Greek Entanglement, by E.C.W. Myers. In this book Myers provides what is likely the most detailed and authoritative account of any special operations commando in Greece during the Second World War. Parachuted into the mountains of Roumeli in September 1942, it appeared at the time that Rommel might soon be in Cairo. One year later Italy had surrendered. A little over a year after that, the remaining German forces evacuated, triggering a brief but vicious civil war as the Communist-led forces of the Greek resistance termed EAM/ELAS turned on the incoming British and their royalist Greek supporters, massacring thousands of their fellow Greeks in December, 1944. The civil war resumed in 1946, even more viciously and with incomparably larger numbers of victims than in 1944 as Britain persisted in its efforts to return the Greek King to power, the conflict lasting through 1949.
Chiefly valuable in documenting relations between those factions of the Resistance that favored the British and the Greek government in exile which the British supported, headed by the King, these memoirs track the disintegration of their truce with the Communist led factions as the latter steadily extended their military presence throughout the country in 1943 and 1944, at times attacking their “andarte” rivals with more purpose and verve than the Axis occupation forces. This while the British, strangely, threw their full support behind Stalin’s rep in Yugoslavia, Tito, while starving the Yugoslav royalists of British support.
During this period, Myers relates that he strived well and often to repair the rifts in Greece, and persuade the British government—all the way up to Churchill—to take EAM/ELAS seriously and postpone or cancel plans to bring the Greek King back to Athens. Ultimately, his efforts were unsuccessful, thus the explosion in late 1944 and its repeat in 1946-49.
What is most noteworthy about this book, however, is what is not said. Given the steady advance of the Soviet Red Army through the Balkans in late 1944, triggering the German evacuation, and the fact that Communist partisans were swarming Eastern Europe and the Balkans in the late war period, it is strange that Russia and Stalin are hardly mentioned in this book at all. The most interesting question is not whether EAM/ELAS wanted to gain power; that’s a given for any political faction, especially one armed to the teeth such as they were–but where they got their weapons, and who supported them, and why. Most did not come from the British, and, although many came from captured Italians in 1943, by 1946 their weapons came primarily from Tito and the new Bulgarian Communist regime. Which presents the further question of Tito’s motives in aiding the Greek Communists, and who supplied Tito and the Bulgarians? After—as usual with British authors—failing even to ask why the British and Germans were in Greece in the first place, breezily assuming that the answer should be obvious, while it is not, the most important questions are simply side-stepped.
The ultimate question for the Greek conflict, which went far in setting the stage for the Western powers’ programmed response to the new era of “national liberation fronts” around the world from Korea to Vietnam, is: Was Stalin using the Greek Communists to “test the West” with a new type of guerrilla conflict, intent on expanding a monolithic Soviet control in the post-war era? Myers omits this issue entirely, making his book little more than an informative local travel guide relating which are the best mountain retreats to dodge German planes. Tito and the Bulgarians provided ample weapons and supplies to the Greek Communists up to the moment that he broke with Stalin, and then the flow stopped, causing the Greek Communists to immediately collapse. Myers has no light to shed on whether Tito or Stalin himself was behind their bid for power, so the most interesting question relating to the broader significance of the Greek Communists’ bid for power remains unanswered here.
