Finest Years (71 page)

Osbert Lancaster, the artist then serving as press attaché at the British embassy, described the arrival next afternoon of Churchill, once more borne by armoured car from the harbour through the drab, dusty, bullet-scarred streets. The prime minister wore the uniform of an RAF air commodore: ‘
The change in his appearance
since I had last seen him at close quarters some three years previously was marked. His face seems to have been moulded in lard lightly veined with cochineal and he badly needed a haircut. But the sound of mortaring and rifle-fire, combined with the historic associations of the countryside through which he had just passed, were clearly already having a tonic effect and he was distinguished from all his companions by an obvious and unswerving sense of purpose none the less impressive for being at the moment indeterminate.' The latter intimation of confusion was unwarranted. The British had already convened a conference of all the warring parties, to meet under Churchill's auspices, but Damaskinos's chairmanship.

The embassy resembled a besieged outpost during the Indian Mutiny. Power was cut off, while gunfire provided orchestration. Some fifty staff, many of them women, had been subsisting for nine days on army rations in conditions of acute discomfort. The ambassador's wife, whom Harold Macmillan found more impressive than her husband, directed domestic operations with a courage and energy likewise worthy of a Victorian imperial drama. Fortunately for the inmates, ELAS guerrillas had only small arms, so the British remained safe if they avoided exposing themselves at doors and windows. Between meetings with
commanders, Churchill met and applauded the embassy staff, for whom he afterwards arranged an immediate issue of decorations.

At 4 p.m., representatives of the Greek factions assembled around a long table in the freezing, otherwise barren conference room of the Foreign Office. The rattle of musketry punctuated the proceedings, with voices sometimes drowned out by rocket and mortar concussions. Churchill seated himself in the centre, flanked by Archbishop Damaskinos, Eden and Macmillan. At one end were American, Russian and French representatives. The Greeks filled in around them, leaving space at a vacant end for the communists, who were late. Churchill and the prelate spoke brilliantly and at length, with long pauses for interpretation, before news arrived of the absentees, ‘
three shabby desperados
'. The communists had been delayed arguing with British security guards about their demand to bring weapons into the conference chamber. On their appearance, Churchill wrote to Clementine later, ‘
after some consideration
I shook the ELAS delegates' hand[s] and it was clear from their response that they were gratified'. He repeated much of his opening harangue: ‘Mr Eden and I have come all this way, though great battles are raging in Belgium and on the German frontier, to make this effort to rescue Greece from a miserable fate and raise her to a point of great fame and repute…Whether Greece is a monarchy or a republic is a matter for Greeks and Greeks alone to decide. I wish you all that is good, and good for all.'

Alexander said: ‘Instead of me putting my brigades into Greece, I should like to see Greek brigades coming to help me in Italy in the war against our common enemy.' Macmillan was disgusted by the oily platitudes offered by the communists, who extolled their own desire for peace: ‘
I thought it all very disingenuous
, especially remembering the frightful atrocities these men are committing both on our troops and on harmless fellow-countrymen throughout Greece. Winston was much moved, however.' Then the foreigners rose and left the table, to enable the Greeks to negotiate with each other.

Once they were outside, their exchanges provided several notable vignettes. The prime minister engaged the head of the Russian military mission in conversation:‘What's your name? Popov? Well, Popov,
I saw your master the other day, Popov! Very good friends your master and I, Popov! Don't forget that, POPOV!' Even the colonel's limited English enabled him to grasp Churchill's attempt to brandish his relationship with Stalin. Then it was explained that the delay to proceedings had been caused by the need to disarm the communist delegates. The prime minister looked thoughtful and withdrew a pistol from his own pocket, growling complacently: ‘
I cannot tell you the feeling
of security one enjoys, knowing that one is the only armed man in such an assembly as that!' He replaced the weapon in his overcoat before retreating with his entourage by armoured car to the embassy, and thence to Phaleron. When his typist Elizabeth Layton seated herself at the opposite end of the naval barge's cabin to the prime minister, Churchill said, ‘No, come and sit by me.' To Alexander's wry amusement, the two travelled back across the water to
Ajax
cosily enfolded together in a huge rug.

Next day, the archbishop came to the British embassy to report on progress of the noisy, bitter talks at the Foreign Office. At one point, apparently, General Plastiras—whom Churchill insistently addressed as ‘Plaster-Arse'—shouted at a communist: ‘
Sit down, butcher!
' The prime minister was in high spirits, having been taken by Alexander to a vantage point from which the general explained the Athens battlefield. Macmillan saw this as a reprise of Churchill's famous appearance at a London shoot-out with terrorists during his 1911 incarnation as Home Secretary: ‘
Of course this affair is
a sort of “super Sidney Street”, and he quite enjoyed having the whole problem explained to him by a master of the military art.' When the ELAS delegates asked to see Churchill privately, he was eager to accept. But Macmillan and Damaskinos persuaded him that it was essential now to leave the Greeks to sort out their own affairs. That evening, the archbishop announced Papandreou's resignation as prime minister. His last act in office was to cable to King George II in London, declaring the united endorsement of Greece's politicians for a regency. Churchill wrote to Clementine: ‘
This Wednesday has been
an exciting and not altogether fruitless day. The hatreds between these Greeks are terrible. When one side have all the weapons which we gave them to fight the
Germans and the other, though many times as numerous, have none, it is evident that a frightful massacre would take place if we withdrew.'

Lack of both electricity and camera flashbulbs made it necessary to hold the prime minister's parting photocall in the embassy garden, much to the dismay of those responsible for his safety. Access was possible only by traversing a short walkway from the drawing room, on which he was visible to the world from Constitution Avenue. Attempts to hustle him behind the safety of the garden wall were frustrated by an onrush of photographers which caused the prime minister to halt on the walkway. To the dismay of the press attaché behind him, ‘
a short crack followed by
a shower of plaster announced that a bullet had hit the wall two feet above our heads. Summoning all my courage, I…gave the infuriated Prime Minister a sharp shove in the back, precipitating him smartly down the steps into the comparative safety of the garden.' On 28 December, Churchill flew out of Athens for Naples. He had yearned to linger, and again to meet the Greeks. Macmillan, however, persuaded him that his duty was to return to London and reconcile King George of the Hellenes to the regency. Churchill allowed himself to be buckled into his seatbelt on the Skymaster, acknowledging that ‘Even the most eminent persons are subject to the laws of gravity.' As the plane taxied, he suddenly ordered it to halt. He insisted on passing down to the ground party an amendment to the British final communiqué. Then he took off for Italy, and home.

Back in London next afternoon, the prime minister twice met the King of the Hellenes, at 10.30 p.m. and 1.30 a.m. At 4 a.m., George II at last agreed to the regency. Churchill retired to bed after a working and travelling day that had lasted twenty-two hours. General Nikolaus Plastiras became prime minister, though he was obliged to resign soon afterwards, following the leak of a letter revealing that in 1941 he had offered himself to the Nazis as leader of a collaborationist Greek government. On the night of 4 January 1945, the firepower of the British Army and diminished confidence in their own prospects persuaded the communist guerrillas to retire to the countryside. An uneasy armistice was agreed between the factions. Violence in Athens subsided, though it required the deployment of 90,000 British
troops to secure the country. Greece remained in a state of civil war between 1946 and 1949, but a non-communist—indeed, bitterly anti-communist—government survived until the Americans relieved the British of responsibility for Greek security.

Churchill's visit was significant chiefly because it reconciled him to a course of action which all the other British players had already endorsed. The decisive factor in Greece was Stalin's abstention. It suited Moscow to acknowledge the principle that whichever ally liberated an occupied country should determine its subsequent governance. The ELAS guerrilla leaders were vastly more impressed by the silence of Colonel Popov, Stalin's man in Athens, than by the eloquence of Britain's prime minister. In Greece, Churchill received his sole reward for the Moscow ‘percentages agreement' which Americans so much disliked. So tormented and riven was Greek society in the wake of the occupation that it is hard to imagine any course of action which might have brought about the peaceful establishment of a democratic government. What emerged was probably the least bad outcome, in which no one could take just pride.

Churchill's dramatic venture into personal diplomacy commanded less world attention than it might otherwise have done, because it coincided with the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and Luxembourg. According to a State Department survey, the overriding US media impression of British action remained unfavourable: ‘
Anglo-American differences
and British military action in Greece during early December received more than twice as much front page space as Churchill's mission to Athens…Predominant editorial opinion throughout the crisis was never categorically opposed to British leadership in Greece and the Mediterranean, but strongly objected to the possible imposition of an unrepresentative and unpopular government on the Greek people, and to the possible creation of a closed British sphere of interest.' Drew Pearson's final column of 1944 unfavourably compared Churchill's ‘outgrown imperialism' with more enlightened attitudes elsewhere in the British body politic. Criticism of British shortcomings at home and abroad was now a running theme in the US press. Virginius Dabney wrote in the
New York Times
on 31 December that opinion in the American South, traditionally friendly to Britain, was turning hostile: ‘The development which has provoked most adverse comment is Winston Churchill's policy in Greece and Italy. Even in this strongly pro-British region criticism is being heard, not only of Churchill but of the British people.'

The British did not receive this bombardment in silence. On 30 December, after a surge of American comment which added allegations of ‘slacking' to other charges against America's ally, the
Economist
delivered a counterblast:

What makes the American criticisms so intolerable is not merely that they are unjust, but that they come from a source which has done so little to earn the right to postures of superiority. To be told by anyone that the British people are slacking in their war effort would be insufferable enough to a people struggling through their sixth winter of black-out and rations and coldness—but when the criticism comes from a nation that was practising Cash-and-Carry during the Battle of Britain, whose consumption has risen during the war years, which is still without a national service act—then it is not to be borne.

There is still a great deal of wishful thinking in Britain, even in the highest quarters, to the effect that good behaviour on our part will procure some great prize, such as an Anglo-American alliance…It is as well to be brutally frank: there is no more possibility of any of these things than of an American petition to rejoin the British Empire…What, then, is the conclusion for British policy towards America? Clearly it is not that any quarrels should be picked…But let an end be put to the policy of appeasement which, at Mr Churchill's personal bidding, has been followed, with all the humiliations and abasements it has brought in its train.

Following the
Economist
's outburst, the State Department recorded ‘
an orgy of recrimination
between the American and British presses'. The Washington embassy reported to London the following week on US attitudes: ‘
The general reaction
is that although the British attack was not unprovoked and the British cannot have been expected
to take the flood of criticism poured by the United States press and radio lying down, yet the British are surely much too touchy and the tone of their retort is much too harsh.' Though a 14 January
Life
magazine editorial described the
Economist
's criticisms as wellmerited, many American publications remained hostile.
OWI and State Department surveys
in the early months of 1945 found that Americans consistently rated the British more blameworthy than the Russians for the difficulties of the Grand Alliance.

The State Department study noted: ‘
Despite recent press comment
sympathetic to the British, a confidential opinion poll indicates that dissatisfaction with the British has increased among the public at large. The tabulation shows that mass opinion, dissatisfied with the way in which Russia, Britain and the United States are cooperating, blames chiefly Britain…The “nationalist” press, even in comment praising Field-Marshal Montgomery and the British people, continued to charge that the “British and Russians are playing power politics against each other in the middle of this war, while we, at least at this moment, do most of the fighting”.'

Churchill found little to celebrate in what he called the ‘new, disgusting year' of 1945. Russian intransigence was familiar, but overbearing American behaviour filled a bitter cup. Tempers were sorely frayed, in government and among the British people. Eden wrote on 12 January: ‘
Terrible Cabinet
, first on Greece…Whole thing lasted four and a half hours. Really quite intolerable. I was in a pretty bloody temper…for everyone started taking a hand in drafting messages for me.' Churchill found it much harder to sustain relative inactivity in Downing Street than to undertake initiatives abroad, even if these were ill-rewarded. One morning he told his typist Marion Holmes: ‘You know I cannot give you the excitement of Athens every day.'