GREECE: Civil War

For Greece, Britain, Europe, it was a week of tragedy, a week of decision.

The hills of Athens echoed and re-echoed to the boom of bombs. Against a sullen sky loomed the Parthenon, monument to the ruin of Europe’s most serene civilization. Across it flashed the shadows of strafing Spitfires. On the sides of the Acropolis and in the streets of Athens, where British soldiers and Greek Leftists stalked each other with Tommy guns, were the ruins of the hopes born of liberation. Splashes of Greek and British blood slowly clotted on the pavements. Athens, where the word democracy (from demos, the people) first achieved political meaning, was a battleground for two forces, each claiming to defend democracy.

No Man’s City. An armed showdown had come between the Communist-cored EAM and its fighting wing ELAS on the one side, and the coalition Government of Socialist Premier George Papandreou with the backing of the British occupation forces, on the other. Ever since the police fired on a forbidden EAM demonstration, called to protest the surrender of its arms (TIME, Dec. 11), open warfare had raged in the ancient capital.

Because the battle lines were everywhere, all Athens was a no man’s land in which few unarmed civilians dared to venture. One chilly dawn British Lieut. General Ronald MacKenzie Scobie ordered tanks to take the ELAS and KKE (Greek Communist Party) headquarters on Constitution Square. A Sherman tank smashed into one building; airborne troops entered the other with the aid of new plastic explosives. The committees were captured, but not communist Secretary George Siantos.

Not all the ELAS men were Communists. Some of them were middle-class business people, some of them were liberals and patriots who had fought the Germans, fighting now because they feared a dictatorship of the Right, should the British bring back King George, as much as their opponents feared a dictatorship of the Left, should EAM win.

On Patission Street. The struggle went on all week. British troops and the British-trained Mountain Brigade methodically cleaned up street after street only to have ELAS riflemen, clad in civilian clothes, infiltrate behind them. At week’s end the British-held area was still only an island in a hostile sea.

TIME’s Correspondent Reg Ingraham and four other U.S. correspondents ventured into an ELAS area—Patission Street. ELAS snipers opened up on them at 25 yards; three of the correspondents dashed behind a wall. But Ingraham and another could not make it. Wrote Ingraham:

“Bullets were whining up the street, so we dived behind an inadequate steel phone pole and hydrant. We tried three times to join the others, but each time bullets drove us back. Trying to accommodate my not exactly sylphlike figure to that reedy pole, I wished savagely its designer were in my place. Finally, after the longest five minutes I ever spent, we risked a dash and legged it back the way we had come and sat down behind a retaining wall and wondered what to do next. Civiliansin windows and balconies offered all sorts of unintelligible suggestions in Greek or sign language. One sent a note by a scampering little boy (snipers don’t deliberately shoot at children). The note said in English: ‘Friends, I am Warner Brothers manager here. Come to my house.’ ” A British jeep finally rescued the newsmen.

No Bread, No Beds. In the slowly reviving capital, life collapsed completely. Martial law and the general strike ordered by EAM paralyzed all public services. Shops closed, trams stopped, streets emptied. Conditions at Athens’ Hospital of the Evangelist had been bad enough before the fighting began. Now so many civilians had been wounded that there was not enough of anything, except drugs, to care for them. Patients lay on mattresses on the floor. Even the doctors’ offices, reception rooms and corridors were full of wounded.

After the first mass funeral, nobody found time for more burials. Since several cemeteries were being used as guerrilla strong points, naked corpses were piled up in mortuaries like cordwood.

No Let-Up. On Sunday, Dec. 10, the day originally set for all Greek guerrillas to surrender their arms, the fighting mounted to a furious climax. All day, heavy, devastating shelling from British 25-pounders and guerrilla 75-mm. guns crisscrossed between British headquarters at the eastern foot of the Acropolis and the ELAS citadels in the Stadium area, in the park east of the Arch of Hadrian and the Temple of Zeus. Both sides were still trying hard not to damage monuments that had survived 2,000 years of human havoc. As the eighth bloody day ended, ELAS still held the port of Piraeus (the Allied food ships had anchored, for safety, outside the harbor), and most of the police stations in Athens. ELAS casualties already numbered around 4,000. General Scobie gave no figure for his casualties, said only that he had received no “peace proposals.” ELAS called up reserves; the Government called up four new classes. From London came word that skilled Negotiator Harold Macmillan, Resident Minister at Allied Mediterranean Headquarters, might soon appear in Athens as peacemaker.

No “Gluzburg.” The political war kept pace with the shooting. In the absence of newspapers, EAM littered the streets with leaflets denouncing the Government and “George Gluzburg”* as “great enemies of the people.” By order of Winston Churchill, wavering Premier Papandreou withdrew his resignation, issued a statement: “My Government defends freedom against the tyranny of an armed minority which is fascist.” Said his Minister of Marine, Poet-Politician Panayotis Kanellopoulos: “We are waging a struggle of the democratic front against the fascist Left.”

* King George II of Greece is a member of house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.