5 - The legacy of the civil war 1950–74

Summary

The decade of the 1940s was the darkest in Greece’s independent history. The glories of her stand at the time of the Italian and German invasions during the winter of 1940/1 and the heroism of the resistance, both collective and individual, to the barbaric German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation had brought in their wake privations on an unprecedented scale. Moreover, famine, reprisals and wanton material destruction, together with the virtual destruction of Greek Jewry, had been accompanied by internecine strife that was to culminate in outright civil war between 1946 and 1949. The war of independence in the 1820s and the National Schism of the period of the First World War had laid bare profound cleavages in society. But these earlier manifestations of a society divided against itself could not compare with the ferocity of the savagely fought civil war, which was to prolong the agonies of the occupation until the end of the decade. Moreover, the atrocities committed by both sides assumed an added dimension of horror in that they were inflicted by Greek upon Greek. The old quarrel had been between Venizelists and anti-Venizelists, broadly speaking between supporters of the republic and of the monarchy, but this schism had now been overlaid by an even more fundamental division, that between communists and anti-communists.

During the second half of the decade the meagre resources of the enfeebled state were not devoted, as elsewhere in Europe, to repairing the ravages of war and occupation, but rather to the containment of ‘the enemy within’. By 1949 government military and security forces numbered approximately a quarter of a million. Much of the American aid that in western Europe was being devoted to economic development was channelled into military objectives. The bourgeois order, although at times gravely threatened, was to survive. But the government’s dependence for its political and military survival on external patronage effectively made Greece a client state of the United States. Few major military, economic or, indeed, political decisions could be taken without American approval, testimony to a degree of external penetration that had scarcely existed even when British hegemony was at its height.