GREECE: Long, Long Trail

The guerrillas were back. Barely a month after the Greek army’s victory in the Grammos Mountains (TIME, Aug. 30), 6,000 of Markos Vafiades’ Communists had filtered back into the Vitsi Mountains, 40 miles to the northeast, and were threatening the government base at Kastoria.

For over an hour one night last week, U.S. Major General Arthur Harper, General Van Fleet’s deputy, watched from a Kastoria window as the rebels lobbed sixty 75-mm. shells into the town. A direct hit through the window of a nearby hospital killed two soldiers and two nurses. The next day Americans asked why the city’s lights had not been turned off during the shelling. The answer was fear of looting by neighbors. The Greek army’s artillery did not answer the guerrillas until half an hour after the shelling had ended.

The Vitsi battle began shaping up just before the Grammos fight ended. At that time there were only 800 guerrillas in Vitsi. Now, 5,000 more, who escaped from Grammos into Albania, have joined them.

How the guerrillas recoup so quickly was explained last week by a Greek officer, who told this story of a guerrilla chieftain named Ypsilantis: “Last year 400 of Ypsilantis’ band of 720 surrendered to me. By combat we reduced the remainder of his band to only five, and Ypsilantis fled to Albania. But I had also captured Ypsilantis’ girl friend Sophia, who was very pretty. Seeing in her eyes that she was still with Greece at heart, I proposed to let her escape to follow Ypsilantis and report to me what he did. She went to Albania and sent me a message that Ypsilantis was waiting for 500 soldiers trained in Bulkes, Yugoslavia. Now our intelligence, says Ypsilantis is operating in Vitsi.”

Of 15 roads leading into Greece from its Communist neighbors, the guerrillas control five—two from Bulgaria, two from Yugoslavia, and one from Albania. One high-ranking U.S. officer said last week: “So long as it’s Communist policy to disrupt Greece by permitting guerrillas to cross and recross the borders there will be war in Greece.”

Even War Minister George Stratos, who gets publicly furious at any report except “Victory on all fronts,” was privately doubtful. Said he with a sigh: “I guess it will be somewhere else after Vitsi—maybe the Grammes again.”