King Constantine (28th December 2004)

However, a traditionalist, right-wing nationalist group of middle-ranking army officers led by Colonel George Papadopoulos took action first and staged a coup d'état on 21 April. The coup leaders met Constantine at his residence in Tatoi, which was surrounded by tanks to prevent resistance.

Constantine later recounted that the officers of the tank platoons believed they were carrying out the coup under his orders.[7] The king argued with the colonels and initially dismissed them. Later in the day, he went to the Ministry of National Defence, where all coup leaders were gathered, and had a discussion with Kanellopoulos and with leading generals. He agreed to concede to the military demands and swear the new regime in only when the junta agreed to include a number of civilian politicians, with a royalist nominee, Konstantinos Kollias, as prime minister.

However Panayotis Kanellopoulos, the last legitimate prime minister of Greece prior to the coup, acting as witness for the prosecution, at the junta trials in 1975 during metapolitefsi, testified how he was arrested by machine-gun toting soldiers and transported to the palace to meet King Constantine.[citation needed] He added that during the meeting he urged the king to use his status as commander-in-chief of the Greek military to order loyal officers to crush the coup. Constantine apparently refused to do so because he feared bloodshed.[8]

From the outset, the relationship between Constantine and the regime of the colonels was an uneasy one.[9] Constantine organised a counter-coup and it was probably meant as one, although no help or involvement of the United States was forthcoming.

The king finally decided to launch his counter-coup on 13 December 1967. Since Athens was effectively in the hands of the junta militarily, Constantine decided to fly to the small northern city of Kavala, east of Thessaloniki. There he hoped to be among troops loyal only to him.

The vague plan he and his advisors had conceived was to form a unit that would advance to Thessaloniki (Greece's second biggest city and unofficial capital of northern Greece) and take it. Constantine planned to install an alternative administration there. International recognition, which he believed to be forthcoming, as well as internal pressure from the fact that Greece would have been split in two governments would, the king hoped, force the junta to resign, leaving the field clear for him to return triumphant to Athens.

In the early morning hours of 13 December, the king boarded the royal plane together with Queen Anne-Marie of Greece, their two young children, Princess Alexia and Prince Pavlos, his mother, Queen Frederica, and his sister, Princess Irene. Constantine also took with him Premier Kollias.

At first things seemed to be going according to plan. Constantine was well received in Kavala which, militarily, was under the command of a general loyal to him. The air force and navy, both strongly royalist and not involved in the 1967 coup, immediately declared for him and mobilised. Another of Constantine's generals effectively cut all communication between Athens and the north.

However, the king's plans were overly bureaucratic, naïvely supposing that orders from a commanding general would automatically be followed.[citation needed] Further, the king was obsessive about avoiding "bloodshed" even where the junta would be the attacker.[citation needed]

Under these circumstances, rather than managing to put together a force and advancing on Thessaloniki, middle-ranking pro-junta officers neutralised and arrested his royalist generals and took command of their units, which subsequently put together a force advancing on Kavala to arrest the king.

Realising that the countercoup had failed, Constantine fled Greece on board the royal plane, taking his family and hapless premier with him.

They landed in Rome early in the morning of 14 December, where they remained in exile all through the rest of military rule (although he continued as king until 1 June 1973.) He was never to return to Greece as a reigning king.

/r/greece Thread Parent Link - youtube.com