Ghurkha or Gurkha, the first being the British, the second the Nepali latinized spelling.
- Chapter 3. 1944–1945: The Battle of Athens
- » Athens, December 3, 1944
By the summer of 1944, as the Soviet army was advancing toward Romania and Yugoslavia, it became obvious that the Germans would soon withdraw from Greece rather than risk being cut off and left behind enemy lines. The government-in-exile, now led by a prominent liberal, George Papandreou, moved to Cava dei' Tirreni, close to Naples, in preparation for the return to Greece. Very close to Cava dei' Tirreni is Caserta, where an agreement was signed in September 1944. It stipulated that all the Resistance armies in Greece were to be disarmed and placed under the command of a British officer, General Ronald MacKenzie Scobie.
British troops (including forces from the colonies—South Africans, New Zealanders, and Nepali Ghurkhas) landed in Greece in October. Resistance by the Germans was minimal, since they were rapidly retreating and most of Greece was under the control of ELAS or EDES. The only significant German presence, assisted by “X” and Bourandas forces, was in central Athens. ELAS numbered about fifty thousand men at that moment, and it was effectively restocking from supplies left behind by the Germans. On October 13, British troops entered Athens, and Papandreou and his ministers followed six days later. The king stayed in Cairo, in accord with the agreement, awaiting a referendum on the future of the monarchy.
At this point, there was little to prevent ELAS from taking full control of the country. They did not do so. When ELAS forces approached Athens, they waited at Eleusis until the Papandreou government had come back from Egypt. ELAS did so partly because a forcible takeover of Athens had never been part of the KKE project (for which KKE was criticized by the Trotskyists as having abandoned the principles of revolutionary ideology), and partly because the KKE leadership was reluctant to undertake action that would not have the support of the Soviet Union, as Stalin had expressly mentioned the need for the unity of the Allied front. Greece was not part of Stalin's postwar project. KKE's leadership tried to avoid a confrontation with the Papandreou government, and ELAS considered the Allies to be liberators, although not without some suspicion by KKE , particularly Andreas Tzimas and Aris Velouchiotis, who did not trust them.
The issue of disarmament was a cause of bitter disagreement between George Papandreou and the EAM members of his government. Prompted by the British ambassador Sir Reginald Leeper, Papandreou demanded that a National Guard under government control be constituted and all forces bearing arms be disarmed with the exception of the Hierós Lóchos and the Third Mountain Brigade, or Rimini Brigade, both units that had been formed by the British after they suppressed the revolt in Egypt. EAM, having faced the anti-Communist brutality of “X” and the Tágmata, and fearing that disarmament would leave the Left in a vulnerable position and its members in real danger of liquidation, counter-proposed the total and simultaneous disarmament of all armed groups. Papandreou, who by then was considering the Tágmata a possible ally in the event of a further strengthening of the Left, rejected the EAM plan. On December 1, Scobie issued a directive demanding the dissolution of ELAS, a gesture that he had neither the legal nor the political mandate to make. ELAS (and KKE) decided that such a demand was not only unwarranted but also beyond the scope of Scobie's authority and decided to resist the dissolution. The EAM ministers resigned from the government on December 2. Meanwhile, the leader of “X,” Georgios Grivas, had instructed his Chites to fortify themselves in central Athens against possible EAM and ELAS violence, until the British troops arrived, as Grivas had been promised. The Chites obeyed and joined forces with the Bourandádhes.
Scobie became so hated in Greece for his involvement in Greek domestic policy and the role that he played in the Dekemvrianá that songs ridiculing him circulated in Greece until the 1970s. The last time that I heard one of them, He Psole tou Scobie, was during the last years of the junta, sung by a friend of my mother's at our house as she was having coffee. It was sung to a swing tune, and its first verse (perhaps the only verse that has survived) referred to Scobie's member:
Vervenioti 2000 also mentions the song, as one sung by the women prisoners on Trikeri, but does not give the lyrics.He psōlé tou Scobie
Einai kómboi-kómboi
Ki an te lysei tha fanei
He megálē tou politikê
Scobie's dick
is tied up in knots
and if he lets it lose
his grand politics
will be shown.
According to Nikos Pharmakes, an ex-deputy of the Right who was recruited by the “X” at the age of fourteen, the reason why ELAS did not attack Athens was of purely military nature. Pharmakes says that in October 1944, when ELAS was voluntarily stationed in Eleusis, the collaborationist Prime Minister Rallis had mobilized five to six thousand Tagmatasphalētés from various garrisons that had been defeated by ELAS as the Germans retreated. In addition, there were about five hundred Chites, who were heavily armed, since they had started buying the German arms stock as early as mid 1944. They did so through an intermediary, Christos Zalokostas, who, Pharmakes mentions, was able to procure the necessary funds. They continued buying arms until September 1944. ??In addition, the British sent “X” three shipments of automatic weapons, which arrived at the port of Porto Rafti in September 1944. Pharmakes mentions that he participated in one of those operations himself. Half of the Athens police force was also present (the other half, Pharmakes claims, had joined EAM), as well as the Mountain Brigade, with twenty-five thousand men. ELAS could not have expected to win against such a force. So, Pharmakes claims, ELAS made a tactical move, correctly assessing the situation and biding their time. Whether Pharmakes's analysis is correct or not no one can know, since it is intuitive and not factual. What is invaluable in his account, however, is the (unwitting) admission that the collaborationist government forces, along with the British, had planned for a battle (Pharmakes 2006). I am indebted to Stella Litou and Kostas Spiropoulos of ERT (Greek National Television) for making the transcript of this interview available to me.
A Greek journalist who interviewed Milovan Djilas late in his life mentioned to me that during the interview Djilas told her, off the record, that Greece should declare Stalin a national hero for not having included the country in the Warsaw Pact.
The Third Mountain Brigade had managed to expel ELAS partisans from Mt. Hymmetus, in Athens, by creating an ecological catastrophe: they cut and burned the thick pine forest that covered the mountain so as to expose the hiding places of the partisans. Only recently is the forest beginning to recover from the napalm that the brigade dropped. In the foothills of the mountain lies my parents' house, on Third Mountain Brigade Street (Hodos Trites Oreines Taxiarcheias), which was renamed thus from Plethonos Street, in honor of the brigade, some time in the mid 1950s.