# Greek Civil War **1946–1949.** The first hot war of the Cold War, fought before most people had a name for the Cold War, and the reason the American containment doctrine exists in the form it does. ## The Shape of It Greece was occupied by Germany, Italy and Bulgaria from 1941. The largest resistance organization, EAM, and its army **ELAS** were Communist-led and by 1944 controlled most of the countryside. When the Germans withdrew, the question of who inherited the state was settled first by British troops in Athens in December 1944, then by a full civil war from 1946 between the Western-backed government and the Communist Democratic Army. The government won in 1949, after Tito closed the Yugoslav border and cut the insurgents' supply line. ## Why It Is In This Vault **Because of what it produced, not what happened in it.** **1. The Truman Doctrine.** On 12 March 1947, with Britain unable to continue underwriting Athens, Harry Truman asked Congress for aid to Greece and Turkey and framed it as a choice between two ways of life. The [[Truman Doctrine]] is the founding text of containment, and it was written about Greece. Every subsequent American commitment justified as holding a line against communism descends from a speech about a Balkan civil war. **2. A security state with a permanent licence.** The winning side did not demobilize its categories. For decades afterwards Greeks needed *certificates of social belief* to hold public jobs or attend university; the Communist Party was outlawed until 1974; opponents were exiled to prison islands; and a parastate of paramilitary networks operated alongside the official one. **3. The officer corps that made 1967.** The colonels who took power in the [[Greek Junta]] were formed in this war and believed themselves to be finishing it. **The 1967 coup is unintelligible without 1949** — its participants did not think they were overthrowing a democracy; they thought they were resuming a war the politicians had gone soft on. > [!note] The reusable finding > **A civil war ends when the fighting stops and the categories it created outlive it by decades.** Greece kept the winning side's security apparatus, loyalty tests and enemy definitions for a generation after the enemy was defeated — and that apparatus, not the Communists, is what eventually took the state. **Look for what a victory institutionalizes, not only what it settles.** ## See Also - [[Truman Doctrine]] · [[Cold War]] · [[Marshall Plan]] · [[World War II]] - [[Greek Junta]] · [[Metapolitefsi]] · [[Greek History Hub]]