DBWI: Communist lost civil war in Greece

Now, what if the communist had lost, and the royalist had won? What affects would a West-Allied Greece would have on the Cold War?
 
Now, what if the communist had lost, and the royalist had won? What affects would a West-Allied Greece would have on the Cold War?

Out of curiosity how did you get a communist victory in Greece in the first place? Did you have Stalin going back on the "Percentages Agreement"? Because that's pretty much the only way you can prevent the British army from simply crushing the communists in Greece.
 
Out of curiosity how did you get a communist victory in Greece in the first place? Did you have Stalin going back on the "Percentages Agreement"? Because that's pretty much the only way you can prevent the British army from simply crushing the communists in Greece.

OOC: the British couldn't afford to pay for their own army in Greece. The US agreed to bankroll them. Without that decision, Greece goes red.
 
OOC: the British couldn't afford to pay for their own army in Greece. The US agreed to bankroll them. Without that decision, Greece goes red.


I though they were already deployed in Greece before money became a real issue, am I wrong about this? It would be hard to see the Brits completely pulling out of Greece before militarily crushing the Greek communists (lets face it it wouldn't have taken an enormous army to do so) and the Russians were unwilling to break their agreement with Britain to help them. However the UK certainly wouldn't have the money to rebuild the Greek economy the way the US would (the US famously sent a huge number of Missouri Mules to help the Greek farmers and prevent the crops from failing). Maybe with the UK being unable to feed an occupied Greece (all the UK's grain surplus at the time was being sent to occupied Germany) we could see some sort of second-wave communist uprising fighting a guerrilla war, but it is hard to see the British abandoning Greece to the Soviets, even if the Americans refused to help with financial support, as it would make the British look extremely weak if they couldn't maintain control of a satellite state that the USSR was willing to let them have. In the face of such a loss of prestige i see the British pressing on with the military occupation of Greece, but an impoverished, starving and restive Greece, rather than the country that would later be rebuilt as a liberal, Western and wealthy (not so much in 2015 though).
 
I think that whatever a non-Warsaw Pact Greece would be should have to be at least a little better than the morass we know of. Greece was left outside the percentages agreement but also was used by Stalin as a vehicle for what he really wanted - control of Istanbul and the Dardanelles. After Skobie was killed in December 1944, the Greek Left was ascendant with no signs of slowing down. Although London and Washington tried their best to work with the triad of Siantos, Klaras, and Zachariadis they made it clear they felt more loyalty to Stalin and the International. With Athens firmly on his side by early 1946, especially thanks to Zachariadis, Stalin began moving on Turkish claims precipitating the Turkish Straits Crisis that year. Pressured by Stalin and with Truman on the record that the issue was for Turkey and the USSR to solve on their own, the Turks capitulated to a new summit over control of the straits that resulted in the USSR gaining the land for the large naval complex in the Sea of Marmara known today as "Pasha's Gas Station" for its submarines and Red Fleet. Turkish neutrality became akin to that of Finland, a window dressing for how nice the USSR could be when it chose to be, and at only the cost of the northeastern parts of Turkey and control of the Dardanelles. Hence why Persia and the Hashies became such close US allies, the Hashemite Kingdom of the Levant (OTL Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria) today is only behind Israel as the most stable nation in the region. They had some very tense moments in their history but mutual hatred of the Russians and word of the rumors of what happened in Kars and other areas once the Russians assumed control kept tensions to a minimum.

Although the WSG (Worker's Soviet of Greece) was able to consolidate and gain some territorial concessions from Albania and Bulgaria those territories are still disputed even today. Ultimately it was the absorption of Greece by Yugoslavia in 1950, along with Bulgaria a short time later after Dimitrov's death and Albania about the same time, that permitted the 'New Byzantium' to prosper as an eventual renegade though Communist state. Crete managed to break away in 1972 as its own nation, desperately poor and home to a US military base at Heraklion ever since. The fall of the wall left some hope of a Balkan Federation but the Bosnian civil war and Greek occupation of FYROM and Albania made that impossible. The brief Greco-Turkish War of 1995 found a Greek flag flying over Istanbul for the first time in almost 550 years, the taste of 'Magna Graecia' overwhelmed the country and it had to be contained with airstrikes on its key industrial centers until Istanbul could be liberated by OPSFOR two months later. Turkish military forces are getting training and new supplies from the EU and US as a recent member of NATO and the European Community, though the large numbers of Greeks now working in Turkey has brought tensions up again, especially on the Aegean Sea. Their economy is all but wrecked, though industrialization from the Soviet era has helped them become to us now what South Korea was in the late 1950s.

Had Greece stayed pro-Western I doubt their territorial ambitions would be so great, they had a rivalry with Turkey brewing for a while but I am not sure how far it would go without Russia fanning the flames. Maybe they would have a second tier economy, tourism was strong even in the 1940s and might have helped them develop further.
 
Out of curiosity how did you get a communist victory in Greece in the first place? Did you have Stalin going back on the "Percentages Agreement"? Because that's pretty much the only way you can prevent the British army from simply crushing the communists in Greece.
OOC:If you're not gonna post from the POV of the DBWI, then put "OOC" in front of your posts.
 
Truman may have survived the 1948 election - people saw the fall of Greece as the beginning of an impending red tide. With that, the US would likely have been less concerned about its foreign commitments, as the fall of Greece prompted so much alarm that the government became increasingly worried about the "Domino Theory" that General Eisenhower later described, and a big part of the Dewey Doctrine was paying heed to shoring up American allies to contain Communism and the supposed expansionism of the USSR, as Kennan described in the "Long Telegram".
 
I though they were already deployed in Greece before money became a real issue, am I wrong about this? It would be hard to see the Brits completely pulling out of Greece before militarily crushing the Greek communists (lets face it it wouldn't have taken an enormous army to do so) and the Russians were unwilling to break their agreement with Britain to help them. However the UK certainly wouldn't have the money to rebuild the Greek economy the way the US would (the US famously sent a huge number of Missouri Mules to help the Greek farmers and prevent the crops from failing). Maybe with the UK being unable to feed an occupied Greece (all the UK's grain surplus at the time was being sent to occupied Germany) we could see some sort of second-wave communist uprising fighting a guerrilla war, but it is hard to see the British abandoning Greece to the Soviets, even if the Americans refused to help with financial support, as it would make the British look extremely weak if they couldn't maintain control of a satellite state that the USSR was willing to let them have. In the face of such a loss of prestige i see the British pressing on with the military occupation of Greece, but an impoverished, starving and restive Greece, rather than the country that would later be rebuilt as a liberal, Western and wealthy (not so much in 2015 though).

OOC: They were in there before the money became a desperate issue, but it was always there as a concern. Also, it would have been easy for the British to leave, saying that the Germans are gone so their job there is done, and leave the Greek government to it's fate.

I think it's often underestimated just how desperately the British were in terms of finances after the Second World War. The clusterfuck that is the Israel-Palestine issue was largely caused by the UK dropping Palestine as quickly as possible because it was making a major loss in terms of soldiers to police it. Greece wasn't even part of the British Empire, so there was no need to save face by staying. The only reason the British intervened in Malaya was because they were setting up an independent allied state on territory of their former empire and didn't want the Communists to "bugger it", and they only fought the Mau Mau in Kenya to protect the white colonists there.
 
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