The Truman Doctrine of Aid to Greece: Introduction

The Truman Doctrine of Aid to Greece:
A Fifty-year Retrospective

Eugene T. Rossides, Editor

1998

Introduction

By Demetrios Caraley

The Academy of Political Science is delighted to publish jointly with the American Hellenic Institute Foundation this set of excellent essays on the “Truman Doctrine of Aid to Greece: A Fifty Year Retrospective.” They tell the story of a successful foreign and military policy intervention by the United States without loss in combat of any American lives. The essays provide a record of the numerous reasons for this success, reasons that have relevance today. Eugene T. Rossides, president of the American Hellenic Institute Foundation, deserves warm congratulations for the imagination and drive that brought together such a stellar cast of practitioners and scholars to write this retrospective analysis.

The hallmark of the Truman doctrine was that it be “the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” On March 12, 1947, President Harry Truman went before a joint session of Congress and requested a program of economic aid, military equipment, and military advisers to help Greece defeat the heavily armed communist insurgents who were trying to topple the Greek government and turn Greece into a Soviet-dominated dictatorship. The insurgents were being helped by the three Soviet satellite states—Albania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria—on Greece’s northern border. By May 9, 1947, both houses of the Republican-controlled 80th Congress passed the necessary legislation with bipartisan majorities: 287-108 in the House (Republicans 127-94; Democrats 160-13; Independent 0-1) and 67-23 in the Senate (Republicans 35-16; Democrats 32-7). By July 15, the American Mission for Assistance to Greece had arrived in Athens and by November 1, military equipment began to flow in. By August of 1949, after being increasingly depleted in numbers and confined to the northwest mountain areas of Greece, the insurgents were defeated in a major offensive and those who were not killed or captured fled over the border into Albania and Yugoslavia.

This brief summary may suggest that the launching and success of the Truman doctrine had been in today’s terms, a “no brainer.” Would not any American president recognize the critical location of Greece in the eastern Mediterranean for protecting American sea lanes to the Middle East and its oil, and seek to keep it from falling behind the Iron Curtain? And given these realities, would not any president be able to persuade Congress to back his initiative with bipartisan majorities? Also, wasn’t it certain that the Greek government, the Greek army, and the Greek people would use the American support effectively and outfight the insurgents, in light of their ancient traditions and very recent World War II experience of resisting aggression and fighting for liberty? Finally wasn’t it easy to adhere to the original strategy of not introducing American combat troops to prevent combat casualties even though on occasion it looked like the communists might score a major victory?

In fact, as the essays explain, none of what happened was inevitable, and the story might have ended very differently. Truman was a new president, having succeeded to the office after Franklin Roosevelt’s death only two years before, and was largely untried in forging new foreign and military policy initiatives. He might not have been willing to break with all tradition and propose America’s first peacetime foreign assistance program. The Republican-led Congress might have delayed or defeated the initiative of what they saw as a Democratic lame duck president in order to keep him from generating a successful record that he could use in his 1948 election campaign. True, the Greek government, army, and people had played a heroic role in World War II. They had rejected an October 1940 ultimatum to surrender and allow the Italian army that was invading from Albania to occupy Greece; instead they counterattacked, pushing the invading army back into Albania and almost destroying it by April 1941. Then, when Hitler dispatched large German forces to invade Greece through Yugoslavia in order to bail out his Italian ally, the Greeks offered fierce resistance on mainland Greece and then on the island of Crete. Because of the need for this German intervention and because of the unexpected ferocity of Greek resistance, the German attack on the Soviet Union was delayed from May to late June, undermining the German Army’s ability to reach its major objectives in 1941 before the Russian winter set in.

Nevertheless, by 1947 the Greeks were war weary, for they had been fighting continuously since 1940, against the Italian and German armies, as part of the wartime resistance from the mountains, and finally against the communist insurgents. And while the Greek soldiers remained brave, the officer corps—largely tutored by British officers during the pre-World War II period and through the resistance—was imbued with cautious, unimaginative strategies and tactics that took the head of the American advisers, General James A. Van Fleet, considerable time to counteract. Finally it was not at all a given that the Soviet Army, which had crushed democratic forces in Poland and Czechoslovakia, would not come in force over Greece’s northern borders through Yugoslavia or Bulgaria and overrun the Greek Army with its small cadre of American advisers. This would have posed to the United States the choice of accepting the loss of Greece to the Soviet Communist movement or taking on the risk of igniting a World War III by introducing major American combat units.

These essays, beyond fleshing out the historical record of how the Truman doctrine was conceived and implemented in Washington and in Greece fifty years ago, also offer lessons for the present, especially now that the United States is the only remaining superpower. One reading of those lessons is that for an American military intervention in another country’s civil war or counterinsurgency to succeed, (1) the president must educate the Congress and the public about the threat to American interests and the desirability but also the attainability of the objective, (2) the country receiving American aid must be willing to shoulder most of the burden of the fighting, (3) the objective of defeating the insurgents must be realistic given their resources and strategic positions versus those of the forces we wish to help, and (4) the nation and government we help should preferably be not just an enemy of our enemy but one that shares our own democratic and civil-libertarian values so that it can be counted upon to become a long-term friend, as Greece has been to the United States.

Finally, as some of the essays discuss in depth, the value of Greece’s friendship with the United States did not end with the cold war. Greece’s strategic location athwart sea lanes connecting the oil users of western Europe and the United States with the oil producers of the Middle East remains important to keep in the hands of a friendly government and a friendly people. As fewer and fewer governments in the Middle East are willing to give the United States bases for ground troops or warships, the superb harbors of mainland Greece and its islands are becoming more valuable for maintaining large American naval forces from which to project power in the eastern Mediterranean. And Greece’s presence as a modern, economically-growing, stable democracy adjoining the war-torn states of the former Yugoslavia may yet prove valuable to bringing about a long-term reconciliation there through peaceful democratic processes.