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Why should we be interested in a battle that took place 80 years ago, in December 1944, in Athens?[1] The Dekemvriana (“December events”), as the clash between British troops and Greek government forces with Greek Communist resistance fighters has become known, was a highly significant incident in World War II, yet remains little-known outside of Greece. It was the sole instance of Allied forces clashing in an armed conflict during the war, and the first military intervention by an Allied army in a liberated country. While chronologically falling within the context of World War II, which had not yet ended, politically, this intervention was more in line with the Cold War, which had not yet begun.
Menelaos Charalambidis is a historian and author of several books on the Greek resistance and civil war. He is also a founding member of the Social History Forum.
Furthermore, the Dekemvriana was an instance of popular uprising with a distinct class-based character. Citizens, mainly from the poor districts of Athens and Piraeus, took up arms and fought against a well-organized and well-equipped Allied army operating within a colonial logic and the Greek conservative forces that supported it. The insurgents may have been severely lacking in weapons and inadequately organized, but they were also driven by a deep belief that justice was on their side and that they fought for a democratic post-war Greece.
The Dekemvriana is a typical example of how a deep crisis — one taking the worst possible form, that of war and foreign military occupation — can, in a very limited time, sweep away political constellations, provoking their rearrangement or even their complete overthrow on a national and international level.[2] The December clash also shows us that in times of crisis, the relations of dependence between great powers and peripheral states are revealed to their full extent. As we will see, in their attempt to regain power, the Greek government-in-exile and the country’s king allowed, if not sought out, the crude involvement of British political and military forces in settling domestic Greek affairs. The Dekemvriana was a dramatic concession of national independence.
Finally, the Battle of Athens shows that the post-war world had begun in earnest well before Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany on 8 May 1945.
The Axis Invasion
Greece entered World War II on 28 October 1940, when Fascist Italy invaded the country from the Greek-Albanian border. After fierce and heroic fighting, the Greek army repelled the attack and fought back, pushing the invaders back into Albania. This was the first defeat of the Axis powers during World War II.
The Italian failure forced Nazi Germany to launch an attack on Greece. On 6 April 1941, the German army invaded the country from its northern border. The Greeks found themselves fighting against the Italians and the Germans at the same time, and the help offered by the Allies (60,000 Australian, New Zealander, British, Cypriot, Palestinian, and Jewish soldiers arrived in Greece in March 1941) could not halt the German advance.
At the end of April, the king and the Greek government decided to leave Athens to avoid capture by the German army. The Greek government-in-exile settled in London, its military department in Cairo. The fight to occupy Greece lasted two months and was concluded on 30 May 1941, with victory for the Axis forces in the Battle of Crete. A triple military occupation was imposed on Greece by the Germans, the Italians, and the Bulgarians. The country was divided into three occupation zones.
In the new reality created by the occupation and resistance struggle, EAM represented the general demand for political change after the end of the war.
Unprecedented plundering of the Greek economy, mostly by the German occupation authorities, mass terrorism by the Wehrmacht and the SS and the collaboration of Greek politicians, military officers, and businessmen with the occupiers disrupted the cohesion of Greek society. From the early days of the occupation, a rift began to form between those who took advantage of the emergency to get rich and those who suffered because of it.
The chasm widened with the outbreak of the deadly famine in the winter of 1941–1942. The worst European famine of World War II, it left at least 45,000 dead in Athens and Piraeus and about 250,000 in total in a country of 7.3 million inhabitants. Most of the victims belonged to vulnerable population groups in urban centres. The largest of these were refugees (about 20 percent of the population) who had arrived in the country from Anatolia and East Thrace after the defeat of the Greek army in the Greco-Turkish war (1919–1922). In 1941, they still lived in squalid conditions in slums on the outskirts of Athens and Piraeus. The famine also affected the middle class, which saw its income evaporate due to the sharp rise in inflation and the collapse of the economy.
From Resistance to Liberation
After the famine subsided in the summer of 1942, these population groups played a central role in the growth of the Greek resistance movement. They joined resistance organizations en masse, particularly the National Liberation Front (EAM), which was founded on the initiative of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE).[3] In contrast, those who collaborated with the occupiers formed a front that fought against EAM-KKE. Their aim was to prevent EAM from rising to power after the end of the war, in order to retain what they had gained from collaborating during the years of the occupation.
The Greek resistance movement was highly significant — and powerful. EAM was the largest resistance organization within the movement, representing the political radicalization of a significant portion of Greek society due to the extreme hardships of daily life that had become almost universal during the occupation. Anatolian refugees, women, and youth who until then had been living on the political margins found themselves at the vanguard of political action through their membership in EAM. In October 1944, when Greece was liberated, three powerful groups were in a position to shape Greece’s future: EAM, the liberals and monarchists who had formed a temporary anti-EAM alliance, and the British.
At the time of liberation, everything pointed to EAM prevailing. The Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), EAM’s guerrilla army, dominated most of the country, while the political organizations of EAM and the party organizations of the KKE were flourishing. This was in part due to the trust they had earned through heroic resistance activities, which had garnered unprecedented levels of political influence for the Left in Greece, and in part due to the brute power of their armed forces.
In the new reality created by the occupation and resistance struggle, EAM represented the general demand for political change after the end of the war. It sought to abolish the monarchy and prevent the return to power of the pre-war political establishment — the politicians who had proved incapable of preventing, or even unwilling to prevent, the imposition of a dictatorship by General Ioannis Metaxas and the king (1936–1941). EAM sought reform over revolution, seeing that it could rise to power through bourgeois parliamentary processes without using revolutionary force. It called for a referendum on the abolition of the monarchy and elections to form the new parliament.
Two Fronts against EAM
The EAM’s political opponents were weak. During the occupation, two anti-EAM fronts had formed around equal pillars of power: the “internal” front formed around Ioannis Rallis’s collaborationist government with the support of the German occupation authorities,[4] while the “external” front formed around the Greek government-in-exile, with the support of the British government. The anti-EAM front of Rallis’s administration had been condemned in the minds of most Greeks, as it cooperated closely with the Germans. The “external” anti-EAM front was also weakened, however, as its prestige had suffered a great blow. The king and the government-in-exile did not offer any substantial help to the resistance struggle — they were reduced to petty party conflicts aiming to secure a place in post-war power. Furthermore, the king bore primary responsibility for the imposition of the dictatorship in 1936. The big loser in a smooth post-war transfer of power would have been the monarchist bloc.
The British wanted a friendly (that is, non-EAM/Communist) Greek government and for the king to return to the throne, since he was the main guardian of their interests in Greece. The British hoped to secure control of maritime routes in the southeastern Mediterranean, through which they communicated with their colonies in India, and to use Greece as a barrier to the Soviet Union’s entry into the Mediterranean. Moreover, large British companies were active in Greece, mainly in the energy, transport, and construction sectors, while British banks had a significant number of Greek government bonds in their portfolios. The Greek state had declared a default on its public debt in 1932 (bankruptcy) as a result of the global financial crisis of 1929. An EAM government would hurt the profits and interests of British businesses.
The sunny morning of Saturday, 3 December did not foreshadow the day’s events.
In signing the Atlantic Charter in September 1941, the Allies and governments-in-exile laid out the framework for their post-war policy. They explicitly declared that they would respect the right of all people to freely choose the form of their government. However, the progress of the war undermined this commitment. By 1943, it had already become clear that post-war political developments would be determined not by democratic declarations, but by the Allies’ aspirations in rearranging the global power balance.
The division of Europe into spheres of influence was the first episode in the coming Cold War. In their advance towards Berlin, the Red Army liberated the countries of Eastern Europe, placing them within the Soviet sphere of influence. The liberation of the Western European countries by American and British troops put them under the influence of the Western Allies. Greece was the only Balkan country to enter the British sphere of influence, with the consent of the Soviet Union. Discussions between the British and the Soviets to define spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and the Balkans had already begun in the spring of 1944. They were finalized during Churchill’s visit to Moscow on 9 October 1944, which led to the famous percentages agreement. Greece was placed in the British sphere of influence.
British Interventions in Greek Politics
A national unity government was formed in September 1944, incorporating parties from across the political spectrum including, for the first time, the Communists. EAM was given six ministries. The centrist politician Georgios Papandreou was appointed prime minister. The government arrived in Athens on 18 October 1944 and would serve as an interim authority to carry out the transition from occupied to post-war Greece.
The government faced enormous problems. The country had been devastated by the war and looting by the occupying armies. The most pressing issues were rebuilding the economy, punishing those who collaborated with the occupiers, and establishing a new national army. Challenges arose regarding the composition of the new army: how many soldiers would come from EAM and how many from the anti-EAM side?
It was at this point that the first critical British intervention took place, although the negotiations had not yet reached a clear impasse. On 1 December 1944, General Ronald Scobie[5] issued a decree ordering the disarmament of the ELAS and EDES guerrilla armies.[6] EAM could not accept the disarmament of ELAS, which controlled almost all of Greece, without receiving guarantees of equal participation in the new national army. The next day, its six ministers resigned from the government in protest. EAM announced a rally in Syntagma Square on 3 December, as well as a general strike.
The sunny morning of Saturday, 3 December did not foreshadow the day’s events. When the first large bloc of protesters appeared in the square, the police opened fire, killing at least 13 protesters and injuring more than 60. The order for the police to shoot at the unarmed crowd was given by the police chief, Angelos Evert. However, it is not known who gave the order to Evert. Many pointed to the monarchists, the only ones likely to benefit from a disrupted political process. EAM decided not to launch an armed response.
Even after the massacre in Syntagma Square, a political solution was sought by the British government’s representatives in Athens, the Greek prime minister, and EAM leadership. It was agreed that Papandreou would resign and centrist politician Themistoklis Sofoulis would take over as prime minister. On 4 December, Papandreou handed in his resignation and Sofoulis agreed to take over as prime minister — EAM agreed, and so did the British envoys who had taken the lead on reaching this solution.
But Winston Churchill did not accept it. The extent of British intervention is evident in the unprecedented and absurd events of that day; the Greek prime minister handed in his resignation, which was not accepted by the British prime minister, and thus he remained in his post. This was Britain’s second critical intervention. Churchill’s move closed the door on the last chance of finding a solution by political means. The situation would now be resolved militarily.
Athens as Battlefield
The Dekemvriana turned Athens into a battlefield. Military operations began on 4 December 1944 and ended on 11 January 1945. The fighting can be divided into two phases: before 17 December, when ELAS had the upper hand and the small number of British forces were backed into a defensive posture, and after 17 December, when the arrival of reinforcements gave the upper hand to the British.
The first major battle began on 6 December, when ELAS attacked the barracks of the Greek Royal Gendarmerie in the Makrygianni district at the foot of the Acropolis. Crossing through the ancient ruins of the Temple of Olympian Zeus and through the alleys of Plaka (the old city), some 1,200 young men and women from the refugee municipalities ferociously attacked 550 gendarmerie men, who had barricaded themselves inside the barracks. The intervention of the British air force at the crucial moment when the gendarmerie’s defences were beginning to crumble prevented ELAS from seizing the barracks.
In the following days, the residents of Athens were astonished to see mortars and artillery shells destroying their homes, British tanks passing by outside their windows, bearded ELAS guerrillas smashing doors and windows to take cover in houses and factories, British airplanes bombing entire districts, and snipers firing from rooftops and bell towers. This was the biggest battle ever to take place in Athens.
The British attack led to a massacre. In a single day, 290 people died, most of them civilians killed by the bombing.
ELAS’s first operation against a British target took place on 13 December in Kolonaki, a wealthy district of Athens. Guerrillas breached the external wall of the camp where the most important British unit was stationed, entered it, and started fighting hand-to-hand. The British were caught completely by surprise. In the darkness of night and in the panic caused by a huge explosion among the fuel tanks, all coordination was impossible.
British corporal Rehill saw a female ELAS fighter running down the slope of Mount Lycabettus, holding a grenade: “She must have been hit, as she slid on to her back and lay briefly waxen-faced and staring before the grenade exploded still in her hand … The blood-soaked clothes lay in a shapeless huddle.” Immediately afterwards, a British lorry went up in flames and the ammunition it was carrying began to explode. Private White went down the road to size up the situation. Upon returning, he said to Rehill, “There’s a poor bloody fellow with his arm off — they’re getting the bloody hammer here!” As soon as dawn broke, ELAS withdrew, taking with them 108 British prisoners and leaving behind 48 British injured and 20 dead.
One of the reasons that ELAS did not take advantage of the plight of the British during the first phase of the Dekemvriana was the country’s total dependence on external humanitarian and financial aid. EAM could not quickly repair the damage the war had caused to transport and production units. EAM leadership knew that the survival of the undernourished Greek people and the recovery of the economy would only be possible with British aid. It was following this logic that EAM-KKE decided to prioritize political over military objectives. They attempted to push the British into negotiations by attacking at first only the Greek government forces.[1] This explains why ELAS did not carry out the anticipated general attack against the inadequate British forces in the centre of Athens during the first phase of the battle.
In December 1944, there was a major German counterattack on the Western Front known as the Battle of the Bulge. Many believed that the British could not open a new front, especially against their EAM allies, in the capital of a country that had just been liberated. Both EAM leadership and British officers themselves were therefore taken by surprise when Churchill ordered the transfer of a large number of soldiers from the active front in northern Italy to Greece. By January 1945, the British government had sent some 70,000 soldiers to Greece, a larger number than it had sent in March 1941 to bolster the Greek defence against the impending German invasion.
The British counter-attack began on 17 December, after the arrival of reinforcements with carrier planes. The streets of Athens and Piraeus now saw Scots, Welsh, English, Armenian, Kurdish, Cypriot, South African, Assyrian, and Indian soldiers fighting, organized into 20 infantry battalions, two artillery regiments, four tank regiments with 140 armoured vehicles, and eight air force squadrons with some 120 aircraft. The superiority of the British was overwhelming.
A week later, the British prime minister arrived in Athens in an attempt to find a political solution. Churchill sought to restore his image in British and international public opinion; he had been severely criticized by the British press and Labour Party MPs for the involvement of British troops in the battle of Athens. Yet discussions between EAM and the government reached an impasse, giving the green light to major British clearance operations.
The major attack against the eastern suburbs of Athens, where ELAS had a significant stronghold, began on 29 December in the municipality of Kaisariani, a slum built to house refugees from Anatolia that the British called the “Greek Stalingrad”. The British engaged in a fierce two-hour bombardment before the infantry invaded the area. Giorgos Gounaris, an ELAS guerrilla, recalled in his unpublished diary:
In the streets, in houses, on balconies, shells are constantly bursting … They have driven us crazy with the bombing … Three fellow fighters go up to the roof of a house with a machine gun. With a swoop, [British] fighter planes with rockets blew all three of them up in the air, literally cutting them to pieces. Fellow fighters who rushed up there found nothing but pieces.
The British attack led to a massacre. In a single day, 290 people died, most of them civilians killed by the bombing.
After clearing the eastern suburbs, the British gathered the entirety of their forces for the final strike against ELAS in the city centre, the western and northern suburbs. Some of the fiercest street fighting took place in Exarcheia, where ELAS members from the universities were fighting. Female and male students barricaded themselves in apartment buildings, using Molotov cocktails to intercept British tanks and tins filled with gravel and dynamite as grenades. Those who fought against the British in the Battle of Exarcheia included the renowned composers Mikis Theodorakis and Iannis Xenakis, whose face was severely injured by a British shell, the philosopher Kostas Axelos, and film directors Nikos Koundouros and Alexis Damianos.
The overwhelming superiority of the British forced ELAS leadership to order their forces to withdraw from Athens on the evening of 4 January 1945. The British kept bombarding the guerrilla columns as they withdrew, causing heavy casualties. The armistice that put an end to the fighting was signed on 11 January 1945. The battle’s toll reflects its ferocity: 70,000 injured, 5,500 dead, and 25,000 displaced in only one month of fighting.
Politically, the Dekemvriana concluded on 12 February 1945 with the signing of the Varkiza Agreement between EAM and the Greek government. One of the pact’s major terms was ELAS’s disarmament. The victors of the Dekemvriana did not respect the agreement — immediately after ELAS surrendered its weapons, the period of “White Terror” (1945–1946) began, a time of relentless persecution of those on the Left by law enforcement agencies and far-right paramilitary groups. This persecution forced many former ELAS guerrillas to take to the mountains again and was one of the causes of the Civil War (1946–1949); the new guerrillas joined the Communist-led Democratic Army of Greece and fought against government forces.
The Dekemvriana’s International Dimensions
The Dekemvriana was not merely a regional conflict concerning a small country in Southeastern Europe. It may have been the only instance of armed confrontation between allies during World War II, but its political origins reveal themes common to many European countries. The Dekemvriana was part of a broader conflict that broke out within European countries over post-war power.
The military takeover of countries by Axis forces created a power vacuum. Governments fled abroad, national armies were disbanded, and security forces and the state apparatus were put under the command of the occupiers. The old world, which had failed to prevent the rise of Fascism and Nazism, had lost its prestige. A new world, which would rise from the ashes of the war, had to undertake the task of post-war reconstruction. The end of the war marked the beginning of a process of re-establishing state power in a volatile environment that left many possibilities open. The Allies tried to control this process by political means and, where this was not possible, with armed forces.
Post-war, the state apparatus was not purged of the collaborators. On the contrary, those who fought against the Communists by cooperating with the German occupiers were employed in post-war governments to build the new state.
The outbreak of the Dekemvriana must be understood in a context in which the political aspirations of EAM, the most powerful political and military power within the country, could not be reconciled with those of the Allies — the international power holders — and particularly of the British.
For the Allies, interested in stabilizing power, preventing revolutions and uprisings, and securing their interests, the Dekemvriana represented the great risk they saw for post-war Europe. A viewpoint typical of the Allied powers is recorded in a report US Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson wrote to Harry Hopkins, presidential advisor to Roosevelt. Acheson was in Athens in December 1944 and saw an uprising unfold with his own eyes. In his report, he pointed out that if the Allies did not actively assist the struggle of citizens to survive and the restoration of the social and moral order, a potential bloodbath awaited the entirety of Europe that would lead to the fall of governments. Acheson feared that the scenes he witnessed in Athens might spread throughout Europe, causing a pan-European civil war.
The British came to the conclusion that if the Dekemvriana became a successful example of an uprising, it could be transmitted, domino-like, to other European capitals: “If affairs in Greece worked out as we hoped they might, the effect might be to stop an enormous amount of anarchy in Europe and to discourage similar outbreaks in other countries.”
The Dekemvriana consolidated two factors that characterized Greek political reality until the fall of the junta in 1974. One concerned external intervention in the country’s internal issues. Britain’s military intervention during the Dekemvriana turned into a constant foreign (as of 1947, American) presence. Foreign intervention in Greek political developments may have undermined national independence, but it provided valuable support to the Greek governments and the king, who returned to the country with the 1946 referendum. This support allowed them to maintain a climate of tension and a regime of harsh persecution against the Left.
The second factor concerned the formation of a new nationalist state. The Greek state had been anti-communist since the 1920s, a tendency that had intensified after the six-year dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas. Anti-communism became the central state policy during the occupation and the cornerstone on which collaboration with the occupiers was based.
Post-war, the state apparatus was not purged of the collaborators. On the contrary, those who fought against the Communists by cooperating with the German occupiers were employed in post-war governments to build the new state. The nationalist state institutionalized harsh persecution of those on the Left (thousands of executions, long-term imprisonment, and exile) and legislative discrimination against Greeks according to their political beliefs. It was a state that, by invoking the Communist danger, prevailed for a full 30 years, prevented the democratization of the country, advanced the people who enforced and staffed the dictatorial Regime of the Colonels in 1967, and collapsed with the fall of that junta in the summer of 1974.
[1] Everything mentioned here is discussed in detail in Menelaos Haralabidis, Δεκεμβριανά 1944. Η Μάχη της Αθήνας (Alexandria Publications, 2014).
[2] For more on the immense political subversions caused by the period of occupation in Greece, see Menelaos Haralabidis, Η εμπειρία της Κατοχής και της Αντίστασης στην Αθήνα (Alexandria Publications, 2012).
[3] Three smaller parties — the Socialist Party of Greece, the Union of People’s Democracy, and the Agrarian Party — also participated in EAM.
[4] The German authorities established three Greek administrations during the occupation.
[5] In anticipation of impending liberation, the Greek government placed the Greek and British armed forces that would be operating in Greece under the command of British general Ronald Scobie.
[6] The National Republican Greek League (EDES) was a resistance organization. Although much smaller in terms of guerrilla numbers and political appeal, it was ELAS’s rival and enjoyed the support of the British government.
[7] The Greek forces that operated jointly with the British forces were: the Greek Mountain Brigade, a unit of the Greek army that had formed in the Middle East, the Cities Police and the gendarmerie, which had collaborated closely with the German authorities during the occupation, and the National Guard Defence Battalions, formed during the Dekemvriana by men from non-EAM resistance organizations as well as organizations that had collaborated with the occupiers.