Provisional government declares war on Germany and Bulgaria

On 23 November 1916, or 10 November by the Julian calendar then used in Greece, the provisional government of National Defence in Salonika declared war on Germany and Bulgaria. It was headed by a triumvirate: Eleftherios Venizelos, Admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis and General Panagiotis Danglis. The date of 23 November is given by the British chronology of the war and by the British official history of the Macedonian campaign (Falls). Other sources speak of the following days. The Greek historian Loukianos Hassiotis, author of the entry in the international encyclopedia of the First World War, and Venizelos’s British biographer S. B. Chester give 24 November, and the New York monthly Current History, published by the New York Times, gives 25 November. The difference may stem from the fact that the news from Salonika, the announcement of the decision and Venizelos’s proclamation reached the press with a delay. We follow the date in the chronology.

It was the first act since the outbreak of the war by which Greeks, albeit only some of them, formally took the side of the Entente. A country that had been arguing for two years over whether to fight now had two governments: one waged war, while the other, in Athens, clung to neutrality.

A government that waited

The National Defence government had come into being in the autumn. At the end of August the Venizelists seized power in Salonika, and at the end of September Venizelos and Kountouriotis formed a provisional government on Crete. On 9 October Venizelos arrived in Salonika and took his place at the head of the triumvirate. From the start he announced that his government would raise an army to fight the Bulgarians, who in the summer had occupied Greek eastern Macedonia with Kavala and since May had held Fort Rupel. Yet he waited more than six weeks before formally declaring war.

The reason was the attitude of the Allies themselves. At the Boulogne conference on 20 October the British and French decided not to recognise the Salonika government officially, but to give it money. According to Falls, on 24 October London authorised its minister in Athens to deal with Venizelos through the consul-general on all matters concerning the districts and islands that had accepted his authority. The British would gladly have gone further, but the French Prime Minister Aristide Briand still hoped for an understanding with King Constantine I. At the beginning of November the French deputy Paul Bénazet negotiated an agreement with the King under which Athens was to hand over part of its arms to the Allies in return for guarantees that they would not reach the Venizelists. The Venizelist press, writes the British publicist George F. Abbott, a defender of the King, made no secret of its disappointment.

By the time the Salonika government declared war, that agreement was already falling apart. On 16 November the French admiral Louis Dartige du Fournet demanded arms from Athens without any guarantees, and on 19 November he ordered the ministers of the Central Powers to leave Greece. That same day the Allies entered Bitola, the first recovered town of Serbia, to which Greece had in 1915 refused the help provided for by their treaty of alliance.

War on two states

The provisional government declared war only on Germany and Bulgaria. Bulgaria was the obvious enemy: its troops stood in Greek Macedonia, and in Greece the memory of the Balkan Wars was still alive. Germany was Bulgaria’s most important ally, and it was German troops together with the Bulgarians who had occupied Fort Rupel in May. According to Hassiotis, the Salonika government did not, however, declare war on Austria-Hungary or the Ottoman Empire. In the case of Turkey the aim was to avoid provoking reprisals against the Greeks of Asia Minor, where a large Greek population lived exposed to persecution.

The same day, according to Current History, Venizelos issued a proclamation setting out the aims of the struggle. “We wish to wipe out the stain cast upon the Greek nation by the disregard of our treaty obligations towards Serbia. We wish to take part in the liberation of our lands invaded by the Bulgarians. We wish to show in a tangible way our deep conviction that Greece cannot develop, or even exist, as a free and independent state otherwise than by maintaining the closest bond with the powers that have always supported her, that rule the Mediterranean, and that are fighting at this very moment for the freedom of Europe and for the right of every small nation to live in freedom and independence,” he wrote.

In it Venizelos assured the King of his loyalty and firmly denied that his movement was directed against the dynasty. He announced, however, that after the war the country would have to be protected against “a small group of men around the King” imposing on the Crown views contrary to the will of the people. The only guarantee was to be the restoration of the broken constitutional order and the return to the nation of the right to decide its own fate, since the maintenance of the “absolute rule” under which Greece had lived for twenty months might draw it closer to the Central Powers. “In short, we are fighting for exactly those principles for whose victory over Prussian militarism the allied powers are waging their great war,” he concluded. His watchword was: “We are not against the King, but against the Bulgarians.”

The Army of National Defence

The declaration of war made sense only if an army followed it. The first battalion of National Defence volunteers had already set out for the Struma in September. According to Falls, after Venizelos’s arrival in Salonika the new government told General George Milne, commander of the British forces in Macedonia, that it would raise four divisions of about 10,000 infantry each and wished to fight in eastern Macedonia. It claimed to have almost enough rifles, uniforms and equipment, but only three mountain batteries. London decided that Britain and France would share the cost of equipping them and that the Greek units would come under overall French command. By 10 November, however, Milne had taken under his orders on the Struma three Greek battalions forming a regiment.

According to the Greek military history cited by modern studies, the Salonika government had at first only about 65 guns of various origins and fewer than 10,000 shells. Three divisions were planned: the Serres Division, formed from volunteers and from those soldiers of the Greek IV Corps who in the summer had refused to surrender to the Germans at Kavala and had made their way to Salonika; the Crete Division on Crete; and the Archipelago Division on the Aegean islands. There were too few volunteers, so the government introduced conscription in the territories under its control. Hassiotis notes that many inhabitants of Greek Macedonia, Muslims, Jews and Slavs, did not share Venizelos’s national aspirations, others were loyal to the King, and still others simply did not want to go to war. Falls writes that the Serres Division suffered mass desertions, especially among recruits from the Chalkidiki peninsula, while the Islanders, above all the Cretans, were much more loyal supporters of Venizelos and better soldiers.

The Entente: help without recognition

The Allies received the declaration of war without enthusiasm. Hassiotis writes that Venizelos’s assurances that his aim was to recover territory and fulfil the obligations towards Serbia, not to change the regime, persuaded the Entente to recognise the Salonika government de facto, though not de jure, and to grant it a loan and equipment. The British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith said on 9 November at the Lord Mayor of London’s banquet that Venizelos had assured the Allies that his efforts were “in no way directed against the throne of Greece”. The Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, Lord Robert Cecil, explained at the beginning of November that wherever the majority of the population recognised Venizelos’s authority, Britain recognised him as the de facto ruler of that part of Greece.

Not all the Allies thought alike. According to the British official history of the war at sea (Newbolt), Russia feared that the course of events would shake Constantine’s throne, while Italy, like Russia, distrusted and disliked the Venizelists. The Allies also drew a neutral zone in Thessaly between the royal and Venizelist forces when, at the end of October, National Defence units attacked Katerini on the border of Old Greece. Venizelos later complained that the zone cut him off from Thessaly and from recruits who wanted to join him.

The answer from Athens

For the King and the government of Spyridon Lambros the men in Salonika were rebels. Newbolt describes how, after the Venizelist secession, officers who had deserted the royal army were dismissed from the service and deprived of their pensions, while many others were arrested on mere suspicion. The same fate befell officials, judges and mayors. Liberal newspapers were closed and their editors imprisoned. Reservist leagues in the provinces accused and tried their opponents themselves. The British minister, Sir Francis Elliot, felt that honour required him to defend the persecuted Venizelists and showered the Greek ministers with protests. The Athens government, for its part, rejected the Allies’ successive demands precisely because surrendered arms might end up with Venizelos’s army.

What came next

The declaration of war coincided with the sharpest crisis in the Entente’s relations with Athens. On 1 December an Allied landing party tried to enforce the surrender of arms and fighting broke out in Athens itself, after which royalists attacked Venizelists for two days. On 8 December the Allies began a blockade of the coasts of royalist Greece, and on 17 December the Athens government issued a warrant for Venizelos’s arrest on a charge of high treason. Only then did London decide to recognise the Salonika government: according to the British chronology the decision was taken on 19 December, and in January 1917 Lord Granville became Britain’s representative to Venizelos. France soon did the same.

The division of Greece lasted until June 1917, when the Allies forced Constantine to leave the country and Venizelos returned to Athens as prime minister of a reunited state. After his return to power, on 27 June 1917, Greece as a whole entered the war. Falls notes that it was officially recognised at the same time that the declaration of war proclaimed by the provisional government on 23 November 1916 applied to the whole of Greece from that date. According to Hassiotis, the National Defence forces numbered about 60,000 officers and men in June 1917, and in May 1918 they played an important part in the victorious Battle of Skra-di-Legen. In September 1918 the Greeks took part in the offensive that broke the Bulgarian front and ended the war in the Balkans. The rift that had become visible in November 1916 nevertheless divided the Greeks for decades to come as the National Schism.