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Following EAM and ELAS, other political constituencies founded other Resistance armies and movements, most of them short lived and rather insignificant either in their impact on the general population or in the outcome of their actions. The most important such forces were the Ethnikos Demokratikos Hellenikos Syndesmos, or EDES (Greek National Republican League), led by a former army officer, Colonel Napoleon Zervas, and a minor Resistance force, Ethnike kai Koinonike Apeleftherosis (National and Social Liberation, or EKKA), led by Colonel Demetrios Psaros. EKKA was a liberal, antimonarchist movement, and its importance lies only in the fact that its leader, Psaros, was executed in 1943 by members of ELAS on suspicion of collaboration with the Germans, an act that provided the British with an excuse to declare ELAS a Communist organization interested in power, to cut off their funding, and to encourage antagonism between ELAS and EDES. EDES's initial democratic and republican ideology was soon eroded after 1943, when Zervas morphed into a royalist and collaborated closely both with the Germans (in a common attempt to eradicate the ELAS) and with the British Foreign Office in preparing the return of the king to Greece after the expected collapse of the Axis powers.
The geographical structure of Greece, a mountainous country with thousands of islands, and the lack of any infrastructure that would have permitted effective communications favored guerrilla operations. By 1943 the Axis forces and their collaborators controlled only the main towns and connecting roads, whereas the rest of the country was controlled by the Resistance. At that time, ELAS had an army of over thirty thousand men and controlled large areas of the Peloponnese, Crete, Thessaly, and Macedonia (a territory of thirty thousand square kilometers and 750,000 inhabitants). EDES had about five thousand men, nearly all of them in Epirus. EKKA only had about a thousand men. There is no question that the brunt of the Resistance was carried by ELAS, and this explains the large numbers of those interned in the camps later. But let me say no more about this now.
The Allies initially contributed to the Resistance by supplying all Resistance organizations with funds, equipment, knowledge, and agents for covert operations. When the British Foreign Office realized that ELAS was developing into a regular army and was no longer a small and insignificant force, however, fearing a further strengthening of the Communist Party, it started withdrawing support from ELAS, with all the consequences that such a gesture meant—no funds, no equipment, no agents, no collaboration whatsoever—while it turned exclusively to EDES. ELAS managed to take control of the armament of the Italian army after Mussolini's government collapsed in the summer of 1943 and Italy joined the Allies. In 1944, after the Germans retreated from Greece, ELAS took over most of the armament and equipment left by the Germans.
A less fortunate child during the famine. Photograph by Voula Papaioannou, Athens 1941–44. Reproduced with the permission of the Benaki Museum.
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