Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [275]
The next day, December 1, the six Communist and socialist ministers in the Athens regime resigned en bloc, and called a general strike. On December 3, frightened and ill-disciplined police fired on a demonstration. One policeman and eleven demonstrators were killed. Furious crowds besieged Athens police stations. The police, like other elements of the Papandreou government’s makeshift security forces, were widely perceived by Greeks as having collaborated with the German occupiers. The historian Mark Mazower has written: “Despite Churchill’s belief1002 that he had forestalled a communist attempt to seize power, there is no sign that the uprising in Athens was anything other than a spontaneous popular movement which took the [Communist] party leadership by surprise.” At first, the guerrillas of EAM/ELAS concentrated their fire on Greek government forces. But, when they perceived British troops furthering the cause of their right-wing foes, they started shooting at the “liberators.”
The nuances of this situation eluded British commanders on the spot. They merely perceived their authority violently challenged. It should also be noticed, as it was not by most American observers at the time, that all over Greece the Communists were conducting murderous purges of bourgeois opponents, often along with their families. Churchill was bitterly angry. He assessed the Greek situation, and Communist intentions, through the prism of developments in Poland, Albania, Yugoslavia and Belgium.
The Greek crisis broke while the Belgian one was still making headlines. Churchill was harshly misjudged by Americans, who supposed that he sought an undemocratic outcome in Greece. His mistake was that, for two turbulent months, he conceded to the Greek king, George II, exiled in London, a veto on constitutional arrangements. So intemperate were Churchill’s expressions of hostility to the Communists of EAM/ELAS that Clementine felt moved to write him a note of warning:
My darling Winston1003,
Please do not before ascertaining full facts repeat to anyone you meet what you said to me this morning i.e. that the Communists in Athens had shown their usual cowardice in putting the women & children in front to be shot at. Because altho’ Communists are dangerous, indeed perhaps sinister people, they seem in this War on the Continent to have shown personal courage …
Your loving & devoted Clemmie
Clementine’s words were significant, because they reflected widespread sentiment in Britain as well as America. Allied propaganda throughout the Nazi occupation had made much of the Communist role in resistance, portraying EAM/ELAS, like Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia, as heroic freedom fighters. Not only was their contribution to the anti-Nazi struggle exaggerated, but reports of their atrocities, well-known to SOE officers on the ground, were suppressed. Many people on both sides of the Atlantic thus viewed the Greek left in roseate hues.
Worse, Churchill’s lingering desire to salvage the Greek monarchy, despite overwhelming evidence of its unpopularity, compromised his own authority. Almost all his ministers, including Eden and Macmillan, were unwilling to offer even vestigial support to George II. They were also conscious of the rickety character of the Papandreou regime, an unconvincing foundation for the restoration of democracy. Churchill’s instinct was probably right, that if the Allies had done nothing the Communists would have seized Greece with the same ruthlessness they were displaying everywhere else in eastern Europe and the Balkans. But clumsy diplomacy caused the British to be seen, above all in Washington, as would-be imperialist oppressors of a liberated people. Lincoln MacVeagh, the U.S. minister in Athens, criticised the British for “handling this fanatically freedom-loving country as if it were composed of natives under the British raj.”
On December 5, Edward Stettinius, who had just replaced Cordell Hull as U.S. secretary of state, raised the stakes by publicly criticising British policy in Greece and also in Italy, where the