Greece enters the war

On 27 June 1917 Eleftherios Venizelos, who had formed a government the day before, entered Athens and was sworn in as prime minister. From that day, according to the British official history of the Macedonian campaign (Falls), the declaration of war proclaimed on 23 November 1916 by the provisional government in Salonika was officially recognised as binding on the whole of Greece. The British chronology of the war puts it the same way, also recording under 27 June the breaking off of diplomatic relations with Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. A country that for almost three years had argued over whether to fight, and since the autumn of 1916 had had two governments, stood as a whole on the side of the Entente.

The sources date the individual acts of this turnabout differently. According to Falls, Venizelos’s government instructed the Greek ministers in Berlin, Vienna, Constantinople and Sofia to ask for their passports the day after the swearing-in, that is, on 28 June. The same day is given as the date of the formal declaration of war on the Central Powers by the Greek historian Loukianos Hassiotis, and Greek lists of governments give 15 June by the Julian calendar, which is also 28 June. The New York monthly Current History writes that the dispatches from Athens about the breaking off of relations were dated 29 June, and the American New International Year Book states in one place that relations were broken off on 30 June, and in another that war was declared on Germany and Bulgaria on 2 July. We adopt the date given by the chronology and the official history.

Entry into Athens

Venizelos returned to the capital, which he had secretly left in September 1916, under the cover of foreign bayonets. In the morning General Regnault’s French troops, who for two days had held the hills around the city, entered Athens with machine guns and occupied the main squares and gardens. According to Falls, at eleven in the morning the prime minister entered the city and went straight to the palace to take the oath before King Alexander. The British writer George F. Abbott, who was sympathetic to Constantine, describes sardonically how Venizelos and his ministers drove through the city in motor cars at high speed, avoiding the main streets, and how the palace and the Hotel Grande Bretagne, where the prime minister took up residence, were guarded by 400 Cretan gendarmes brought from Salonika. In the afternoon a Cretan regiment landed, which was to replace the French battalions in Athens.

In the evening Venizelos addressed the assembled crowd from the hotel balcony. He recalled that ten months earlier he had warned King Constantine from the balcony of his house, and that when the warning was ignored, the healthy part of the nation had risen to save the rest. He announced that the state would be purged of supporters of the old regime and that a constituent assembly would be convened in future. In foreign affairs, he said, there was no need even to explain that Greece’s place was at the side of the powers fighting for democracy.

Break with the Central Powers

The Greek ministers in Berlin, Vienna, Constantinople and Sofia were instructed to leave their posts and hand their archives over to the Dutch legations. According to the New International Year Book, the minister in Berlin, Nikolaos Theotokis, resigned on 1 July. Abbott writes that the young King Alexander was surprised at how sharply these steps contradicted the assurances given to the Greek people until then, but was told that since he had accepted Venizelos, he must also accept his foreign policy. According to Current History, Turkey announced that it regarded the breaking off of relations as equivalent to a declaration of war, and threatened to deport the Greeks living in its territory and confiscate their property. The same source records that on 16 July the United States received official notice that Greece regarded itself as a belligerent.

Venizelos did not promise an immediate offensive. On taking the oath he said, according to Current History, that as long as the Bulgarians remained in eastern Macedonia, which they had occupied in the summer of 1916 together with Kavala, that part of the country would always be in danger. Before the part of Greece that had not joined the National Defence movement could be mobilised, however, the neglected military organisation had to be rebuilt and the two armies, the royal and the Salonika one, merged. To begin with he announced the call-up of the 1916 and 1917 classes, which had not yet been trained.

Purges

The new government quickly dealt with its opponents. The most prominent members of the royalist camp, regarded as particularly pro-German, among them the former prime ministers Dimitrios Gounaris and Stefanos Skouloudis and Constantine’s military advisers, General Viktor Dousmanis and Colonel Ioannis Metaxas, were exiled to Corsica or to the islands of the Aegean. The first group was expelled from the country even before Venizelos’s return, at the demand of the French High Commissioner Charles Jonnart. According to the New International Year Book, on 29 June the prime minister announced the suspension of the principle that judges could not be removed, and the government declared that it would bring to trial those responsible for the December events in Athens and take action against the metropolitan who had anathematised Venizelos. Hassiotis judges that Venizelos’s government in practice replaced Constantine’s unconstitutional rule with its own form of dictatorship, which lasted until the elections of 1920.

An army for the Salonika front

For the Allies the most important thing was that the threat to the rear of their army fighting on the Salonika front had disappeared. Since the autumn of 1915 the commanders in Macedonia had feared that at the first serious attack on the Bulgarians the royal troops would strike them from behind or cut their communications. Now Greece could give them new divisions. According to Hassiotis, the National Defence forces numbered about 60,000 soldiers and officers in June 1917. On 2 July the soldiers and officers of the Athens garrison swore an oath of loyalty to the fatherland, the king and the constitution.

General mobilisation, however, was introduced gradually and with great difficulty. It was hampered by purges in the army, royalist propaganda, mutinies of royalist officers and soldiers, and a lack of money and equipment. Even so, a year later ten Greek divisions, some 300,000 men, were able to support the Allies in Macedonia. In May 1918 three of them won a success at Skra-di-Legen, and in September 1918 the Greeks took part in the offensive that broke the Bulgarian front.

The unification of the country, however, was only formal. Falls admits that the two camps were roughly equal in numbers, and many Greeks saw Venizelos as a prime minister imposed by foreign troops, and Constantine as a victim of the Allies. The rift, which the Greeks called the National Schism, did not end in June 1917, and in 1920 it brought Constantine’s return to the throne.