Atmosphere of .Appeasement?

Into Athens' Constitution Square rumbled a bus full of wounded Greek soldiers. They waved their crutches jauntily, sang hearty peasant songs and enjoyed the warm spring weather. After a hard winter, the city's heavy-scented orange blossoms were out at last. And in their rugged mountains, the stubborn Communist guerrillas at last seemed to be weakening.

The Reds put out peace feelers that seemed a little more urgent than the peace bids they had made during the winter for propaganda purposes. Miltiades Porphy-rogenis, Minister of Justice in the rebels' "free" Greek government, cabled President Herbert Evatt of the U.N. General Assembly, appealing for a U.N.-negotiated settlement of Greece's civil war.

Clearly, the Reds were hard-pressed. In the Peloponnesos they had been wiped out or driven so far back into their lairs that the mopping-up job could be left to the gendarmerie and peasants. Lieut. General James A. Van Fleet's U.S. military mission reported that in 1948 the Communists had lost 33,000 men by death, capture and desertion. "This," said Van Fleet, "is a report of success. However, I want to caution against too much optimism."

In the U.S., some observers took the Red peace feelers, together with the Soviet backdown at Berlin, as a symptom of a general Red retrenchment in Europe, supposedly designed to free the Reds for allout action in Asia. Porphyrogenis himself seemed to support this view. "The atmosphere of appeasement," he said, "that has developed in recent weeks on the European scene makes peace [in Greece] seem possible."

The Reds might want to try to appease the West, all right, but Washington remained wary. No less cautious were plain Greeks as they scanned their papers in Athens' sunny cafes last week. Most of them scoffed at the Communist move, agreed with General Van Fleet: if the rebels wanted peace, let them lay down their arms.

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