On October 28, 1940, Greece refused an Italian ultimatum, a moment the country still marks every year as OXI Day. Eighteen months earlier, Britain had publicly promised to stand behind exactly that kind of refusal.
On April 13, 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the House of Commons that Britain would help Greece if its independence were threatened and the Greek government chose to resist. The pledge was limited and one-sided. It was not a treaty, and it asked nothing of Greece in return. But it shaped the choices Greek leaders made as war approached, and it framed the help Britain later sent.
Here is what the guarantee said, how Athens received it and how far Britain was able to honor it.
Six days after Albania
Italian forces began landing in Albania in the early hours of April 7, 1939, which was Good Friday. Within days, Benito Mussolini’s troops held a country that bordered Greece’s northwestern region of Epirus.
Europe was already on edge. On March 15, German troops had entered the remaining Czech lands of Czechoslovakia. On March 31, Chamberlain had told Parliament that Britain would lend Poland “all support in their power” if its independence were clearly threatened.
Italy moved quickly to reassure Athens. Chamberlain told lawmakers that Mussolini had instructed Italy’s chargé d’affaires in Athens to say that Italy “intended to respect in the most absolute manner the territorial and insular integrity of Greece.” That message was conveyed to the Greek government on April 10.
Rumors that Italy planned to seize the island of Corfu had been discredited, but Chamberlain said they showed how uneasy recent events had made Europe. “Once confidence has been roughly shaken it is not so easily re-established,” he said. That afternoon he announced the guarantee, telling the House that he understood the French government was making a similar declaration the same day. Greece was not covered alone, as the same pledge was extended to Romania too.
What the guarantee actually said
Chamberlain’s statement to the Commons was carefully worded. If any action clearly threatened the independence of Greece or Romania, and the government concerned considered it vital to resist with its national forces, Britain would feel bound at once to lend that government “all the support in their power.”
Several limits were built into that sentence. The pledge covered Greece’s independence, not its territorial integrity, so it did not promise to defend every border or island. It was a unilateral declaration made in Parliament rather than a treaty, and it placed no obligations on Greece. It also left the decision in Greek hands. Britain would act only if Athens itself judged that resistance was vital.
Nor did it say what “support” would mean in practice. Historian Procopis Papastratis has described the guarantee as deliberately vague on that point, and writes that it was “issued after close consultation and agreement with Italy.”
Turkey, whose close relations with Greece Chamberlain noted in the same speech, was treated differently. On May 12, 1939, Britain and Turkey signed a declaration concerning mutual assistance in the event of aggression, a two-way commitment of a kind Greece never received.
A cautious reception in Athens
For Ioannis Metaxas, the general who led Greece’s authoritarian government, the guarantee eased one problem without solving it. Metaxas wanted British protection, and before the war he had repeatedly sought a formal alliance with Britain. The Foreign Office had politely declined.
He also could not afford to provoke Rome or Berlin. Greece professed neutrality, and Italy kept offering assurances. In September 1939, after war broke out, Mussolini wrote to Metaxas promising to respect Greek neutrality and to pull Italian troops back from the Greek border. Italy also offered to renew a 1928 friendship treaty. After consulting London, Metaxas turned it down.
Papastratis writes that, on the surface, Greece “felt reassured” by the British and French pledges and by a later Anglo-French treaty with Turkey. He argues that both assurances were weaker than they appeared, and that Metaxas was unaware of how weak they were.
October 28, 1940: The promise tested
The test came in the early hours of October 28, 1940. At about 3 a.m., Italy’s ambassador in Athens, Emanuele Grazzi, handed Metaxas an ultimatum demanding free passage for Italian troops to occupy unspecified strategic points in Greece. Metaxas refused, answering in French, “Alors, c’est la guerre” (“Then it is war”). Greeks remember the reply that became OXI Day by a single word, oxi, meaning “no.” Italian forces attacked from Albania within hours.
Greece had decided to resist, which was the condition Chamberlain had set. Britain responded within days. No. 30 Squadron of the Royal Air Force moved to Eleusis, west of Athens, on November 3, and further squadrons of Blenheim and Wellington bombers and Gladiator fighters followed during November. The help was modest but important. Papastratis notes that it amounted initially to fifteen aircraft.
Britain also sent troops to Crete, which it planned to use as a naval and air base. The first significant force, the 14th Infantry Brigade, arrived in November 1940. Its presence allowed the Greek government to send the island’s Fifth Cretan Division to fight on the mainland.
Metaxas welcomed air and naval help but resisted British pressure to accept an expeditionary force on the mainland. He feared that British troops would give Germany a pretext to attack, an assault Greece could not withstand, and doubted that the forces on offer would meaningfully strengthen the Greek army. In the meantime, Greek troops drove the Italians out of Greece and advanced into Albania.
The limits of a promise
Did the guarantee deter Italy? It may have made Rome more cautious for a time, but it did not stop Mussolini. He asked his chief of staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, to draft a plan for an attack on Greece as early as August 1939, and Italy’s road to war with Greece ended in invasion all the same.
The larger test came from Germany. Metaxas died on January 29, 1941. In late February, the government of his successor, Alexandros Koryzis, met British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and accepted the offer of ground forces. British and Commonwealth troops began arriving in early March. Some 58,000 men, including two thirds of the Australian 6th Division, were shipped from North Africa.
It was not enough. On April 6, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Greece and Yugoslavia at the same time. Within weeks, the Allied forces were in retreat. An evacuation began on April 24 and removed more than 50,000 troops over five nights.
Britain kept its word, within the limits of what it could deliver. The Australian War Memorial describes the Greek campaign as the result of Britain’s earlier guarantee to support Greece. But the forces Britain could spare in 1940 and 1941 were never a match for the German army.
OXI Day is rightly remembered as a Greek act of defiance. The decision to resist was made in Athens, and the early victories in the mountains of Epirus were won by Greek soldiers. But it did not happen in a diplomatic vacuum. When Metaxas said no, he did so knowing that Britain had promised, 18 months earlier, to stand behind that no with “all the support in their power.”
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