Niall Ferguson on Eleftherios Venizelos

“It was in fact more plausible for the Turks to portray the Greeks as a fifth column, since the Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos strongly favoured Greek intervention on the side of the Entente powers and, although King Constantine resisted until finally driven to abdicate in June 1917, the presence of an Anglo-French force at Salonika from October 1915 cast doubt on the credibility of Greek neutrality. Viewed from Salonika, the First World War was the Third Balkan War, with Bulgaria joining Germany and Austria in the rout of Serbia; indeed, it was to shore up the disintegrating Serbian position that the Entente powers had sent their troops to Salonika. It was too late. The Anglo-French force remained penned in, unable, despite Greece's belated entry into the war, to prevent the German-Bulgarian defeat of Romania in 1917. Yet the final phase of the war saw a collapse as complete as that suffered by the Germans on the Western Front. An offensive on the Salonika Front forced Bulgaria to sue for peace on September 25,1918; six days later the British marched into Damascus, having defeated the Turkish army in Syria.”

“On October 30 the Turks surrendered. For Venizelos it was a moment of intoxicating triumph. He had begun his political career by leading the revolt that had driven the Turks out of Crete; he had led Greece to victory in the First and Second Balkan Wars; he had finally got his way over the Third, and won that too. Now he saw an opportunity to extend Greek power further, from the Péloponnèse across the Aegean to Anatolia itself. It was in fact the British government that initially encouraged Greek forces to occupy Smyrna. Lloyd George's motive was to forestall Italian moves to annex the city; mutinous Italian troops, led by the flamboyant poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, had already acted unilaterally by occupying Fiume on the Adriatic in defiance of the other members of the Big Four. At first the campaign went the Greeks' way. They advanced deep into Anatolia. In the best traditions of classical Greek drama, however, hubris was soon followed by nemesis. The crisis of defeat had led to revolution in Turkey. In April 1920 a Grand National Assembly was established in Ankara, which repudiated the Treaty of Sèvres and offered the post of President to the fair-haired, blue-eyed, hard-drinking General Mustafa Kemal. Almost simultaneously, Venizelos fell from power in Athens and the British, French and Italians withdrew their support for the Greek expedition.”