Background
Ioannis Ioannis Metaxas was born in Ithaca, April 12, 1871, the son of a member of the Greek Parliament.
Ioannis Ioannis Metaxas was born in Ithaca, April 12, 1871, the son of a member of the Greek Parliament.
After graduating from the Athens Military Academy with a commission in the engineers, he fought with distinction in Greece's unsuccessful war against Turkey in 1897.
He continued an exemplary military career by compiling a brilliant record at the War Academy in Berlin, 1899-1903. As a General Staff officer during the Balkan Wars, 1912/1913, he drafted plans for a future seizure of the Dardanelles by the Greek army.
At the outbreak of World War I Colonel Metaxas was deputy chief of staff of the Greek army. Greek foreign policy soon became a contest of wills between Prime Minister Venizelos and King Constantine; the circle of military advisers close to the monarch played a crucial role. In Leon's view, Metaxas soon became "the most influential military man in the king's immediate entourage.” At critical moments, Metaxas reinforced Constantine's longstanding respect and sympathy for the Central Powers. The brilliant young officer saw a clear-cut Entente victory as unlikely. On the contrary, he assumed German military power was going to determine the outcome of the war and German culture was destined to dominate Europe's future.
Metaxas opposed cooperation with a British move against the Dardanelles when London first approached the Greek government in early September 1914. Allied pressure intensified in early 1915, and Venizelos urged the king to accept proferred rewards of territory in Asia Minor. Along with diplomatic advisers like George Streit, Metaxas held Constantine to a neutral course. Metaxas pointed to the difficulties in establishing and maintaining military control over the areas the Entente held out. When Venizelos seemed about to win Constantine over in early March, Metaxas again used telling military arguments to halt the king: Constantine heard his trusted military adviser state that hopes of effective army operations at Gallipoli were unfounded. Venizelos resigned.
As Bulgaria mobilized in late September 1915 and Anglo-French forces prepared to land at Salonika, Metaxas provided Constantine with the usual cogent military arguments to protest this Allied presence. Athens, he noted, had made no plans for joint operations with Britain and France to aid Serbia. Moreover, Greek mobilization, to comply with the Greco-Serb defense treaty of 1913, would be disrupted by improvised attempts to cooperate with the Entente.
The successful offensive of the Central Powers against Serbia brought the war to Greece's northern borders. Metaxas now acted as Constantine's link to the German High Command, pledging to intern the retreating Serbs and to "neutralize" the Anglo-French forces now established in Macedonia. Metaxas pushed Constantine to draw closer to Berlin. Along with other influential army officers, Metaxas pictured a German advance against Salonika as a means of liberating Greek territory from an Anglo-French invasion. In January 1916, he urged Constantine to slip off to northern Greece, where the monarch could rally Greek troops to fight alongside the Central Powers. The hesitant king rejected such suggestions. But Metaxas and the General Staff provided intelligence information for the Bulgarian army, purged Venizelist officers from the Greek army, and, in May 1916, permitted the Bulgars to seize the strategic border position of Fort Rupel.
Allied demands for the demobilizaton of the Greek army led Metaxas to organize the Reservist Leagues, powerful paramilitary organizations devoted to the king. Allied pressure led to a nominal purge of the General Staff in August. Packed off to run an officers school, Metaxas nonetheless continued his role as adviser to Constantine. In November 1916, he helped reverse Constantine's drift to conciliate the Entente by surrendering a large number of heavy guns.
The ensuing "Battle of Athens" in early December saw royalist troops fighting French and British marines. Constantine's days were numbered. Metaxas helped organize guerrilla units in Macedonia, and he called again for Constantine to flee northward to lead the Greek army into battle side by side with the Germans. When Constantine was deposed and exiled in June 1917, Metaxas and his like-minded colleagues of the General Staff were exiled to Corsica.
World War I merely marked Metaxas' debut as a major Greek figure. He continued to play a leading role as a monarchist politician and antirepublican revolutionary. In 1936 a military coup made him dictator of Greece. Despite his creation of a regime that borrowed freely from Fascist political practice, Metaxas saw no ally in Italy. His military talents intact, he led the Greek army in humiliating Mussolini's forces in the fall of 1940. His death in Athens on January 29, 1941, spared him the need to fight against German forces the following spring.