Greece 1944-45 and civil war

Lieutenant-General Sir Ronald Scobie

Communist Party of Greece (KKE)
Greek National Liberation Army (Ethnikos Laikos Apeleftherotikos Stratos or ELAS)
National Liberation Front (in Greek Ethniko Apeleftherotiko Metopo, or EAM)

By late 1944 it was obvious that the Germans would soon withdraw from Greece. The government in exile, now led by George Papandreou, moved to Caserta in Italy in preparation for the liberation of Greece. Under the Caserta Agreement of September 1944, all the resistance forces in Greece were placed under the command of a British officer, General Ronald Scobie .

British troops landed in Greece in October. There was little fighting since the Germans were in full retreat. They were greatly outnumbered by ELAS, which by this time had 50,000 men under arms and was re-equipping itself from supplies left behind by the Germans. On October 13 the British entered Athens, and Papandreou and his ministers followed a few days later. The King stayed in Cairo, because Papandreou had promised that the future of the monarchy would be decided by referendum.

At this point there was little to prevent ELAS from taking full control of the country. Stalin had agreed with Winston Churchill that Greece would be in the British sphere of influence after the war. The KKE leadership knew this, but the ELAS fighters and rank-and-file Communists did not.


On December 1, Scobie issued a proclamation requiring the dissolution of ELAS. Command of ELAS was the KKE's greatest source of strength, and the KKE leader Siantos decided that the demand for ELAS's dissolution must be resisted.

On December 3, following an outbreak of shooting at an EAM demonstration in Syntagma square in central Athens, full-scale fighting between ELAS and troops of the Greek government and the British began, with artillery and aircraft being freely used. Churchill ordered General Scobie to treat Athens “as a captured city where a local rebellion is in progress". By December 12 ELAS was in control of most of Athens and Piraeus. The British, outnumbered, flew in the 4th Division from Italy as reinforcements. During the battle, ex-Nazi collaborators fought side by side with the government forces and the British troops, triggering a massacre by ELAS fighters.

Fighting continued through December, with the British slowly getting the upper hand.

The outbreak of fighting between British troops and an anti-German resistance movement, while the war was still being fought, was a serious political problem for Churchill's coalition government. To prove his peace-making intention, Churchill himself arrived in Athens on December 24 and presided over a conference, in which Soviet representatives participated, to bring about a settlement. It failed because the EAM/ELAS demands were considered excessive and rejected.

By early January ELAS had been driven from Athens. On January 15 1945 Scobie agreed to a ceasefire, in exchange for ELAS's withdrawal from its positions at Patras and Thessaloniki and its demobilisation in the Peloponnese.

http://www.all-science-fair-projects.com/science_fair_projects_encyclopedia/Hellenic_Civil_War

http://www.harrys-athens-greece-guide.com/athens-civil-war.asp