This is part number 6 of the documentary describing the events and the fights between EAM-ELAS (Resistance) and the British forces who arrived in Greece after the liberation. Anticommunist point of view, of course in the middle of the Cold War.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QJjYcaK2Kg&feature=player_embedded

This is part number 6 of the documentary describing the events and the fights between EAM-ELAS (Resistance) and the British forces who arrived in Greece after the liberation. Anticommunist point of view, of course in the middle of the Cold War.

Many thanks for this!

I posted an article last year about this that I really liked, but now I can't find it with search. Maybe some of the electron jockeys around here will have better luck. Here's another one I don't like quite as much, but it's ok. I'm posting this for general readership and not so much for you Nikos, since I'm sure you're amply familiar with the history.

http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html

British Intervention and The Greek Revolution
John Newsinger

The Dekemvriana

The Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou arrived at Piraeus with the British on 17 October and the following day established his government in Athens. He was accompanied by his minder Rex Leeper, the British Ambassador, who according to one of his advisers had the powers of “a colonial governor” and behaved as if Greece was “a form of British protectorate” rather than an independent country. [40] (http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n40) The enormity of the task they faced confronted them even as they approached Greek soil. One British army officer, W. Byford-Jones, has described how as his vessel came into Piraeus it became clear that the electric signs they could see “defined the initials ‘EAM’ ... ‘ELAS’ ... ‘KKE’ ... all of which we were to see a million times in the next few weeks, on flags and banners, on posters, in the newspapers and, finally, attached to defiant revolutionary messages written in red on walls, pavements and roads”. [41] (http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n41) Leeper himself described his journey from Piraeus to Athens:


Our drive into Athens that morning was by an unfamiliar route through the outer suburbs of Piraeus, some of the poorest quarters, and so on to the junction with the road from Eleusis. We entered Athens in consequence by the Sacred Way ... All along the route nearly every house was covered with slogans painted in red by EAM. Many of them were in English, of which the following was most common: “Well Come Brave Allies”. One would have thought from these outward and visible signs that the whole population consisted of EAM sympathisers ... The poor suburbs through which we passed that morning were one of EAM’s strongholds, and no other slogans save those of EAM would have been permitted. [42] (http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n42) They had arrived in a country where EAM was effectively in control everywhere outside of Athens itself and a few other places occupied by British troops. Greece in the winter of 1944 was, according to Pierson Dixon to all intents and purposes, “a Communist country”. [43] (http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n43)

From the very start, the British intention was to secure the disarming and disbanding of ELAS as soon as possible. This was the overriding priority. It was also intended to ensure that the EAM ministers in Papandreou’s Government remained impotent and without influence, there on sufferance and to be dismissed once ELAS had been removed from the board. EAM and the KKE on the other hand were prepared to disband their guerilla army but only if they were assured of a genuine partnership in government and that the new armed forces that were to be formed incorporated a large enough ELAS contingent to ensure that they could not be used to re-impose the monarchy or suppress the left.

Throughout October and November every effort was made to mobilise popular opinion behind these demands so as to maintain pressure on Papandreou. The arrival of the royalist Mountain Brigade on 9 November greatly increased tension in the city. EAM insisted that if ELAS was to disband then so should the Mountain Brigade and a new army should be raised. This was not acceptable to the British who regarded the Brigade as the core around which a reliable army uncontaminated by the left could be formed. It was this dispute that was to eventually precipitate armed conflict.

The demobilisation crisis came to a head on 2 December when the EAM ministers resigned from the Government and determined to take the issue onto the streets. They called a demonstration on the 3rd and a general strike the following day. Papandreou banned the demonstration but it went ahead anyway with thousands of people converging on Constitution Square. Byford-Jones was an eye-witness to what happened:

The procession approached: men, women and children marching eight to ten abreast, every third or fourth person carrying an Allied flag, a Greek flag, or a banner ... It was a typical KKE-EAM demonstration. The ages of those who were taking part ranged from ten and twelve years of age to sixty and more. A few of the children were without shoes, most of the people without overcoats, but there were many who were well dressed ... there was a preponderate number of girls between eighteen and thirty years of age. There was nothing sullen or menacing about the procession. Some of the men shouted fanatically towards the police station and the hotel, but there was a good deal of humorous banter and many jokes ...

Then the police opened fire. According to Byford-Jones it was all “so fantastically unreal I might have been watching a film” and to begin with he assumed they were firing blanks.
But the worst had happened. Men, women and children, who a few moments before had been shouting, marching, laughing, full of spirit and defiance, waving their flags and our flags fell to the ground, blood trickling out of their heads and bodies ... I shall never forget that scene. A young girl in a white blouse which was becoming red with blood near her breasts; a young man, with a mark that might have been made by a fish-hook, writhing for a moment, and then dying; a child screaming and clutching her head ... For over half an hour the shooting continued, all of it from the police.

Twenty-eight people were killed in this massacre. Byford-Jones completely rejected the suggestion that any of the demonstrators were armed: feelings were such that if they had been the police would have been overwhelmed and killed. Eventually British troops arrived to occupy the Square and the demonstrators dispersed. [44] (http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n44)


<snip>

Churchill in Athens

The fighting in Greece proved a grave embarrassment to Churchill: the British press was overwhelmingly hostile, Government policy was attacked by the left in the House of Commons and the United States was decidedly unsympathetic. Only the Russians made no criticism of Churchill’s war on the EAM. [62] (http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n62) In answer to his critics, Churchill decided to visit Athens himself, arriving on the afternoon of 25 December. He was very keen to see some actual fighting but also wanted to reassure himself with regard to Macmillan’s Regency proposal. A conference was set up to which all the Greek factions, including EAM, were invited, although as the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden made clear, this was with the object “of splitting the good from the bad in ELAS”. [63] (http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n63) Despite earlier reservations, Churchill became positively enthusiastic about Archbishop Damaskinos once he was convinced of his hostility to EAM. On the morning of the 26th he watched the Piraeus battle from the bridge of the cruiser, HMS Ajax, enjoying the spectacle of Beaufighter aircraft strafing ELAS positions and the excitement of ELAS shells falling near the ship. Later that evening the conference took place in Athens with three EAM representatives present, Georgios Siantos, Dimitros Partsalides and the ELAS commander in Athens, General Emmanuel Mandakis. Predictably no agreement was reached, but Churchill could now tell his critics that he had tried. Over dinner afterwards, Alexander explained why the conquest of Athens was taking so long: it would be much quicker if they simply “Rotterdamed” whole areas of the city, bombed them flat, but this was not possible, not least because the loss of civilian life would cause unrest among the troops. Instead, the city was having to be taken street by street which was a slow, painstaking affair. [64] (http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n64) The next day Alexander took Churchill to an observation post so he could get an idea of the Athens fighting. As Macmillan noted “this affair is a sort of “super Sidney Street”. [65] (http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n65) On his return to London, Churchill quickly bullied the Greek King into appointing Archbishop Damaskinos as his Regent.


The British were also taking other steps to silence the critics of their Greek policy. A remarkably successful propaganda campaign was launched, portraying ELAS as murderers, gangsters and terrorists, and accusing them of large-scale atrocities. They had it was alleged taken civilian hostages, tortured people, carried out mass executions (10,000 according to Damaskinos) and mutilated the corpses. There was undoubtedly some truth in some of these accusations, but they were deliberately exaggerated and completely one-sided. There had been hostage taking and executions but this reflected the character of the conflict. The British had intervened in what was a civil war between the left and the right and in this civil war both sides took large numbers of civilian prisoners and carried out summary executions. In the course of the fighting, the British arrested some 15,000 people suspected of Communist sympathies, of whom 8,000 were deported to camps in the Middle East. There was, of course, nothing wrong with this hostage taking, but when ELAS, in response, began arresting their political opponents, this was successfully portrayed as a war crime. The British complained of ELAS’s guerrilla tactics and yet had no hesitation in calling down artillery fire and air strikes on urban areas in rebel hands. Moreover there were occasions when British troops summarily executed prisoners: one paratroop officer subsequently recalled how he had maintained order in Thebes, ordering the public hanging of one “very bossy bastard”. [66] (http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n66)

(http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n66)
ELAS undoubtedly carried out summary executions, but these were mostly of former collaborators. This was a feature of every European resistance movement during the Second World War: collaborators received popular justice. What was distinctive about Greece was not the shooting of collaborators, but the British decision to protect them and enlist them in the fight against the resistance. To police the areas that were being cleared of ELAS, the British established a 15,000 strong Greek National Guard, which consisted overwhelmingly of former members of the Security Battalions (eight of the fourteen National Guard battalion commanders had been officers in the Security Battalions). The British handed the Greek people over to men who had fought for the Germans, indeed Churchill himself made absolutely clear that they were the real patriots as far as he was concerned. [67] (http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n67) There were excesses, however, including the elimination of opponents on the left, among them the Greek Trotskyists who were routinely killed, a vendetta that the Communists pursued regardless of any other considerations. [68] (http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n68) Nevertheless these shootings were not on the scale alleged by the British, who were certainly not concerned about dead Trotskyists anyway. Indeed, much of the evidence of mass executions was manufactured, with the bodies of people who had died of natural causes or been killed in the fighting, being mutilated after death and produced as evidence. Despite this, the result was a propaganda triumph for the British, a triumph that was finally crowned by the obliging report of a British TUC delegation, headed by Lord Citrine, a report that predictably endorsed the official British position. [69] (http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n69)


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A Flickr photostream I found that seems to have a large archive of pictures from this period. I can never figure out how to embed from this one website, so I just have this link to offer and one picture I screencapped to give a sample:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23526937@N08/

http://i955.photobucket.com/albums/ae35/mpkartist/kke.png



(http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n69)






(http://www.marxists.de/balkans/newsinger/greekrev.html#n69)

Very nice photos in the flick photostream. Its the first time i see some of them. If you have any question about whats in some of the photos i gladly will give some info. Some of them are from the civil war, others from the Resistance and others from Dekemvriana (the events of December of '44).

British forces were luck that they faced not the regular army of ELAS but only our youth organization and some unorganized small groups of communists. Our main forces were outside Athens and in Nothern Greece. And it was a mistake of out leadership that believed the promises of the govenrment. Thats a mistake that will never repeat. Never!

A page about the Greek Civl War from the marxists.org

http://www.marxists.org/subject/greek-civil-war/index.htm