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ATHENS
DECEMBER 1944
No. 155
£4.25
NUMBER 155
© Copyright
After the Battle
2012
Editor: Karel Margry
Editor-in-Chief: Winston G. Ramsey
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5th PROOF
A rare photo of a group of EDES and ELAS guerrillas posing in harmony.
The causes of the civil war that ravaged
Greece between 1943 and 1949 trace back to
the country’s political, social and economic
developments in the 19th and early 20th cen-
tury. The events in Athens in December
1944, which are commonly labelled the ‘Sec-
ond Round’ of that war, and which saw
British troops pitted against an attempted
Communist take-over of the country, had
their immediate origin in developments dur-
ing the preceding three years of Axis occupa-
tion of Greece.
PRELUDE: THE FIRST ROUND OF THE
GREEK CIVIL WAR (1943-44)
In October 1940, Fascist Italy invaded
Greece from Albania. To the general sur-
prise, the Greek Royal Army held its own
and threw the invaders back. However, the
Greeks’ right flank was turned in late April
1941 by German troops who poured down
from Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and defeated
both the Greeks and the Anglo-ANZAC
forces sent to support them. Remnants of the
defeated armies withdrew to Crete where in
May they were narrowly but decisively
beaten by a German airborne invasion (see
After the Battle
No. 47). King George II,
Prime Minister Emmanouil Tsouderos and
several other important Greek politicians
went into exile to Egypt, allowing the Ger-
mans to set up a collaborationist puppet gov-
ernment in Athens under General Georgios
Tsolakoglou.
Opposition against the Axis occupation
started spontaneously and grew quickly.
Bands of Greek
andartes
(guerrillas) soon
sprang up and began fighting a partisan war
against the foreign oppressors. By 1942
Greek resistance had developed into several
rival organisations. The most important of
these were:
EAM (Ethnikon Apeleftherotikon Meto-
pon — National Liberation Front).
Set up by
the Greek Communist Party, the KKE
(Kommounistikon Komma Ellados), on Sep-
tember 27, 1941, EAM was nominally a
coalition of the KKE and five other left-wing
parties, calling upon all Greeks to rally in
opposition against the occupiers. Adopting a
programme of national independence, demo-
cratic liberties and opposition to the Axis, it
purported to be a nationwide group strug-
gling for a free Greece. However, in reality it
was just a front for the secretive and gener-
ally unpopular KKE and firmly controlled by
the Communists.
ELAS (Ethnikos Laikos Apeleftherotikos
Stratos — National Popular Liberation
Army).
Set up by the EAM on April 10,
1942, as its military wing it was, like the
EAM, completely Communist-controlled.
Although ostensibly focused on fighting the
Axis, its real and final aim was to seize power
over the country and set up a Communist
regime under the umbrella of the Soviet
Union. From its very beginning, ELAS
sought to absorb or eliminate the other resis-
tance groups. Taking over many weaker
guerrilla bands by persuasion or outright
threat of annihilation, its fighting strength
grew rapidly from a few hundred in 1942 to
5,000 in the spring of 1943 to 50,000 by Octo-
ber 1944. However, many of the ELAS’s
rank and file had been recruited against their
will or joined the organisation without realis-
ing they were fighting for a Communist
cause. Originally led by a man known as Aris
Veloukhiotis (real name Athanasios Klaras;
nom de guerre ‘Aris’), an avowed Commu-
nist, by October 1944 command of ELAS
had diverted to Colonel Stefanos Saraphis
(‘Saraphis’), a regular army officer, with Aris
as his so-called ‘Kapetanios’. (All ELAS
units down to company level had three lead-
ers: a military commander (usually a former
regular officer or NCO); a kapetanios (com-
monly the leader who had originally formed
the guerrilla band), and a political commissar
(always an avowed Communist). The
kapetanios and political commissar were
often combined in one person. The kapetan-
ios, appointed by EAM, was effectively the
unit leader since any decision taken by the
military leader had to be approved by him.)
EDES (Ethnikos Dimokratikos Ellinikos
Syndesmos — National Democratic Greek
League).
Formed in Athens on September 9,
1941, EDES was thoroughly republican, liberal
and anti-monarchist in doctrine although it did
attract a few monarchist and other right-wing
followers. Many of its members were former
regular soldiers of the pre-war Greek Army.
Led by Colonel Napoleon Zervas, its guerrilla
bands had their heartland in the mountains of
Epirus in north-west Greece. Soon surfacing as
the main rival of the left-wing ELAS, both the
Greek Government-in-exile and Britain were
well-disposed towards EDES, hoping it would
provide some counterweight to ELAS. From a
first nucleus of about 100, and with British sup-
port, it grew to a fighting strength of some
4,000 armed fighters in March 1943 to some
12,000 by October 1944.
CONTENTS
ATHENS, DECEMBER 1944
FROM THE EDITOR
IT HAPPENED HERE
The Murder of
Countess Teresa Lubienska
2
42
52
Front Cover:
Fighting in Athens in December
1944. A Sherman tank from the 46th Royal
Tank Regiment and paratroopers from the 6th
Parachute Battalion pictured at the inter-
section of Athinas and Sofokleous Streets in
the centre of Athens during a foray to clean
out ELAS rebels on December 18. (IWM)
Back Cover:
The Monument of National
Reconciliation in Klafthomonos Square
(Square of Grief) in central Athens. Sculpted
by Vassilis Doropoulos, it was erected in
1989 to commemorate the 40 years from the
end of the civil war. As such, it covers the
wartime First and Second Rounds and also
the post-war Third Round of the conflict.
Acknowledgements:
The Editor would like to
extend his special appreciation to Kostas
Alexopoulos who over the course of several
years supplied us with invaluable material on
the December 1944 fighting in Athens and
located and matched up the wartime pictures
of that battle. He thanks Gail Parker for the
additional comparison photography. For
further help with the story he is thankful to
Jiannis Gkenidis, Ilonka Weijenberg and
Hans Houterman.
Photo Credits:
BPK — Bildarchiv Preussischer
Kulturbesitz (Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur
und Geschichte), Berlin; CWGC — Common-
wealth War Graves Commission; IWM —
Imperial War Museum, London; USNA — US
National Archives.
2
5th PROOF
In December 1944, the British liberation
forces in Greece found themselves invol-
untarily and unhappily involved in the vio-
lence and hatred of the Greek Civil War.
Having landed in Greece the previous
October, believing their mission would be
limited to supporting the legal Greek Gov-
ernment in setting up its administration
and to helping in relief work, they became
the target of the Communist-controlled
guerrilla forces of EAM/ELAS, which
endeavoured to take over the country by
force of arms. The fighting was mostly
limited to Attica — Athens and the port of
Piraeus — the British units stationed in
other parts of the country managing to
maintain an uneasy peace with ELAS. The
small British garrison in Athens initially
had a very difficult time, being cut off and
surrounded in a tight perimeter in the cen-
tre of the city, besieged by superior and
well-armed rebel forces. It took five weeks
of brutal and bitter street-fighting against
an elusive opponent, and the arrival of
considerable reinforcements from over-
seas, before the British were able to break
the siege and drive the ELAS insurgents
out of the city, a final truce coming into
effect on January 15, 1945. One of the
epitomising pictures to come out of the
December fighting in Athens was this shot
taken by Lieutenant Morris of the Army
Film and Photo Unit (AFPU) of three para-
troopers, most likely from the 5th Para-
chute Battalion, lying in position behind
cover on a corner in the centre of Athens
on December 6. Note the KKE (Greek
Communist Party) slogan on the wall
above their heads.
ATHENS, DECEMBER 1944
Both ELAS and EDES were armed and
trained by the Allies. In early October 1942,
the Special Operations Executive (SOE)
sent in its first sabotage team to Greece,
which on the night of November 25/26 in a
joint operation with ELAS and EDES guer-
rillas successfully blew up the important
Gorgopotamos railway viaduct — a vital link
in the German supply line to North Africa.
The success of this operation prompted
Britain to form a British Military Mission
with the Greek guerrillas and to start sending
in British Liaison Officers and dropping
weapons and supplies to both ELAS and
EDES, in order that they could fight the
Germans. However, soon and increasingly so
in 1943, the two guerrilla organisations
turned to fighting each other.
In the autumn of 1943, in the mistaken
belief that the collapse of Fascist Italy and
the Allied landings in Sicily and southern
Italy foreshadowed the early liberation of
Greece, the Communists decided to attempt
to seize power by force before it was too late.
On October 12, 1943, the 8th (Epirus) Divi-
sion and other ELAS elements struck against
EDES units in the mountains of Thessaly,
beginning what came to be called the ‘First
Round’ of the Greek Civil War. With a four-
to-one superiority in manpower and the
additional advantage of having captured
large amounts of Italian arms, ammunition
and equipment after the capitulation of Italy
just the previous month (see
After the Battle
No. 152), ELAS achieved a good deal of suc-
cess against EDES, pushing its forces back
into Epirus.
The British Military Mission (by now
renamed Allied Military Mission), fearing a
total victory of ELAS, increased its support
to EDES. The influx of arms and money
enabled Zervas to mount a counter-offensive
and by February 1944 he had regained much
of his territory. At the insistence of the
Allied Military Mission, representatives of
ELAS and EDES met at the Plaka Bridge
over the Arakhtos river in Epirus to discuss a
truce. The resulting Plaka Bridge Agree-
ment, signed on February 29, provided for
the establishment of well-defined zones of
operation for each group in the fight against
the Germans, a vow by each group to refrain
By Karel Margry
from infringing on the other’s assigned terri-
tory, and a further promise that all future
efforts would be directed against the Ger-
mans rather than against each other.
Although it looked good on paper, the Plaka
peace would prove to have only a very lim-
ited tenability.
It was taken on the corner of Panepistimiou (now known as Eleftheriou Venizelon)
and Kriezotou Street, one block north of Syndagma (Constitution) Square. The old
building has been replaced by a modern office block of the ATEbank (Agricultural
Bank of Greece). Comparison photography in Athens today is not made easy due to
the constant streams of traffic and parked cars.
3
GAIL PARKER
IWM NA20515
5th PROOF
provided for the reorganisation of the armed
forces outside and inside Greece, the end of
the reign of terror in the mountains, the
relief of hunger and other needs, the restora-
tion of order and liberty in collaboration
with Allied Forces, the punishment of collab-
orators, and the post-war satisfaction of
Greece’s economic and territorial needs.
Again, it looked good on paper and raised
high expectations; but its implementation
would not be as simple and undisputed, as
later events were to prove.
On September 2, as a belated result of the
conference, six prominent members of EAM
joined Papandreou’s Cabinet (five as Minis-
ters and one as Under-Secretary), allowing
the latter to transform it into a Government
of National Unity. This was a major break-
through because, with EAM Communists
forming part of the legal government, there
seemed less risk of them planning to over-
throw it by use of force.
A serious problem remained on the consti-
tutional side. Except for a strong and influen-
tial minority of monarchists, few in Greece
wanted King George II to return from exile
after the liberation. Even before the war,
large segments of the Greek political spec-
trum — Republicans, Populists, Commu-
nists, etc — had doctrinally been opposed to
the monarchy. His reinstatement to the
throne by a disputed plebiscite in 1935; his
association with the pre-war dictatorship of
General Ioannis Metaxas (1936-41), and his
flight from the country in 1941, had all seri-
ously damaged the King’s popularity with
the Greek public, giving ample fuel to anti-
royalist feelings. However, George II had
family ties with the British Royal Family, and
the British Government, particularly Prime
Minister Winston Churchill and the Foreign
Office, remained a firm supporter of the
exiled King.
Nonetheless, the Greek Government-in-
exile had from 1942 begun to put pressure
on the King not to return to the country
until after a plebiscite had been held show-
ing that the majority of the people wanted
him. Even though George II had on several
occasions doggedly refused to agree to this
request, on June 12 Papandreou publicly
announced that the King would only return
after a positive outcome of a referendum. It
had long since been suggested that in the
interim a Regency be set up, but there was
still discussion about this. Archbishop
Damaskinos of Athens was proposed as the
Regent, but neither the King nor Papan-
dreou was in favour of him.
In the early autumn of 1944, as an Axis
withdrawal from Greece became more likely,
the British sponsored a meeting of the princi-
pal Greek factions at Allied GHQ at Caserta
in Italy to co-ordinate military activities and
establish the ground rules for political activ-
ity in Greece when the liberation took place.
Taking part were Saraphis for ELAS and
Zervas for EDES (both now promoted to
generals), as well as Papandreou and four of
his cabinet ministers. In the resulting Caserta
Agreement, signed on September 26 after
much argument and with deep reservations
on all sides, both EDES and ELAS, as well
as the Greek Government-in-exile, agreed to
place their forces under the command of
Lieutenant-General Ronald Scobie, the
British officer designated to represent the
Allied High Command in Greece, for the
purpose of driving the Axis forces out of
Greece. ELAS and EDES also agreed to
allow the landing of British forces in Greece,
to refrain from any attempt to seize power
on their own, and to support the return of the
Greek Government of National Unity. They
also accepted that the city of Athens was out
of bounds for guerrillas and promised not to
send any of them into the capital, leaving
Greek command there in the hands of a sep-
arate military governor to be appointed by
the Greek Government.
SALONIKA
PATRAS
ATHENS
PIRAEUS
When planning the liberation of mainland Greece, the British intended first to occupy
Athens and the port of Piraeus, then establish themselves in a few vital port towns —
notably Patras in the Peloponnese and Salonika in Macedonia — and from there
distribute themselves over the rest of the country to help in relief and reconstruction.
As the war went on, the resistance move-
ment lost much of its popularity with the
Greek population. The brutal reprisal
actions against innocent civilians taken by
the Germans after partisan attacks; the
internecine battles between the guerrilla
movements, and the terror, confiscation and
blackmail imposed by the andartes on the
ordinary people in the mountains seriously
discredited the Resistance, especially ELAS,
with the Greek populace.
In late 1943 the German occupying forces
set up the Greek Security Battalions (Tag-
mata Asfalias), an armed militia force whose
main task was to hunt down and eliminate
guerrillas. Due to the reign of terror insti-
tuted by ELAS in the mountains, and the
food and pay provided for the new force, the
Security Battalions gained a certain popular-
ity in early 1944, leading to an influx of new
recruits, and they grew to a strength of some
15,000. Soon, ELAS was spending more time
fighting the Security Battalions than the Ger-
mans — which added a new dimension to the
civil war. ELAS regarded all members of the
Security Battalions as traitors and collabora-
tors, and they would become a prime target
of their hatred and vengeance after libera-
tion.
In April 1944, the position of the Greek
Government-in-exile in Cairo suffered badly
when a wholesale mutiny broke out among
the Greek troops in Egypt. It began among
soldiers of the two Greek Army brigades
encamped near Alexandria on the 8th and
then spread to sailors on Greek Navy ships in
4
the ports of Alexandria and Port Saïd. The
mutineers declared in favour of a republic
and demanded the resignation of the existing
government of Prime Minister Emmanouil
Tsouderos. The rebellion came at a very
unfortunate moment as the Greek units were
eagerly awaited to reinforce the Allied front
in Italy. The British authorities took a very
strong line and British troops suppressed the
troubles in the army brigades, while loyal
Greek navy forces did the same on the ships,
the final mutineers not surrendering until
April 28. Ring-leaders were arrested and, in
a subsequent screening of all personnel,
every soldier suspected of anti-monarchist or
EAM sympathies was rooted out and the
remaining men were reformed into the 3rd
Greek Mountain Brigade.
On April 13, as a direct consequence of the
mutinies, Prime Minister Tsouderos resigned
and on the 26th the King appointed Georgios
Papandreou, a leading republican politician
and leader of the Social Democratic Party,
who had just evaded from occupied Greece,
as the new Prime Minister. Despite being an
anti-Monarchist and anti-Communist,
Papandreou sought to form a representative
government and he called all concerned par-
ties to a national conference in the Lebanon,
which was held on May 17-21. Representa-
tives of most of the old political parties —
including the KKE — and of the main resis-
tance groups — EAM, ELAS and EDES —
participated and after three days of stormy
debate a document known as the Lebanon
Charter was signed by all those present. It
5th PROOF
The Allied liberation plan for Greece,
known as Operation ‘Manna’, was hurriedly
prepared after the Caserta conference. The
designated landing force was small in size
and had few heavy weapons, being more
intended as a ‘take-over’ force than for dri-
ving out the Germans. It comprised two
British brigades (the 2nd Parachute and the
23rd Armoured, both in an infantry role), a
few commando and special forces units and
two units of the Free Greek army (the Greek
Mountain Brigade and the Greek Sacred
Regiment), plus three aircraft squadrons
(two RAF and one Greek). Assigned to help
in the distribution of food, clothing and med-
icine to the starving and destitute population
by the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Agency) and the Red Cross
and in reconstruction work, it had a large
non-combatant administrative complement.
General Scobie’s instructions were to
establish his GHQ in Athens, to maintain
law and order, and to help the Papandreou
Government set up its administration. He
was not to interfere in local politics. How-
ever, it was considered vital that British
troops occupy Athens as soon as possible
after its evacuation by the Germans to pre-
vent Greek guerrillas from establishing
themselves in the city and thus in all proba-
bility provoking civil war. Put differently, he
was to
prevent
a Communist coup d’état
rather than
counter
it. Unfortunately but per-
haps understandably, Greek Communists
and anti-Royalists would come to regard the
British presence in Greece as having as pri-
mary aim to bring back the monarchy and
restore King George II to the throne.
The vast majority of the British soldiers
who came to Greece as part of the British
Liberation Force had no inkling of the intri-
cacies of Greek politics or any idea that they
were arriving in a country on the verge of
civil war. They regarded the Greeks as
friends and expected to be greeted as such.
They loved the Greek people for their affa-
bility and generous hospitality, and admired
the Greek partisans for their courageous
struggle against the Axis. To most British
soldiers it seemed inconceivable that large
segments of Greek society would come to
regard them as occupiers rather than libera-
tors and that they would eventually end up
fighting the Greeks in a brutal, nasty conflict.
On October 12, 1944, the British 2nd Parachute Brigade landed in a strong wind on the
airfield of Megara, 45 kilometres north-west of Athens, its mission being to advance to
the capital and secure it as soon as possible. First to drop was C Company of the 4th
Parachute Battalion, but due to the continued bad weather the rest of the brigade did
not come in until later, the remainder of the 4th Battalion and the 6th Battalion land-
ing on the 14th, the 5th Battalion on the 15th and the brigade’s glider element only on
the 16th. By then, the 4th and 6th Battalions had started on their way towards Athens.
LIBERATION OF MAINLAND GREECE
In mid-September 1944, prompted by the
Soviet Red Army advance into Bulgaria and
towards Yugoslavia, Hitler decided to with-
draw his troops from Greece, first from the
Aegean islands and the Dodecanese and
then from the mainland. The Peloponnese
was the first part of the mainland to be evac-
uated and, with the spectre of EAM/ELAS
seizing power in the vacuum created, the
British were stirred to go into action there.
On the night of October 3/4, 58 para-
chutists of the Special Boat Squadron (SBS)
dropped to seize Araxos airfield in the north-
west Peloponnese as the vanguard of a 950-
strong task force under Major Earl George
Jellicoe — ‘Bucketforce’ — which further
comprised a squadron of the Long Range
Desert Group (LRDG), two infantry compa-
nies of Highland Light Infantry, a few Royal
Marine commandos and No. 2908 Squadron
of the RAF Regiment. They landed unop-
posed and received a terrific welcome from
overjoyed Greek civilians. Following the
parachute drop, the main force landed at
Katakolon on the west coast of the Pelopon-
nese. The vital port of Patras, 30 kilometres
away, was still held by a German garrison of
under 1,000 and some 1,600 men of the local
Greek Security Battalion but entirely sur-
rounded by ELAS guerrillas under Aris. By
quickly switching his SBS patrols from one
area to another, Jellicoe created the impres-
sion of much greater strength, as a result of
which the Security Battalion, whose mem-
bers feared that they would be murdered as
traitors by the ELAS forces, keenly surren-
dered to him. Meanwhile, the majority of the
Germans evacuated by the port and Patras
was captured with the harbour still intact.
However Aris’ forces had already carried out
horrifying massacres at nearby Kalamata and
Pyrgos, butchering Royalists, bourgeois,
Security Battalion men and anyone else sus-
pected of being anti-Communist.
From the Peloponnese, liberation moved
first to Athens and then to the north. The
Germans did not attempt to defend the capi-
tal, only holding the approaches to the city so
that their evacuation could go as smoothly as
possible. The small number of SBS, LRDG
and commandos moving from the Pelopon-
nese to Athens found that the hospitality of
the Greeks slowed them down much more
than German opposition.
On October 12, in Athens, the Swastika
flag was taken down for the last time before
the last German units withdrew from the
city. A small group of ELAS fighters pre-
vented the Germans from destroying the
electric power station and the Marathon
Dam on the outskirts of town just before
they pulled out.
That evening (October 12), a company
from the 2nd Parachute Brigade (Brigadier
Charles Pritchard) was dispatched to seize
the airfield at Megara, 45 kilometres north-
west of Athens, thus to secure a landing zone
for the rest of the brigade, prior to an
advance on the capital. C Company of the
4th Parachute Battalion (Lieutenant-Colonel
Vic Coxen) took off from Brindisi in Italy
and, after a very bumpy flight, dropped on
the airfield. They landed in a very strong
wind, which caused three men killed and 40
injured. The prevailing weather conditions
forced the abandonment of further para-
chute operations and it was not until two
days later (October 14) that the rest of the
brigade (less the 5th Parachute Battalion)
arrived. The Germans had blown up the road
to Athens but every form of local transport
was commandeered and the 4th and 6th Bat-
talions entered the city on October 15, only
to find that other British troops had beaten
them to the goal: Lord Jellicoe and about 55
men from the SBS had already reached the
capital and installed themselves in the best
hotel, the Grande Bretagne overlooking
Constitution Square; and ‘Foxforce’, com-
prising No. 9 Commando (Lieutenant-
Colonel Ronnie Tod) with a detachment
5
IWM CNA3182

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