The National Bands Agreement in Greece

On 5 July 1943 the National Bands Agreement (Greek: Σύμφωνο των Εθνικών Ομάδων, Symfono ton Ethnikon Omadon) was signed in occupied Greece. It was concluded between the British Military Mission attached to the Greek guerrillas and the main organisations of the armed resistance: the communist ELAS, the republican EDES and, a fortnight later, EKKA. All these groups were recognised as “national bands”, which were to operate under the orders of the Allied Middle East Command in Cairo, receive arms and supplies from the British and answer to a joint guerrilla headquarters.

The date of 5 July refers to the signature of ELAS, the largest of the organisations, without which the agreement would have been meaningless. The commander of EDES, Colonel Napoleon Zervas, had accepted an earlier version of the text as early as the end of March 1943, and EKKA signed the document on 18 July. According to Greek studies, the final talks were held from 6 June in the village of Liaskovo (today Petroto) in the Karditsa prefecture, but the participants’ accounts differ as to the place and the order of the individual signatures, which is why some works date the agreement only loosely to “early July”.

Why the British wanted an agreement

After the Gorgopotamos viaduct was blown up in November 1942, the British team of Lieutenant Colonel Edmund “Eddie” Myers of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) did not return to Cairo. It remained in the mountains as the British Military Mission to the Greek guerrillas, and its liaison officers dispersed to the bands of all the organisations. Myers, soon promoted to brigadier, and his deputy, Major Chris Woodhouse, quickly realised that the greatest threat to sabotage operations was not the Italians or the Germans but the mutual hostility of the guerrillas themselves.

Since the first action of ELAS in June 1942, the army led by the communists of the EAM front had grown faster than any other and sought to be the only armed force in the mountains. In the spring of 1943 its units broke up the band of Colonel Stefanos Sarafis in Thessaly; after a short captivity Sarafis went over to ELAS and became its military commander. ELAS also disarmed the 5/42 Evzone Regiment, the EKKA unit of Colonel Dimitrios Psarros; Psarros himself was held prisoner by ELAS for a time and was released only after Myers intervened. There were clashes with EDES units, and in March 1943 Zervas asked the British for permission to strike at ELAS. After the liberation of Karditsa in March, ELAS already controlled a large part of Thessaly and Central Greece.

The British also had a reason of their own, a strictly military one, for bringing about an agreement. At the Casablanca Conference the Allies had decided that their next objective in the Mediterranean would be Sicily (Operation Husky). To draw German attention away from it, they mounted an extensive deception campaign, Operation Barclay, designed to convince Adolf Hitler that the Allies would land in the Balkans. Its best-known element was Operation Mincemeat. A sham invasion, however, needed real evidence, and only a wave of coordinated sabotage in Greece could supply it. That required the cooperation of all the organisations at once.

Difficult negotiations

Myers presented the first draft of a “military agreement” in March 1943. Zervas signed it at once, since he was counting on British arms and protection against his stronger rival. ELAS and the EAM leadership hesitated for a long time. The communists’ representative on the ELAS staff, Andreas Tzimas (nom de guerre Vasilis Samariniotis), did not question cooperation with the British or the supplies as such, but objected to ELAS being placed on an equal footing with the smaller groups. He argued that his organisation had been founded first, had the most men and enjoyed the broadest support, and should therefore command the whole. Myers, for his part, insisted that he would not take the matter forward in Cairo until ELAS released the captured Psarros and his officers.

At Liaskovo ELAS was represented by Sarafis and Tzimas, EDES by Zervas and his deputy Komninos Pyromaglou, and the British by Myers and Woodhouse. In the end the idea of a “unified” headquarters, in which numerical superiority would have been decisive, was dropped in favour of a “joint” one. ELAS sent three representatives to it – in effect its entire three-man command: Sarafis as military commander, Aris Velouchiotis as “first kapetanios” and Tzimas as the representative of EAM. The other organisations and the British Mission had one representative each. Every organisation kept its own command and its separate identity, and Greece was divided into areas of operation assigned to the individual groups.

The agreement bound the parties to carry out the orders of Middle East Command, headed since February 1943 by General Henry Maitland Wilson, and to refrain from fighting one another and from raiding the areas of other organisations; the British, in turn, undertook to deliver arms, ammunition, clothing and gold regularly. The Joint General Headquarters of the Guerrillas (Κοινό Γενικό Στρατηγείο Ανταρτών) began work on 18 July at Pertouli, a summer resort in the mountains west of Trikala. On the same day Colonel Psarros and the politician Georgios Kartalis signed the document on behalf of EKKA. The admission of smaller organisations was also considered, among them the nationalist PAO, active in Macedonia.

Operation Animals

The agreement provided the political underpinning for Operation Animals, a wave of sabotage planned by Cairo as part of Barclay. On 29 May Myers learnt that the Allies would land in Sicily in the second week of July, and he was ordered to begin the operation on 21 June. As early as the night of 1–2 June ELAS sappers blew up a passing train carrying ammunition and Italian soldiers in the Kournovo tunnel on the railway north of Lamia; depending on the source, between 200 and 300 Italians were killed, and in reprisal the Italian authorities shot 106 prisoners from the camp at Larissa. On the night of 20–21 June a group of six British SOE officers, without the guerrillas taking part, blew up the Asopos viaduct, not far from the Gorgopotamos bridge. The Salonika–Athens railway remained out of action until the end of August.

Between 21 June and 11 July guerrillas of all the organisations blew up bridges, railway lines and telephone lines in Macedonia, Thessaly and Epirus. At the Sarantaporo pass an ELAS unit destroyed a German motor column, and American aircraft bombed airfields near Salonika and Athens. Myers called off the operation on 11 July, the day after the Allied landing in Sicily.

The outcome was favourable to the Allies. The German command, alarmed by the sabotage and by false reports of troop concentrations in Egypt and Syria, substantially reinforced its forces in Greece in the summer of 1943; among the units sent there was the 1st Mountain Division, placed under Army Group E of General Alexander Löhr in Salonika. On 25 July Erwin Rommel even flew to Salonika to take command in the south-east, only to be recalled that same day as a result of events in Rome. The civilian population paid the price: German and Italian punitive expeditions burned villages and shot hostages, and Wilson himself later admitted that the Greeks had paid heavily for the operation.

The agreement’s short life

The joint headquarters never became a real command. Zervas and Psarros attended its meetings only once and thereafter sent their deputies; in practice the headquarters was run by the ELAS command, which had a majority in it. The accord lasted only through the summer of 1943, when Velouchiotis and Zervas even made a joint tour of villages in Epirus to announce it.

In August Myers took a delegation of guerrillas from all the organisations to Cairo. The EAM representatives demanded ministerial posts in the government-in-exile of Emmanouil Tsouderos and a guarantee that King George II would not return to the country before a plebiscite on the form of government. The King, backed by Winston Churchill, refused; the delegates went back to the mountains empty-handed, and Myers, suspected in London of being too well disposed towards EAM, was not allowed to return to Greece. Woodhouse took over the leadership of the Mission.

The final blow to the agreement was the Italian surrender in September 1943. Each organisation tried to seize as many of the Italian garrisons’ weapons as it could, and ELAS gained the most, disarming among others the Pinerolo Division. In October ELAS units attacked EDES. The fighting, which historians call the first round of the Greek Civil War, was ended only by a truce concluded under British pressure in February 1944 at Plaka and Mirofyllo. In April 1944 ELAS destroyed the 5/42 Evzone Regiment, and Psarros was killed by ELAS soldiers.

Significance

The National Bands Agreement was the only moment when the entire armed resistance in Greece formally operated under a single command and according to a single plan. In military terms it served its purpose: Operation Animals helped to confirm the Germans in their belief that the Allies were aiming at the Balkans, and it tied down in Greece divisions that were needed elsewhere. It also showed that the guerrillas in the Greek mountains were a real force that the Allies had to reckon with.

Politically, the agreement solved nothing. It merely postponed the conflict between the communists and their opponents, which intensified as soon as the common threat had passed and in post-war Greece grew into a bloody civil war. At the same time it consolidated Britain’s role as arbiter of Greek affairs, a role London exercised right up to the country’s liberation in the autumn of 1944 and beyond.