Churchill in Athens

On 28 December 1944 Winston Churchill and the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, left Athens after three days in a city where, since the beginning of December, fighting had been raging between ELAS units on one side and British troops and Greek government forces on the other. They had flown in on Christmas Day, 25 December, to try in person to reconcile the warring parties in the Greek conflict. Popular chronologies record under 28 December that Churchill and Eden “are in Athens, trying to reconcile the warring factions”. The statement is true but needs qualifying: 28 December was the last day of the visit, and its core – a conference of the Greek parties attended by representatives of the left – took place on 26 and 27 December. The talks did not end the fighting, but they produced one concrete result: the agreement of almost all participants that the powers of regent should be entrusted to the Archbishop of Athens.

The decision to go

The fighting that began after the shooting in Syntagma Square on 3 December, at the start of the Dekemvriana, quickly turned into open war between ELAS and the British garrison of Lieutenant General Ronald Scobie. For the British government it was a serious political problem. British soldiers were shooting at people who only a few weeks earlier had been fighting the Germans, and across the Atlantic the American press was almost unanimously critical of London. In the House of Commons, Labour MPs and some Liberals accused the Prime Minister of suppressing a democratic resistance movement in the interests of the unpopular King George II. Churchill replied that he was defending the lawful government against an attempt by the communists to seize power by force. He knew, however, that military force alone would not suffice and that he had to show public opinion that he was willing to seek a political solution.

Churchill also felt that he had a free hand as far as Moscow was concerned. At the Moscow Conference in October he had obtained Stalin’s acquiescence in British predominance in Greece and – as he himself later stressed – Stalin kept that undertaking. The Soviet press was silent about the fighting in Athens, and the head of the Soviet military mission in Greece, Colonel Grigori Popov, did not encourage ELAS to resist.

The Prime Minister decided to make the journey on Christmas Eve, cancelling his holiday plans. By his own account in his memoirs, his family and staff were taken aback, and Eden would have preferred to stay in London. On the night of 24/25 December the aircraft carrying Churchill and Eden took off for Italy and, after a short stop at Naples, reached Kalamaki airfield near Athens on 25 December. There they were joined by Field Marshal Harold Alexander, Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, and by Harold Macmillan, the British Minister Resident at Allied headquarters. For security reasons Churchill stayed not in the city but aboard the cruiser HMS Ajax, which lay in the Phaleron roads.

That same evening, 25 December, the Archbishop of Athens, Damaskinos, came aboard Ajax. Churchill had previously regarded him with distrust, suspecting him of political ambitions and leftist sympathies. Their conversation changed that picture. In his memoirs Churchill wrote that Damaskinos made a great impression on him and that by the following day he considered him the outstanding figure in the Greek turmoil. This meeting determined the shape of the later compromise.

The charge under the Hotel Grande Bretagne

Churchill’s stay in Athens was dangerous. The city centre was in British hands, but ELAS was shelling it from the districts it controlled, and snipers were active in the streets. On the day of Churchill’s arrival British sappers discovered in the sewers beneath the Hotel Grande Bretagne on Syntagma Square, which housed the British headquarters, a large charge of explosives – according to British accounts, about a ton of dynamite. Churchill mentioned it in a cable to his wife.

The plan to blow up the building is attributed to ELAS. Years later Manolis Glezos, famous for tearing down the swastika flag from the Acropolis in 1941, confirmed that he had taken part in laying the charge. According to his account, the target was the British headquarters, not the Prime Minister; when the EAM leadership learned that Churchill might come to the hotel, the operation was called off, since they did not want to bear responsibility for an attack on one of the leaders of the Big Three. This version comes mainly from Glezos himself and cannot be fully verified. Some studies also state that the defusing of the charge was entirely the work of British sappers. All that is certain is that there was no explosion.

A conference by the light of oil lamps

The conference opened on the afternoon of 26 December in the building of the Greek Foreign Ministry. The building was unheated and lit by oil lamps, as the city had no electricity, and gunfire could be heard in the distance. Damaskinos presided. On the Greek side sat the Prime Minister, Georgios Papandreou, General Nikolaos Plastiras, the veteran Liberal politician Themistoklis Sofoulis and other leaders of the pre-war parties. Allied representatives were also present: besides Churchill, Eden, Alexander and Macmillan, the British ambassador Reginald Leeper, the US ambassador Lincoln MacVeagh, a French representative and Colonel Popov as Soviet observer.

The delegates of EAM and the Communist Party of Greece – the KKE secretary Georgios Siantos, Mitsos Partsalidis of the EAM leadership and General Emmanouil Mantakas of ELAS – arrived late, having been escorted through the front line under British protection. Their presence was the most remarkable feature of the whole meeting: the British Prime Minister sat at the same table as the leaders of a movement with which his soldiers were fighting in the streets of the same city.

In his opening speech Churchill urged the Greeks to come to an agreement. He stressed that Britain did not wish to interfere in Greece’s internal affairs or to impose a government on it, but neither would it allow power to be seized by force. He added that if the talks failed the struggle would be fought to the end, and he emphasised that his policy had the support of Stalin and Roosevelt. After speeches by Eden and Alexander, the British and the other foreigners left the room, leaving the Greeks on their own.

The talks went on until 27 December and produced no truce. According to participants, the EAM delegation demanded, among other things, about half the portfolios in a new government and the disbandment of the formations supporting the government, including the Mountain Brigade and the newly formed National Guard, which was also taking in former members of the Security Battalions. The other politicians found these terms unacceptable. Agreement was reached on one point only: until the question of the form of government was settled by a plebiscite, the powers of head of state should be exercised by a regent – Archbishop Damaskinos. The EAM delegation also accepted this solution.

Departure and the regency

On 28 December Churchill and Eden flew out of Athens and, by way of Italy, returned to London on 29 December. Their task now was to win over George II, who was in London and firmly opposed the regency, fearing that it meant the end of the monarchy. On the night of 29/30 December, after many hours of discussion, Churchill and Eden made it clear to the King that the British government would recognise the Archbishop’s authority even without his consent. Early on the morning of 30 December George II gave way and issued a statement entrusting the regency to Damaskinos and undertaking not to return to Greece until the nation had pronounced on the form of government. Damaskinos was sworn in as regent on 31 December.

The visit did not alter the British decision to settle the fighting by force. Reinforced British units, brought over from the Italian front, continued clearing Athens and Piraeus, and at the beginning of January 1945 ELAS withdrew from the capital area, taking thousands of hostages with it. On 3 January the regent appointed a new government headed by Plastiras, and Papandreou stepped down. On 11 January a truce was signed, which came into force on 15 January, and on 12 February 1945 the government and EAM concluded the Varkiza Agreement, which provided for the disarmament of ELAS, an amnesty for political offences and a plebiscite on the monarchy. In practice the Varkiza settlement brought no reconciliation: over the following months a wave of repression, known as the “White Terror”, fell upon the left.

Significance

The Athens visit was one of Churchill’s most personal gestures of the war. The 70-year-old Prime Minister spent Christmas in a city under fire, at the very moment when the fate of the German offensive was being decided in the Ardennes. To his supporters it was proof of courage and goodwill: the Prime Minister sat down at the same table as the communists and brought about a compromise that made it possible to break the political deadlock without imposing the King on the Greeks. Critics in Britain and the United States pointed out that the conference also served to justify armed intervention, and that its terms were set by a party that was fighting at the same time.

The regency of Damaskinos, agreed in Athens, lasted until 1946. After the plebiscite of September 1946 George II returned to the throne, and in the same year Greece descended into civil war, which ended in 1949 with the defeat of the communists. The events of December 1944 ensured that Greece remained in the British, and later the Western, sphere of influence – in line with the agreement reached by Churchill and Stalin in Moscow.