Using the wartime reports produced by various field agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), this dissertation attempts to rebut the currently hegemonic notion that the communist-led EAM/ELAS resistance organization was unprepared to militarily challenge the British and their anticommunist Greek clients for control of Greece after the German evacuation in late 1944. It also seeks to counter the related assumption that EAM/ELAS’s wide popularity after the end of the Axis occupation made a fight with the British unnecessary. The fact that conflict erupted anyway is cited by many historians sympathetic to EAM/ELAS as proof positive that EAM/ELAS’s supposedly hapless, naïve, and inexperienced leadership was manipulated into starting a revolution by the preternaturally clever British. The OSS reports from various parts of wartime Greece collected in this dissertation refute this supposition.
By restoring historical agency to EAM/ELAS, this study also implicitly broaches the broader question of the origin of revolutionary violence. Despite the stated commitment of EAM/ELAS’s leaders to the concept of the Popular Front, the organization as a whole was responsible for conducting numerous ideological witch-hunts against its perceived domestic enemies during the war. In contrast, opposing the Axis appeared in many instances to be a secondary concern for many within the organization. Ultimately, this study argues that the beguiling utopian vision of a communist future for Greece created a kind of revolutionary imperative that dragged many members of EAM/ELAS, whether leaders or rank-and-file, along in its inexorable wake. Unfortunately for Greece, at the end of that path lay civil war.