Entente ultimatum on the Greek fleet

On 10 October 1916, or 27 September by the Julian calendar then used in Greece, Vice-Admiral Louis Dartige du Fournet, commander of the Allied fleet anchored off Salamis since September, handed the Greek government a note of demands. Greece was to surrender the light warships of its navy, disarm the large ones and the coastal batteries, and give the Allies control of the port of Piraeus, the police and the railway to Larisa. The admiral announced that he would take action at 1 p.m. on 11 October. The British chronology of the war speaks of an ultimatum from the Entente governments, but in reality it was a French step: the British official history of the war at sea (Newbolt) shows that the British and Russian ministers refused to put their names to the note.

Orders from Paris

According to Newbolt, at the beginning of October the admiral, on the instructions of the French Ministry of Marine, returned to the question of the unfulfilled terms of the powers’ note of June. He was to demand the reinstatement of Venizelist officers recently dismissed from the fleet, the removal of officers hostile to the Entente, and the placing of Piraeus and the railway under Allied control. He told the ministers in Athens that he wanted to land 300 French sailors “to reinforce the police”. The British minister, Sir Francis Elliot, telegraphed to London that he did not know to what extent the Allied governments had entrusted the French admiral with authority in political matters. The first demand, in his view, was meant to prevent the government in Athens from stopping the fleet from going over to Venizelos, and the second was a step towards complete control of Greece, which, if not the French government, then at least some of its officials were seeking. The Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, replied that the presence of the French fleet did not entitle the admiral to act at his own discretion. Paris then decided to bypass the usual diplomatic channels and act directly through the admiral.

The demands coincided with a government crisis in Athens. Nikolaos Kalogeropoulos’s cabinet had resigned at the beginning of the month, and the new prime minister, Professor Spyridon Lambros, was still assembling his government. According to Newbolt, on 6 October the admiral passed some message to the Greek government, and the next day brought the battleships Patrie, Suffren and Démocratie and the Russian battleship Chesma into the Bay of Eleusis. “The Greek fleet thus found itself between two fires and was completely paralysed,” he wrote in his memoirs. Elliot asked him to wait until Lambros was “in the saddle”, and when argument failed, declared that the admiral must present the note himself, because neither he nor his colleagues could associate themselves with it. On 9 October a telegram arrived from the French Ministry of Marine instructing the admiral to act without the participation of the Allied ministers in all matters concerning the security of the army in the East and of the fleet. The British government, absorbed by Romania’s defeats, according to Newbolt gave no thought to the political consequences of these instructions.

The content of the note

The note, whose text the admiral passed to Elliot, began by stating that the Greek government had only partly met the Allies’ demands, and that France regarded some of its steps, such as changes among the officers and crews of the warships and the moving of troops and artillery into Thessaly, as unfriendly and threatening to the security of the Allied fleet and of the army at Salonika. The admiral added that the reservists’ leagues in the provinces, instead of disarming, were arming and agitating against the Entente. He announced the seizure of the light cruisers, destroyers, torpedo boats and submarines, which were to move to the Allied fleet’s anchorage with those members of their crews who wished to stay. The three large ships, the battleships Kilkis and Lemnos and the armoured cruiser Georgios Averof, could remain where they were, but were to unload their gun breech-blocks, torpedoes and ammunition and reduce their crews to one third. The admiral also wanted to occupy one of the islets and demanded the disarming of the batteries on Salamis and around Piraeus, except for two that he intended to take over. Finally, in the name of the security of the army at Salonika, he demanded that control of the police and of the railway from Piraeus to Larisa be exercised by officers appointed by him.

The British writer George F. Abbott, who was sympathetic to the King, writes that Greece was called on to comply within twenty-four hours, and that concern for the safety of the Allied armada was a pretext that exposed itself. The Greek fleet consisted mostly of obsolete ships and a small flotilla of light craft. Abbott quotes Dartige du Fournet himself as saying that to see it as a serious threat would be childish. The admiral regarded the seizure of the fleet as a precaution that could still be justified. He could not, however, justify the control of the police, the railway and the port. “We officially recognised Greece’s right to neutrality, and yet we were laying our hands on part of her national life, even on the secrets of every Greek’s private life,” he wrote. According to Abbott these demands were solely the work of the French government, of which the admiral did not approve, any more than did the British and Russian ministers.

A night in Athens

Lambros’s ministers, sworn in that same day, deliberated over the note all night. Resistance was out of the question: the Greek fleet lay under the guns of the Allied battleships, and since the previous day Venizelos had been in Salonika, where a government ready to fight alongside the Entente was taking shape around him. On the morning of 11 October Athens gave way to force, protesting against an “act of violence”. That same day the French took the light ships of the Greek navy away to their anchorage. Newbolt judges that the Allies did themselves serious harm by this: the Greek navy, trained by a British naval mission, was the armed force most friendly to the Entente in neutral Europe, and a dozen or so torpedo boats and two submarines did not make up for the loss of its friendship and respect.