Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria all supplied arms and some materiel aid to the rebels. But from Stalin, who had the most to gain from the situation, came nothing except exhortations in the United Nations. At a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on January 21, 1946, for example, Russia loudly condemned what it called the persecutions of leftists in Greece, and the Greek Communists saw this as a sign that Russia would support a new armed rebellion.

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In March 1946, the Greek Communist Party refused to participate in the national elections which produced an overwhelming rightist victory. In response, the Communists stepped up their disruption and infiltrated sympathizers into the government bureaucracy, the military and the unions, with the intention of obstructing any constructive government actions.

Under the command of 40-year-old Markos Vafiadis, small ELAS units began training for hit-and-run raids across the border to gather supplies and recruits. The first strike came at the end of March.

An armed group entered the village of Litochoron and attacked an army platoon, which quickly surrendered. Some gendarmerie in a police station put up a stiffer resistance, but soon they, too, put up the white flag. The insurgents then retreated without a scratch as a British unit approached.

It was a signal to ELAS rebels throughout the country. The andartes dug up their weapons and headed for the mountains.

A few months later, a band of 1,000 to 1,500 men attacked and overran a gendarmerie post in the town of Deskati in Thessaly. Villagers later said the rebels looked ragged, almost starved, but they were armed with three-inch mortars and PIAT anti-tank weapons. The garrison was betrayed by a second lieutenant who led 20 gendarmes over to the rebel side. It took government forces five days to clear the area and restore order, with the rebels retreating across the frontier into Yugoslavia–the last stages of their retreat covered by fire from the Yugoslavs.

By the end of 1946, rebel units were making almost daily forays into Greece. Roads were mined and villages burned, the marauders passing without hindrance over the frontiers from the neighboring Communist countries. Although the rebels had pockets of strength throughout the country, there were four main areas of guerrilla activity: central Macedonia along the Yugoslavian-Albanian borders; Thrae and the Bulgarian frontier of northern Greece; the Tripolis-Sparta area of the southern Peloponnesus in the sun-baked Mediterranean, and the mountainous region of Thessaly in eastern Greece.

The national government in Athens, meanwhile, dithered over the situation, relying on right-wing groups to fight ELAS sympathizers in the city’s back alleys instead of immediately sending out forces into the countryside, where thy could show the peasants that the government could protect them. It was the remarkable Greek people–particularly the tough, resilient peasants–upon which the government’s strength ultimately depended, a fact which it often failed to appreciate.

The Athens government, under the influence of the British, also thought of the rebels in ‘bandit’ terms rather than as guerrillas. It was a nearly fatal mistake. Government forces–gendarmerie, national guard and police–totaled about 30,000 men. Although under-equipped, poorly trained, they could, with proper leadership and coordination, have dealt with ‘bandits.’ With guerrillas, they were out of their depth. In October 1946, the government finally began committing units of its 100,000-man army, which was neither trained, armed nor organized for counterinsurgency operations.

Markos Vafiadis now organized his force of about 4,000 guerrillas into semiautonomous units of 100 combatants each. By the end of 1946, he had 7,000 combatants–now called the ‘Democratic Army’–and he had established his headquarters inside Greece at the juncture of the Albanian, Yugoslavian and Greek borders, in the rugged terrain of the Grammos and Vitsi mountains. Markos was a thin, hawk-faced man, a member of the Communist Party since 1928. He had escaped from the notorious Gavdos island prison at the start of World War II and made his way to the mountains, where he had joined ELAS as a kapetanios. Although tough and ruthless, he could also be paternal, and he alone of all the guerrilla leaders had the courage to stand up to the Communist Party chiefs and argue his opinions.

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