Reading about SOE's operations in the Eastern Med has taken me deep into the preliminaries of the struggle for post-war Greece, with both EDES (Royalist) and ELAS (Communist) guerrillas a lot of the times more interested in fighting each other instead of Axis troops, but with the Reds following blindly the diktat of Moscow against anything that smelled of Greece's government-in-exile. This reminded me of a similar situation in China, with Mao's mob antagonizing the Nationalists at every step, often forgetting about the common enemy, the Japanese. What was, then, the ultimate goal of the Soviet-backed insurgent groups? Winning a civil war in the middle of a world war, to ensure post-war communist domination? Wasn't that, as we say down here, selling the skin before catching the deer? Or the master plan included the new and improved version of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, once the Western Powers where too exhausted to continue the fight?
good day warlord,veteran wannabe,yesterday 11:34pm.re:communist guerrilas ultimate goal:defeat of the axis or of the western army's.either one if it meant they could take over for there como masters.and and do a deal with stalin after the war.interesting post.they made a mess of greece after the war,regards bernard85
Warlord seemed to me at the time that Stalin was not sure if he could get into Central Europe before the allies and so he was trying to make sure that he could get a piece of it in Greece plus the fact that he stopped all talk about the 8th and 5th armies halting him in Poland by having FDR and Marshal going along with his South of France invasion which weakened the Italian forces- then 8th Army sent a force over to Greece to halt the fighting - and FDR stopped Monty from taking Berlin thus Stalin had Central Europe for the next 40 years to spread his communism - we weren't all that bright in those days - apart from Churchill who knew the score but couldn't do anything about it… Cheers
Though the whole afterwar insurgents bloody breakdowns in greece - chech - hungary is a sorry mess where local national people's interests were sacrificed for "grand" strategists (and both west and east got blood on their hands)... I find that it has worked out better for the west to let the warschaupact get a few central european countries and "save" greece for the west. Afterall, had Stalin e.a. had the greek islands then much more trouble (in strategy (resources, planning, conflicts), but also nuclear accidents, collisions) would have occurred in the med (Suez, Algeria, Palestine, israel)..up to 1989.....
