National Affairs: Report from Greece

A month ago, concerned over reports from Greece, Secretary of State George Marshall secretly sent a special envoy to make an appraisal. The man he sent was Major General Stephen Chamberlin, the War Department’s Director of Intelligence. Last week, General Chamberlin was back. His report, in a nutshell: the U.S. experiment in Greece—the first application of the Truman Doctrine—is going very badly.

The failure could be put down to two main causes: 1) the appalling weakness of the Greek Army; 2) a personal feud between the two equal U.S. plenipotentiaries in Athens, Ambassador Lincoln MacVeagh and Dwight Griswold, special head of the U.S. mission.

The entire Greek Army now consists of only a little more than nine divisions. General Chamberlin, who was Douglas MacArthur’s wartime operations officer, found that even under the most favorable conditions it would take the Army a year to regain mastery of northern Greece, which is at the mercy of the guerrillas.

General Chamberlin, it was learned, recommended that the U.S. 1) increase its military aid at least to the point of assigning U.S. officers as advisers to Greek division commanders, and 2) abolish the special mission to Greece and concentrate the entire U.S. effort under one man. As between MacVeagh and Griswold, General Chamberlin recommended MacVeagh.