Report on Revolt

Seldom has a statesman of his stature taken such a public drubbing as Prime Minister Winston Churchill for his policy in Greece. Public opinion of all shades distrusted his use of British troops to defend the Greek Government against ELAS. The press was almost unanimously critical. From Athens most correspondents reported the struggle as if ELAS was the defender of Greek liberty and the British troops were little better than Nazis. Twice Churchill had to defend his course in Parliament.

Last week a British labor delegation, which had investigated the Greek situation on the spot, presented its report. In effect, it said that the facts as presented by Winston Churchill were true.

Inland to ELAS. The delegation was composed of five British trade-union leaders with impeccable labor records. At its head was Sir Walter Citrine, general secretary of Britain's Trades Union Congress. The British trade unionists interviewed scores of miscellaneous Greeks and some 500 British paratroopers (not officers) in Athens. It traveled 100 miles inland to interview ELAS' trade-union leaders, who claimed to be the real leaders of the Greek workers.

It found that:

P: EAM was not composed only of Communists but that the Communist Party dominated EAM. The Communists were even stronger in ELAS, EAM's military force.

P:Before the German withdrawal, EAM had not used the arms sent by Britain to fight the Germans. It had fought the Germans with captured Italian arms, hoarded its superior British arms to use in the seizure of power in Greece. P: It had been much less zealous in fighting the Germans than in fighting other Greeks. P:ELAS had committed atrocities during the civil war. The Regent, Archbishop Damaskinos, estimated the number of persons killed by ELAS, or by the Communist Party's terrorist organization, OPLA, at 10,000. Many of them were civilians. P: The three EAM trade-union leaders, who claimed to represent Greek labor, were all formerly associated with Moscow's Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern). They had no more authority to speak for labor than labor leaders loyal to the Greek Government. P: The British common soldiers were resentful at the reporting of Greek news. They also despised ELAS, whom the Tommies, many of them members of the British Postal Workers Union, considered "the lousiest, dirtiest, scruffiest lot of fighters our men ever came across, compared with whom the Germans were gentlemen." The delegation was "impressed with the universal opinion of these British troops and of many others whom we consulted that, had they not been ordered into action against ELAS, there would have been wholesale massacre in Athens. . . ."

The British labor delegation concluded that the generally pro-EAM reports of the correspondents in Athens were due to the fact that they "seemed to think that Greece consisted of the Hotel Grande Bretagne [where the newspapermen lived]."

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