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British liaison officers’ reports on Greek army officers in Elas. A reappraisal of the problems of source value

p. 115-132

Résumé

During the Second World War, recruits to Elas, Greece’s communist-led guerrilla army, included several hundred officers of the country’s pre-war regular army. Today, the declassified files of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, which include the reports of British military personnel, sent to Greece to work with Elas, challenge established images of the motivations, status and influence of those Greek officers. Indicating a more complex and fractured relationship between professional Greek military personnel and the Elas political leadership, these sources also suggest grounds on which to counter postwar claims that anticommunist bias is a sufficient explanation for criticisms of Elas found in British accounts.


Extrait

1During the Second World War, Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), a clandestine organisation established in 1940, dispatched thousands of trained personnel into enemy-occupied territory to promote and assist resistance activity. These included over 120 army officers from Britain and its empire whom SOE sent, by parachute and sea, into mainland Greece, which had been occupied by Axis forces since 19411. Scattered around the country in individual teams and supported by a similar number of British non-commissioned officers (NCOs), these soldiers, who arrived between the autumn of 1942 and late 1944, were tasked with encouraging local resistance to the Axis and sought to provide support in multiple ways, from distributing supplies of weapons and explosives to delivering training and medical aid2. This work brought them into contact with Greek fighters of various political hues. Some of these proclaimed loyalty to Greece’s king, who had gone into exile when the Axis took c

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