The Caserta Agreement

On the afternoon of 26 September 1944 at Caserta near Naples, at Allied Force Headquarters in the Mediterranean (AFHQ), housed in the Royal Palace, an agreement was signed that was meant to decide who would take power in Greece once the Germans had gone. The parties were the Greek government of national unity under Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou and the commanders of the two largest partisan armies: General Stefanos Sarafis, commander of the communist-dominated ELAS, and General Napoleon Zervas, leader of the republican and anti-communist EDES. The talks were chaired by the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, General Henry Maitland Wilson, and attended by the British Minister Resident at Allied headquarters, Harold Macmillan. Under the agreement all the partisan units in Greece recognised the authority of the Papandreou government, which in turn placed them under the orders of the British General Ronald Scobie, appointed to command the Allied forces that were to enter the country.

At the time the agreement was presented as the culmination of efforts, under way since the spring, to reconcile Greece’s political camps. In reality neither the communists, nor the right, nor the British trusted one another, and the agreement postponed the conflict rather than resolving it. Less than ten weeks later fighting broke out in Athens between ELAS and British and government troops.

Three Greeces

In the summer of 1944 Greece was still under occupation, but authority over it had split between several centres. In Athens the collaborationist cabinet of Ioannis Rallis governed, raising, with German help, the Security Battalions to fight the partisans. In the mountains of the interior the National Liberation Front (EAM) and its army, ELAS, reigned supreme, directed in practice by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). In March 1944 EAM set up the Political Committee of National Liberation (PEEA) in Evrytania – the “mountain government”, which rivalled the government-in-exile in Cairo. In Epirus operated Zervas’s smaller EDES, with which ELAS had been waging an armed struggle since the autumn of 1943, interrupted only by a truce in February 1944.

The government-in-exile of King George II depended entirely on the British, and its authority had been undermined in the spring of 1944 by a mutiny in the Greek units in Egypt, whose participants demanded a government based on the PEEA. The British suppressed the mutiny, and Georgios Papandreou became Prime Minister – a liberal and an opponent of the communists who had recently escaped from occupied Greece. At the Lebanon Conference (17–20 May 1944) representatives of all the parties and resistance organisations signed the so-called National Charter (the Lebanon Charter), which announced a government of national unity in which EAM was to receive roughly a quarter of the portfolios.

From Lebanon to Caserta

The signature of the PEEA delegation on the National Charter caused a storm in the mountains. The leadership of EAM and the KKE decided that the delegates had exceeded their authority, and throughout the summer it set new conditions: it demanded key ministries, including the interior and the army, and Papandreou’s resignation. The talks stalled, and the Prime Minister, backed by Winston Churchill, had no intention of giving way. Since the spring of 1944 Churchill had regarded EAM as a threat to British interests in the Mediterranean and was determined that when the Germans withdrew it should be a government friendly to London, not the communist partisans, that stood in Athens.

The breakthrough came at the end of July, when a Soviet military mission under Colonel Grigori Popov flew in to ELAS headquarters. The Soviet officers brought neither weapons nor promises of aid and – according to many historians – gave the Greek communists to understand that Moscow would not support a confrontation with the British. In August the PEEA dropped its demand for Papandreou’s dismissal and most of its other conditions. On 2 September 1944 its representatives joined the government: Alexandros Svolos took the finance ministry, Ilias Tsirimokos the national economy, the communist Yiannis Zevgos agriculture and Miltiadis Porfyrogenis labour, while Angelos Angelopoulos became under-secretary for finance. A few days later, on 7 September, the government moved from Egypt to Italy, to Cava de’ Tirreni near Salerno, in order to be nearer to Greece and to the forces that were to take it there.

Meanwhile the situation in the country was changing by the day. After the coup in Bulgaria Bulgarian troops began leaving occupied eastern Macedonia and Thrace, and the Germans, threatened with being cut off by the Red Army advancing through Romania and Bulgaria, were preparing to evacuate Greece – in September they began withdrawing from the Peloponnese. ELAS moved into the emerging vacuum, clashing in many places with the Security Battalions. The most notorious episode was the battle of Meligalas in Messenia (13–15 September 1944): after taking the small town, ELAS partisans shot, according to various estimates, between 700 and about 1,100 prisoners and civilians. News of the massacre prompted the EAM leadership to try to curb summary reprisals, but it deepened the fears of the government and the British about what would happen when the partisans entered the towns.

The British were then preparing an operation to land a small force in Greece – Force 140, based on the staff of General Scobie’s British III Corps. It was not large enough to control a country in which ELAS had – according to various estimates – some 50,000 armed men, and EDES several times fewer. The partisans’ consent to place themselves under the government and the British command was therefore a precondition for a peaceful transfer of power.

The talks at Caserta

Sarafis and Zervas were flown to Italy by an RAF aircraft from a partisan airstrip in Thessaly. The talks, attended by Wilson, Macmillan, Scobie and his chief of staff, and members of the Greek government – besides Papandreou, they included Svolos, Tsirimokos, Zevgos and Porfyrogenis – began, according to Greek studies, on 23 September. Sarafis was accompanied by Konstantinos Despotopoulos as his legal adviser. After three days of discussion, on the afternoon of 26 September, the parties signed the agreed text.

The most important provisions of the agreement were as follows:

• all partisan units operating in Greece place themselves under the orders of the government of national unity;
• the government places them under the orders of General Scobie, appointed by the Supreme Allied Commander as commander of the forces in Greece;
• the leaders of ELAS and EDES undertake not to allow any group to attempt to seize power on its own initiative – such actions were to be treated as a crime;
• in Athens no action may be taken except on the direct orders of General Scobie;
• the Security Battalions are regarded as an instrument of the enemy – unless they surrender in accordance with the orders of the British commander, they will be treated as enemy formations;
• the two partisan organisations set aside their past quarrels and coordinate their operations “for the good of the common struggle”.

The agreement also defined the areas of operation of the two armies. EDES was to operate in Epirus and ELAS in the rest of the country, with special provisions for Attica, the Peloponnese, Thrace and Salonika (Thessaloniki). General Panagiotis Spiliotopoulos, an officer associated with the government, was appointed commander of the forces in Attica and was to work with the cabinet’s representatives in the capital; Sarafis was to name a liaison officer to him and a commander of the partisan forces in the Peloponnese, who would be accompanied by a British liaison officer. The task of the regional commanders was to harass the retreating Germans, disarm their garrisons, keep order in the liberated areas, help restore the civil administration and prevent arbitrary punishments and arrests.

According to Greek studies, the draft originally contained an article entrusting Scobie with maintaining “law and order” in the country. Svolos demanded that it be struck out, arguing that this was an internal matter for the Greek government. Papandreou and Macmillan tried to find a compromise wording, but Wilson agreed to remove the article altogether. This seemingly minor change showed how much both sides feared that the British would become the arbiter of political affairs in Greece.

The agreement did not, however, settle the questions that divided Greeks most deeply: the future of the monarchy, the fate of the partisan armies after liberation, how they were to be disarmed and a new army built, or the punishment of collaborators. All these matters were postponed until after the government’s return to the country.

An apparent accord

The agreement is sometimes described as a deal between the government-in-exile and “various partisan leaders” who recognised its authority at a time when the communist EAM and the British-backed government seemed irreconcilable. That picture needs qualifying. When the agreement was signed, EAM did not stand opposed to the government but sat in it, and its leadership, having changed course during the summer, accepted the terms of Caserta. Nor was the agreement concluded with a random group of commanders, but with the commanders of the two main armies, ELAS and EDES, and under the supervision of the British command, which was as important a party to it as the Greek government.

The tension, though, was real. In the ranks of ELAS the agreement was received with reluctance. According to some accounts, Aris Velouchiotis, the most radical of the partisan commanders, called a meeting of ELAS officers at Lamia after Sarafis’s return and proposed seizing power by force, but the majority did not want to risk a clash with the Allies. On the right and in royalist circles, by contrast, the government was accused of having conceded too much to the communists. The British, Churchill included, regarded the agreement more as a safeguard against ELAS seizing Athens than as a lasting reconciliation – hence the provision that in the capital Scobie would be the sole source of orders. Memories of the Kalavryta massacre and the Distomo massacre, as well as of the fratricidal fighting of ELAS against EDES and the Security Battalions, meant that in many regions people intended to settle the scores of the occupation in their own way, whatever had been signed in Italy.

Significance

The Caserta Agreement made possible a relatively peaceful transfer of power in Greece in the autumn of 1944. At the beginning of October British troops began landing in the Peloponnese, on 12 October the Germans left Athens, and over the following days British units entered the capital. The Papandreou government arrived there on 18 October. ELAS, true to its undertaking, made no attempt to seize power in the capital, although it controlled most of the country. Almost simultaneously, on 9 October in Moscow, Churchill agreed with Joseph Stalin the so-called percentages agreement, under which Greece fell 90 per cent within the British sphere of influence. Stalin kept to this arrangement: the USSR gave the Greek communists no help, either then or in December.

The accord reached at Caserta did not survive the dispute over disarming the partisans. On 1 December 1944 Scobie called for ELAS to be disbanded, on 2 December the EAM ministers left the government, and on 3 December the police opened fire on a demonstration of many thousands in Syntagma Square. There followed the fighting in Athens known as the Dekemvriana, which lasted until 11 January 1945 and in which ELAS clashed with British and government troops. It was ended by the Varkiza Agreement (12 February 1945), which provided for the disarming of ELAS but did not bring peace: after a period of persecution of the left known as the “White Terror”, Greece was engulfed in 1946–1949 by a full-scale civil war. The Caserta Agreement, concluded as an accord between allies against the retreating Germans, thus proved to be the last moment of formal unity in the Greek resistance and one of the first examples of how liberation from occupation turned into a struggle over the post-war order in Europe.