The flagship Averof steams past Hagia Sofia, Istanbul during the War of Turkish Independence, 1919.
One of the smaller and newer navies of the pre-dreadnought period, the Greek service in this period established a worthy naval tradition with several victorious battles. Although Greece was a poor country and her navy pretty much a start-up operation, she had an ancient tradition of seafaring on which to build, and skilled master mariners to man her ships. Now these assets were mobilized to preserve Greece's independence and chisel territory away from her former imperial masters, the Ottoman Turks.
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Armored Cruiser Giorgios Averof (1910) |
Kilkis and Lemnos (1907) |
Cruiser-Minelayer Elli (1914) |
The Torpedo Boat Fleet (1902) |
A small fleet of sailing warships had been in service during the Greek War of Independence (1820s) and this was transformed into a national navy. This modest fleet -- one corvette, three brigs, two gunboats, and two steam tugs -- was augmented by King Otto and a naval base established on the island of Poros. A national naval academy was founded in 1846 aboard the corvette. In the 1850s, in the last days of King Otto, four up-to-date steam corvettes were purchased from Britain. In the 1880s a sweeping reorganization of the navy was carried out under prime minister Charilaos Trikoupis, who invited a French mission to Greece. The French emissaries retrained the officers and revamped the naval academy to bring it up to modern standards. Most of all, they designed a fleet of new battleships -- the Hydra, Spetsai, and Psara -- to ensure dominance over the Ottoman Empire. These were uniquely strange battleships. Their design was never imitated in any navy. It was not ship design, however, that kept the fleet in port during the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. Had the Ottoman navy not been even more incompetently led than the Greeks, the inactivity of the Hellenic fleet might have badly embarrassed Greece. The need for improvement was noted in Athens.
The failure to act in 1897 led to another round of reform in the Hellenic Navy. New ships were purchased: six destroyers, six TBs, and a new armored cruiser, commonly called a battleship in Greece. Faster and more powerful than any of the existing Greek or Ottoman battleships, the Giorgios Averof proved to be a match for the lot, especially when comamanded with skill and courage as she was during the First Balkan War. Adm. Pavlos Kontouriotis was the naval hero of the age in Greece, author of the twin victories of Elli and Lemos in 1912-13. He is seen above, crowned with victor's laurels by Glory and Themistocles. The three old battleships were involved in both battles, more heavily in the latter, but they were completely outdated by that time and did not take the primary rôle; indeed, Averof acted as a virtual one-ship navy. Nevertheless, there was glory for the bit players too: torpedo boat NF11 sank a stationary ironclad being used as a barracks ship at Thessaloniki; this was magnified into an heroic feat of arms by Greece's jingo press. Also, this was the age of aviation, and Greek naval pilots pioneered the use of the new technology in warfare. Never especially good ships, the Hydras seemed as quaint to the air-age public as the biplanes of that time seem to us today.Naval prowess appeared to be the way forward, and Greece continued with modest naval acquisitions. In 1912 she purchased two pre-dreadnought battleships being discarded by the U.S. Navy, although they did not join the fleet until 1914. A turbine-driven, U.S.-made protected cruiser, the Elli, augmented the existing fleet and added minelaying capability. A new quartet of destroyers was purchased. The war record of this navy was less glorious than had been hoped. The reason was the phenomenon known as the Greek National Schism. King Constantine was pro-German, while the Allies were putting intense pressure on the Greek government to come into World War I on the Allied side. Part of that pressure took the form of the French Mediterranean squadron sailing into Athens in 1916 and seizing the main elements of the Greek navy. These were then held hostage pending a satisfactory change of government. A pro-Allied politician, Eleftherios Venizelos, was installed as prime minister in July 1917, with a rump government sitting at Thessaloniki, Greece's second city. Bulgaria, a junior member of the Central Powers which received a stiffening of Germans and Austrians into its armed forces, took the opportunity to invade, seeking to take Thessaloniki and push the Allies out of the Balkans altogether. The invaders were soon within 40 miles of Thessaloniki. A major Allied troop commitment was necessary to hold them back. This campaign was known as the Salonika Front; it drew off considerable British strength from the Western Front, and naval support to transpot and supply the troops. After Venizelos took power, the Greek fleet was returned to the nominal control of his government. Its duties were principally in patrol and convoy escort work in the Mediterranean. The apparent position of Greece as a small nation, abrasively used by the Great Powers in their hour of need, and the lingering bitterness over the Schism somewhat dampened the patriotic ardor aroused by the Balkan Wars victories. Yet it was the Balkan upheavals that had touched off the powder-keg of Europe with the Sarajevo assassination of 1914.
After the Armistice these ships were all involved in the British-led intervention against the Bolsheviks in Russia, and the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22 -- one which the Greeks and their allies siezed vast swathes of land around the Dardanelles and the Mediterranean coastline around Izmir. The war was in acknowledged pursuit of the establishment of a "Magna Graecia" or overseas empire and culture as had once existed under the Phoenicians and Athenians. The Greeks appeared to be winning at first, but their prolonged occupation aroused grass-roots resistance under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Pasha and other farsighted Turkish nationalists. They in turn expelled the Greek army at last in 1921-2, and further negotiations ended in the establishment of the western-looking Republic of Turkey. Tit-for-tat expulsions of ethnic Greeks from Turkey and ethnic Turks from the Greek-held Aegean islands set the stage for the ongoing Cyprus conflict plaguing the region to this day.
Between the wars, the Greeks earned their reputation for thrift by keeping all but the Hydra class ships in commission. The Hydras were sold to the breakers in 1922. The economy of the Greek navy can be appreciated by the way it maintained the original "cage masts" on its U.S.-made battleships up through 1941, long after the U.S. had abandoned this particular technology. In 1940, Helle was torpedoed by an Italian sub in a sneak attack that preceded the Axis invasion of Greece. Kilkis and Lemnos were sunk by JU-87 dive bombers in the Nazi invasion of Greece in 1941. Averof took an active part in WWII on the Allied side; after the victory, the ship had the distinction of transporting the Greek government-in-exile back to Athens. In belated gratitude, the Greek government decided in 1984 to restore the ship and keep her as a national naval museum. She may be visited at her permanent berth at Faliron, near Athens -- a worthy survivor of turbulent times.
A somewhat garish representation of the Greek battle line at Lemnos, January 1913.
