The Metaxas regime and World War II

Public disillusionment with the endless political corruption, which had been growing swiftly in the preceding years, was exacerbated when the news broke that the main political blocs were secretly negotiating with the communists. When the nonpolitical figure who headed a caretaker government charged with overseeing the elections died, he was replaced as prime minister by Gen. Ioannis Metaxas, a right-wing and lesser-known figure. Metaxas exploited labour unrest and a threatened general strike to persuade the king in August 1936 to suspend key articles of the constitution. Although the suspension was intended to be temporary, parliament did not reconvene for another decade.

Backed by the army and tolerated by the king, the Metaxas dictatorship lasted more than four years. The dictator—whose paternalistic style was signaled by the adoption of such titles as “National Father,” “First Peasant,” and “First Worker”—shared a dislike for parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and communism that was characteristic of German Nazism and Italian Fascism, but the “Regime of the Fourth of August 1936” simply lacked their dynamism. The government led by Metaxas did not seek alliances with the European dictatorships. On the contrary, with the support of the king, Metaxas strove to maintain the country’s traditional alignment toward Britain. The dictator, however, endeavoured to recast the Greek character in a more disciplined mode, invoking the values of ancient Greece and, in particular, of the Spartans. He also sought to fuse them with the values of the medieval Christian empire of Byzantium, thus fashioning what he pompously described as the “Third Hellenic Civilization.”

At the outbreak of World War II, Metaxas tried to maintain neutrality, but Greece was increasingly subject to pressure from Italy, whose dictator Benito Mussolini sought an easy military triumph to match those of his ally Adolf Hitler. A series of provocations culminated in the delivery of a humiliating ultimatum on October 28, 1940. Metaxas, reflecting the mood of the entire country, rejected this with a simple answer: “No!” The Italians immediately invaded Greece from Albania, which they had occupied 18 months previously. Any hopes of a lightning military triumph were quickly lost. Within weeks not only had the Italians been driven from Greek territory, but Greek forces had pushed on to occupy much of what the Greeks term “Northern Epirus,” the area of southern Albania with a substantial Greek minority.

Though he accepted token British military aid, Metaxas, until his death in January 1941, was anxious to avoid provoking German intervention in the conflict. However, his successor agreed to accept a British expeditionary force as it became apparent that Hitler’s aggressive designs extended to the Balkans. The combined Greek and British forces, however, were able to offer only limited resistance when the Germans crossed the borders in April 1941. British and Commonwealth troops were forced to retreat from superior German forces but managed to get to Crete, where they held out for 10 days against German parachute and glider troops. By the beginning of June the country was overrun and subjected to a harsh tripartite German, Italian, and Bulgarian occupation. King George II and his government-in-exile fled to the Middle East. The requisitioning of food stocks resulted in a terrible famine during the winter of 1941–42, in which as many as 100,000 people died. In 1943 virtually the entire Jewish population was deported to German death camps—most to Auschwitz. A devastatingly high rate of inflation added to the miseries and humiliations of everyday life.

Almost from the outset of the occupation, acts of resistance were recorded. These took a more systematic form after the Communist Party in September 1941 founded the National Liberation Front (Ethnikón Apeleftherotikón Métopon; EAM), whose military arm was known as the Ellinikós Laikos Apeleftherotikós Strátos (ELAS). Although the communists had been a marginal force during the interwar period, EAM-ELAS became the largest resistance organization. Other groups came into being, the most important of which, the Greek Democratic Army (Ellinikós Dímokratikos Ethnikós Strátos; EDES), opposed—as did EAM-ELAS—the return of the king upon liberation. With the support of a British military mission, the guerrillas engaged in some spectacular acts of resistance, most notably the destruction in November 1942 of the Gorgopotamos viaduct, which carried the railway line from Thessaloníki to Athens, and in April 1944 the kidnapping and removal to Egypt of the German commander on Crete.

During this time of grave national crisis, just as during the war of independence and World War I, conflicts within groups divided the resistance organizations. Besides fighting the Axis occupation, they jockeyed for postwar power. During the winter of 1943–44, civil war broke out in the mountains of Greece between EAM-ELAS and the much smaller British-backed EDES, which had become increasingly alarmed at the prospect of a postliberation seizure of power by the communists.

Not for the first time in Greek history, the country’s fate was to be determined by the great powers. The British prime minister, Winston Churchill, eager to restore King George II to his throne, engaged in the summer and autumn of 1944 in some high-level negotiations with the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, trading Russian predominance in postwar Romania for British predominance in Greece. It would seem that Stalin gave no encouragement to the Greek communists to make a bid for power in the autumn of 1944 as the Germans began their withdrawal, but by this time they were by far the most powerful force in occupied Greece.

The confrontation was only postponed, however, for bloody fighting broke out in Athens in December 1944 between EAM-ELAS and the small British force that had accompanied the Greek government on its return from exile in October. It was a sign of Churchill’s obsession with the crisis in Greece that he flew to Athens on Christmas Eve 1944 in an unsuccessful attempt to resolve the conflict. The British prime minister, however, was able to persuade King George II not to return to Greece pending a plebiscite on the monarchy and to accept the regency of Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens. A temporary respite in the struggle between left and right was achieved at the Varkiza conference in February 1945, which aimed at a political settlement of the crisis.