By Menelaos Charalambidis**
Why should we be interested in a battle that took place 80 years ago, in December 1944, in Athens? Dekemvriana (‘December events’), the clash of British troops and Greek government forces with Greek communist resistance fighters has become known, was a highly significant incident in World War II, which however remains little known outside of Greece. It was indeed the sole instance where Allied forces clashed in an armed conflict during the war, and the first military intervention by an Allied army in a liberated country. An intervention, which may chronologically fall within the context of World War II, which had not yet ended, but politically it shifts our gaze towards the Cold War, which had not yet begun. Furthermore, Dekemvriana was an instance of popular uprising with a distinct class-based character. Citizens, mainly from the poor districts of Athens and Piraeus, took up arms and fought against a well-organized and well-equipped Allied army operating with a colonial logic, and the Greek conservative forces that supported it. The insurgents may have been severely lacking in weapons and inadequately organized, but they were also driven by a deep belief that justice was on their side and that they fought for a democratic post-war Greece.
Dekemvriana is a typical example of how a deep crisis, and indeed in its worst possible form, that of war and a foreign military occupation, can in a very limited time sweep away political constellations, and provoke their rearrangement or even their complete overthrow on a national and international level.[1] The clash of December also shows us that in times of crisis, the relations of dependence between great powers and peripheral states, are revealed in their full extent. As we will see below, in their attempt to regain power, the Greek government-in-exile and the country’s King allowed, if not sought, the crude involvement of British political and military force in settling domestic Greek affairs. Dekemvriana was an dramatic concession of national independence. Finally, the Battle of Athens shows us that the post-war world had begun in earnest, well before field marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945.
A difficult liberation. Political constellations in Greece.
Greece entered World War II on October 28, 1940, when Fascist Italy invaded the country from the Greek-Albanian border. After fierce and heroic fighting, the Greek army repelled the attack and fought back, pushing the invaders back into Albania. This was the first defeat of the Axis powers during World War II. The Italian failure forced National Socialist Germany to launch an attack on Greece. On April 6, 1941, the German army invaded the country from its northern border. The Greeks found themselves fighting against the Italians and the Germans at the same time. The help offered by the Allies—60,000 Australian, New Zealander, British, Cypriot, Palestinian and Jewish soldiers arrived in Greece in March 1941—could not halt the German advance. At the end of April, the King and the Greek government decided to leave Athens to avoid capture by the German army. The Greek government-in-exile settled in London and its military services in Cairo, Egypt. The operations to occupy Greece lasted two months and were concluded on May 30, 1941, with victory in the Battle of Crete. A triple military occupation was imposed on Greece by the Germans, the Italians and the Bulgarians. The country was divided into three occupation zones.
The unprecedented plundering of the Greek economy, mostly by the German occupation authorities, the mass terrorism by Wehrmacht and the SS, and the collaboration of Greek politicians, military and businessmen with the occupiers, disrupted the cohesion of Greek society. From the early days of the Occupation, a chasm began to emerge between those who took advantage of the emergency to get rich and those who suffered because of it. The chasm widened with the outbreak of the deadly famine in the winter of 1941-1942. The worst famine of World War II in Europe, it left behind at least 45,000 dead in Athens and Piraeus, and about 250,000 in total in a country of 7.3 million inhabitants. Most of the victims belonged to the vulnerable population groups of urban centers. The largest of those were the refugees (about 20% of the population) who had arrived in the country from Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace after the defeat of the Greek army in the Greco-Turkish war (1919-1922). In 1941, they still lived in squalid conditions in slums on the outskirts of Athens and Piraeus. The famine also affected the middle class, which saw its income evaporate due to the sharp rise in inflation and the collapse of the economy. After the famine subsided in the summer of 1942, these population groups played a central role in the growth of the Greek resistance movement. They joined resistance organizations en masse, particularly the National Liberation Front (EAM), which was founded on the initiative of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE).[2] In contrast, those who collaborated with the occupiers formed a front that fought against EAM-KKE. Their aim was to prevent EAM from rising to power after the end of the war, in order to retain what they had gained from collaborating during the years of the Occupation.
The Greek resistance movement was highly significant, and powerful. The EAM was the largest resistance organization within the movement, and expressed the political radicalization of a significant portion of Greek society, which had occurred due to the extreme hardships of daily life that had become almost universal during the Occupation. Asia Minor refugees, women and youth, who until then had been living on the political margins, found themselves at the vanguard of political action through their membership in the EAM. As such, in October 1944, when Greece was liberated, the power holders, who could shape Greece’s future, were three: the EAM, the liberals and the monarchists, who had formed a temporary anti-EAM alliance, and the British.
At the time of liberation, everything pointed towards the EAM prevailing. The Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), the EAM’s guerilla army, dominated most of the country, while the political organizations of the EAM and the party organizations of the KKE were flourishing. This was in part due to the trust they had earned through heroic resistance activities, which had developed the influence of the left in politics to unprecedented levels in Greece, and in part due to the influence they were able to exercise using the brute power of their armed forces. In the new reality created by the Occupation and the resistance struggle, the EAM expressed the general demand for political change after the end of the war. It sought the abolition of the institution of monarchy and to prevent the return of the pre-war political personnel to power. These were the politicians that had proved incapable or even unwilling to prevent the imposition of a dictatorship by General Ioannis Metaxas and the king (1936-1941). The EAM sought reform over revolution as it saw that it could rise to power through bourgeois parliamentary processes without using revolutionary force. It called for an unbiased referendum on the abolition, or not, of monarchy and elections to form the new parliament.
The EAM’s political opponents were weakened. During the Occupation, two anti-EAM fronts were formed around equal pillars of power. The “internal” one, around Ioannis Rallis’ collaborationist government,[3] with the support of the German occupation authorities, and the “external” one, around the Greek government-in-exile, with the support of the British government. The anti-EAM front of Rallis’ administration had been condemned in the minds of most Greeks as it was cooperating closely with the Germans. But the “external” anti-EAM front was also weakened, as its prestige had suffered a great blow. The King and the politicians of the government-in-exile did not offer any substantial help to the resistance struggle, they were reduced to petty party conflicts aiming to secure a place in post-war power, while, furthermore, the king bore the primary responsibility for the imposition of the dictatorship in 1936. The big loser from a smooth post-war political process would have been the monarchist bloc.
The British wanted the King’s return to the throne, because he was the main guardian of their interests in Greece, and a friendly, that is, non-EAM/communist, Greek government. The British wished to secure control of the maritime routes in the southeastern Mediterranean, through which they communicated with their colonies in India, and to use Greece as a barrier to the Soviet Union’s entry into the Mediterranean. Moreover, large British companies were active in Greece, mainly in the energy, transport and construction sectors, while British banks had a significant number of Greek government bonds in their portfolios. The Greek state had declared a default on its public debt in 1932 (bankruptcy), as a result of the global financial crisis of 1929. An EAM government would hurt the profits and interests of British businesses.
In September 1941, in signing the Atlantic Charter, the Allies and self-exiled governments laid down the framework for their post-war policy. They explicitly declared that they would respect the right of all people to choose freely the form of their government. However, the progress of the war undermined this commitment. Already in 1943, it became clear that the post-war political developments would not be determined by such democratic declarations, but by the Allies’ aspirations in the context of the rearrangement of the global power balance.
The division of Europe in spheres of influence was the first episode of the coming Cold War. In their advance towards Berlin, the Red Army liberated the countries of Eastern Europe, placing them in the Soviet sphere of influence. The liberation of the Western European countries by the American and the British troops, put them under the influence of the Western Allies. Greece was the only Balkan country to enter the British sphere of influence, with the consent of the Soviet Union. Discussion between the British and the Soviets to define spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and the Balkans had already begun in the spring of 1944. They were sealed by Churchill’s visit to Moscow on October 9, 1994, which led to the famous “percentages agreement.” Greece was placed in the British sphere of influence.
British interventions in Greek political developments
In September 1944, the National Unity government was formed, which featured parties from the entire political spectrum and, for the first time, communists. The EAM was given six ministries. The centrist politician Georgios Papandreou was appointed Prime Minister. The government arrived in Athens on October 18, 1944. It would serve as an interim authority that would carry out the transition from occupied to post-war Greece.
The government faced enormous problems. The country had been devastated by the war and the looting of the occupying armies. The rebuilding of the economy, the punishment of collaborators of the occupiers, and the establishment of the new national army, were the most pressing issues. Challenges arose in the composition of the new army: how many would come from the EAM and how many from the anti-EAM side? At this point, even though the negotiations had not yet reached a clear impasse, the first critical British intervention took place. On December 1st, 1944, General Ronald Scobie[4] issued a decree ordering the disarmament of the guerilla armies of the ELAS and EDES.[5] The EAM could not accept the disarmament of ELAS, which controlled almost the entire Greece, without having received clear guarantees of equal participation in the new national army. The next day, its six ministers resigned from the government in protest. The EAM announced a rally in Syntagma Square on December 3 as well as a general strike.
The sunny morning of Saturday, December 3 did not foreshadow what would follow. When the first large bloc of protesters appeared in the square, the police opened fire killing at least 13 protesters and injured more than 60. We know that the order for the police to shoot at the unarmed crowd was given by the Police Chief, Angelos Evert. However, we do not know who gave the order to Evert. Many pointed to the monarchists, who were the only ones who would likely benefit from a disrupted political process. The EAM decided not to make an armed response.
Even after the massacre in Syntagma Square, the British government’s envoys in Athens, the Greek Prime Minister and the EAM leadership, sought a political solution. It was agreed that Papandreou should resign, and centrist politician Themistoklis Sofoulis should take over as prime minister. On December 4, Papandreou handed in his resignation, Sofoulis agreed to take over as prime minister, the EAM agreed, and so did the British envoys who had led the way to reach this solution. But Winston Churchill disagreed. The extent of British intervention is evident in the unprecedented and absurd events of that day; the Greek Prime Minister gave his resignation, which was not accepted by the British Prime Minister, and thus he remained in his post. This was the second critical British intervention. Churchill’s move closed the door on the last chance of finding a solution by political means. The situation would now be resolved militarily.
From alley to alley. Athens as a battlefield[6]
Dekemvriana turned Athens into a battle field. Military operations began on December 4, 1944 and ended on January 11, 1945. They can be divided them into two phases: until December 17, when the ELAS had the initiative, with the small number of of British forces backed into a defensive posture; and after December 17, when the arrival of reinforcements gave the initiative to the British.
The first major battle began on December 6, when the ELAS attacked the barracks of the Greek Royal Gendarmerie in the Makrygianni district at the foot of the Acropolis. Crossing through the ancient ruins of the temple of Olympian Zeus and through the alleys of Plaka (the old city), some 1,200 young men and women from the refugee municipalities ferociously attacked 550 gendarmerie men, who had barricaded themselves inside the barracks. The intervention of the British air force at the crucial moment, when the gendarme’s defenses were beginning to crumble, prevented the ELAS from seizing the barracks.
In the following days, the residents of Athens were astonished to see mortars and artillery shells destroying their homes; British tanks passing by outside their windows; bearded ELAS guerillas smashing doors and windows to take cover in houses and factories; British airplanes bombing entire districts; and snipers firing from rooftops and bell towers.. This was the biggest battle that ever took place in Athens.
The first operation of the ELAS against a British target took place on December 13 in Kolonaki, the wealthy district of Athens. Guerillas created a breach in the external wall of the camp, where the most important British unit was stationed, entered it and started fighting hand-to-hand. The British were caught completely by surprise. In the darkness of night and in the panic caused by a huge explosion in the fuel tanks, all coordination was impossible. British Corporal Rehill saw a female ELAS fighter running down the slope of Lycabettus Hill, holding a grenade: “She must have been hit, as she slid on to her back and lay briefly waxen-faced and staring before the grenade exploded still in her hand. … The blood-soaked clothes lay in a shapeless huddle.”[7] Immediately afterwards, a British lorry went up in flames and the ammunition it was carrying began to explode. Private White went down the road to size up the situation. Upon returning, he said to Rehill: “There’s a poor bloody fellow with his arm off – they’re getting the bloody hammer here!”[8] As soon as dawn broke, the ELAS withdrew, taking with them 108 British prisoners and leaving behind 48 British injured and 20 dead.
One of the reasons that ELAS did not take advantage of the plight of the British during the first phase of Dekemvriana was the country’s total dependence on external humanitarian and financial aid. The EAM could not quickly repair the damage caused by the war to transport and production units. Its leadership knew that the survival of the undernourished Greek people and the recovery of the economy would only be possible with British aid. It was in this logic that EAM-KKE decided to prioritize its political over its military objectives. It attempted to push the British into negotiations, by attacking, at first, only the Greek government forces.[9] This explains why ELAS did not carry out the anticipated general attack against the inadequate British forces in the centre of Athens, during the first phase of the battle.
In December 1944, there was a major German counterattack on the western front (the Battle of the Bulge). It was thought by many that the British could not open a new front, and all the more one against their EAM allies, in the capital of a country that had just been liberated. As such, both EAM leadership, and even British officers themselves, were taken by surprise when Churchill ordered the transfer of such a large number of soldiers from the active front in northern Italy to Greece. By January 1945, the British government had sent some 70,000 soldiers to Greece,[10] that is, a larger number than it had sent in March 1941 to bolster the Greek defense against the impending German invasion.
On December 17, the British counterattack began after the arrival of reinforcements with carrier planes. Now, in the streets of Athens and Piraeus, there were Scots, Welsh, English, Armenians, Kurds, Cypriots, South Africans, Assyrians and Indians fighting, organized in 20 infantry battalions, 2 artillery regiments, 4 tank regiments, with 140 armoured vehicles, and 8 air force squadrons with some 120 aircraft. The superiority of the British was overwhelming.
A week later, the British Prime Minister arrived in Athens in an attempt to find a political solution. Churchill sought to restore his image in the British and international public opinion. He had been severely criticized by the British press and by Labour Party MPs for the involvement of British troops in the battle of Athens. The discussions between the EAM and the government came to an impasse. This gave the green light for the major British clearance operations to take place.
On December 29 the major attack against the eastern suburbs of Athens began, where there was a significant ELAS stronghold; . The municipality of Kaisariani, a slum built to house refugees from Asia Minor, had been termed the “Greek Stalingrad” by the British. The British engaged in a fierce two-hour bombardment before the infantry invaded the area. Giorgos Gounaris, an ELAS guerilla, recalls:
“In the streets, in houses, in balconies, shells are constantly bursting. … They have driven us crazy with the bombing. … Three fellow fighters go up the roof of a house with a machine gun. With a swoop, [British] fighter planes with rockets blew all three of them up in the air, literally cutting them to pieces. Fellow fighters who rushed up there, found nothing but pieces.”[11]
The British attack led to a real massacre. In just one day 290 were dead, most of them civilians killed by the bombing.[12]
After clearing the eastern suburbs, the British gathered the entirety of their forces for the final strike against ELAS in the city centre, the western and northern suburbs. Some of the fiercest street fighting took place in Exarcheia, where ELAS from the universities were figthing. Female and male students barricaded themselves in apartment buildings, using Molotov cocktails to intercept the British tanks and tins filled with gravel and dynamite as grenades. The renowned music composers Mikis Theodorakis and Iannis Xenakis, who was severely injured in the face by a British shell, the philosopher Kostas Axelos, and film directors Nikos Koundouros and Alexis Damianos, fought against the British in the Battle of Exarcheia.
The overwhelming superiority of the British forced the leadership of the ELAS to order the withdrawal of its forces from Athens. This happened on the evening of the 4th January 1945. The British kept bombarding the guerilla columns as they withdrew, causing heavy casualties. On January 11, 1945, the armistice that put an end to the fighting was signed. The toll of the battle reflects its ferocity: 70,000 injured, 5,500 dead, and 25,000 displaced in only one month of fighting.
Politically, Dekemvriana was concluded on February 12, 1945 with the signing of the Varkiza Agreement, between the EAM and the Greek government. One of its major terms was the disarmament of the ELAS. The victors of Dekemvriana did not respect the agreement. Immediately after the ELAS surrendered its weapons the period of the ‘White Terror’ (1945-1946) began. This was the name given to the relentless persecution of the people of the Left by law enforcement agencies and far-right paramilitary groups. These persecutions forced many former ELAS guerillas to take to the mountains again. It was one of the reasons that led to the Civil War (1946-1949). The new guerillas joined the communist Democratic Army of Greece and fought against the government forces.
The international aspect of Dekemvriana
Dekemvriana was not a regional conflict concerning a small country in south-eastern Europe. It may have been the only instance of armed confrontation between allies during World War II, but its political origins display themes common to many European countries. Dekemvriana was part of a broader conflict that broke out within European countries over post-war power.
The military takeover of countries by Axis forces created a power vacuum. Governments fled abroad, national armies were disbanded, security forces and the state apparatus were put under the command of the occupiers. The “old world,” which had failed to prevent the rise of Fascism and Nazism, had lost its prestige. A “new world,” that would rise from the ashes of the war, had to undertake the task of post-war reconstruction. The end of the war marked the beginning of a process of reestablishing state power in a volatile environment that left many possibilities open. The Allies tried to control this process by political means, and where this was not possible, with the use of armed force.
The outbreak of Dekemvriana must be considered in a context in which the political aspirations of the EAM, the most powerful political and military power within the country, could not be reconciled with those of the Allies, – the international power holders – – and particularly of the British,
For the Allies, interested in stablising power, preventing revolutions and uprisings, and securing their interests, Dekemvriana represented the great risk they saw in post-war Euorpe. f. Typical is what US Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson wrote in a report to Harry Hopkins, presidential advisor to Roosevelt. Acheson was in Athens in December 1944 and saw with his own eyes the unfolding of an uprising. In his report, he pointed out that if the Allies did not actively assist the struggle of citizens to survive and with the restoration of the social and moral order, a potential bloodbath awaited the entire Europe, and would lead to the fall of governments. Acheson feared that the scenes he witnessed in Athens would possibly spread throughout Europe, causing a Pan-European civil war.[13] The British also came to the same conclusion. If Dekemvriana became a successful example of an uprising it could be transmitted domino-like to other European capitals: “If affairs in Greece worked out as we hoped they might, the effect might be to stop an enormous amount of anarchy in Europe and to discourage similar outbreaks in other countries.”[14]
Dekemvriana consolidated two factors that characterized the Greek political reality until the fall of the Junta in 1974. One concerned the external intervention in internal issues of the country. The British military intervention during Dekemvriana turned into a constant foreign (American since 1947) presence Foreign intervention in Greek political developments may have undermined national independence, but it provided valuable support to the Greek governments and the King, who returned to the country with the 1946 referendum. This support allowed them to maintain a climate of tension and a regime of harsh persecution against the people of the Left.
The second factor concerned the formation a new state, the state of nationalists. The Greek state had been anti-communist already since the 1920s, a tendency that had intensified after the six-year dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas. Anticommunism became the central state policy during the Occupation and the cornerstone on which collaboration with the occupiers was based. Post-war, the state apparatus was not purged of the collaborators. On the contrary, those who fought against the communists by cooperating with the German occupiers, were used in post-war governments to build the new state. The nationalist state institutionalized the harsh persecution of the Left (thousands of executions, long-term imprisonment and exile) and the legislative discrimination of Greeks according to their political beliefs. It was a state, which by invoking the communist danger, prevailed for a full thirty years, prevented the democratization of the country, developed the people who enforced and staffed the dictatorial Regime of the Colonels in 1967, and collapsed with the fall of that Junta in the summer of 1974.
*Everything mentioned here is discussed in detail in Menelaos Haralabidis, Δεκεμβριανά 1944. Η Μάχη της Αθήνας [December 1944. The Battle of Athens], Alexandria Publications, Athens 2014.
**Menelaos Charalambidis was born in 1970 in Athens. He studied economics at the University of Piraeus and History at the University of Athens. His PhD thesis was published in 2012 under the title The Experience of Occupation and Resistance in Athens, while his second book, entitled December 1944. The Battle of Athens, was published in 2014 – both published by Alexandria Publications . He has co-edited three collective volumes of modern Greek history, while many of his articles have been published in historical magazines and newspapers. A founding member of the Social History Forum
***Image by George Micalef
[1] For the immense political subversions caused by the period of Occupation in Greece, see Menelaos Haralabidis, Η εμπειρία της Κατοχής και της Αντίστασης στην Αθήνα [The experience of the Occupation and the Resistance in Athens], Alexandria Publications, Athens 2012.
[2] Three smaller parties, the Socialist Party of Greece, the Union of People’s Democracy and the Agrarian Party, also participated in EAM.
[3] During the Occupation, three Greek administrations were formed, a creation of the German authorities.
[4] In anticipation of the impending liberation, the Greek government placed the Greek and British armed forces that would be operating in Greece under the command of British General Ronald Scobie.
[5] The National Republican Greek League (EDES) was a resistance organization. Although much smaller in terms of guerilla numbers and political appeal, it was the rival of ELAS with the support of the British government.
[6] For reasons of economy, only a few of the dozens of the major and minor battles of Dekemvriana are mentioned here.
[7] Henry Maule, Scobie: Hero of Greece. The British Campaign 1944-5, Arthur Barker Limited, London 1975, p. 150.
[8] Ibid.
[9] The Greek forces that operated jointly with the British forces were: the Greek Mountain Brigade, a unit of the Greek army that had been formed in the Middle East; the City Police and the Gendarmerie, which had collaborated closely with the German authorities during the Occupation; and the National Guard Defense Battalions, formed during Dekemvriana by men from non-EAM resistance organizations, but also organizations that had collaborated with the occupiers.
[10] British National Archives, CAB 79/30, Chiefs of Staff Committee, March 8, 1945.
[11] Giorgos Gounaris, unpublished diary.
[12] Haralabidis, Δεκεμβριανά 1944, p. 235.
[13] Keith Lowe, Savage Continent. Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, Penguin, London 2012, p. 71.
[14] British National Archives, War Cabinet 65/48/22, December 29, 1944.
