by Max Hastings
A malevolent hand in Washington leaked Churchill’s draconian directive to Scobie to columnist Drew Pearson, who published it in the Post on 11 December. The ensuing anti-British tirade caused Churchill to draw unfavourable contrasts with Moscow’s useful silence. ‘I think we have had pretty good treatment from Stalin in Greece,’ he wrote to Eden, ‘much better in fact than we have had from the Americans.’ The Post editorialised on 6 December: ‘The use of force carries within it the seeds of its destruction.’ On the 8th, a Post article by Marquis Childs argued: ‘Winston Churchill and the clique around him want to believe that you can put a little paint and a little varnish on the old order and prop it up in place again. It won’t prop. That’s the meaning of the news out of Brussels and Athens…the course that is being followed in Greece and Belgium is the best way to ensure communism in the end.’
Walter Lippmann wrote in the Washington Post of 14 December that problems had arisen in Greece ‘because Mr Churchill is trying to apply the great principle of legitimacy in government without a correct appreciation of the unprecedented condition of affairs which the Nazi conquest and occupation have created’. The problem facing those trying to reconstruct Europe is ‘how to fuse the legitimacy acquired by Resistance movements with the legitimacy inherited by the old governments’. This was an accurate analysis of Churchill’s dilemma, lacking only an answer to it. Events in Greece, and elsewhere, were critically influenced by the outcome of policies promoted by the prime minister himself through SOE. It was only possible for ELAS to mount a challenge to the Greek government and its British sponsors because London had provided the communists with arms.
Halifax cabled gloomily from the Washington embassy: ‘Our version of the facts is largely disbelieved.’ On the ground in Athens, Scobie’s units faced increasingly violent pressure from ELAS guerrillas. Open insurgency was breaking out. Alexander signalled: ‘British forces are in fact beleaguered in the heart of the city.’ Both Macmillan and Leeper, at the British embassy, believed that Churchill failed to grasp the complexities of the situation. However distasteful were the communists, the Greek right was at least as much so. Macmillan urged the prime minister to accept that the king—‘the real villain of the piece’—must remain exiled in London, while the primate of Athens, Archbishop Damaskinos, should be appointed regent in Athens, to reconcile the warring factions. Damaskinos, fiftythree years old, born Dimitrios Papandreou, had become famous during the Occupation for his public defiance of the Germans, and especially for his denunciations of the persecution of the Jews. Macmillan had little time for the Greek prime minister: ‘We do not wish to start the Third World War against Russia until we have finished the Second World War against Germany—and certainly not to please M. Papandreou.’ The British in Athens, who perceived a regency as offering by far the best chance of a settlement acceptable to the Greek people, were enraged by the perceived duplicity of the Greek prime minister, who urged George II to reject a regency.
Men of the British Army who found themselves seeking to sustain by force the Athens regime were as divided as the rest of the world about the merits of their cause. Captain Phillip Zorab, for instance, hated the communists and everything that he saw and heard of their doings: ‘These ELAS guerrillas don’t care who they hit,’ he wrote in a letter home, ‘and I have four first-hand reports of atrocities committed by them on other Greeks…Greeks now know that when we said that political differences would not be settled by use of arms, we meant it.’ Other British soldiers, however, were deeply troubled by the role in which they found themselves cast. Major A.P. Greene, like Zorab a gunner, told his family:
I thought a good deal before writing this letter, because it contains some pretty definite views. But they must be aired or ten years of principles go for naught. Briefly I think our country is being misled on the subject of Greece. I have just finished reading Churchill’s speech, and I disagreed with it vehemently. Greece is a country with no background of real democracy in its modern history…We, the preachers of non-intervention, are forcing on Greece the government we want, and think it wants…Churchill’s speech was, to me, a political falsehood…People at home should know that it is the Manchester Guardian and not Churchill that represents the opinion of 80% of the army here. Whether they be regulars or volunteers, high ranking officers or privates, the vast majority want no part in what, to them, is a face-saving war of Churchill’s own making.
Greene acknowledged that all the local factions were guilty of atrocities, ‘but I think the bulk of Greek youth wants socialism…I shall stay until I’m so heartily sick of assisting in the installation of a fascist regime in Greece that I summon up enough courage to resign.’ He was right in believing that the wartime experience had radicalised Greek youth, as it appears to have radicalised him. Yet if Churchill’s support for restoring the monarchy was mistaken, he was surely justified in his revulsion against allowing power to fall by default into communist hands, as would have been most likely to happen in the absence of British military intervention.
On 17 December, Alexander signalled that another infantry division might be needed to hold Athens, a shocking prospect since the formation would have to be withdrawn from the Italian front. Two days later, 563 RAF personnel at the British air headquarters at Kifissia, outside Athens, surrendered to ELAS after a battle in which fifty-seven airmen had been killed or wounded. During the month’s fighting in Athens, the British Army lost 169 killed, 699 wounded and 640 missing—mostly prisoners—an appalling scale of casualties for what began as a post-liberation security operation. Macmillan wrote in his diary on 21 December: ‘Poor Winston! What with Greece, Poland and the German breakthrough on the Western Front, this is going to be a grim Christmas.’ By the 22nd, with strife intensifying, Churchill was at last becoming persuadable about the possibility of a regency, keeping the king out of Greece pending a referendum on his future. But he said crossly to Cadogan: ‘I won’t install a Dictator.’ In truth, the prime minister was dithering. An almost daily barrage of hostile questions in the Commons sustained pressure on the government. He cabled to Smuts: ‘I have had endless trouble about Greece where we have indeed been wounded in the house of our friends. Communist and Left-wing forces all over the world have stirred in sympathy with this new chance and the American Press reporting back has to some extent undermined our prestige and authority in Greece. There would be no chance of our basing a British policy upon the return of the King. We must at all costs avoid appearing to be forcing him on them by our bayonets.’
Much grief—even perhaps the bloody strife in Greece—might have been averted if Churchill had reached this conclusion months earlier, and explicitly proclaimed it to the Greek people. But it was hard to resolve the affairs of half a world emerging from the horrors of occupation, amid the new reality of Soviet expansionism. If British policy was sometimes misjudged, so too was American. The British embassy in Washington reported to London about US media opinion: ‘Indignation with Britain has given way to a kind of disgruntled and disenchanted cynicism which says that it was foolish ever to have supposed that the European, and in particular Russian and British, leopards could really have been expected to change their spots as the result of a few idealistic words from America.’
What now was to be done? On the afternoon of Saturday, 23 December, Churchill drove to Chequers, where a large family party was assembled for Christmas. He had scarcely arrived before he declared his determination to abandon the celebration, and travel to Athens. His decision caused consternation, above all to Clementine. This was one of the very rare moments of the war at which she broke down, fleeing upstairs in floods of tears. Her husband was just seventy, and in poor health. Private secretary John Martin wrote in his diary: ‘Glad I am not going on an expedition of which I disapprove, the prize not being worth the risks.’ Late on Christmas Eve Churchill and his entourage, including Anthony Eden, drove to Northolt and took off for Italy in a new American C-54 Skymaster. ‘Make it look British,’ Churchill urged when the
plane was delivered, and the aircraft had been refitted to an extraordinary standard of comfort for the times. Its principal passenger complained only that the clock in his private compartment ticked too loudly, and insisted upon disconnection of an electrically heated lavatory seat.
What did Churchill hope to achieve in Athens? It seemed to him, rightly, essential to Britain’s global prestige, and above all to relations with the US, that he should succeed in stabilising Greece. It was implausible that this could be achieved under Papandreou. Some broadly-based coalition government was needed. His advisers believed that Archbishop Damaskinos might provide the necessary sheet anchor, and supervise the creation of such a regime. Yet Churchill was mistrustful of surrendering the country to some wily local prelate. As ever, he wanted to see, and then to be seen to act, for himself. Early in the afternoon of Christmas Day, his Skymaster landed at Kalamaki airfield.
One of the welcoming party observed cynically that the visitors ‘had the air of men to whom a brilliant idea had been vouchsafed after the third glass of port upon which they had immediately decided to act but which they could now no longer very clearly recall’. Macmillan found the prime minister ‘in a most mellow, not to say chastened mood’. A two-hour conference took place in the plane, the interior of which became icy cold. Churchill’s shivering typist, Elizabeth Layton, was increasingly fearful for ‘Master’s’ health. The security situation was much worse than had been recognised in London, with snipers active in many parts of the Greek capital. Towards evening, a convoy of armoured cars took the party on a long, tense, uncomfortable journey to Phaleron, where they were transferred by launch to the light cruiser Ajax, a veteran of the 1939 River Plate battle, which was anchored offshore, safely beyond small-arms range.
The captain warned the exalted visitor that it might be necessary to disturb his tranquillity by firing the ship’s main armament in support of British ground forces. Churchill, of course, enthused at the prospect: ‘Pray remember, Captain, that I come here as a cooing dove of peace, bearing a sprig of mistletoe in my beak—but far be it from me to stand in the way of military necessity.’ Shortly afterwards Macmillan, Leeper, Papandreou and Damaskinos boarded the ship. The spectacle of the prelate in full canonical dress, complete with black silver-knobbed staff, brushing past sailors in the ship’s companionways who were celebrating Christmas in fancy dress, impressed the British as irresistibly droll.
Churchill was captivated by the jolly archbishop, who made plain his revulsion towards the communists and the atrocities which they had committed. The prelate, the prime minister told MPs later, ‘struck me as a very remarkable man, with his headgear, towering up, morally as well as physically, above the chaotic scene’. Colville wrote: ‘We are now in the curious topsy-turvy position of the prime minister feeling strongly pro-Damaskinos…while [Eden] is inclined the other way.’ Next morning, the visitors rose to survey the battlefield—what Churchill called ‘the pink and ochre panorama of Athens and the Piraeus, scintillating with delicious life and plumed by the classic glories and endless miseries and triumphs of its history’. The shore was bathed in bright sunshine. ‘One can see the smoke of battle in the streets west of the Piraeus,’ wrote Colville, ‘and there is a constant noise of shellfire and machine-guns. We had a splendid view of Beaufighters strafing an ELAS stronghold.’
Osbert Lancaster, the artist then serving as press attaché at the British embassy, described the arrival next afternoon of Churchill, once more borne by armoured car from the harbour through the drab, dusty, bullet-scarred streets. The prime minister wore the uniform of an RAF air commodore: ‘The change in his appearance since I had last seen him at close quarters some three years previously was marked. His face seems to have been moulded in lard lightly veined with cochineal and he badly needed a haircut. But the sound of mortaring and rifle-fire, combined with the historic associations of the countryside through which he had just passed, were clearly already having a tonic effect and he was distinguished from all his companions by an obvious and unswerving sense of purpose none the less impressive for being at the moment indeterminate.’ The latter intimation of confusion was unwarranted. The British had already convened a conference of all the warring parties, to meet under Churchill’s auspices, but Damaskinos’s chairmanship.
The embassy resembled a besieged outpost during the Indian Mutiny. Power was cut off, while gunfire provided orchestration. Some fifty staff, many of them women, had been subsisting for nine days on army rations in conditions of acute discomfort. The ambassador’s wife, whom Harold Macmillan found more impressive than her husband, directed domestic operations with a courage and energy likewise worthy of a Victorian imperial drama. Fortunately for the inmates, ELAS guerrillas had only small arms, so the British remained safe if they avoided exposing themselves at doors and windows. Between meetings with commanders, Churchill met and applauded the embassy staff, for whom he afterwards arranged an immediate issue of decorations.
At 4 p.m., representatives of the Greek factions assembled around a long table in the freezing, otherwise barren conference room of the Foreign Office. The rattle of musketry punctuated the proceedings, with voices sometimes drowned out by rocket and mortar concussions. Churchill seated himself in the centre, flanked by Archbishop Damaskinos, Eden and Macmillan. At one end were American, Russian and French representatives. The Greeks filled in around them, leaving space at a vacant end for the communists, who were late. Churchill and the prelate spoke brilliantly and at length, with long pauses for interpretation, before news arrived of the absentees, ‘three shabby desperados’. The communists had been delayed arguing with British security guards about their demand to bring weapons into the conference chamber. On their appearance, Churchill wrote to Clementine later, ‘after some consideration I shook the ELAS delegates’ hand[s] and it was clear from their response that they were gratified’. He repeated much of his opening harangue: ‘Mr Eden and I have come all this way, though great battles are raging in Belgium and on the German frontier, to make this effort to rescue Greece from a miserable fate and raise her to a point of great fame and repute…Whether Greece is a monarchy or a republic is a matter for Greeks and Greeks alone to decide. I wish you all that is good, and good for all.’
Alexander said: ‘Instead of me putting my brigades into Greece, I should like to see Greek brigades coming to help me in Italy in the war against our common enemy.’ Macmillan was disgusted by the oily platitudes offered by the communists, who extolled their own desire for peace: ‘I thought it all very disingenuous, especially remembering the frightful atrocities these men are committing both on our troops and on harmless fellow-countrymen throughout Greece. Winston was much moved, however.’ Then the foreigners rose and left the table, to enable the Greeks to negotiate with each other.
Once they were outside, their exchanges provided several notable vignettes. The prime minister engaged the head of the Russian military mission in conversation:‘What’s your name? Popov? Well, Popov, I saw your master the other day, Popov! Very good friends your master and I, Popov! Don’t forget that, POPOV!’ Even the colonel’s limited English enabled him to grasp Churchill’s attempt to brandish his relationship with Stalin. Then it was explained that the delay to proceedings had been caused by the need to disarm the communist delegates. The prime minister looked thoughtful and withdrew a pistol from his own pocket, growling complacently: ‘I cannot tell you the feeling of security one enjoys, knowing that one is the only armed man in such an assembly as that!’ He replaced the weapon in his overcoat before retreating with his entourage by armoured car to the embassy, and thence to Phaleron. When his typist Elizabeth Layton seated herself at the opposite end of the naval barge’s cabin to the prime minister, Churchill said, ‘No, come and sit by me.’ To Alexander’s wry amusement, the two travelled back across the water to Ajax cosily enfolded together in a huge rug.
Next day, the archbishop came to the British embassy to report on progress of the noisy, bitter talks at the Foreign Office. At
one point, apparently, General Plastiras—whom Churchill insistently addressed as ‘Plaster-Arse’—shouted at a communist: ‘Sit down, butcher!’ The prime minister was in high spirits, having been taken by Alexander to a vantage point from which the general explained the Athens battlefield. Macmillan saw this as a reprise of Churchill’s famous appearance at a London shoot-out with terrorists during his 1911 incarnation as Home Secretary: ‘Of course this affair is a sort of “super Sidney Street”, and he quite enjoyed having the whole problem explained to him by a master of the military art.’ When the ELAS delegates asked to see Churchill privately, he was eager to accept. But Macmillan and Damaskinos persuaded him that it was essential now to leave the Greeks to sort out their own affairs. That evening, the archbishop announced Papandreou’s resignation as prime minister. His last act in office was to cable to King George II in London, declaring the united endorsement of Greece’s politicians for a regency. Churchill wrote to Clementine: ‘This Wednesday has been an exciting and not altogether fruitless day. The hatreds between these Greeks are terrible. When one side have all the weapons which we gave them to fight the Germans and the other, though many times as numerous, have none, it is evident that a frightful massacre would take place if we withdrew.’