THE BATtLE FOR GREECE

Last week President Truman reported to Congress on the progress of "Assistance to Greece and Turkey." The report's optimistic conclusion: "All of the necessary elements for Greek recovery . . . can begin to be operative once internal order is established. . . ." But other reports from Greece indicate that economic reconstruction must follow, not precede, the establishment of law & order. TIME Correspondent Robert Low cabled from Athens last week:

The $300 million American aid-to-Greece program is failing. If you sit around Athens, close your eyes to everything but the abundant food in de luxe restaurants, watch new American cars roll down the streets, look into shop windows filled with American canned goods, Italian woolens and Swiss watches, you can pretend it is not failing. But once you get outside Athens, you realize that the situation is the worst it has been since October 1944 when the Germans left. The Greek Government, the high command, the Army and the people are carrying out a sort of mass psychological "sitdown strike"; the Communist-led guerrillas are not in the grip of this self-induced inertia.

"Where Is It?" Many Greeks, ready to fight, wonder why they do not get the U.S. help they have been promised. I visited a village in Thrace where, the night before, guerrillas had carried out a raid, burning four houses and abducting three men and a woman, plus a good part of the village's winter food supply. There I was asked: "Where is this American aid? We heard a lot about it for months but we haven't seen any of it yet. The Communists always told us it wouldn't come. We didn't believe them--but where is it? If the Americans can't help us, who can?"

Today most farmers are afraid to venture into their fields. The food situation is bad now, but it will be far worse next spring. I flew hundreds of miles over Macedonia and saw the fields of perhaps one farm in ten being plowed for winter wheat planting. And the usual herds of goats and sheep were missing from the scrub-covered hills.

Balance Sheet. Two reports, issued the same day last week, show how fast guerrilla destruction is outracing U.S. reconstruction. One was a program report from AMAG (American Mission to Aid Greece). The other was a report from the Greek III Army Corps, tabulating guerrilla destruction during October in its area in northwestern Greece (roughly one-third of guerrilla-infested territory in Greece).

The AMAG report showed that five airfields were being "winterized," work had started on repairs to three stretches of highway, repairs had begun on port installations in Piraeus and Salonika, and work would soon begin on clearing the Corinth Canal (blocked by German demolitions since 1944).

The III Corps reported that in its area 83 guerrilla attacks were carried out on towns and villages, 218 houses, shops, schools and public utilities buildings were burned to the ground, 26 railway bridges were blown up, 8 road bridges destroyed, 11 locomotives and trains mined and destroyed, 193 villages looted, 6,000 animals stolen and several hundred tons of food stores plundered.

Perhaps the worst problem is the 300,000 refugees from guerrilla country. These peasants know that the Government has started the forced evacuation of a quarter-million civilians from the countryside because the Army cannot defend them, and carry out an offensive at the same time. And they wonder how they are going to live this winter crowded into mud huts, shanties and abandoned buildings on Government relief, which will provide them with less than a pound of bread and about 15-c- in cash a day. The huts in which they live, unlike the airfields, are not "winterized."

"Like Flies." In Salonika a top police officer told me: "If there has ever been a fertile breeding ground for Communism, it's among these refugees. Communist agents are swarming over them like flies and I don't know what we're going to use for DDT. If we can't feed them, house them, or give them any real hope, all they are going to have to live on this winter is Communist propaganda."

To save face, Greeks do not like to admit how badly off they are. The young prefect of a district described to me how his town was virtually encircled, how its garrison was outnumbered, how nearby villages were raided nightly, how he was at a total loss to feed and house all the thousands of refugees who had flocked in to the relative safety of the town. He painted a hopeless picture. Finally a British correspondent with me commented that, judging by the way the prefect talked, the guerrillas were winning the battle in this area.

"Aha," said the young Greek prefect quite seriously, "another Communist journalist."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.