Blockade of Greece

At 8 a.m. on 8 December 1916, or 25 November in the Julian calendar used in Greece, the Allies began a blockade of the coast of royalist Greece. The British chronology of the war records two steps: on 7 December the Entente governments announced the blockade, and on 8 December they imposed it. That is indeed what happened. On 7 December the French ambassador in Washington, Jean Jules Jusserand, informed Secretary of State Robert Lansing that the Allies had decided to blockade Greece from 8 a.m. on 8 December. The same day the American minister in Athens, Garrett Droppers, cabled that the blockade was to come into force the next day, although “in practice it has been in force for several days”. The Greek government was notified on 8 December by the French Vice-Admiral Louis Dartige du Fournet, commander of the Allied fleet.

It was not the first blockade of Greece, but it was the first to be formally declared. In June the Allies had stopped Greek ships without a word of explanation, and suspended that blockade after two weeks, when Athens gave way. This time it was a response to the fighting in Athens on 1 December, in which French and British sailors were killed, and to the persecution of the Venizelists.

Extent of the blockade

According to Jusserand’s note, the blockade covered the coast of Greece and the offshore islands between two points: in the west, on the Ionian Sea, at 39°20′ north and 20°20′ east, and in the east, on the Aegean, at 39°50′ north and 22°50′ east. Among the islands covered, Droppers listed Euboea, Zakynthos and Lefkada. The blockade also applied to all other islands still under royal authority. The western point lay roughly on the coast of Epirus, a little south of Corfu, occupied by the Allies since January 1916, and the eastern one off the coast of Thessaly, near the mouth of the Pineios. Left outside the blockade were thus Macedonia, where Venizelos’s provisional government ruled and the army of General Maurice Sarrail stood, and the islands that had already gone over to Salonika, Crete among them. Ships of third countries were given 48 hours to leave Greek ports.

According to the American journalist Paxton Hibben, who was sympathetic to the King, subjects of the Entente powers were told to leave Greece by 10 December. The Russian and Italian ministers gave no such instruction to their nationals. The French minister asked Droppers to take charge of French interests if necessary.

Why a blockade

The blockade was a compromise among the Allies. After the fighting of 1 December the French prime minister, Aristide Briand, proposed on 4 December that, in reparation for the blood that had been shed, King Constantine I should be deposed and Venizelos’s government recognised. The Greek historian S. P. P. Cosmetatos, who drew on Russian diplomatic documents published later, shows that everyone refused. Petrograd considered a change of regime by “foreign bayonets” impracticable, since the army and people of Old Greece stood by the King. The Italian foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, argued that the Allies were overrating Venizelos and letting themselves be drawn away from their main aim, the defeat of the enemy. On 6 December the Russian ambassador in London reported that the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, had rejected both French ideas and that Britain proposed a blockade of Greece as a security guarantee. On 7 December Briand gave way.

The admiral himself had also changed his mind. The British writer George F. Abbott, sympathetic to the King, who relied on Dartige du Fournet’s memoirs, writes that after 1 December the admiral at first wanted to bring in troops and bombard Athens. It soon turned out, however, that the transports had brought men and mules without supplies, that the Greeks were gathering forces to defend the capital, that the British admiral did not want to take part in hostilities and that the French minister feared open war. Dartige du Fournet therefore advised Paris not to open a new front at Athens, and proposed a pacific blockade (PL), that is, cutting off the seaborne trade of a country with which one is not formally at war. The British official history of the naval war (Newbolt) states that in those days the British vice-admiral in the eastern Mediterranean was ordered to cooperate with the French in the blockade, to occupy the island of Syros and to prepare to cut the railway from Athens to Larissa and on the Isthmus of Corinth. He was not, however, allowed to land troops at Piraeus.

Athens protests

Athens was given no conditions on whose fulfilment the blockade would be lifted. The government of Spyridon Lambros protested to the representatives of the neutral powers, the United States, the Netherlands and Spain. “Greece, which is at peace with the Entente powers and has never ceased to give them the most extraordinary proofs of her unshakeable will to maintain the mutual bonds of friendship with them, sees with painful astonishment that these same powers resort against her to a measure so manifestly contrary to international law,” the government wrote, awaiting an explanation of “the character and motives of the blockade”. On 9 December the King told Droppers that he greatly desired peace, though he would fight if necessary, but that he felt himself in a false position, because the Entente had blockaded his ports and had officially explained nothing to him.

The explanation came a few days later. According to the British official history of the Macedonian campaign (Falls), the new British War Cabinet decided to maintain the blockade until Greece gave reparation for the attack on Allied troops and guarantees for the future. Admiral Dartige du Fournet soon lost his command, and the blockade was continued by his successor, Vice-Admiral Dominique-Marie Gauchet.

Hunger

Greece lived on imported grain, and its seaborne trade had been restricted by the Allies for months. Hibben claims that from 30 November no ship could enter or leave Piraeus. Abbott writes that even before the end of December the country began to feel the shortage of food, and that it struck the poor first. The authorities and charities tried to hold down prices and handed out food. The Patriotic League of Greek Women, led by the Queen, served according to him 10,000 meals a day. The lack of raw materials stopped the factories and put thousands out of work.

In the following months things grew steadily worse. The pro-royalist authors Abbott and Cosmetatos describe adulterated bread that spread dysentery and poisoning, the deaths of infants whose mothers had no milk, and people living on figs, raisins and carob pods. According to Cosmetatos, the daily bread ration fell to an eighth of a kilogram. Both also accuse the French of sinking fishermen’s boats and telling them: “If you want peace, drive out your king.” Their accounts are partisan, but food shortages, and in places hunger, in royalist Greece are confirmed by other sources as well.

The blockade lasted more than half a year. It was lifted only in June 1917, when under Allied pressure Constantine I left the country and the French High Commissioner Charles Jonnart announced the end of the blockade.