The liberation of Athens

On 12 October 1944 the last German units left Athens, which they had occupied since April 1941. The Greek capital was not taken by force: the Germans withdrew of their own accord as part of the evacuation of the whole south of the country, and for almost two days there were no Allied troops in the city at all. Control of the streets passed to the organisations of the National Liberation Front (EAM) and units of its army, ELAS. The statement, popular in chronologies, that “Athens was liberated by EAM” therefore captures the mood of those days but needs qualifying: the liberation was not the result of EAM fighting the Germans but of their departure, and the left merely filled the resulting vacuum – and did so within limits set by earlier agreements with the government and the British. The first British soldiers appeared in Athens on 13 October, and larger British forces entered the city on 14 October. Four days later, on 18 October, Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou’s government of national unity returned to the capital.

The last weeks of the occupation

Athens in the autumn of 1944 was an exhausted city. The memory of the Great Famine of the winter of 1941/1942 – caused by the occupiers’ requisitions, the breakdown of the market and the British naval blockade – was still fresh. Estimates of its victims across Greece vary, usually above 100,000 and in some studies as many as about 300,000; most died in Athens and Piraeus. Only from 1942 did supplies organised through Sweden and the International Red Cross ease the situation, but malnutrition and inflation persisted until the end of the occupation. In the spring of 1944 the Germans deported to the extermination camps most of the Jews of Athens, who until the autumn of 1943, under Italian occupation, had remained relatively safe.

The city was also the scene of an increasingly bitter civil war in miniature. ELAS units and its urban organisations were active in the working-class suburbs, while the collaborationist government of Ioannis Rallis formed the Security Battalions, which together with the Germans carried out round-ups in left-wing districts. The shooting of hostages and the cordoning off of whole quarters of the city, combined with the screening of suspects, left deep hostility on both sides.

The political fate of Athens, however, was decided elsewhere. On 26 September, at Caserta, representatives of Papandreou’s government, ELAS and EDES agreed that all guerrilla forces were subordinate to the government, which in turn placed them under the orders of the British Lieutenant General Ronald Scobie. In Athens itself no action could be taken without his direct order. The ELAS commanders accepted this undertaking – the partisans standing outside the city were not to enter it as conquerors. On 9 October in Moscow Winston Churchill put to Stalin a proposal for dividing influence in the Balkans under which Greece fell 90 per cent to Britain and – according to accounts of the Moscow Conference – obtained the Soviet leader’s acquiescence in British predominance in the country.

12 October

The German command in Athens had been preparing to leave for several weeks. The troops withdrew northwards along the road through Thebes and Lamia, blowing up bridges, depots and some of the port installations in Piraeus behind them. The centre of Athens itself, with its monuments and government buildings, came through the occupation without major damage. On the morning of 12 October the last columns left the centre. According to frequently cited accounts, the German commander laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in front of the parliament before departing, and the swastika flag was lowered from the mast on the Acropolis and replaced with the Greek flag.

News of the Germans’ departure spread like wildfire. Tens of thousands of people poured into the streets; the city centre filled with processions carrying Greek flags and – as foreign observers noted – British, American and Soviet flags, as well as red banners. Church bells rang all day. Order in the streets was kept by ELAS units and the EAM militia, and the Front’s organisations occupied many public buildings and strategic points. The Rallis cabinet ceased to exist; Rallis himself was soon arrested and after the war convicted of collaboration. In the working-class districts there were lynchings of real and alleged collaborators and clashes with members of the Security Battalions who had not managed to hide or place themselves under British protection.

The leadership of EAM and the Communist Party of Greece, however, made no attempt to use the moment to seize power in the state. In keeping with its undertakings at Caserta and with the line adopted earlier by the authorities of the Political Committee of National Liberation, EAM called on the population to remain calm and to welcome the Allies and the government of national unity, in which its own representatives sat. Historians differ in their assessment of this decision: for some it was proof that the communists took the parliamentary road seriously, for others a tactical postponement of the showdown, forced on them by the British presence and Moscow’s restraint.

Paratroops at Megara

On the same day, 12 October, the airborne phase of Operation Manna began. A company of the 4th Parachute Battalion of the British 2nd Independent Parachute Brigade landed at the airfield at Megara, some 45 kilometres west of Athens, which had already been secured by the men of Lieutenant Colonel George Jellicoe, who had been advancing through the Peloponnese. The drop took place in a very strong wind; many men were injured on landing, and some were killed. The weather forced the command to suspend further drops, and the rest of the brigade – apart from the 5th Battalion, which arrived on 16 October – did not arrive until 14 October.

The brigade was commanded by Brigadier Charles Pritchard. It was an experienced formation – a few weeks earlier it had fought in southern France – but a small one, a few thousand strong and lightly armed. Its task bore little resemblance to a classic airborne operation: the aim was to seize an airfield quickly where transport aircraft could land, and to reach the capital as fast as possible, before the political vacuum left by the Germans’ departure could be permanently filled by anyone else. From the outset British planning for Operation Manna combined military aims with political ones – installing Papandreou’s government in Athens – and humanitarian ones: bringing food to a population left severely malnourished by years of occupation.

Meanwhile Jellicoe drove into Athens with a small group of soldiers. According to British accounts this happened on 13 October; Jellicoe himself was remembered as one of the first Allied soldiers in the city – ahead of the ELAS units, which, in accordance with the Caserta agreement, kept away from the centre. Immediately afterwards his force, renamed Pompforce, set off northwards in pursuit of the retreating Germans.

14 October: the British in Athens

On 14 October the main body of the British parachute brigade marched into Athens, and further units, including the 23rd Armoured Brigade, soon arrived by sea. British and Greek ships landed troops at Piraeus, whose harbour first had to be swept of mines. In mid-October General Scobie arrived in Athens and took command of all forces in Attica. The British were greeted by crowds, and EAM organised rallies in their honour. Many who lived through those days later described them as the only moment of complete unity among the Greeks – left and right alike saw the newcomers as liberators.

The British forces, however, were very small: a few thousand soldiers were stationed in and around Athens, while ELAS had tens of thousands of men under arms across the country. The British took over the protection of the city and began distributing food – as part of Operation Manna substantial supplies of grain and medicine were brought to Greece, vital for the starving population.

On 17 October the cruiser Georgios Averof, flagship of the Greek navy in exile, sailed into Piraeus with Papandreou’s government on board. The next day, 18 October, the prime minister made a ceremonial entry into Athens. In Syntagma Square he gave a speech announcing the reconstruction of the country, the restoration of democratic freedoms and the punishment of collaborators, and according to accounts the flag from the Averof was ceremonially raised on the Acropolis that day. King George II, contrary to his expectations, remained in Cairo – Papandreou and the British judged that his return before the constitutional question had been settled by a plebiscite might provoke an explosion.

Significance

The liberation of Athens ended three and a half years of occupation that had begun with the Germans’ entry into the city on 27 April 1941. For the Greeks it was a moment of immense relief, but also the point at which unresolved political disputes could no longer be set aside in the face of a common enemy. Papandreou’s government had no armed force of its own apart from a few units brought from the Middle East and a handful of police; the country was largely controlled by ELAS. The British, for whom Greece was the key to their position in the Mediterranean, backed the government but lacked the forces that would have allowed it to impose its will without the cooperation of the left.

The most important dispute became the question of disarming the partisans and building a new army. The government wanted to keep intact the units loyal to it – the Sacred Band and the 3rd Greek Mountain Brigade, which arrived in Athens from Italy in November under Colonel Thrasyvoulos Tsakalotos – while demobilising ELAS. The left replied that under such an arrangement the state would fall into the hands of the right and of people who had collaborated with the occupiers. On top of this came the matter of punishing collaborators, including members of the Security Battalions, some of whom had found their way into the new police formations.

On 1 December 1944 Scobie ordered the guerrilla units to disband; on 2 December the EAM ministers resigned from the government, and on 3 December the police opened fire on a demonstration of many thousands in Syntagma Square, killing several dozen people. Fighting broke out in Athens between ELAS and British and government troops, lasting more than a month and known as the Dekemvriana. On Christmas Day Churchill flew to Athens to look for a political solution; Archbishop Damaskinos became regent. The fighting ended with a truce in January 1945, followed in February by the Varkiza Agreement, which provided for the disarmament of ELAS. The peace proved short-lived, however: in 1946 the Greek Civil War broke out, lasting until 1949 and ending in the defeat of the communists. The October days of 1944, when the flags of all the Allies flew side by side in the streets of Athens, remained in Greek memory as a brief moment of unity before years of division.