Post War America 1945-1971. Howard Boone's Zinn
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million in a population of seven million, and it probably would have won—if the British army had not moved in with 75,000 men. (British political analyst Hugh Seton-Watson said afterward that “without British action, Greece would have had the same regime as Yugoslavia.”) Two British divisions were flown in by American planes piloted by Americans. An American observer, newsman Howard K. Smith, wrote later:
One would prefer to be generous to the British and say that they attempted to bolster what middle-way and democratic forces there were in order to create compromise and a basis for democracy. Unfortunately, there seems little evidence to support this, and one is forced to conclude that the British were determined to break EAM and install in power the discredited monarchy and its blindly vengeful rightist supporters.
Churchill’s instructions to General Ronald Scobie, head of the British forces in Greece, were: “Do not … hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.”
The EAM was defeated in a few months. Elections were held in early 1946, which were boycotted by the left, and, to no one’s surprise, the monarchists won. Smith said he was told by peasants in a village outside Athens shortly after the election that they were threatened with having the village burned down if the monarchists did not get a majority. During this early postwar period of British control, a right-wing dictatorship came to power in Athens. The elected leadership of the trade unions was replaced by government-appointed rightists; dissident university professors and government officials were fired; opposition leaders were put in jail; and corruption spread as the war-ravaged nation became desperate for food. Under the government of Constantine Tsaldaris, half the expenditures were for the army and the police; only 6 per cent for reconstruction.
In the face of imminent arrest, many former leaders of the ELAS (National Popular Liberation Army, the military arm of the EAM) went into the hills and began arming small guerrilla groups. By the fall of 1946, it had 6,000 men under arms, and was carrying on hit-and-run raids in northern Greece. With international criticism becoming increasingly sharp, the British asked Premier Tsaldaris to liberalize his oppressive regime; instead, he eliminated all opposition parties from the cabinet. The civil war intensified. The ELAS rebels received small arms from Yugoslavia, used Albanian and Yugoslavian territory as sanctuaries, stepped up their raids, and executed hostages. As the jailing and murder of the opposition by the government increased, the rebel forces rose to 17,000 fighters, 50,000 active supporters, and perhaps 250,000 sympathizers.
At this point, with the rebels gaining more and more support and the government having more and more difficulty in putting them down, the British informed the United States State Department that they could no longer continue either economic or military aid to the Greek government. One State Department career man, Joseph Jones of the policy planning staff, later commented that “Great Britain had within the hour handed the job of world leadership, with all its burdens and all its glory, to the United States.”
It was the administration of Harry Truman, heir to New Deal liberalism, that now acted to save the rightist Tsaldaris government of Greece from revolution. The State Department career officers were eager to take over from Britain, and the high-ranking military men agreed that the Greek rebels must be put down. Truman’s popularity was at a record low in the country, and his Democratic party had just lost the 1946 congressional elections to an overwhelming Republican majority. It has been argued that the domestic political situation was a factor in Truman’s decision to move. Whether or not it was, he called congressional leaders to the White House to sound them out on the idea of military and economic aid to Greece, and it was Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson who supplied the most persuasive argument: stopping world communism. Jones recorded Acheson’s argument as follows:
Only two great powers remained in the world, the United States and the Soviet Union. We had arrived at a situation unparalleled since ancient times. Not since Rome and Carthage had there been such a polarization of power on this earth. … It was clear that the Soviet Union was aggressive and expanding. For the United States to take steps to strengthen countries threatened with Soviet aggression or Communist subversion was to protect the security of the United States.
The argument carried, and the decision was made to give aid to Greece. As was to become a common pattern in such situations, a request for such aid was drafted in Washington by the State Department and suggested to the Greek government, which then made a formal request.
The Truman Doctrine was the name later attached to the speech Truman made before Congress, March 12, 1947, in which he asked for $400 million in military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey:
The very existence of the Greek state is today threatened by the terrorist activities of several thousand armed men, led by Communists, who defy the Government’s authority. … Meanwhile, the Greek Government is unable to cope with the situation. …
At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. …
One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression.
The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.
I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.
I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.
I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid, which is essential to economic stability and orderly political processes. …
If Greece should fall under the control of an armed minority, the effect upon its neighbor, Turkey, would be immediate and serious. Confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East. …
There were at least three questionable elements in Truman’s speech. First, his description of the “second way of life … terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms,” while it might conceivably fit some imagined future left-wing regime in Greece, at that time most accurately described the right-wing government for which Truman was asking support. Second, the connection between the Greek rebellion and the “outside pressures” of world communism ran counter to one basic fact: although the Greek rebels were getting some useful aid from Yugoslavia, their manpower was Greek; internal conditions and indigenous support made it a Greek affair. The “outside pressures” were largely British; they were about to become American.
Back in the fall of 1944, in Moscow, Churchill and Stalin had agreed on the division of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence; Rumania, Poland, and Bulgaria would be in the Soviet sphere, and Greece in the British. When the British were suppressing the ELAS rebellion in 1945, the Russians sat by. They studiously refrained from giving aid to the insurgents. Churchill wrote later that Stalin had “adhered strictly and faithfully” to their agreement to give the British a free hand in Greece. Historian and biographer Isaac Deutscher has pointed out that in 1948 the Soviet Union expelled Yugoslavia from the Comintern and President Tito closed the border to the Greek rebels. Tito’s aide, Milovan Djilas, reported that in early 1948 Stalin told the Yugoslavs that “the uprising in Greece must be stopped, and as quickly as possible,” that it did not have a chance of succeeding. The “international communism” excuse for American intervention ignored the fact that Soviet communism was as nationalistic as American communism, and that like the United States, the Soviet Union preferred revolutions it could control.
The third questionable element hidden by the moralistic language of the Truman Doctrine was that the traditional interests of political power and economic profit were involved in the American decision to keep a rightist government in power in Greece. Presidential adviser Clark Clifford had suggested that Truman’s speech to Congress should also say that “continued chaos in other countries and pressure exerted upon them from without would mean the end