Georgios Hatzianestis

Georgios Hatzianestis (also transliterated Hadzianestis) was the last commander-in-chief of the Greek Army of Asia Minor. He took it over in May 1922, when the front had been stuck deep in Anatolia for a year, and in August that year Mustafa Kemal’s Great Offensive shattered it within a few days. The defeat ended the Greek dream of the “Great Idea” (the Megali Idea), cost Greece Smyrna and forced more than a million Anatolian Greeks to flee. Hatzianestis, an eccentric and harsh officer whom many contemporaries considered unbalanced, became the scapegoat for this catastrophe: he was the only soldier sentenced to death in the Trial of the Six, and was shot together with five politicians. In 2010 a Greek court quashed the sentence.

Artillery officer

He was born in Athens in December 1863; sources give the date as 3 December without explaining whether this is according to the Julian calendar, then in use in Greece. He came from a wealthy and influential family: his father, Nikolaos, was prefect of Attica and Boeotia, and his mother, Maria, was the daughter of the writer Iakovos Pitsipios. In 1884 he graduated from the Athens cadet school (the Evelpidon School) as a second lieutenant of artillery, and then, like many officers close to the court, completed his military education in Germany. He worked in the army’s geographical service.

In the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 he was a staff officer and later commanded a mountain artillery battery. The defeat in Thessaly set off reforms in the course of which he was promoted into the staff officer corps. When the Military League carried out the Goudi coup in 1909, directed among other things against the court’s influence in the army, Hatzianestis, who was close to the royal family, left the service.

The Balkan Wars and the Schism

He returned in 1912 as a reserve major. In the First Balkan War he was chief of staff of the 6th and then the 5th Division in the army of Crown Prince Constantine, and in the Second Balkan War again with the 6th Division. He was promoted to colonel, and in August 1914 became commandant of the cadet school.

In 1915 he took command of the 5th Division at Drama in eastern Macedonia. His discipline was so ruthless that at the beginning of 1916 his soldiers mutinied, and he had to be transferred to the 15th Division. Meanwhile the country was split by the National Schism: the conflict between the King, who wanted to keep Greece neutral, and Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, who wanted war on the side of the Entente. Hatzianestis was a committed royalist. When Constantine had to leave the country in June 1917 and Venizelos took power, he was removed from the army. He spent 1917–1920 abroad, mainly in Switzerland, where the exiled king was living.

The last commander in Anatolia

After the elections of November 1920, which Venizelos lost, and Constantine’s return, Hatzianestis went back into service. By then Greece was already fighting the Turkish national movement in Anatolia: since May 1919 its troops had held the area around Smyrna, and in 1921 the army of General Anastasios Papoulas had advanced as far as the Sakarya river near Ankara before being forced to fall back. In April 1922 Hatzianestis was given command of the Army of Thrace, and in May, after Papoulas resigned, the government of Petros Protopapadakis appointed him commander-in-chief of the Army of Asia Minor. Papoulas had named him as one of two candidates, but the choice caused surprise: Hatzianestis had not commanded in the field for years and had a reputation in the army as an oddity. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George later described him as “a psychiatric case”.

At the beginning of June 1922 he assumed command in Smyrna, at a headquarters several hundred kilometres from the front, and stayed there most of the time. The government in Athens was looking for a way out of a war it could neither win nor end. In the summer a plan emerged to threaten Constantinople instead of seeking a decision in Anatolia, and Hatzianestis backed it eagerly. A dozen or so infantry battalions and several artillery batteries were moved from the Anatolian front to Eastern Thrace. At the end of July 1922 the Allied powers occupying Constantinople threatened to use force, and the plan collapsed. The weakened army in Anatolia was left on an overstretched line without reserves.

On 26 August 1922 Kemal struck near Afyon. The front broke within two days, and on 30 August, at the Battle of Dumlupınar, the main Greek forces were surrounded and destroyed. According to accounts cited by historians, when the offensive began Hatzianestis was aboard a ship sailing from Smyrna and was recalled by radio. Command disintegrated; General Nikolaos Trikoupis, surrounded with the remnants of his troops, was captured on 2 September and only learnt in captivity that he had been appointed to succeed Hatzianestis. At the beginning of September Hatzianestis was formally replaced by General Georgios Polymenakos, but by then the army was in disorderly retreat towards the coast. On 9 September the Turks entered Smyrna, which soon went up in flames.

An anecdote repeated by many authors has it that in those days Hatzianestis believed his legs were made of glass and was afraid to get out of bed in case they broke. It is hard to verify, but it says a great deal about how his contemporaries saw him.

The Trial of the Six

At the end of September 1922 mutinous troops from the Aegean islands, led by Colonels Nikolaos Plastiras and Stylianos Gonatas, forced Constantine to abdicate. The revolutionary committee looked for those to blame for the defeat. In October the leading royalist politicians and Hatzianestis were arrested. An extraordinary court martial, which convened on 13 November 1922, charged eight men with high treason: the former prime ministers Dimitrios Gounaris, Petros Protopapadakis and Nikolaos Stratos, the ministers Georgios Baltatzis, Nikolaos Theotokis, Michail Goudas and Xenophon Stratigos, and Hatzianestis, the only military commander. The charge was in essence one of political and military errors, not treason. Hatzianestis defended himself by arguing that he was being unjustly blamed for the course of a war that all his predecessors had conducted.

On 28 November 1922 (15 November by the Julian calendar, which Greece used until 1923) the court sentenced six of the accused to death. The sentence was carried out a few hours later in a field at Goudi near Athens. Hatzianestis, it was reported, tore off his own epaulettes, refused a blindfold and said before the volley that he was ashamed only of having commanded an army of runaways. The execution caused outrage in Europe; Britain recalled its minister from Athens.

Memory and rehabilitation

The Trial of the Six became one of the deepest wounds in Greek politics. For royalists it was judicial murder; for Venizelists, a deserved punishment for destroying Venizelos’s achievement. Historians generally see it as an act of political revenge: responsibility for the catastrophe was spread across many governments, including that of Venizelos, which had sent the army to Smyrna in 1919. The verdict on Hatzianestis is harsher than on the politicians, because as commander he did weaken the front on the eve of the offensive and failed to control the army at the moment of crisis. Even so, in 2010 the Supreme Court of Greece, at the request of Protopapadakis’s descendants, quashed the sentences on all those convicted.

The defeat for which he paid with his life had consequences reaching far beyond Greece. Victorious Turkey forced at Lausanne in 1923 a revision of the Treaty of Sèvres that had been imposed on it – the first successful revision of the Versailles settlement. In Greece itself the catastrophe brought the republic and then years of coups, until the restoration of the monarchy in 1935 and the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, under which the country entered the Second World War.