The British general who commanded the Battle of Athens
On 1 December 1944, Scobie ordered ELAS to disarm.
Ronald Scobie was a British Army general who served in both world wars and commanded forces at Tobruk, Malta, and later III Corps. After Greece was liberated in 1944, he became the military commander who embodied Britain's intervention in the country's contested transition. His 1 December order for ELAS to disarm helped precipitate the Dekemvriana, and he directed British operations during the fighting in Athens.
Also known as: Ronald MacKenzie Scobie · Sir Ronald Scobie
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1914–1918Royal Engineers officer, serving on the Western Front
- 1920–1924Officer of a cadet company at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich
- 1939Deputy Director of Mobilisation at the War Office
- 1941Commander of the 70th Infantry Division and commandant of Tobruk fortress
- 1942General Officer Commanding the Troops in Malta
- 1943–1944Chief of the General Staff, Middle East, then commander of III Corps
- 1944–1946Commander of British forces in Greece
- 1947Retired from the Army
Related historical events
The Athens Intervention and the Dekemvriana
Under the Caserta Agreement of September 1944, all Greek resistance forces were placed under the Allied command of Lieutenant-General Ronald Scobie. British troops entered Athens on 13 October, and as commander of Allied forces in Greece Scobie became the decisive figure in reshaping the country's post-war order. With the National Liberation Front (EAM) and its armed wing, the National People's Liberation Army (ELAS), in control of the countryside and most cities, Scobie unilaterally ordered ELAS to disarm and disband on 26 November and again on 1 December. Historians regard this 'Scobie Order' as the immediate spark of the December events (Dekemvriana).
Six EAM ministers resigned in protest, and on 3 December some 200,000 people gathered in Syntagma Square to demand the order's withdrawal and the punishment of collaborators. Greek police and gendarmerie fired on the unarmed crowd, killing at least 28 and wounding more than a hundred, igniting 37 days of fighting in Athens. Scobie declared martial law on 5 December and directed the aerial bombing of the city. That day Winston Churchill cabled him to act 'as if you were in a conquered city' and to 'hold and dominate Athens', a phrase now emblematic of the first armed intervention by an Allied army in a liberated country.
The battle fell into two phases. Before 17 December ELAS had the upper hand and drove British and government forces into central Athens, where guerrillas derisively called the defended enclave 'Scobia' (Scobie's country). The balance shifted once Churchill rushed reinforcements from the Italian front: by January 1945 roughly 70,000 British troops had been committed to Greece, more than had been sent in 1941 to meet the German invasion. EAM-ELAS was defeated and disarmed under the February 1945 Varkiza Agreement. The intervention smashed the Greek left militarily and opened a period of White Terror that set the conditions for the 1946 Greek Civil War. Scobie remained commander of British forces in Greece until 1946.