MODERN GREECE: A History since 1821 - Amazon Web Services

THE TURBULENT INTERWAR PERIOD (1923–41) 105
never held a cabinet post, was the dictator’s closest confidant and
remained unknown even after the dictatorship; minister-governor of
the capital, C. Kotzias, was an anti-Venizelist who aspired to become
Metaxas’s successor; the minister of labor, A. Dimitratos, was a former
trade unionist of small significance. Diakos’s own devastating appraisal
sums up their weight in the system: “The dictatorship … was like the
number 1,000,000 but without Metaxas only six zeroes.” 6 Alexander
Papagos, commander-in-chief of the Greek forces in the Greco-Italian
war, was overshadowed both by Metaxas’s involvement in military
affairs and King George’s patronizing attitude. His stature as the rallying
point of an entire political cause came much later in his life, when
he assumed full responsibility and credit for the civil war campaign of
1949. Papagos was born in Athens in 1883. A young man of good breeding
and family ties with the royal court, he studied in a cavalry academy
in Brussels and subsequently entered the corps that produced few
generals in the Greek army. His loyalty to the Crown throughout its
period of tribulations earned him a dismissal from the army in 1917.
He was reinstated in 1920 after Venizelos’s electoral defeat and the
royalists’ return to power and saw action in Asia Minor. He was dismissed
again in 1923 for his role in the abortive coup that sought to
purge the army of the enemies of the monarchy and was readmitted in
1927 as part of a reconciliation between Venizelist and anti-Venizelist
politicians. He was instrumental in the restoration of the monarchy in
1935 and was appointed minister for military affairs in the caretaker
government under Demertzis. 7
Greece’s Finest Hour
The war compelled Britain and Greece to search for ways of cooperation
in the economic field. Already in the spring of 1939, the governments
of the two countries had negotiated an agreement by which
Britain would provide Greece with export credits for €2 million at
5 percent interest per annum, to be repaid over 20 years. In the autumn,
a war trade agreement was signed, by which Greece undertook to fix a
maximum for the export from Greece to Germany of such commodities
as cereals, fruits, vegetables, oil, tobacco, and practically all metals,
while Britain undertook to put no obstacles in the way of importation
into Greece of certain products, such as cereals, coal, and petroleum.