The death of Ioannis Metaxas

On 29 January 1941, shortly after six in the morning, General Ioannis Metaxas, Prime Minister and since 1936 dictator of Greece, died at his villa in Kifisia near Athens. He was 69. He was killed by an infection that developed from a seemingly trivial throat complaint: tonsillitis turned into a peritonsillar abscess and, after a few days, into general blood poisoning. His death came at a remarkable moment. Three months earlier Metaxas had rejected the Italian ultimatum and taken Greece into the war, and now the Greek army stood dozens of kilometres inside Albania, having just taken the Klisura Pass. At the same time German troops were massing in Romania, and no one in Athens doubted that in the spring Hitler would come to the Italians’ aid. That same day King George II appointed as prime minister Alexandros Koryzis, a banker with no political following, and within a few weeks the new government reversed the dead man’s most important decision: it agreed to accept British ground troops.

A last decision: refusing Wavell

The last weeks of Metaxas’s life were taken up with talks with the British. Since November 1940 British air squadrons had been operating in Greece, and there was a British garrison on Crete, but Metaxas did not want ground troops on the mainland. From December 1940 London knew from intercepted signals that Germany was preparing to strike at Greece through Bulgaria. Winston Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff concluded that after the capture of Bardia the most important task in the Middle East had become aid to Greece, even at the cost of halting the offensive in Libya. The Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, despite his own doubts, flew to Athens with the air commander, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Longmore. On 13–15 January 1941 they held talks with Metaxas and the Commander-in-Chief, General Alexandros Papagos.

The British offered small forces to begin with, chiefly specialised units such as artillery, anti-aircraft defences and tanks, which within roughly three months were to grow to two or three divisions, and they wanted to deploy them in Macedonia, in the Salonika area. The Greeks had hoped for much more. Papagos calculated that stopping the Germans would take nine divisions with strong air support. Metaxas judged that a few British regiments in Macedonia would not stop the Wehrmacht but would give Hitler a pretext for an attack which Greece still hoped to avoid or at least to postpone. He turned the offer down. At the same time he gave assurances that Greece would defend itself against Germany just as it had against Italy, and agreed to accept British troops only once the Germans entered Bulgaria. According to Greek accounts, Metaxas sent his last telegram on the matter on the morning of 18 January, and a few hours later he fell ill.

The illness

Metaxas’s health had been deteriorating since the spring of 1940. He suffered from gastrointestinal bleeding, and the war with Italy, which he directed as Prime Minister, Minister of War, Foreign Minister and Minister of Education all at once, was sapping what strength he had left. On 18 January 1941 he felt unwell on his way to a cabinet meeting and returned to his home in Kifisia. An ear, nose and throat specialist diagnosed purulent tonsillitis. Because of the patient’s age and exhaustion the doctors decided against removing his tonsils and on 21 January merely lanced the abscess. For several days the Prime Minister seemed to be recovering, and the end of the treatment was planned for 27 January. That afternoon, however, a high fever returned. The infection spread through his whole body; the doctors gave blood transfusions, and on 28 January his condition deteriorated sharply. The doctors tried to bring the well-known internist Hans Eppinger from Vienna, but it was already too late.

The bulletin issued by a team of more than a dozen doctors stated that ten days earlier the Prime Minister had fallen ill with a throat infection that had turned into a peritonsillar abscess, and that despite lancing and treatment, symptoms of toxaemia had appeared, with gastrointestinal bleeding and uraemia. Penicillin, which a few years later made it possible to treat such infections routinely, was not yet in use in 1941. Some English-language accounts give throat cancer as the cause of death, but the medical bulletins of the time make no mention of it.

The circumstances of his death immediately gave rise to rumours. The security chief, Konstantinos Maniadakis, blamed the doctors for negligence, while German propaganda spread the rumour that Metaxas had been poisoned by the British, with whom he had dined several times in mid-January. Publications developing this theory still appear in Greece today, but there is no evidence for it whatsoever.

Mourning

Athens announced the Prime Minister’s death on the morning of 29 January. The regime, which for four years had built up a cult of the “Father of the Nation”, this time had no need to stage anything: since 28 October Metaxas had been genuinely popular in the country, and his death in the midst of a victorious war was received as a national calamity. His funeral in Athens drew huge crowds, and he was buried in the First Cemetery, where many Greek leaders lie. On the Albanian front his death changed nothing: the army, under Papagos’s command, was preparing to repel the expected Italian spring offensive.

Koryzis in place of Metaxas

The choice of successor was made by King George II himself. There was no parliament, the parties had been dissolved in 1936, and none of the politicians of the old parties, many of whom were in internal exile or in prison, sought the office. Metaxas’s closest associates, the Minister of Security Maniadakis and his secretary Ioannis Diakos, backed the candidacy of Alexandros Koryzis, governor of the National Bank of Greece, the country’s largest commercial bank. Koryzis, born in 1885 on the island of Poros, a lawyer and economist who had been with the bank for almost forty years, had served in 1936–1939 as Minister of Hygiene and Social Welfare in Metaxas’s government. He was regarded as an honest and efficient administrator, respected by Venizelists and monarchists alike, but he had neither a following of his own nor experience of foreign policy or military affairs. The King is said to have remarked that in the present circumstances only he could take over the authority of the dead man.

Koryzis was sworn in on 29 January and, like his predecessor, took on, in addition to the premiership, the portfolios of foreign affairs, education and the armed forces. The composition of the cabinet hardly changed, and the government announced that it would “resolutely continue the national programme”. The 4th of August Regime thus survived its creator: censorship and Maniadakis’s political police remained in operation, and the political prisoners stayed on the islands. The distribution of power did change, however. Koryzis lacked Metaxas’s standing, and the real decisions were increasingly clearly taken by the King and Papagos. The British minister in Athens, Michael Palairet, judged the new prime minister to be a weak man.

A turn towards the British

Metaxas’s death made it easier for London to achieve what it had failed to achieve in mid-January. On 1 February Churchill instructed Wavell to try again to persuade the Greeks to accept British troops. The new government, faced with increasingly evident German preparations in Romania and Berlin’s talks with Bulgaria, confirmed at the beginning of February that Greece would fight Germany too, and asked what help it could expect. On 22 February the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Dill, arrived in Athens, and Wavell with them. At a night-time conference in the royal palace at Tatoi, attended by the King, Koryzis and Papagos, the Greeks agreed to accept a British expeditionary corps. The plans included two Australian divisions, a New Zealand division and a British armoured brigade, as well as the Polish Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade, which in the end never reached Greece.

The Tatoi agreement, however, had a weak point that historians still debate today. The British understood that the Greeks would immediately withdraw their troops from the forward positions in Macedonia to a shorter line on the Haliacmon river; Papagos understood that the decision depended on the attitude of Yugoslavia. When Eden and Dill returned to Athens at the beginning of March, it turned out that the withdrawal had not begun, while on 1 March Bulgaria had joined the Tripartite Pact and let the Wehrmacht in. For want of a better solution a compromise was adopted, and from 4 March convoys carrying the troops of General Henry Maitland Wilson began to sail from Alexandria. Under Metaxas this would probably not have happened, or would have happened later. Whether his caution was wiser than his successor’s decision remains a matter of dispute, since Germany had decided to attack Greece regardless: Hitler’s directive on Operation Marita dated from 13 December 1940, long before the British arrived.

Dictator and symbol

Metaxas left the Greeks a twofold memory. For four years he ruled as a dictator: he dissolved parliament and the parties, introduced censorship, exiled communists and political opponents to the islands of the Aegean, extracted “declarations of repentance” from them and built up a personality cult, borrowing the salute and a youth organisation from Fascist Italy. At the same time he prepared the army for war, built the Metaxas Line on the Bulgarian border, and on 28 October 1940 took a decision supported by the whole nation, his opponents included. He died at the moment of his greatest triumph, before defeat came, and for that reason the image of the victorious leader of the “epic of 1940” long prevailed in Greek memory. Critics pointed out, however, that by breaking up the parties and repressing the left he had indirectly contributed to the communists becoming the strongest force in the resistance during the occupation, and to the country sliding into civil war after the war. After the fall of the colonels’ junta in 1974, the view of the 4th of August Regime as a Greek variety of fascism, or as an authoritarian dictatorship with a fascist façade, became firmly established. Even so, 28 October remains a national holiday in Greece: Ochi Day.

Its place in the war

Metaxas’s death closed the first, victorious chapter of Greece’s war. His successor lacked his authority, and the decision to accept the British, taken in February 1941, tied the fate of Greece to a campaign that Britain could not win. Halting the pursuit in Libya in order to transfer troops to Greece allowed the Germans to strengthen the African front, and on 6 April 1941 the Wehrmacht struck at Yugoslavia and Greece simultaneously. That morning Koryzis rejected a German note demanding the removal of the British from the country. The Metaxas Line held for a few days but was outflanked through Yugoslavia, and on 9 April the Germans entered Salonika. On 18 April, after a stormy conversation with the King, Koryzis took his own life at his home in Athens. A few days later the Army of Epirus capitulated, the King and the government fled to Crete, and at the end of April the Germans entered Athens. Greece faced three and a half years of German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation, the famine of the winter of 1941–1942, the destruction of the Greek Jews and civil war.

Metaxas lived to see none of these events. His decision of October 1940, however, had consequences that went far beyond him: Italy’s defeat in Albania forced Hitler into the Balkan campaign in the spring of 1941 and drew Britain into the ill-fated expedition to Greece and, in its wake, into the fighting for Crete.