Ioannis Metaxas

Ioannis Metaxas was a general who had opposed the war Venizelos wanted, a royalist whom the king made dictator in 1936 with a party that held seven seats, the builder of a regime with a youth movement, a salute and a Third Hellenic Civilisation, and the man who told the Italian ambassador no at three in the morning of 28 October 1940 and gave Greece its second national day. He was born on Ithaca in 1871, trained at the Berlin war academy, planned the Balkan war campaigns as a staff officer, and as acting chief of staff in 1915 told Venizelos that the Dardanelles expedition would fail and Greece should stay out, which it did while it could. When the Allies deposed the king in 1917 he was exiled to Corsica. He founded a party of his own after the war, took part in the royalist coup attempt of 1923, and spent the next decade as a minor minister in a parliament that could not form governments. The restoration of George II in 1935 and the deaths of every major party leader within months in 1936 left him, at the king's choice, prime minister in April. In August, with a general strike called, he had the king suspend the constitution and dissolved parliament, and did not recall it. The regime of the Fourth of August banned parties, censored, sent communists to the islands under a security minister who became notorious, and enrolled the young in EON with uniforms and salutes. It also built the fortified line on the Bulgarian border that bears his name, brought in social insurance and a minimum wage, and stayed British in foreign policy because the king was. When Mussolini's ultimatum came in October 1940 he refused it, the army threw the Italians back into Albania, and for four months Greece was the only state fighting the Axis on land. He died in January 1941 of a throat infection, before the Germans came, which spared him the choice his successor made with a pistol. The Ohi is his; the regime is what the left never let anyone forget.

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