Greece in the First World War

For most of the First World War Greece was formally neutral, although both sides fought on its soil. The quarrel between Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, who wanted war on the side of the Entente, and King Constantine I, who favoured neutrality, tore the country apart. From autumn 1916 Greece had two governments: a royal one in Athens and a revolutionary one in Salonika, which declared war on Germany and Bulgaria. In June 1917 the Entente forced the king to leave, and Greece, united under Venizelos, entered the war and in 1918 fought on the Salonika front. It came out of it enlarged but deeply divided.

The road to war

Greece came out of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 with large gains. After the Peace of Bucharest of 1913, with Salonika, Kavala, Epirus and southern Macedonia, its population grew from 2.66 to 4.36 million, and in the same year Crete was united with it. The architect of these successes was Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, a Cretan who had governed since 1910 and was the leading champion of the Great Idea, the union with Greece of all Greeks living under Turkish rule.

In 1913 the throne passed to Constantine I, commander of the victorious army, educated at the Berlin military academy and married to the sister of Emperor Wilhelm II. To many Greeks he was a hero, and his name recalled the last emperors of Byzantium. In the same year Greece concluded a defensive alliance with Serbia.

Neutrality and the National Schism

When war broke out, Venizelos believed that Greece should side with the Entente, because the powers that ruled the Mediterranean would win, and the break-up of Turkey would give a chance to fulfil the Great Idea. The king and the General Staff wanted neutrality. In 1915 the Entente tempted Greece with gains in Asia Minor, and then with Smyrna.

On 5 March 1915 Venizelos offered the Entente the fleet and a division for the Dardanelles operation, but the king rejected the plan and the prime minister resigned. He won the election, however, and in August returned to power.

As Bulgaria prepared to attack Serbia, Venizelos asked the Entente for 150,000 soldiers, and on 23 September 1915 the king signed the decree on mobilisation. On 5 October a French and a British division began landing at Salonika, but the same day Constantine again forced Venizelos to resign.

The new government of Alexandros Zaimis declared armed neutrality and refused to help Serbia, holding that the alliance of 1913 did not cover a war against several Great Powers at once. The Greeks called the quarrel between king and prime minister the National Schism.

Neutral Greece became a battleground and the target of pressure from both sides. The Entente occupied the islands of Lemnos and Corfu, where the Serbian army was rebuilt, and at Salonika General Maurice Sarrail was in command.

On 26 May 1916 the Bulgarians and Germans entered Greek Macedonia, and the next day the garrison, forbidden by its government to resist, handed Fort Rupel over to them. The Entente replied with a blockade and an ultimatum, after which the Greek army was demobilised. In September the Greek IV Corps, surrounded at Kavala, gave itself up to the Germans so as not to fall into Bulgarian captivity.

Two governments

The Bulgarian entry into eastern Macedonia outraged many officers. On 30 August 1916 Venizelos’s supporters set up a Committee of National Defence in Salonika and renounced obedience to Athens. The loss of Kavala persuaded Venizelos to lead the movement. At the end of September he sailed from Athens to Crete, and on 9 October he took his place in Salonika at the head of a provisional government together with Admiral Kountouriotis and General Danglis.

This government took control of northern Greece, Crete and the Aegean islands, and on 23 November 1916 it declared war on Germany and Bulgaria, but not on Austria-Hungary and Turkey, so as not to endanger the Greeks of Asia Minor. In spring 1917 its units fought on the Macedonian front for the first time.

Relations between the Entente and the king broke down. In October 1916 the French took the Greeks’ light warships, and on 1 December an Allied landing party sent to force the surrender of arms became embroiled in fighting with royal troops in Athens. The next day royalists attacked the Venizelists.

The Entente declared a blockade of the coasts of royal Greece, and hunger set in in Athens. The Archbishop of Athens laid an anathema on Venizelos, while Britain and France received representatives of his government.

In May 1917 the British and French agreed in London that the king had to go. On 11 June the French High Commissioner Charles Jonnart demanded his abdication, and the French occupied Thessaly and the Isthmus of Corinth. On 12 June Constantine left Athens, leaving the throne to his younger son Alexander, although he did not formally abdicate.

On 26 June Venizelos formed a government, and on 27 June he took power in Athens. His government broke off relations with the Central Powers, and from that day the whole of Greece was at war. We take this day as the beginning of Greece’s participation in the war as a whole, although the Greek historian Loukianos Hassiotis dates the formal declaration of war to 28 June.

Greece at war

The new government exiled the leaders of the royalist camp to Corsica and the Aegean islands, among them the former prime ministers Dimitrios Gounaris and Stefanos Skouloudis. Hassiotis judges that Venizelos replaced Constantine’s unconstitutional rule with his own form of dictatorship, which lasted until the elections of 1920. Mobilisation was extremely difficult. It was hampered by purges in the army, royalist propaganda, mutinies by royalist officers and soldiers, and a lack of money and equipment. Constantine went to Switzerland, and his supporters built an effective propaganda network there, which made mobilisation even harder.

Even so, a year later ten Greek divisions, about 300 thousand men, were able to support the Allies in Macedonia. On 30 May 1918 the Greeks stormed the Bulgarian salient of Skra di Legen and took about 2 thousand prisoners. The success raised the army’s morale and its standing with its allies.

In the great offensive of September 1918 the Greek Archipelago Division helped the Serbs and French at Dobro Pole, while the Seres and Cretan Divisions, together with the British, attacked at Lake Doiran. The attack broke down, but it pinned down Bulgarian forces.

On the eve of the breakthrough 135,000 Greeks stood on the Macedonian front. On 29 September Bulgaria signed an armistice, and on 30 October Turkey capitulated. For Greece the war ended with the Armistice of Compiègne on 11 November 1918.

The end of the war and the reckoning

Greece found itself on the side of the victors. By the Treaty of Neuilly of 1919 it took Western Thrace from Bulgaria, and the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920 gave it even more land at Turkey’s expense. The war cost it between 3.2 and 3.7 per cent of its population.

The National Schism, however, did not die out. In 1920 Venizelos lost the elections and Constantine returned to the throne. The Greek army fought the Turkish nationalists in Anatolia until its defeat in August 1922, after which more than a million Greeks left Asia Minor for ever. Hassiotis writes that for Greece the war did not begin in 1914 but in 1912, and did not end in 1918 but in 1922.