VESTI:Napalm bomb relics: https://www.ww2wrecks.com/portfolio/a-napalm-bomb-relic-from-the-greek-civil-war-1946-1949/
VESTI:makedonija.org.au: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/greek-civil-war-1944-1949
VESTI: http://macedonian.atspace.com/knigi.htm
VESTI: https://www.macedoniantruth.org/forum/forum/macedonian-truth-forum/macedonian-history/544-where-when-was-the-first-napalm-used
IZVORI: When We Helped Napalm Greece
Posted on July 17, 2008. Filed under: 4. War and Empire |
“In 1945 most parts of the world celebrated the end of the Second World War and, in order to prevent such a tragedy from reoccurring, established the United Nations Organization. Yet Greece remained a battlefield and already one year after the Second World War the Cold War started. As the frustration of the Greek left grew, a fraction rearmed and took to the hills and in the fall of 1946 started a civil war against the British and the local right. Britain exhausted by World War, could no longer control the country and in early 1947 asked the United States for support. CIA expert William Blum relates that ‘Washington officials knew well that their new client government was so venal and so abusive of human rights that even confirmed American anti-Communists were appalled.’ Yet as Communist Yugoslavia supported the Greek left with arms and the country seemed on the brink of turning red, President Truman with his ‘Truman Doctrine’ speech in March 1947 was able to convince Congress to openly intervene in Greece. Greece was the first country to be invaded by the United States during the Cold War according to its strategy of combating Communism globally. In the following decades Washington put forward the argument used in Greece to justify its open or cover invasions of Korea, Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, Kambodscha, Nicaragua, Panama and several other countries.
“By some ideological alchemy, Truman labeled the corrupt right-wing regime in Athens as ‘democratic’ and dismissed its opponents on the left as ‘terrorists,’ as US forces with heavy military equipment landed in Greece. The left-wing partisan force of some 20,000 men and women, scattered in the Greek mountains, was outnumbered six to one as the US special units linked up with the Hellenistic Raiding Force and other units of the Greek right. When Stalin realized that civil war in Greece could lead to a superpower confrontation, Yugoslavia was excluded from the Soviet Bloc in 1948 where upon the arms supply for the Greek partisans ebbed away. The situation became desperate as the Hellenic Raiding Force operating under US command was excellently equipped and gained strength. The United States secretly started ‘Operation Torch’ and used chemical warfare to defeat the Greek partisans by dropping thousands of gallons of Napalm on Greece.” - Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (New York: Frank Cass Pub., 2005), 214,215.
“In early June two American Air Force officers and four enlisted men from the Military Advisory and Planning Group prepared to train the Greeks in [napalm] use. By the middle of the month the Americans made arrangements for moving the napalm equipment and crews from Eleusis Airfield to Kozani. Van Fleet agreed with Matheny that it was time to seek the American aid mission’s approval for napalm attacks. Orders went out for over 5,000 pounds of napalm from the United States and 200 drop tanks from Germany which could hold 75 gallons of liquid each. On June 20, ten Spitfires launched their first napalm raid on targets chosen by the army.” — Howard Jones, “A New Kind of War”- America’s Global Strategy and the Truman Doctrine in Greece (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 293.