"Greek Merchant Navy in World War II"

AI-assisted Knowledge Update: This article was automatically consolidated to provide you with the most up-to-date data instantly.

- CONTENT--
The Greek Merchant Navy was a participant in World War II, along with the Greek Navy. The Merchant Navy became involved in the war about a year before Greece entered the war and continued its participation in the war after the liberation of Greece (October 1944) for another 11 months.

History professor Ilias Iliopoulos notes that the participation of the Greek merchant fleet in the war corresponds to the thesis of American naval theorist, Rear Admiral Alfred Mahan, that the sea power of a nation is the sum of the navy and merchant fleets. Iliopoulos notes that even in ancient times the "great sea state" of Athens (Thucidus) was the sum of the potentials of the Athenian military and merchant fleet, and that Athens then had about 600 merchant ships.

Background
Despite the fact that during the First World War, Greek shipowners lost 2/3 of their ships and despite the economic crisis in the 1930s, the Greek merchant fleet experienced another period of its heyday and was in the top ten largest merchant fleets in the world.

On the eve of World War II, the Greek merchant fleet was the ninth largest in the world in terms of tonnage and had 577 steamships. Given the fact that in the top ten were the Axis countries – Germany, Italy and Japan – as well as the fleet of occupied France (see Vichy Regime), the importance of the Greek merchant fleet to the anti-fascist coalition was more than significant.
Professor Iliopoulos writes that the Greek merchant fleet had 541 Greek-flagged steamers with a total capacity of 1,666,859 BRT and 124 foreign-flagged steamers with a capacity of 454,318 BRT. According to Iliopoulos, the Greek merchant fleet was fourth in the world and the Greek dry cargo fleet second.

Researcher Dimitris Galon, based on German sources, writes that in 1938, a year before the outbreak of World War II, the Greek merchant fleet was in third place in the world, after England and Norway, with 638 ships with a total capacity of 1.9 million BRT. 96% of all ships of the Greek merchant fleet were bulk carriers.

According to Rear Admiral Sotirios Grigoriadis, the Greek merchant fleet had 600 ocean steamers and 700 motor Mediterranean vessels before the war. 90% of ocean steamers were dry carriers. Grigoriadis confirms that the Greek pre-war fleet was ahead of the fleets of Sweden, the Soviet Union, Canada, Denmark and Spain, but notes that the Greek fleet did not exceed 3% of the world fleet, while the first fleet in the world, the British, in 1939 had 26.11 % of the tonnage of the world fleet. However, after a few months of war, the situation at sea for Britain sharply deteriorated. By mid-1940, the British Navy had only 2 months of fuel. By September 1941, the British merchant fleet had lost 25% of its ships. In this connection, the Greek merchant fleet became of great importance to the Allies, and especially to Britain.

Signed in January 1940 with the government of then-neutral Greece