Life did not change much in the villages of Greece. Although the Germans had invaded the country in 1941, the peasants seemed to go about their business undisturbed, the rhythms of the seasons passing as they had always done since the time of the gods of myth.

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One morning in June of 1942, therefore, the villagers of Domnitsa, a hamlet about 185 miles from Athens, were startled to see a group of 15 heavily armed men suddenly appear. Their black-bearded leader gave a short speech.

He was Aris Velouciotis, formerly a colonel of artillery in the Greek army, and he was raising the banner of revolt against the occupying forces of their beloved Greece. He and his men were andartes, guerrillas. The name of their force? The National Popular Liberation Army–the Greek initials: ELAS. In the coming months and years, the peasants would get to know that name well.

Two years later, in October 1944, British Lt. Gen. C.J. Scobie, commanding two brigades and some Free Greek units, about 26,000 men in all, landed in Greece to liberate the country from the German occupation forces. The Germans, as it turned out, were only the beginning of the problem.

Greece had been devastated by the war. Thousands of civilians had been uprooted. The country was economically bankrupt–industry at a standstill, factories destroyed, ports and cities in ruins. The civil government was in chaos, almost ineffectual in dealing with the country’s problems.

Scobie could do little more than occupy the major towns while the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) began the immense task of getting the civilian population back on its feet.

But one of the general’s more immediate problems was dealing with the guerrilla forces that had fought the Germans during the war and were now beginning to fight each other. The victor’s prize: control of Greece.

At the end of World War II, the Greek political spectrum was an alphabet soup of organizations covering almost the entire range of political opinion. The most prominent, strongest and best organized group, however, could trace its history back to almost the beginning of the war. When the German army invaded Greece in April 1941, it found many of the country’s prominent Communists in jail. Not finding any reason to hold them, and desiring to keep on good terms with their political ally of the time, Stalin, the Germans released the Communists, a move the Germans no doubt later intensely regretted. When Germany attacked Russia in June, these Communist leaders immediately formed a resistance organization, the National Liberation Front–Ethnikon Apeleftherotikon Metopan (EAM).

While ostensibly independent from the Greek Communist Party–the KKE–the EAM was, in fact, tightly controlled by the Communists. About this time, too, another group was formed among the armed bands operating in the mountains, the leftist National Popular Liberation Army or Ellinikos Laikos Apeleftherotikon Stratos (ELAS). Loosely controlled by the EAM and the Communist Party proper, ELAS tended to be somewhat independent, preferring to defeat the Germans first and talk about politics later. As time went on, however, the Communists made sure that ELAS toed the party line more closely. In contrast to ELAS, the purist EAM wanted to nothing less than the total transformation of Greek society along Soviet lines. Thus, relations between the two groups were usually strained and often broke down into actual fighting.

On the other side of the coin, meanwhile, a 51-year-old republican colonel named Napoleon Zercas formed the Ethnikos Dimokratikos Ellinikos Syndesmos (EDES), or National Republican Greek League, which was the bitter enemy of the EAM, but on one occasion conducted operations with ELAS against German and Italian targets. There were also other groups on the right, such as the organization named Kh, or X, commanded by the Cypriot-born Colonel George Grivas, and it waged a war of terror and counterterror against the Reds and their sympathizers. In this cauldron of extremes, the more moderate anti-Communist organizations quickly became irrelevant and ineffective.

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