American Intervention in Greece 1943-1949 (review)

Abstract

Reviews 251 rather because Churchill trusted General Wilson and his political adviser Harold Macmillan at CaserÃ-a to do a more efficient job in Greece, and they were certainly no more sympathetic to ELAS than Hammond was. This and some other inaccuracies are no doubt due to the fact that the book records what Hammond thought in 1945. For instance he writes (154) that Papandreou (in 1944) was a strong leader who "had united the party leaders," which was hardly true. His remarks (96) about the "intransigence" of the EAM representatives in Cairo in August 1943 are also misleading. It is strange that the well known KKE leader Yiannis Zevgos is consistently called "Zevgoyannis," but is is more worrying, perhaps, that Hammond in the last chapter (written in 1981) asserts that "the [resistance] movements on the Greek mainland started of their own volition. In this respect Greece was different from Yugoslavia." This is true of ELAS but not of EDES: it has been known for many years that Zervas was heavily subsidized and pushed by British agents in Athens before he went to Epirus and organized his guerrilla army. One cannot blame Hammond for not having studied this period of Greek history since the war, and indeed the fact that the book is a record of his wartime beliefs and attitudes makes it all the more interesting as an historical document. It is clear, however, both from the preface and from some scattered remarks which bring the story much further than 1945, that there has been some revision of the manuscript , and it would have been helpful to know the precise extent of the changes made. Apart from these reservations, the book is a tough and candid account which gives a most vivid impression of relations between ELAS and the British and of British policy in Greece. Lars Baerentzen University of Copenhagen Lawrence S. Wittner, American Intervention in Greece 1943-1949. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Pp. 445. $20.00 Wittner's topic is American intervention in the brutal Greek civil war of 1944-49. He draws on extensive research of American and British official archives to interpret the American impact on Greece—her politics, economy, and trades union movement; her do- 252 Reviews mestic conflict; and her foreign affairs. The book is structured thematically rather than chronologically, a style more convenient to the writer than the reader. Unfortunately, it encourages a disjointed perception of the harmonious flow of history, aggravated, in this instance , by the absence of a concluding chapter. Wittner argues that the Americans, through their obsessive anticommunism, prolonged the civil war and aided the establishment in Greece of a quasi-fascist regime. They repulsed genuine pleas for peace from the Greek Left and wrongly attributed the civil war to machinations by the Soviet Union. This inept American policy of confrontation instead of conciliation with the Left has been repeated throughout the developing world since the Truman Doctrine of 1947. The book, writes Wittner, "bolsters the 'revisionist' case." Of all Greek political factions, Wittner treats the communists most leniently. He seems incapable of distinguishing them from social -democrats. There are fascists, conservatives, and centrists, but only one democratic Left. The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) might as well have declared for the Second International. It "tamely garrisoned" Greece upon liberation, welcomed Papandreou to a "peaceful" atmosphere (9-10) and was quite happy to play conventional politics until cornered into civil war by fascists and British and American imperialists. But were the communists as bereft of vision as Wittner thinks? Surely the burden of evidence is that they were not. In theory, their stated objective, laiki dimokratia, was defined as dictatorship as early as 1934; and in 1935 and again in 1943 i laokratiki lisi was confirmed as the stage intermediate to its fulfillment. In practice, they aimed persistently at the jugular of power: possession of the key ministries of the Interior, Justice, and Defence. Preoccupied with the constitutional issue (which has distracted countless other writers), Wittner fails to comment on these crucial points. Indeed, the absence of a detailed analysis of communist deliberations marks a major lapse on his part. To confuse matters, he himself uses the...