her (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 (Gitlin, 1967).
In fact, there were many similarities. The Greek Communist insurgent force grew directly out of the wartime resistance against the Nazi German occupation in Greece, just as the Vietcong and North Vietnamese state grew out of the wartime Vietminh resistance against Imperial Japanese occupation in Vietnam. Both acted ruthlessly to dominate or suppress non Communist elements in the resistance. Both faced, on the other side, Western supported forces who had played little part in national liberation from the Axis powers, and Western supported politicians who were far from democratic and notably corrupt.
There was and is one fundamental difference between the two involvements, however: while Vietnam ended as a disaster for the United States, at least in psychological if not in geopolitical terms, the action in Greece was fundamentally a success. Greece was saved from Communism and for the West, if not altogether for democracy. Why did the Communists, who won in Vietnam against half a million Americans, lose in Greece, where no US troops were actually committed to combat?
To understand the situation of Greece in the latter part of World War II, as the Western allies' advance began to threaten the German occupation in 1943 44, it is necessary to briefly outline the course of Greek politics during the two decades between the world wars. From the end of World War I which, for Greece, effectively lasted into the early 1920s, in the form of war with Turkey until 1936, Greek politics was divided between two chief factions, a monarchist group which had been more or less pro German during the war, and an expansionist, nationalist, pro All...