Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [243]
Resistance in Greece became a more widespread popular movement than in western Europe. Some spectacular acts of sabotage were carried out by SOE teams, notably the 1942 destruction of the Gorgopotamos bridge. But “pundits overestimated what guerrillas could achieve,”893 in the words of Noel Annan, who served on the Joint Intelligence Staff of the Cabinet Office. He asserts that such successes as the destruction of the Gorgopotamos came too late to be strategically useful, and made the planners in London overly optimistic. “It took months for our liaison officers to persuade ELAS to blow up the bridge. Had it been destroyed earlier it would have cut one of Rommel’s supply lines when he stood at El Alamein. But it was not … The difficulties with ELAS should have warned the Foreign Office that ELAS’s first objective was less to harass the Germans than to eliminate other guerrilla forces and their leaders.” Nick Hammond, a British officer with the Greeks, wrote afterwards: “Armed resistance in the open countryside894 is something rarely undertaken. Only men of extreme, even fanatical enthusiasm will undertake the initiation and leadership of such a resistance, because it invites terrible reprisals on one’s family, friends and fellow-countrymen.”
In Greece and other occupied countries, the Germans economised on their own manpower by recruiting local collaborators for security duties. In France there were several brutal Pétainist militias, which until the summer of 1944 were notably more numerous than the maquis. The Croat Ustashi in Yugoslavia became a byword for savagery. Cossacks in German uniform, later the objects of much sympathy in the West for their enforced repatriation to Russia, played a prominent role in suppressing resistance groups in northern Italy and Yugoslavia, where their brutality was notorious. The Athens puppet government deployed its own “security battalions” against the guerrillas. A million Greeks lost their homes in consequence of German repression, and a thousand villages were razed. More than 400,000 Greek civilians died in the war, albeit most by mere starvation.
Bloodshed became relentless. Hitler’s OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) headquarters ordered that fifty to a hundred hostages should be killed to avenge each German victim. At the end of October 1943, guerrillas in the northern Peloponnese achieved a notable coup, capturing and then killing 78 men of the 117th Jaeger Division. In consequences, 696 Greeks were executed, twenty-five villages burned. On May 1, 1944, 200 hostages were shot in Athens after an attack on a German general. On the fifth, 216 villagers were massacred in Klisura. On the seventeenth, 100 more hostages were executed in Khalkis. The tempo of such atrocities rose until the last day of the German presence in Greece. As the Wehrmacht withdrew, British officers sought with limited success to persuade the rival armed factions to harass the retreat. “We didn’t inflict as much serious damage as we might have done,” wrote Monty Woodhouse of the SOE. “But by that time, certainly in the case of EAM and ELAS895, their sights were set on the future and not on the immediate future.” It can convincingly be argued that much of what did and did not take place reflected domestic strife between Greeks, together with spontaneous acts of opposition to the occupiers, over which the British could exercise negligible influence.
In Italy, partisan warfare began to gather momentum after the Rome government’s surrender of September 1943. Again, there were deep divisions between Communist and non-Communist