After the end of the Balkan wars, the position of Greece was extremely precarious. The Turks laid claim to the islands of the eastern Aegean and began a systematic persecution of the Greeks of eastern Thrace and the coast of Asia Minor. A new Greco-Turkish war seemed imminent, while there were serious signs of a parallel Bulgarian attack on Greece. Attempts to resolve the dispute peacefully did not continue, because in the meantime the First World War broke out and the new Turkish leadership instead of the war against Greece chose the war against Russia.

In the vital sphere of the Aegean Sea, the balance hangs in the balance. The Germans and Austrians still supported the Turkish claims to the islands, and three months before Turkey entered the war on the side of the Central Empires, the Anglo-French refused to agree to the return of the islands to Turkey. At the same time, Washington refused to give in to Turkish pressure to cancel the sale of two warships to Greece. However, the fronts remained open, and Greece was still suffocatingly surrounded by states with openly hostile sentiments. Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos was convinced that a necessary condition for the survival of the country was to prevent the creation of two threatening forces on its borders. For a politician like Venizelos, Turkey’s entry into the war on the side of the Central Empires was the great strategic opportunity he was looking for for Greece to resolve its differences with its threatening neighbor, with the two strongest maritime powers of the day as allies. Venizelos realized that only the weakening of the Ottoman Empire would guarantee the security of Greece, prevent the extermination of the Greek population and, under more favorable circumstances, enable it to expand to the other side of the Aegean.

At the end of World War I (1918), Greece’s main rivals, Bulgaria and Turkey, were defeated. Venizelos was acquitted after a hard fought battle. He successfully resisted the attempts to establish an absolute monarchy, the terror of the armies, the successive stops of military units and neutralized the pro-German neutrality of the monarchists, which led the country to death. At the same time, including Greece on the side of Western parliamentary democracies was a choice with great strategic depth. In reality, then the Bulgarian-Turkish threat was neutralized and Macedonia, Western Thrace and the islands of the Eastern Aegean Sea were practically won back for Greece.

Never in the past have there been more favorable circumstances for Greece to advance its redemptive aspirations in the context of a powerful alliance emerging victorious from a world war, given the decision of the great powers to dismember the Ottoman Empire. Venizelos clarified at the Lausanne Conference at the end of 1922 his policy on the question of Asia Minor: the country was not brought to Asia Minor and the Hellespont by “territorial bulimia or a sense of usurpation of foreign property.” […]but the lofty ideals of freedom and the duty of saving two million people.” And he described the geopolitical dimension of his vision: just as it became possible to create several states in the Balkans, three states can be created in Asia Minor: Armenian, Greek and Turkish.

The question still remains: was there another choice? Could the survivors of the persecution again find themselves under the Turkish yoke, at the very moment when a new round of terrorism and persecution began? Indeed, what Greek government could stand in the way of the thousands of refugees who had taken refuge in Greece or were exiled to the depths of Anatolia and now demanded to return to their homes? The only answer that can be substantiated is one: the life and property of hundreds of thousands of Greeks could be provided only by the presence of Greece in Asia Minor. Obviously, the expansion of Greece in Ionia had pronounced features of a humanitarian operation to save the Greek population and, of course, was directly proportional to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which the Allies had already agreed on.

US Secretary of State Robert Lansing lived near Venizelos in Paris. He left us a description of the decisive influence he had on the negotiations: “What he asked for was given because he asked for it. His personality and confidence in his judgment dominated the negotiations in Paris.” Venizelos became a leader with international influence. It was this advantage that he used with impressive skill in favor of his country. It literally became one of the sharp points of his strategy. His relationship with the three leading leaders of the time was more than just friendship. He clearly had the features of ideological closeness to a common goal: building a post-war world based on law and freedom. All of them had liberal views, believed in democracy and self-determination of peoples. Of course, they were also united by common interests. Judging from the available evidence, when Venizelos gave the order to land an army in Asia Minor, the Prime Ministers of Great Britain and France and the President of the United States stood firmly by his side.

Allied solidarity had clear consequences at the operational level as well. During the landing at Smyrna, the Greek army was accompanied by a strong force of the British fleet, the same thing was repeated in the occupation operations of Eastern Thrace in July 1920. In addition, the participation of the British in the Turkish civil war on the side of the Sultan served the Greek goals. Greece responded with a life-saving intervention of its army at Propontis, where it annihilated the Kemalist forces and at the same time freed a small number of British troops from the threat of capture.

These developments in the military field showed that Greek-British interests were mutually reinforcing and that the British presence in the straits was completely intertwined with the defensive wall of the Greek forces. In any case, a big step was taken towards more active involvement of the British in the war, which, after all, was the main strategic goal of Venizelos.

The operations of the Greek army in Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace until October 1920 radically shook the building of the Kemalists.

The Treaty of Sevres, signed by all the allies, confirmed that the strong allied bonds that Venizelos had established remained unshakable. Until November 1920, none of the allied countries raised the issue of revising the treaty or withdrawing Greece from Asia Minor. French Prime Minister Millerand’s hesitation in the months leading up to the signing of the treaty quickly ended after Venizelos intervened and the French leadership rallied. However, the country’s position on the battlefield was just as solid. The operations of the Greek army, carried out in Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace until October 1920, radically shook the nascent Kemalist building. With the subsequent group desertion of Turkish soldiers, as well as the displacement of thousands of residents who sought refuge in the territories occupied by the Greeks.

In November 1920, Venizelos’ Greece emerged as a key player in the international system, exercising dynamic diplomacy and extremely capable of maintaining a balance with the great powers. On the battlefield, the Turkish troops suffered crushing defeats, while the Greek army had a huge numerical advantage, a clear superiority in weapons and supplies, as well as a skilled and experienced leadership. In addition, the Prime Minister of Great Britain committed himself to Venizelos to provide military materials and financial assistance. But was diplomatic and military superiority enough to enable the country to bear the financial burden of the war? In 1918, Greece received the most profitable loan ever made by the Greek government. By November 1920, the country had paid back £6.5 million from the UK and $15 million from the US. Alexandros Diomedes argues that these loans constituted the entire political edifice of the unions the country entered into.

Venizelos’s opponents, who succeeded him in power, did not have and never received any international support. The bridge of trust that Venizelos had built with his allies collapsed. Churchill believed that a political upheaval in Greece would lead to the annulment of the obligations undertaken by the allies to her. Lloyd George, until then the absolute advantage of Greece, without Venizelos it was impossible to continue his philhellenic policy, faced European public opinion, which believed that the return of Constantine to the throne was tantamount to the return to power of the Allied defeated Germany.

Anti-Venezuelan leaders, outcasts of the post-war international system, soon doomed Greece to suffocating isolation and old loneliness. Inexperienced and ambitious, they forced Greece to continue the war. With the difference that the Turkish allied war was replaced by the Greek-Turkish one, which Greece was forced to wage alone, without any military or financial assistance. In March 1921, Prime Minister Dimitrios Gounaris told Metaxas that he preferred to continue the war “and let’s perish!”, adding that “it was never our policy, Venizelos led us there. We have found a war.” A few months earlier, in September 1920, in a conversation with his nephew Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, he stated quite the opposite: “Venizelos did well and took command in Asia Minor. I would do the same. […] If we win the elections, we will continue the military operations. And God helper. Obviously, the new governors, morally and psychologically unprepared, took on a mission they did not believe in.

But what strategic counterbalances did the country have for such a large-scale operation? The diplomatic power of Greece was destroyed. At the very least, they lacked the foresight to take advantage of Venizelos’ authority in the allied capitals. Also, they failed with rudimentary diplomatic flexibility with Allied initiatives in 1921, which would likely have saved the population and secured Eastern Thrace for Greece. In terms of military finances, after the Allied embargo, their policy was doomed from the start. And yet outstanding on the 1918 loan was the payment of the remaining £6 million from the UK and $30 million from the US.

Anti-Venezuelan governments have become a chimera of absolute military coercion. After all, this is where most of the mistakes were made. By extensive purges of the Venizelian officers they destroyed the cohesion of the army. After the failure at Sangarios, in terrible climatic conditions, they doomed the army to immobility and inactivity in anticipation of the end. On a huge front of 700 kilometers, they did not have the elementary foresight to organize a second line of defense or even to secure the defense of Smyrna. In short, the war was lost before it even started.

Panos Sifnaios, one of the editors of Metaxas’s diary, comes to the key conclusion: “In this supreme opposition of wills, faced with the “grey wolf” of Ankara, there was no longer a Cretan rebel, there was a college of squids.” .

* Mr. Nikolaos Papadakis-Papadis is the Director General of the National Research and Research Foundation “Eleftherios K. Venizelos”.