The Greek Civil War

The Greek civil war was, in many respects, the first episode in the Cold War; the first of many civil wars in the lessdeveloped world between Communist movements and Westernbacked governments. It was thus the first "test case" for the U.S. struggle against Communist guerilla movements in the Third World.

The civil war actually began in the Greek countryside nearly two years before World War II itself ended, as rival resistance movements clashed. At the beginning, the supporting power on the Western side was Britain, not the United States indeed, the U.S. held itself sharply and critically aloof from British policy in the early phases of the conflict (Iatrides, 1980: 659). The Soviets, for their part, seem never to have taken an active part.

But by 1947, Greece would become the centerpiece of the Truman Doctrine, proclaimed as such in Truman's "allout speech" of March 12, 1947 (Yergin, 1977: 280ff). By the time the civil war ended, eighty thousand Greeks were dead, and about a tenth of the population had been forced to leave their homes at one time or another (Johnson, 1983:434). The general American public has largely forgotten about the U.S. intervention in Greece. (During the Vietnam years, however, New Left activists looked back bitterly at the Greek intervention experience as the direct precursor of Vietnam; see Gitlin, 1967).

The civil war in Greece differed from Vietnam at least one fundamental respect, however: the Communist sid

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in the long run (Alexander, 1982: 89). As the Americans would later, however, the British soon found themselves frustrated by the material they had to work with the Greek exile leadership. A Foreign Office clerk wrote in frustration that "the pettiness and selfseeking of these Greek politicians passes disbelief" (Alexander, 1982: 41). What the British most wanted was a constitutional monarchy, but to establish this requires a King who combines strong personal leadership qualities with a willingness not to meddle directly in politics. King George II of Greece lacked both of these qualities. Alongside the problem of finding a credible political leadership was the problem of forming an effective, Westernoriented Greek military force. The Greek army in exile was largely mutinous and unreliable, and its most capable officers were ultrarightists in the Metaxis heritage. The British formed a battalion of these troops to be sent to Greece as the Germans withdrew, but their effect would be not to stabilize the situation, but to further polarize it. Finally, at the end of 1944, the Germans withdrew from Athens. The ELAS was most in a position to capitalize on this, but its Communist leadership failed to a

Category: History - T