Venizelos asks for an Allied landing at Salonika

On 2 October 1915 (19 September by the Julian calendar, which Greece then used) Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos asked the French and British ministers in Athens for their troops to come to Salonika as quickly as possible. The request was surprising, because only a day earlier the same prime minister had halted the whole expedition. After a week of conflicting signals, in which Athens one moment accepted and the next rejected Entente help, the road to Salonika was open again.

The alarm of 1 October

The crisis was set off by two things. The first was the speech by Sir Edward Grey in the House of Commons on 28 September. The British foreign secretary spoke of the traditional British sympathy for Bulgaria and of the “legitimate aspirations” of all the Balkan states. The British official history of the Macedonian campaign supposes that Venizelos knew only a summary of the speech, which left out the promise of full support for Britain’s friends in the event of Bulgarian aggression. The second was a series of visits in Salonika itself. At the end of September the Greek military governor, General Konstantinos Moschopoulos, was called on by the French consul, the captain of a French warship and two officers from the Dardanelles, and immediately after them by the British General Hamilton and his staff. They announced that the Allies would occupy part of the city and port and prepare them for defence. Moschopoulos replied politely but firmly that without orders from Athens he would have to oppose the occupation of Greek territory. According to the British official naval historian Julian Corbett, the Greeks believed that it was Sir Ian Hamilton himself, the commander of the troops at Gallipoli, who had come. In fact it was Brigadier-General A.B. Hamilton, sent to prepare the landing.

Venizelos concluded that the Entente meant to seize Macedonia and hand it to the Bulgarians. On 1 October he sent a confidential telegram to the Greek legations in London, Paris, Petrograd and Rome. The landing, he wrote, had not yet been finally accepted, and even once accepted it would require a formal protest and leaving to the Greek authorities the decisions about the port and the railway, which were needed for the concentration of the Greek army. Greece demanded an assurance that the offers made to Bulgaria in August were void and that the troops sent to Serbia would under no circumstances be used against the territorial integrity of Greece and Serbia. The prime minister also asked the French minister, Jean Guillemin, to stop the transports. Five French ships were already at sea. The British cruiser HMS Doris turned them back just short of Salonika, together with British anti-submarine net layers. Admiral John de Robeck cancelled the sailing from Mudros of the ships carrying the British 10th Division, planned for the next morning.

Assurances and a protest

Explanations at once began to flow between Paris, London and Athens. On 2 October both governments informed Venizelos that all the offers to Sofia had lapsed. At his request they also gave a categorical assurance that, in passing troops through Salonika, they had no intention of infringing Greek sovereignty or interfering in the administration of the country. That was enough. The prime minister agreed to the landing, with a purely formal protest, on condition that the units moved inland at once. This the Allies could not accept, because sending troops to Serbia in small groups straight from the ships would have been unacceptable from a military point of view. First the forces had to be concentrated near Salonika and a base set up there. The Greeks raised no objection. During the night of 2–3 October HMS Doris signalled to Mudros that she had written permission to land the troops.

The same day Guillemin handed the prime minister a note. On his government’s instructions he announced in it the arrival at Salonika of the first contingent of French troops, although in reality the ships had yet to sail. France and Britain were sending them to help their ally Serbia and trusted that Greece would not oppose steps taken in the interest of a state that was also her ally. Venizelos replied that same day. Greece was neutral, so she could not permit the passage of foreign troops across her territory and had to protest against it. The fact that the troops were going to Serbia’s aid changed nothing, because until the case foreseen in the alliance had arisen, the threat to Serbia did not affect Greek neutrality. According to the British official history, the protest was addressed only to France, which evidently had no objection to it.

Two policies

The protest was a pretence, and both sides knew it. Venizelos later said that the arrival of the British and French was “the most valuable trump” of his policy. He intended to fight if Bulgaria attacked Serbia, and alongside 150,000 Greek and 200,000 Serbian bayonets he wanted 150,000 Entente soldiers. The British writer G.F. Abbott, sympathetic to the king, on the other hand accused the Allies of moving before agreement had been reached, and the prime minister of presenting the king with a fait accompli. King Constantine I still believed that Greece should remain in armed neutrality.

On the same day, as Abbott noted, the Bulgarians began to mass troops on the Serbian frontier, and on the Danube the final preparations for the Austro-German offensive were under way. Venizelos had three more days in power.