Anastasios Papoulas

Anastasios Papoulas was the general who led the Greek army furthest into Anatolia. As commander-in-chief of the Army of Asia Minor from November 1920 to May 1922, he directed every major battle of the Greco-Turkish War except the last: two failed offensives at İnönü, the victory at Kütahya and Eskişehir, and the march on Ankara, which came to a halt on the Sakarya River. He left a few months before the Turkish counter-offensive that ended in catastrophe. A royalist who owed his command to the return of King Constantine I, after the defeat he went over to the camp of his former opponents, and in 1935, as a leader of a failed Venizelist coup, he was sentenced to death and shot. His fortunes mirror the Greek “National Schism”, which for a quarter of a century split the army into two camps.

Youth and service before the Great War

He was born on 13 January 1857 (1 January in the Julian calendar) in Missolonghi, a town that symbolised the Greek struggle for independence. According to Greek biographies, his father, Spyridon, fought in the uprising of 1821 and later became a wealthy shipowner. Papoulas was not a graduate of the Athens cadet school: he joined the army as a volunteer in 1878 and earned his commission through service in the line.

In the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 he commanded a company in Thessaly as a captain. In the early twentieth century he was involved in the so-called Macedonian Struggle, when Greek volunteer bands vied with Bulgarian komitadjis for influence in Ottoman Macedonia, and in 1905 he headed the police in Athens and Piraeus. In the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 he was a colonel and commanded the 10th Infantry Regiment in the army led by the then heir to the throne, Constantine. After the wars he was given command of a division and then a corps.

When King Constantine and Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos clashed in 1915–1917 over Greece’s participation in the Great War, Papoulas sided with the King. After Constantine’s departure, forced by the Entente in June 1917, the new Venizelist authorities removed him from the army, along with hundreds of other royalist officers.

Commander-in-chief in Anatolia

His chance came after the elections of November 1920, which removed Venizelos from power, and the return of Constantine to the throne. The new government replaced the Venizelist commander of the Army of Asia Minor, General Leonidas Paraskevopoulos, with Papoulas, who was appointed in November 1920. The army, stationed around Smyrna since May 1919, was purged: Venizelist officers were removed and replaced by royalists, many of whom had been out of the service for years. At the same time Greece was losing the support of the great powers, which did not recognise Constantine, while the Turkish national movement of Mustafa Kemal was growing in strength.

The government, and from April 1921 Prime Minister Dimitrios Gounaris, concluded that peace could be imposed only by smashing Kemal’s army. At the turn of 1920 and 1921 Papoulas sent troops towards Eskişehir, but in January 1921 İsmet’s Turks stopped them at İnönü. In March a new, larger offensive again broke down at İnönü, although in the south the Greeks briefly took Afyon. Only the third attempt, in July 1921, carefully prepared and based on an outflanking manoeuvre, brought success: in the Battle of Kütahya–Eskişehir the Greek army captured both towns and an important railway line, and Kemal withdrew his forces all the way behind the Sakarya River.

At the end of July, at a council of war in Kütahya attended by the King and Gounaris, the decision was taken to march on Ankara. According to Greek sources Papoulas had doubts but came out in favour of the advance. In August his army crossed the waterless salt steppes, with ever lengthening supply lines, and on 23 August it attacked the Turkish positions on the Sakarya. The Battle of the Sakarya lasted three weeks; the Greeks took some of the heights, including Mount Çal, and came within a few dozen kilometres of Ankara, but they could not break the defence directed by Kemal and his chief of staff, Fevzi Çakmak. In mid-September Papoulas withdrew the army to the Eskişehir–Afyon line, in good order, though destroying villages and bridges along the way.

A year of waiting and departure

The front fell silent. The Greek army held hundreds of kilometres of front deep in Anatolia, far from the sea, and the country had neither the money for further war nor allies who would help to end it. The great powers proposed an armistice and the evacuation of Asia Minor; Kemal demanded an unconditional withdrawal. Over the winter the morale of an army worn out by years of war fell sharply. Papoulas, historians record, warned the government about the state of the army and differed ever more sharply with it over how the war should be continued. In the spring of 1922, in a dispute with the government over the further conduct of the war, he asked to be relieved and left in May 1922. As his successor he proposed General Viktor Dousmanis or Georgios Hatzianestis; the government of Petros Protopapadakis chose the latter. Three months later, in August 1922, the Turkish Great Offensive shattered the front, and in September the Turks entered Smyrna.

Change of camp and death

After the defeat and Constantine’s abdication, forced by the mutinous army, the revolutionary government put on trial the politicians and commanders blamed for the catastrophe. Papoulas, although he had commanded the army for a year and a half, was not among the accused. According to Greek sources he testified as a witness for the prosecution against Hatzianestis, shifting much of the responsibility onto his successor, and not without the risk of being charged himself. Hatzianestis and five politicians were shot on 28 November 1922.

In the following years Papoulas went over to the camp of the Venizelists and republicans, his former enemies. Greece became a republic in 1924, but in the 1930s, under the People’s Party government, the prospects of a restoration of the monarchy grew. In March 1935 the Venizelists attempted a coup in defence of the republic; Papoulas was one of the leaders of the conspiratorial military organisation that prepared it. The coup collapsed within a few days. The government opted for exemplary sentences: on 24 April 1935, Holy Wednesday in the Orthodox calendar, the 78-year-old Papoulas was shot in Athens together with General Miltiadis Koimisis. Venizelos was sentenced to death in absentia, and the army was purged of his supporters. A few months later General Georgios Kondylis carried out a coup that restored the monarchy, and in 1936 power passed to the dictator Ioannis Metaxas.

Significance

Papoulas remains an ambiguous figure in Greek memory: the commander who gave the army its greatest victory in Anatolia and brought it closest to its goal, but also a co-author of the decision to march on Ankara, after which the army was no longer capable of winning the war. His execution in 1935 closed a circle that had opened in 1917: throughout the interwar years Greece settled its accounts over the “National Schism” through courts martial, coups and purges of the officer corps. The army that Mussolini attacked in 1940 was by then the army of the monarchy and of Metaxas, purged of Venizelists; many of them, despite their requests, were not restored to service even in the face of the Italian invasion.