WI: Crete as a "Greek Taiwan"?

[Cook]

A related query is how many mainlanders would manage to relocate...

People need a reason to abandon their homes, up stumps and relocate. A pretty substantial reason at that.

 

[Hendryk]

People need a reason to abandon their homes, up stumps and relocate. A pretty substantial reason at that.

Communist takeover has historically been such a reason for a non-trivial percentage of the population. See, among others, the White Russian diaspora and the Cuban exiles to Florida.

 

[Cook]

the White Russian diaspora and the Cuban exiles to Florida.

Neither event is analogous of what you are proposing though; the Russian diaspora was the product of an extremely vicious civil war, where neither side generally took prisoners and with pogroms and massacres of civilians in captured territories were common, and even then it was composed mostly of people connected to the former Provisional Government, mostly Social Revolutionaries, with large numbers of Ukrainians and Jews whose ethnicity made them targets.

The Cuban diaspora was initially composed of people who were similarly connected to the previous Batista regime, and again, came at the end of a bitter civil war/revolution.

If mainland Greece had fallen to the Communists in ’44, then it would have been analogous to either the Soviet occupation of Austria and Germany in ’45, or to Tito’s takeover of Yugoslavia. Neither event saw large movements of people initially; in the case of East Germany there was no large refugee movement until several years after the initial occupation and Sovietisation of their zone of occupation, and in the case of Austria there was no significant movement at all; likewise in Yugoslavia.

With Communists in control of Athens, either operating independently or under direction from Moscow, any refugee movement is likely to have been slow to begin and not particularly large; those closely connected to the former regime had already fled to Alexandria, and the monarchy and pre-war regime had both been thoroughly discredited by their fleeing the country.

 

[Cook]

The other significant issue is: how would this 'rebel' Greek regime survive? The Americans wouldn't recognise them, certainly not in '44 or '45, and the British are likely to exert extremely strong pressure on them to compromise with the new Athens regime; and if the Churchill cabinet continued to recognise the royalist regime as the legitimate government, such recognition would be most probably stripped following the election of Attlee.

 

[Hendryk]

If mainland Greece had fallen to the Communists in ’44, then it would have been analogous to either the Soviet occupation of Austria and Germany in ’45, or to Tito’s takeover of Yugoslavia. Neither event saw large movements of people initially; in the case of East Germany there was no large refugee movement until several years after the initial occupation and Sovietisation of their zone of occupation, and in the case of Austria there was no significant movement at all; likewise in Yugoslavia.

If the initial exodus is small, I think it's rather because the war isn't quite over at that point yet and those who want to leave have to do so by their own means, on small boats or by foot through war-ravaged regions, instead of via an organized effort as was the case with OTL's Chinese nationalists. Still, as local Communist partisans exact bloody retribution on suspected collaborators and/or monarchists, these are likely to pack up and leave, especially if they have somewhere to go that is under Greek sovereignty and politically safe for them.

Then as years go by and the new regime tightens the screws, more people will be tempted to make the crossing to Crete. Keeping their citizens from fleeing was/is a chronic problem of most Communist regimes, and with a long coastline, plenty of independent fishermen with their own boats, and a long tradition of emigration, I believe that this alternate Greece would face the same challenge.

 

[lordroel]

Does Turkey end up going Red as well here? That could really make things interesting in Cyprus.

Doubt it, but they could become something like giant neutral Sweden.

 

[Cook]

Doubt it, but they could become something like giant neutral Sweden.

Neutrality wasn't really an option for Turkey after the war; the Soviets were making too many demands. Any 'neutrality' would have been of the subservient Finnish kind, complete with Soviet bases along the Bosporus-Dardanelles and territorial losses in the east.

 

[Hendryk]

Real neutrality wasn't really an option for Turkey after the war; the Soviets were making too many demands. Any 'neutrality' would have been of the subservient Finnish kind, complete with Soviet bases along the Bosporus-Dardanelles and territorial losses in the east.

Which is one of several reasons why WIAF Turkey is a reliable member of the Atlantic Alliance. So the old Greek/Turkish rivalry is exacerbated by their being on opposite sides of the iron curtain (and considering how poorly they get along as nominal allies in OTL, that should be interesting).

 

[lordroel]

Neutrality wasn't really an option for Turkey after the war; the Soviets were making too many demands. Any 'neutrality' would have been of the subservient Finnish kind, complete with Soviet bases along the Bosporus-Dardanelles and territorial losses in the east.

So a bit more in the American side then.

 

[Cook]

So the old Greek/Turkish rivalry is exacerbated by their being on opposite sides of the iron curtain (and considering how poorly they get along as nominal allies in OTL, that should be interesting).

It might do the opposite and actually reduce tensions; historically, them both sheltering under the US umbrella gave them the freedom to continue their long-running feud, resulting in the numerous air clashes over the Aegean, and in the war over Cyprus. But if Greece was in the Warsaw Pact and Turkey NATO, then for most of the Cold War Moscow would take a very dim view of anything that escalated tensions; certainly any Greek adventurism in Cyprus would have been completely out of the question. Then their nationalist rivalries would be frozen, just as they were in the rest of the Balkans for the duration of the Cold War, only to break out again after the collapse of the Communist regimes.

A Tito style regime, Communist but taking its own independent path (and as long as Stalin lived being condemned as rightist-deviationists for doing so) is another matter; that might make things worse. But such an independent Greek Socialist state would be militarily weak; certainly weaker than Greece's military was historically because they wouldn't be receiving any substantial assistance from London and then Washington.

So a bit more in the American side then.

It is hard to see how Turkey could be any more on the American side than they were historically; they did send troops to the Korean War, and based American nuclear missiles and bombers on Turkish soil for the duration of the Cold War.

 

[Alex Richards]

There's an interesting question regarding Cyprus actually, in that it's quite easy to imagine a significant number of Greeks fleeing to there rather than Crete (probably dependent on the Crete Regime- a reactionary Monarchy propped up by the West might see leftists, liberals and Republicans choosing London, Cyprus, Washington etc.).

I did do one scenario where both Greece and Turkey go red and the Middle East is locked into a bit of Great Game situation- Cyprus there stays British for protection and because ethnic tensions are going a bit whacky with the massive numbers of Greek, Turkish, Maronite and other assorted Oriental Christian refugees.

 

[Cook]

There is also the issue of Churchill's 'naughty little agreement' with Stalin; whether this would have been considered a violation of it, and how this impacts the wider early Cold War in Europe.

 

[lordroel]

Would be cool if we instead of the Cuban Missile Crises we had the Crete Missile crisis with the Soviets blockading the island.