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Greek Civil War (1944–1949)

03 Sunday Oct 2010

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Napoleon Zervas (2d from left) with fellow EDES officers.

A two-phase civil war (1944–1945 and 1946–1949) that had its beginning in the German occupation of Greece in 1941. In both phases, Communist forces staged an unsuccessful attempt to take over the country.

During the German occupation, two resistance forces emerged to oppose the Germans. One, the National Liberation Front–National Popular Liberation Army (known as the EAM-ELAS in Greek) was Communist controlled and directed; the other, the Greek Democratic National Army (known as the EDES in Greek), was Royalist.

During the German occupation, both groups fought against the Germans and, on some occasions, worked together. Due to the brutality of German reprisals, both sides worked to bide their time until the Germans left and the inevitable postwar struggle for power would begin. By 1944, when the Germans withdrew from Greece, the EAM-ELAS had removed all political and military opposition in Greece except for the EDES. They established a provisional government in the mountains of Greece and planned for a regime that would not include the king of Greece nor the government in exile in London.

The British had a presence in Athens and were able to cobble together a fragile coalition government between the EDES and the EAM-ELAS in October 1944. The agreement between the two sides failed over the issue of disarming the Communist forces in the field. On 3 December 1944, the EAM-ELAS launched an uprising in Athens, which the British suppressed only after great effort. The Communist forces had been able to capture almost all of Greece but were finally defeated.

With their defeat, the Communists entered into talks and agreed to disarm at a meeting in February 1945. Part of the agreement was that in March 1946 a general election was to be held across Greece. When the elections came, the Communists sat it out and saw a Royalist government placed into power. In September 1946, the king of Greece was restored to the throne via a plebiscite.

All of this was rejected by the Communists, and full-scale civil war broke out in 1946. Britain, which since 1944 had been responsible for the defense of Greece, found that it was a burden it could no longer bear and transferred the task to the United States in 1947. By this time, the EAM-ELAS had established a provisional government in the mountains of the north of Greece. The United States issued the Truman Doctrine, stating that the U.S. would aid those nations struggling against outside-supported insurgency, and started to pour military and economic aid into Greece.

Over the next two years, supported by massive amounts of U.S. aid and military advisers, the Greek government was finally able to push the Communists back, and they abandoned the armed struggle, with many Greek Communists fleeing to Albania. The two phases of the Greek Civil War led to more than 50,000 battle deaths and the creation of over half a million internal refugees.

References and further reading: Weinberg, Gerhard L. A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Tough Greek resistance

28 Monday Jun 2010

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Greek general officers are escorted to the surrender conference in a German staff car. Greece would be garrisoned by German and Italian troops.
Supporting the offensive were the bombers of VIII Flightcorps. As the German dive bombers swooped down on the Greek defences they were disconcerted to met by heavy anti-aircraft fire, for alone amongst the great European fortifications of the time, the defences of the Metaxas Line included turret-mounted 37mm anti-aircraft guns. And unlike the poor-grade fortress divisions that manned the Maginot Line, the Greek defenders were members of high-grade units. The German XXX Corps was thrown back when it attempted to cross the Nestos, suffering heavy casualties. The German mountain troops, fighting their way down the Rupel Pass, were also forced to retreat. Eventually, the XVIII Corps was able to make some progress against the Metaxas Line, bringing up high-velocity guns in order to fire directly into the embrasures of the Greek defences.
The German breakthrough did not come on the Metaxas Line, however, but through the outflanking actions of the 2nd Panzer Division and the XL Panzer Corps (General Stumme), which had invaded Yugoslav Macedonia before turning south into Greece.
German breakthrough
Lieutenant General Vieil’s 2nd Panzer Division – which had played a prominent role in forging the Panzer Corridor in France in 1940 – advanced into Yugoslavia on the 6th, eliminating the Bregalnica Division and capturing Strumica. It then turned south down the Axios valley and entered Greece on 8 April, encountering only limited opposition. An attempt to block the progress of the German panzers at Kilkis was brushed aside, and after a dash of some 90km (56 miles), the port of Salonika was in German hands. As a consequence, all the Greek troops holding the Metaxas Line were cut off from the rest of Greece, and at 1400 hours on 9 April, the Greek commander holding the line, General Bakopoulos, instructed his 70,000 men to lay down their arms.
The main thrust into Greece was made by the XL Panzer Corps, having first destroyed the Yugoslav army in and around Skopje (20,000 troops and seven generals taken prisoner). The main axis of advance lay through the Monastir gap, which ran through the high mountains into Greece. Spring had not reached this region, and the Germans were forced to battle through snow and freezing temperatures.
The German advance had been spearheaded by the 9th Panzer Division and the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler, a reinforced motorised brigade that had won its spurs in the fighting in France. On 10 April, the Leibstandarte was ordered to take the Klidi Pass, the main route into Greece. Instead of Yugoslavs, the SS troops faced better-trained Australians and New Zealanders of the British expeditionary force. Germans casualties mounted but after two days of hard fighting the defenders were prised from their positions, and the Germans made their way into the heart of Greece.
Shortly afterwards, the reconnaissance battalion of the Leibstandarte found itself engaged in a tough battle with Greek troops holding the Klisura Pass. The battalion commander, Kurt Meyer, sent two of his companies to attack the position from the flanks, while he led a detachment up the main road to the pass. During his advance, the Greeks let off a series of demolition charges and raked the advancing SS troops with machine-gun fire. Meyer and his soldiers were pinned down by heavy fire, seemingly unable to move. Meyer recounted how he solved this problem, using ‘dynamic’ SS leadership:
A feeling of nausea tightens my throat. I yell to [Untersturmführer] Emil Wawrzinek to get the attack moving. But the good Emil just looks at me as if he has doubts about my sanity. Machine-gun fire smacks against the rocks in front of us. How can I get Wawrzinek to take that first leap? In my distress, I feel the smooth roundness of my (egg) hand grenade in my hand. I shout at the group. Everybody looks thunderstruck at me as I brandish the hand grenade, pull the pin, and roll it precisely behind the last man. Never again did I witness such a concerted leap forward as at that second. As if bitten by tarantulas, we dive around the rock spur and into a fresh crater. The spell is broken. The hand grenade has cured our lameness. We grin at each other, and head forward to the next cover.

The British offer to help Greece – 1941

28 Monday Jun 2010

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RAF personnel disembark in Athens as part of the first wave of British military aid for the Greeks. Britain encouraged the Greeks to oppose the Axis, even though there were insufficient numbers of British troops in the Middle East to make this a viable strategy.
Although the Greek Government was resolute in defending the country from Italy, it did not wish to provoke Hitler, in the full knowledge that German military involvement could destroy Greece. The British, however, wished to develop an anti-Axis alliance in the southern Balkans. Churchill – and his foreign minister Anthony Eden – had hoped to bring in Turkey, Greece and Yugoslavia on the Allied side. Turkey was determined to stay neutral, however, and Yugoslavia and Greece needed the reassurance of massive military support before committing themselves to overt opposition against Germany, a commitment that Britain was clearly unable to provide.
Greece accepted air support from Britain to attack the Italians, but initially refused offers of full military aid in case this was deemed sufficient provocation to force Germany to take military action against them. Although it was likely that Hitler would have invaded Greece anyway, to ensure the stability of his southern flank prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union, the very fact that the Greeks had allowed the presence of RAF bases in Greece was sufficient to worry the Germans towards intervention. When the Greek Government became aware of German troop movements towards the Bulgarian-Greek border, the fear of German invasion became a reality. As a consequence, Greece accepted the offer of British military assistance.
Why the British should have wanted to become embroiled in the Balkans – when resources in the Middle East were so stretched – remains a controversial point. Churchill favoured British involvement in Greece simply because it was a way of fighting back at the Germans. Churchill was man whose enthusiasms regularly exceeded sound strategic decision-making, and usually his military advisors reined-in his wilder schemes for intervention. But during the early months of 1941, General Archibald Wavell, commander- in-chief in the Middle East, and other senior military officers surprisingly went along with the idea of intervention laid down by Churchill and Eden.
Logistical problems
Apart from the fact that despatching an expeditionary force to Greece would remove troops from the vital North African theatre of operations, the British did not have sufficient resources to make an intervention succeed. The long supply line across the Mediterranean from Egypt to Greece was exceedingly vulnerable to aerial attack, and the British in the Middle East lacked the necessary aircraft – both in terms of quantity and quality – to defend this link. By contrast, the Axis forces had more than sufficient aircraft to dominate the skies over the Balkans and the surrounding coastal waters. The British army and navy would pay heavily for this deficiency in air power.
Under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, a British and Commonwealth force was despatched to Greece on 5 March 1941. Wavell had originally told the Greeks that he would send two Australian infantry divisions, a New Zealand division, a brigade of Polish infantry and an armoured brigade plus artillery and supporting units, totalling over 100,000 men. In the event, the expeditionary force was considerably reduced to 58,000 soldiers. The infantry was supplied by the 2nd New Zealand Division and the 6th Australian Division (totalling nearly 34,000 men). Also included was the 1st Armoured Brigade (around 100 tanks) and two regiments of artillery.
Before the British could assume their positions in northern Greece, however, the Italians launched their spring offensive. The slow but steady volume of reinforcements that had crossed the Adriatic from Italy enabled the Italians to assemble 28 divisions for the attack, which were organised into the Ninth and Eleventh Armies, under the overall command of General Ugo Cavallero (who had replaced Soddu at the end of December). Italian confidence was. such that Mussolini himself crossed over to Albania to oversee the impending victory.
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