Greece accepts the demands over its fleet

On 11 October 1916, or 28 September in the Julian calendar used in Greece, the government in Athens accepted the demands of the French Vice-Admiral Louis Dartige du Fournet. The day before, the commander of the Allied fleet off Salamis had demanded the surrender of the Greek navy’s light vessels and the disarming of its large ones. The British official history of the war at sea (Newbolt) describes how the ministers of the new Prime Minister, Spyridon Lambros, sworn in only a day earlier, sat over the note all night. At eleven in the morning a Greek officer came aboard the French flagship, the battleship Provence, with the reply. The government protested against an “act of violence”, but declared that it was yielding to force majeure and had already issued the necessary orders. The officer found the ship cleared for action, with the crews at the guns.

Disarming the fleet

At half past twelve, half an hour before the deadline set in the note, the French set to work. According to Newbolt, two French deputies who happened to be touring the front on a parliamentary inspection looked on. The small cruiser Elli, the supply ship Miaoulis, nineteen torpedo boats, two submarines and five auxiliary vessels were taken to the Allied fleet’s anchorage. From the largest ships of the Greek navy, the battleships Kilkis and Lemnos, bought from the United States in 1914, and the armoured cruiser Georgios Averof, the breechblocks of the guns, the torpedoes and the ammunition were removed, and their crews were cut to skeleton parties whose only task was to guard the ships. By the evening it was all over.

The note provided for more. The Allies were to occupy one of the islets, the Greeks were to disarm the batteries on Salamis, on the island of St George and at Perama, and remove the breechblocks from the guns at Piraeus, except for two batteries that the French wanted to occupy. The admiral also demanded control of the port of Piraeus, the police and the railway from Piraeus to Larissa. He entrusted control of the railway to Commander Portzamparc and of the police to Commander Roques. According to Newbolt, the Greek government never afterwards complained of the way in which these officers carried out their tasks.

The dignity of the defeated

The Greek sailors behaved with a composure that, according to the British official history, did them honour. “It must be acknowledged that the Greek government did not try to evade any of its obligations regarding the fleet,” Dartige du Fournet wrote in his memoirs. Later inspections showed that no sabotage had been committed on any of the seized ships. The admiral did not hide that the order was distasteful to him: in his memoirs he admitted that he suffered at having to use force against a weak neutral nation and against a navy in which France had so many friends, and he called it childish to see a serious threat in it. The British official history notes that the Greek navy, although royalist in its sympathies, had until then been the armed force most favourable to the Entente among the neutral states. When Eleftherios Venizelos left Athens, only the ironclad Hydra and two torpedo boats went over to the Allies. The Greek officers went ashore embittered, and King Constantine I received them and thanked them for their exemplary conduct.

London taken by surprise

The whole operation had been prepared by Paris without consulting the allies. The British official history of the Macedonian campaign (Falls) states that the Foreign Office learned of the admiral’s orders only on the evening of 10 October, through the Admiralty. The Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, at once protested in Paris that the British were surprised by “so astonishing a step”, in which British ships under a French commander were to take part without consultation or explanation, and asked that the admiral be stopped. It was too late. The explanation from Paris, that the issue was the replacement of Greek crews by men hostile to the Entente and the threat of a torpedo attack, reached London when the operation was already under way. The head of the British naval mission in Greece, the universally respected Rear-Admiral N. C. Palmer, told the minister, Sir Francis Elliot, that his position had become untenable, because the Greek navy had ceased to exist and he represented a fleet that had helped to humiliate it.

Newbolt judges that the Allies paid for nineteen torpedo boats and two submarines with the loss of the friendship and respect of the Greeks. On 16 October, faced with unrest in the capital, the admiral landed patrols at Piraeus and sent a detachment of sailors to Athens. Falls speaks of 140 men in Athens; Abbott, who drew on the admiral’s memoirs, of 1,200 sailors in all, some of whom were quartered in the Zappeion, a few hundred metres from the royal palace. In November the French hoisted their flag on the seized torpedo boats and took over the arsenal on Salamis, and further demands, this time for the surrender of the army’s weapons, led on 1 December to bloody clashes in Athens between Greek soldiers and an Allied landing party.