Arrest of the consuls on Chios

The British chronology of the war states that on 17 February 1916 British forces occupied the Greek island of Chios in the Aegean. The press of the time, however, describes something much more modest than an occupation. A party of sailors from Allied warships landed at the port of Chios, arrested the German and Austro-Hungarian consuls and took them on board a torpedo boat. The news reached Western Europe from Athens on 19 February, among others through the correspondent of the London Daily Mail. The exact day of the arrest is uncertain. French newspapers wrote of an action by “the Allies”, the British chronology attributes it to the British, and one Corsican daily to the French military authorities.

An island off Smyrna

Chios lies only a few kilometres off the coast of Asia Minor, not far from the entrance to the gulf at the head of which lies Smyrna, the largest Ottoman port on the Aegean. Since 1915 the waters between the island and the mainland had been watched by the ships of the British Smyrna patrol, which enforced the blockade of the Turkish coast. Greece was a neutral state, so the consuls of the Central Powers were still at their posts on the island. The Allies suspected that such consuls were passing information about the movements of warships and transports to the enemy. At Salonika General Maurice Sarrail, for the same reason, had already on 30 December 1915 ordered the arrest of the Central Powers’ consuls and their removal from Greece. The action on Chios was a similar, though smaller, move.

Rumour of a landing and a Greek protest

A rumour spread in Athens that the Allies had landed on Chios. The Athens correspondent of Le Petit Journal explained on 20 February that the rumour had arisen from a “simple police operation”, of the kind that circumstances had already forced in several other places in Greece. The consuls had been detained, he wrote, “for security”. The matter was raised in the Greek parliament by a deputy from Chios. The government of Prime Minister Stefanos Skouloudis sent the Entente powers a protest against the arrest of the consuls. Part of the French press called it a purely formal protest.

The protest changed nothing, but the affair showed how little was left of Greek neutrality. The Allies were using Greek islands as bases and acting ever more freely on Greek territory. For a month the French had been occupying Corfu, to which the Serbian army was being shipped. Chios, however, was not occupied at the time and remained under the Greek royal authorities. According to an American yearbook of the events of 1916, the island joined the “National Defence” movement of Eleftherios Venizelos only on 30 September 1916.