this as a success in the Cold War in containing Communism.
The Greek Civil War left the country in more of a mess than the Axis occupation and left the country seriously divided for decades afterwards. The polarisation and instability of Greek politics in the mid-1960s as a direct result of the Civil War resulted in several crises, including:
the murder of the left-wing politician Gregoris Lambrakis in 1963
the execution of a coup d’état by a group of rightist army officers to seize power from the government on April 21, 1967, followed by a military regime which lasted until 1974
the abolition of the monarchy in 1974 after a referendum
It wasn’t until 1981 that the centre-left government of Greece allowed a number of DSE veterans who had been taking refuge in communist countries to come back to Greece which helped to smooth-over the damaging social implications of the Greek Civil War.
In 1989 the Greek government passed a law recognising the 1946–1949 war as a Civil War and not a communist insurgency. For the first time in postwar history it was recognised as a war between the National Army and the Democratic Army of Greece and the term “communist bandits” was replaced by “Fighters of the DSE” wherever it appeared in Greek law.
The Greek Civil War was indubitably a very significant conflict not just domestically but also on a global scale, which leads me to wonder what it is about this incredible period of history that has caused it to be deprived of attention in schools and textbooks.
Another post of mine contains stories of my grandfather who was a teenager living in Athens during the Civil War. If you're interested in finding out more, I highly recommend his stories. Click here to read that in a new tab.
If you are interested in reading about the Civil War in greater detail, I recommend the following resources:
Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation 1941-44 by Mark Mazower
Life's Picture History of World War II (for some absolutely stunning photography including some of the Axis occupation)
Red Acropolis, Black Terror: The Greek Civil War And The Origins Of The Soviet-american Rivalry, 1943-1949 by Andre Gerolymatos
Thank you for reading! If you would like to be updated on when I next post, please do feel free to subscribe. My next article will review the 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge and assess how historically accurate it was.
Bibliography:
Inside Hitler's Greece: The Experience of Occupation 1941-44 by Mark Mazower
Red Acropolis, Black Terror: The Greek Civil War And The Origins Of The Soviet-american Rivalry, 1943-1949 by Andre Gerolymatos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Civil_War
http://www.coldwar.org/articles/40s/GreekCivilWar1945-1949.asp
https://schoolworkhelper.net/tito-stalin-dispute-1948-timeline-analysis-significance/