The first action of ELAS

On Sunday 7 June 1942 a group of a dozen or so armed men in the remnants of army uniforms marched singing, with a Greek flag unfurled, into the mountain village of Domnista in Evrytania (PL), in central Greece. Their leader, who introduced himself as “Major of Artillery” Aris Velouchiotis, kissed the hand of the village priest, asked the headman for permission to speak and addressed the assembled peasants. He announced that they belonged to the Greek People’s Liberation Army, ELAS, and that they were beginning a war against the country’s occupiers and against those Greeks who served them. It was the first public appearance of ELAS partisans, an organisation which within two years became the largest partisan army in Greek history.

War chronologies record under this date that ELAS appeared for the first time in Domnista, where Aris Velouchiotis proclaimed the beginning of armed resistance against the Axis powers. The date and place agree with the findings of historians, but three clarifications are worth adding. Formally, ELAS had been founded a few months earlier, in February 1942, by decision of the leadership of the National Liberation Front (EAM). There was no fighting at Domnista: it was a propaganda appearance, and the band fought its first engagement with occupation troops only in September. Nor was it the first armed resistance in occupied Greece, since individual partisan groups had already been active in 1941. In Greece, however, the appearance at Domnista is regarded as the symbolic beginning of the guerrilla war in the mountains of the mainland.

A country under three occupations

After the capitulation of the Army of Epirus and the German entry into Athens in April 1941, Greece was divided among three occupiers. The Germans kept the strategic points for themselves: Athens and Piraeus, Salonika with part of Macedonia, most of Crete and several Aegean islands. Bulgaria occupied and effectively annexed eastern Macedonia and western Thrace. The largest part of the country, including the whole of central Greece with Evrytania, fell to Italy. In Athens sat the collaborationist government of General Georgios Tsolakoglou, which had its own administration and gendarmerie but little real power.

In the winter of 1941–1942 the country suffered a catastrophe such as it had not known for centuries. The occupiers’ requisitions, the division of the country into zones, the collapse of internal trade and the British naval blockade, which cut off grain imports, brought on the Great Famine. In Athens and Piraeus alone some 40,000 people are estimated to have died, and in Greece as a whole during the occupation, by various calculations, around 100,000. The famine destroyed trust in the Tsolakoglou government and in the pre-war elites, most of whom were waiting out the war outside Greece. For many people, especially the young, the only organisation that was doing anything was EAM: it ran soup kitchens for the starving and organised protests against requisitions and strikes.

The first attempts at armed struggle ended badly. In the autumn of 1941, in the German zone in Macedonia, small groups of partisans linked to the communists attacked German posts. The Germans responded with mass reprisals: they razed the villages of Kerdyllia and Mesovouno and shot their men. The groups were quickly broken up. The leadership of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) long hesitated over whether to start a struggle in the mountains at all. Some of its members believed that the movement should first build up its strength in the cities and that guerrilla warfare was adventurism.

From decision to first band

The turning point came at the turn of 1941 and 1942. In November 1941 the secretary of the KKE’s Athens organisation, Andreas Tzimas, who was responsible for partisan affairs in the party, sent an experienced activist, Athanasios Klaras, to Roumeli, that is, central Greece. He was to find out whether armed bands could be organised in the mountains there and, while he was at it, obtain food for the party apparatus in Athens. Klaras toured the villages of Phthiotis and Evrytania, made contact with local communists and at the beginning of January 1942 reported that conditions were good.

At the same time, at the KKE plenum in January 1942, the party declared one of its main tasks to be the creation of “special combat groups” able to resist the occupiers’ violence. Georgios Siantos, the only member of the leadership with military experience, became acting general secretary. On 16 February 1942 EAM established its armed wing, ELAS. For the time being it existed mainly on paper. Klaras still had to win over the leadership, which distrusted him because of the “declaration of repentance”, a renunciation of communism, that he had signed in prison in 1939. According to his Greek biographers, he received permission to begin operations in Roumeli only in March or April.

At the end of May 1942 he gathered the first band near Sperchiada in Phthiotis. It numbered about fifteen men, fewer than Klaras had expected, and was poorly armed. The partisans took noms de guerre to protect their families from reprisals. Klaras chose the name Aris, after Ares, the Greek god of war, and the surname Velouchiotis, after Velouchi, the old name of Mount Tymfristos in Evrytania. To gain authority among the peasants he gave himself the rank of major of artillery, although in the war with Italy he had served as a private.

Domnista

The first weeks were hard. The band roamed the mountains, hiding from the gendarmerie and the Italians, went hungry and lost men to desertion. Velouchiotis then took two decisions which, according to historians, saved the enterprise. He drew up an oath that made desertion punishable by death, and he decided that the partisans would stop hiding. Instead, they were to enter villages openly, say who they were and what they wanted, and build supply networks there. The point was that the peasants should not mistake them for escaped criminals and the bands of brigands that had long infested the Greek mountains.

The entry into Domnista on 7 June was the first test of these tactics. Velouchiotis spoke of the aims of ELAS: the liberation of the country from foreign occupation and the right of the people to decide their own fate. He compared his men to the klephts, the mountain fighters of the 1821 uprising, who in Greek memory were heroes of the struggle against the Turks. The speech appealed to patriotism, not to communist slogans. Among the listeners were men who a year and a half earlier had fought in the war with Italy, and such words easily struck a chord with them.

In the following days the band appeared in one village after another, often changing location so as to seem more numerous than it was. Word of an “army in the mountains” spread quickly. Velouchiotis also dealt with the bands of brigands and cattle thieves: those who joined ELAS had their past forgiven, while those who resisted were crushed by force. He seized grain from state warehouses and distributed some of it to poor peasants. At the same time he imposed harsh discipline. A partisan could be shot for theft, and peasants’ offences were punished with public flogging. This mixture of protection and ruthlessness, later called “Aris’s law”, won ELAS obedience in the mountains, but it also became the source of its ill repute.

Other resistance organisations

ELAS was not the only force taking to the mountains in 1942. In July, in Epirus, in the Valtos area, Colonel Napoleon Zervas, military leader of the republican organisation EDES, founded in September 1941, organised its first band. Later Colonel Dimitrios Psarros’s band of the EKKA organisation was also formed. These groups, led by former officers, had the backing of the British and of the government-in-exile in Cairo, but a much narrower base than EAM, which could rely on a network of communist cells throughout the country. From the outset they were divided by mistrust: the communists suspected the officers of serving the monarchy, while the officers feared that ELAS was fighting not only the occupier but also for power after the war.

The first fighting

The appearance at Domnista opened a period of rapid growth. On 9 July 1942, in the village of Nea Monastiri in Phthiotis, Velouchiotis’s band killed a big landowner, Nikos Maratheas, who was accused of collaborating with the Italians and handing peasants over to them, and abducted his teenage son, who later died. The action delighted the local peasants but alarmed the KKE leadership, which feared that ELAS would be seen as a movement of class struggle rather than national struggle. The party even considered recalling Velouchiotis to Athens.

On 9 September 1942, in the Rekka gorge in the Giona mountains, Velouchiotis’s band surprised a platoon of Italian infantry that was searching for containers dropped by the British. According to Greek sources 23 Italians were killed, and the partisans later shot their prisoners. It was the first engagement between ELAS and occupation troops. At the end of October ELAS in central Greece numbered about a hundred men, and in December, in Velouchiotis’s own words, about five hundred. On 29 October the band attacked an Italian column near Krikello in Evrytania.

Its place in the war

On the night of 25–26 November 1942 ELAS partisans under Velouchiotis and EDES partisans under Zervas, together with a group of British SOE sappers under Edmund Myers, blew up the railway viaduct over the Gorgopotamos river on the Salonika–Athens line. The action, known as Operation Harling, stopped traffic on the only railway linking the north and south of the country for about six weeks and was one of the most celebrated acts of sabotage in occupied Europe. It was also the last major operation in which ELAS and EDES fought together.

In 1943 ELAS grew into a regular partisan army with divisions and a general headquarters, headed by the professional soldier Stefanos Sarafis, an EAM representative and Velouchiotis as “chief kapetanios”. After the Italian capitulation in September 1943 it took over the weapons of many Italian units. By the end of the occupation it numbered, according to various estimates, from several tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand men, including reservists, and controlled most of mountainous Greece, known as “Free Greece”. At the same time, from the autumn of 1943 it fought EDES in arms, and in April 1944 it destroyed the EKKA band and killed its commander. Historians call these clashes the first round of the Greek Civil War.

After the liberation in October 1944, a dispute over the disarming of the partisans led in December to fighting in Athens between ELAS and British and government troops. ELAS lost and, under the Varkiza Agreement of February 1945, laid down its arms. Velouchiotis, who refused to accept the agreement, died in June 1945, disowned by his own party. Persecution of the left led in 1946 to the civil war, which ended in 1949 with the defeat of the communists.

That is why Domnista has a double meaning in Greece. For the left it marks the birth of the largest resistance movement in occupied southern Europe, which for more than two years tied down considerable Italian and German forces in Greece and gave the mountain people their first experience of self-government. For its opponents it is the start of a road that led, through violence against rivals and “revolutionary justice”, to fratricidal war. Both images are grounded in fact, and historians today stress that ELAS was both at once.