Greece asks about the occupation of Lemnos

On 7 March 1915 the Greek government asked Britain to explain on what grounds its forces had occupied the island of Lemnos. This date is given by the British chronology of the war. According to George F. Abbott, author of a book on Greece and the Allies published in 1922, Athens declared that the British step could not be reconciled with the country’s neutrality. It came just a day after Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos resigned, who had quietly consented to the occupation.

Tacit consent

British marines landed on Lemnos on 23 February, and Mudros Bay became the base of the fleet attacking the Dardanelles. Venizelos, well disposed towards the Entente, did not want to break neutrality openly, so the Greek garrison simply withdrew from the island. According to the British Naval Staff monograph, the Prime Minister gave it to be understood that the batteries would be left in place for the British to look after. The Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, was then urging Athens that Greece should not lodge even a formal protest, since British ships would use the island only briefly and only for the purposes of the operation in the Straits.

The status of Lemnos was, moreover, unclear. The Greek fleet had seized the island in the autumn of 1912, during the First Balkan War. In February 1914 the great powers awarded it to Greece, together with Chios, Lesbos and other islands, but the Ottoman Empire never recognised this decision. This allowed London to treat Lemnos as disputed Turkish territory rather than as part of a neutral state.

More and more troops

At the beginning of March the island was rapidly filling with soldiers. On 4 March the 3rd Australian Brigade arrived at Mudros from Egypt, and the Royal Naval Division and a French division were on their way. According to some accounts British troops went ashore at Mudros on 6 March, the very day Venizelos resigned. A short stay by a few warships was turning into the concentration of an army whose objective was the Gallipoli peninsula.

For the camp of King Constantine I, who wanted to maintain strict neutrality, this was hard to accept. Under one of the Hague Conventions of 1907 the territory of a neutral state was inviolable, and the troops of belligerents could not pass through it. The pro-royalist Greek author S. P. P. Cosmetatos wrote in 1928 that the occupation of Lemnos was a flagrant violation of these principles. Even an American journal of international law admitted in 1918 that the Allies’ only justification was the tacit consent of the Venizelos government.

Who asked?

It is not clear who formally addressed the inquiry. On 7 March Greece did not yet have a new government. The King was looking for a successor to Venizelos, and Dimitrios Gounaris took office as Prime Minister only on 9 March. The British Naval Staff monograph links the request for an explanation to the coming to power of Gounaris, whom it calls an Anglophobe. It is possible, then, that the matter was raised in the last days of the crisis and taken up by the new cabinet.

Whoever raised it, Athens made no attempt to remove the British from the island. The inquiry did, however, allow Greece to make the point that it did not accept its territory being treated as a theatre of war. The reply from London came two days later. Lemnos remained the main Allied base at the Dardanelles until the end of the campaign.