"Why were the Communists unable to overthrow a succession of feeble Athens governments? Woodhouse portrays a Greek Communist party weakened by internal feuding, divided by dissensions over policy, and overcome by the strength of U.S. forces. Basing his account on privileged access to documents, interviews with prominent survivors, and his own unique experience, he analyzes the characters, ideologies, and events behind one of the longest and most bitter civil wars of modern times. This is the definitive history."--BOOK JACKET.

As commander of the Allied Military Mission to the Greek guerrillas in Greece in 1943-4, C.M. Woodhouse has to hold an uneasy balance between the communist and government sides. Against a background of conflicting communist doctrine, shifting foreign alliances, territorial disputes and personality differences, the communist struggle for Greece unfolded in three rounds. The first began in 1941 with the German occupation of Greece when the National Liberation Front attempted to regain control of the country and overthrow the monarchy. In the second round, the communists tried to seize power at the end of the German occupation in December 1944 and were frustrated by the intervention of British forces. The third round (1946-9) was marked by US intervention, UN fact-finding missions, and the shift from guerrilla tactics to conventional warfare. The communists were weakened by internal feuding and overcome by the US forces. The author based his research on interviews with participants, documentary sources and his own experience. He analyzes the characters, ideologies and events behind one of the longest and most bitter civil wars of modern times.

The first full, nonpartisan history of the Greek Civil War, the brutal guerrilla conflict that launched the Cold War

A gripping story of struggle and triumph in Greece in 1940s concentrating on three critical phases of Greek history: The war against the Italians and Germans; the national resistance, and the civil war that followed. Stassinopoulos fought in the heroic resistance against the fascist invaders and vividly recounts the sacrifice, honor, and successes of the Greek armed forces and the Greek guerrillas drew the admiration of the free world and kindled hope for Allied powers victory.

The complicated and dramatic course of the Civil War in Greece had, for lack of parties interested in reconstructing the truth of its events, never been narrated prior to the appearance of this volume. It closed a gap in the history of our times, and did so with thoroughness and vivid journalistic immediacy. In addition to the known sources and unpublished documents, the author relied on testimony painstakingly collected from survivors of the tragedy who were scattered throughout the world. It remains the authoritative account of the kapetanios, the guerrilla chiefs who organized the partisans in the Greek mountains.

During the decade of the 1940s Greece experienced harsh German/Italian/Bulgarian occupation, the emergence of a powerful resistance movement and civil war between communist and nationalists. This critical period in the country's modern history is graphically illustrated through contemporary documents, many of them translated from Greek, many of them difficult to access. This annotated documentary collection, which is prefaced by a substantial introduction, affords a penetrating insight into the history of the 1940s from a variety of perspectives.

This volume makes available some of the most exciting research currently underway into Greek society after Liberation. Together, its essays map a new social history of Greece in the 1940s and 1950s, a period in which the country grappled--bloodily--with foreign occupation and intense civil conflict. Extending innovative historical approaches to Greece, the contributors explore how war and civil war affected the family, the law, and the state. They examine how people led their lives, as communities and individuals, at a time of political polarization in a country on the front line of the Cold War's division of Europe. And they advance the ongoing reassessment of what happened in postwar Europe by including regional and village histories and by examining long-running issues of nationalism and ethnicity. Previously neglected subjects--from children and women in the resistance and in prisons to the state use of pageantry--yield fresh insights. By focusing on episodes such as the problems of Jewish survivors in Salonika, memories of the Bulgarian occupation of northern Greece, and the controversial arrest of a war criminal, these scholars begin to answer persistent questions about war and its repercussions. How do people respond to repression? How deep are ethnic divisions? Which forms of power emerge under a weakened state? When forced to choose, will parents sacrifice family or ideology? How do ordinary people surmount wartime grievances to live together? In addition to the editor, the contributors are Eleni Haidia, Procopis Papastratis, Polymeris Voglis, Mando Dalianis, Tassoula Vervenioti, Riki van Boeschoten, John Sakkas, Lee Sarafis, Stathis N. Kalyvas, Anastasia Karakasidou, Bea Lefkowicz, Xanthippi Kotzageorgi-Zymari, Tassos Hadjianastassiou, and Susanne-Sophia Spiliotis.