The Athens truce

On 15 January 1945 the guns fell silent in Greece. A truce came into force between the commander of British forces in Greece, Lieutenant General Ronald Scobie, and the Greek People’s Liberation Army – ELAS, the armed wing of the left-wing National Liberation Front (EAM). It ended the Dekemvriana – the “December events”, the fighting for Athens and Piraeus that had gone on since 3 December 1944, at the start of the Dekemvriana. Popular chronologies record under this date that Scobie accepted an ELAS request for a ceasefire, which meant the end of the Dekemvriana and a clear defeat for the Greek left. This account calls for two clarifications. First, the truce agreement had been signed as early as 11 January, and 15 January is the day it came into force (some Greek studies give 14 January). Second, the defeat of the left was above all a military defeat in Athens: ELAS kept its weapons and its control over a large part of the country, and its disarmament was decided only by the Varkiza Agreement of 12 February 1945.

The last days of fighting

By the turn of December and January the outcome of the fighting in the capital had already been decided. The British, reinforced by units brought in from the Italian front, had been conducting a general offensive since 27 December and were driving ELAS out of one district after another, house by house. The guerrilla units, trained to fight in the mountains rather than in a city, were exhausted and short of ammunition. According to Greek studies ELAS left Athens on 5 January and Piraeus on 7 January, withdrawing northwards towards Boeotia and Central Greece. That same day, 5 January, the forces of Aris Velouchiotis, brought down from Epirus, reached the area of Thebes, but the leadership of ELAS and of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) forbade him to join the battle for the capital.

At the same time the political situation changed. In line with the compromise worked out during Churchill’s visit to Athens, on 31 December 1944 Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens was sworn in as regent and, until the question of the form of government was settled by a plebiscite, took over the duties of head of state in place of King George II, who was in London. On 3 January General Nikolaos Plastiras became head of a new government. A sixty-one-year-old veteran of the Greco-Turkish War and a distinguished republican who had spent most of the 1930s in exile in France, he commanded respect even among part of the left, and he was acceptable to the British as an opponent of the communists. The outgoing prime minister, Georgios Papandreou, whom the left held responsible for the shooting in Syntagma Square, stepped down.

The request for a truce and Scobie’s terms

After the loss of Athens the KKE leadership, headed by the party secretary Georgios Siantos, concluded that further fighting against the British was pointless. Nor could it count on help from the USSR: Joseph Stalin, true to the understandings reached with Winston Churchill at the Moscow Conference, had kept silent about events in Athens throughout December, and the Soviet press had not devoted a single word to them. ELAS therefore approached Scobie for a ceasefire. Under the Caserta Agreement of September 1944 its units were formally subordinate to British command, but now it was negotiating with that command as a party to an armed conflict. The British, who had earlier refused to talk until the guerrillas left the capital, were now ready to come to terms, because they had achieved their main aim – Athens and Piraeus were in their hands.

The agreement was signed on 11 January. On behalf of EAM-ELAS it was signed by the left-wing politicians Ioannis Zevgos (until December minister of agriculture in Papandreou’s government) and Mitsos Partsalidis and by two ELAS staff officers. It was a military truce, not a political settlement: it decided nothing about the future of ELAS, an amnesty or the form of the state. According to accounts cited in the literature, ELAS undertook to withdraw from Attica – to a line a considerable distance from the capital – and from the areas of Salonika and Patras, while its units in the Peloponnese were to be demobilised. The two sides agreed on an exchange of prisoners; ELAS was, among other things, to release British soldiers and airmen captured during the fighting, including at Kifisia near Athens, where in December it had overrun an RAF headquarters. The truce was to come into force after a few days, needed to send the orders out to the units, and on 15 January the fighting stopped.

These concessions meant that ELAS was giving up ground in the country’s key centres, but it was not laying down its arms. Commentators on both sides pointed out that this was only a pause: the left retained tens of thousands of armed men in the mountains of Central Greece, Thessaly and Macedonia, while the Plastiras government and the British retained control of the capital and the main ports.

The hostages

The most painful issue, which the truce did not resolve, was that of the hostages. As they withdrew from Athens and Piraeus, ELAS units and EAM militias carried off thousands of civilians – officials, policemen, officers, the well-to-do and people regarded as “class enemies” or supporters of the right. Estimates cited in Greek historiography speak of as many as about 15,000 people, although the exact number is not known. The hostages were driven north on foot in wintry conditions, towards Boeotia and the mountains of Central Greece; there was neither food nor shelter for them. Many died of exhaustion and cold, and according to eyewitness accounts and later findings some were killed on the way or lost their lives after sentences passed by so-called people’s courts. The scale of these killings remains disputed – some authors present it as massive, others consider it exaggerated.

According to the EAM leadership, the hostages were meant to guarantee the safety of thousands of left-wingers arrested by the British and the Greek authorities. During the fighting the British had indeed detained well over ten thousand people suspected of links with EAM; some of them were sent to camps in the Middle East, including El Daba in Egypt. The British government called hostage-taking a “barbarous practice condemned by international law”, and Prime Minister Plastiras – as the American press of the time reported – declared that the hostages must be freed before talks on a lasting peace could begin. The affair weighed on EAM’s image: even some of its sympathisers saw the abductions as a blow to the moral authority of a movement that only a few months earlier had enjoyed enormous support in Greece.

The toll of the Dekemvriana

The truce closed more than five weeks of fighting that were among the bloodiest clashes in the modern history of Athens. Figures for the losses are incomplete and conflicting. According to the tally most often cited in Greek studies, the British forces lost about 210 killed and 55 missing, and about 1,100 soldiers were taken prisoner by ELAS; ELAS losses are estimated at 2,000–3,000 killed and 7,000–8,000 captured. The Greek government forces – the army, the gendarmerie and the police – also suffered heavy losses. Hardest to estimate are the victims among the civilian population, who died in the shelling and bombing of working-class districts, in executions carried out by the OPLA organisation and EAM militias, and in reprisals against the left. Some tallies covering the whole country speak of a total of well over ten thousand killed; others give much lower figures.

Defeat – but not the end

Describing the Dekemvriana as “a clear defeat for the Greek left” is accurate as far as the capital is concerned. EAM-ELAS had managed neither to take Athens nor to force political concessions from the British. It had also lost some of the prestige it had won during the occupation as the largest resistance movement in the country: the fighting against an allied army, the executions and the hostage affair had alienated many Greeks, and the defeat showed that without outside help the communists could not take power against Britain’s will. In a broader sense, however, the defeat was not yet final. In mid-January ELAS still had substantial forces and controlled most of the provinces, and its disarmament became a matter for political negotiation, not capitulation.

Significance

On 18 January Churchill defended his Greek policy in the House of Commons, sharply criticising ELAS while at the same time encouraging a settlement. At the beginning of February talks between the government and EAM opened at the seaside village of Varkiza near Athens. The Varkiza Agreement, signed on 12 February 1945 by the foreign minister, Ioannis Sofianopoulos, and by Siantos, provided for the disarmament of ELAS, the release of hostages and an exchange of prisoners, an amnesty for political offences – but not for common crimes – and a plebiscite on the monarchy and elections under international supervision. Over the following weeks ELAS handed over tens of thousands of weapons; Velouchiotis rejected the agreement and was expelled from the KKE for doing so.

The peace proved fragile. Because many acts committed during the Dekemvriana were classed as common crimes, the amnesty in practice gave former guerrillas no protection, and the left was hit by a wave of persecution by right-wing gangs and the state apparatus, known as the “White Terror”. The elections of March 1946, boycotted by the KKE, and the plebiscite of September that year, after which George II returned to the throne, deepened the divisions. In 1946 the Greek Civil War broke out, ending in 1949 in the defeat of the communists, who were backed by Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria. After the British withdrawal the United States took over the role of Athens’s protector, and aid to Greece became one of the pillars of the Truman Doctrine in 1947.

The truce of 15 January 1945 was thus the end of one chapter, not of the Greek conflict. It ensured that Greece – in line with the agreement between Churchill and Stalin of October 1944 – remained in the British, and later the Western, sphere of influence, unlike its northern neighbours in the Balkans. For Greeks, the events from the liberation of Athens in October 1944, through the shots in Syntagma Square, to Varkiza became a source of lasting divisions, and the Dekemvriana itself is still described in different ways to this day – as a suppressed attempt at a communist coup or as a British intervention against the resistance movement. Both interpretations have their supporters among historians; the only point of general agreement is that the fighting in Athens was one of the first harbingers of the post-war division of Europe.