Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [278]
A malevolent hand in the U.S. administration leaked Churchill’s draconian directive to Scobie to columnist Drew Pearson, who published it in the Washington Post on December 11. The ensuing anti-British tirade caused Churchill to draw unfavourable contrasts with Moscow’s useful silence. “I think we have had pretty good treatment from Stalin in Greece,” he wrote to Eden, “much better in fact than we have had from the Americans.” The Post editorialised on December 6 that “the use of force carries within it the seeds of its destruction.” On the eighth, a Post article by Marquis Childs argued: “Winston Churchill and the clique around him want to believe that you can put a little paint and a little varnish on the old order and prop it up in place again. It won’t prop. That’s the meaning of the news out of Brussels and Athens … the course that is being followed in Greece and Belgium is the best way to ensure communism in the end.”
Walter Lippmann wrote in the Washington Post of December 14 that problems had arisen in Greece “because Mr. Churchill is trying to apply the great principle of legitimacy in government without a correct appreciation of the unprecedented condition of affairs which the Nazi conquest and occupation have created.” The problem facing those trying to reconstruct Europe is “how to fuse the legitimacy acquired by Resistance movements with the legitimacy inherited by the old governments.” This was an accurate analysis of Churchill’s dilemma, lacking only an answer to it. Events in Greece, and elsewhere, were critically influenced by the outcome of policies promoted by the prime minister himself through the SOE. It was only possible for ELAS to mount a challenge to the Greek government and its British sponsors because London had provided the Communists with arms.
Halifax cabled gloomily from the Washington embassy, “Our version of the facts is largely disbelieved.”1013 On the ground in Athens, Scobie’s units faced increasingly violent pressure from ELAS guerrillas. Open insurgency was breaking out. Alexander signalled: “British forces are in fact beleaguered in the heart of the city.” Both Macmillan and Leeper, at the British embassy, believed that Churchill failed to grasp the complexities of the situation. However distasteful were the Communists, the Greek right was at least as much so. Macmillan urged the prime minister to accept that the king—“the real villain of the piece”—must remain exiled in London, while the primate of Athens, Archbishop Damaskinos, should be appointed regent, to reconcile the warring factions. Macmillan had little time for the Greek prime minister: “We do not wish to start the Third World War1014 against Russia until we have finished the Second World War against Germany—and certainly not to please M. Papandreou.” The British in Athens, who perceived a regency as offering by far the best chance of a settlement acceptable to the Greek people, were enraged by the perceived duplicity of the Greek prime minister, who urged George II to reject a regency.
Men of the British Army who found themselves seeking to sustain by force the Athens regime were as divided as the rest of the world about the merits of their cause. Capt. Phillip Zorab, for instance, hated the Communists and everything that he saw and heard of their doings: “These ELAS guerrillas don’t care1015 who they hit,” he wrote in a letter home, “and I have four first-hand reports of atrocities committed by them on other Greeks … Greeks now know that when we said that political differences would not be settled by use of arms, we meant it.” Other British soldiers, however, were deeply troubled by the role in which they found themselves cast. Major A. P. Greene, like Zorab a gunner, told his family:
I thought a good deal before writing this letter, because it contains some pretty definite views. But they must be aired or ten years of principles go for naught. Briefly I think our country