The Greek Civil War, 1944–1949

In December 1944, the guns that had driven the Axis from Greece were turned on fellow Greeks. What began as a bitter dispute between the Communist-dominated resistance movement EAM/ELAS and a British-backed government escalated by 1946 into a full civil war. On one side stood the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE), forged from wartime partisan networks and Communist Party cadres; on the other, the National Army, rebuilt with American money and matériel after Britain handed the burden of containment to Washington under the Truman Doctrine.

The Greek Civil War, 1944–1949, traces the conflict from the December 1944 Dekemvriana street fighting in Athens through the fragile peace of the Varkiza Agreement, the mountain guerrilla campaigns of the DSE under Markos Vafiadis, the pitched battles for Mount Grammos and Mount Vitsi, and the movement’s final defeat in August 1949, a defeat sealed as much by Tito’s break with Stalin and the closing of the Yugoslav border as by battlefield reverses.

Drawing on the operational histories of both armies and on the political struggles within the Greek Communist Party (KKE) and the Athens governments alike, it presents the Greek Civil War as the first hot conflict of the Cold War, one whose outcome shaped Greece’s politics for a generation and set a template for Western intervention against Communist insurgency. Based on academic work and official documents, it is lavishly illustrated with original photographs and custom-drawn colour profiles, and is an indispensable single-point reference source.