CIVILIANS LEAVE ATHENS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXV, Issue 21, 22 December 1944, Page 5

CIVILIANS LEAVE ATHENS

RESULT OF BBITISH THREAT. (Rec. 11.45 a.m.) LONDON, Dec. 21. Until noon today there was no indication that General Scobie had acted on the threat to hammer the E.L.A.S. guns if they did not cease firing at. 9 a.m. today. General Scobie’s threat resulted 'in many civilians leaving the areas in Athens where the guns were situated.

Reuter’s Athens correspondent says it is authoritatively stated that the British have cleared approximately onethird of Athens and the majority of the E.L.A.S. in Athens are now holding the northern sector of the city. The members of the E.L.A.S. in the whole of the Athens and Piraeus area are estimated to total 20,000. Five thousand E.L.A.S. members are believed to be casualties or prisoners. The British United Press correspondent reports that the British have cleared new areas in Central and SouthWestern Athens, thus allowing relief food distribution to go on at full pressure for the first time since the hostilities began. British 25-pounders today silenced a battery of’ E.L.A.S. guns whiclr, were holding up the unloading of ships at Piraeus.

Tlic Associated Press correspondent says it is reliably reported that the members of the E.D.E.S. checked the infiltrations of Albanian partisans across the Northern Greece frontier to join the E.L.A.S. forces massing in Northern and North-East Peirus. It is now confirmed that a small number of Bulgarians have entered Eastern Macedonia. E.L.A.S. members are reported to have made an unprovoked attack on General Zervas’s supporters in the frontier zone, of General Zervas’s territory, but there was no major battle.