Greek Inter-Allied Victory Medal 1914-1918

 

World War I.

 

Further relevant historical context can be found at the foot of this entry.

 

 

This medal was instituted in September 1920 following an international agreement at the Inter-allied Peace Conference immediately preceding the Treaty of Versailles which was signed in June 1919.

 

The basic design - a ‘Winged Victory’ - and ‘rainbow’ ribbon was adopted by Belgium, Brazil, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Union of South Africa and the USA. Siam and Japan also issued the medal but with a different design - although the ribbon matched that of the others.

 

The Greek medal was awarded to all military personnel who had served at least three months of active service or had been wounded in action, died of wounds or had been killed in action and to sailors with service of at least a year between 14 June 1917 and 25 November 1918 - and was manufactured by V. Canale.

 

Approximately 200,000 medals were awarded.

 

 

The medal is circular, 37mm in diameter and was struck in bronze. The obverse of this medal depicts the winged figure of Nike (Victory) by Paionius of Mende (ca. 420 B.C.). A palm branch is in her outstretched right hand, and a laurel wreath is held in her left hand.

 

The medal is signed ‘Henry NOCQ’ (for the artist Henri-Eugène Nocq, 1868-1944) on the lower left rim.

 

The reverse depicts a plaque inscribed with the names of the Allied nations supporting the figure of the infant Hercules wrestling with a snake, inscribed with the Greek words; ‘ΟΜΕΓΑΣ ΥΓΕΡ ΤΟΥ ΓΟΛΙΤΙΣΜΟΥ ΓΟΛΕΜΟΣ‘ (The Great War for Civilisation) and dated; ‘1914-1918’.

 

This medal has a distinctive loop and large decorative ring mounted at the top of the medal for ribbon suspension.

 

This medal was issued un-named.

 

 

 

The ribbon is 37mm wide and is the silk moiré rainbow coloured design common to all the Inter-Allied Victory Medals issued by the First World War Allies.

 

 

None were authorised for this medal.

 

Further relevant historical context can be found at the foot of this entry.

 

 

 

* It should be noted that the values quoted above reflect the average price that a medal dealer may expect to sell this medal for - please see the ‘things you should know’ web page for more details about valuing medals.

 

 

This section contains information on:-

 

- Greek Forces During World War I.

- The Entente Powers.

 

Greek Forces During World War I - At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the Kingdom of Greece remained a neutral nation. Despite this, in October 1914, Greek forces moved in and occupied the areas of southern Albania that it claimed (Northern Epirus) at a time when the new Principality of Albania was in turmoil. At the same time, the Kingdom of Italy occupied Saseno and later that December the port of Valona. By the end of 1915, Greek troops abandoned their holdings in Albania without a fight to the expanding Italian forces.

 

Greece had signed a defence treaty with the Kingdom of Serbia in 1913 obliging Greece to come to Serbia's aid if attacked from the Kingdom of Bulgaria. When Bulgaria began mobilization against Serbia, Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos believed that based on the treaty, he could get Greece to join the war on the Allied side if the Allies landed 150,000 troops in Salonika. Venizelos failed to bring Greece into the war on the Allied side because King Constantine I was the brother-in-law of Kaiser Wilhelm II, then emperor of Germany. Constantine was married to Sophia of Prussia, one of Wilhelm's sisters and had also undergone military training in Germany.

 

Thus, the King and the anti-Venizelists (opponents of the Prime Minister) were opposed to joining the Allied side and argued that the Serbo-Greek Treaty was void if a great power fought alongside Bulgaria. Venizelos was removed from office by the King on 5 October 1915, only to return to the political scene in October 1916.

 

Greece, as a neutral without the means to resist, was obliged to acquiesce in the arrival of a Franco-British (and later also Russian) expeditionary force, formed in part by withdrawals from Gallipoli, transforming Salonika into an Allied military base.

 

These Allied forces began to arrive on 3 October 1915. In the early summer of 1916, the Greeks handed over Fort Rupel to the Bulgarians, believing it a neutral act, though claimed as a betrayal by the Allies. Nonetheless, the Allies still tried to swing the Greeks to their side. From their positions in Greece, Allied forces (British, French, and Russian, Italian, and Serb troops) fought the war from Greek territory engaging Bulgarian forces when they invaded Greece in August 1916.

 

In August 1916, Venizelist officials staged the coup, prompting Venizelos to leave Athens. He returned in October 1916 and set up a rival government in Salonika. Allied efforts to persuade the royal government in Athens to abandon its neutrality and join them failed, and relations irreparably broke down during the Noemvriana, when French and Greek troops clashed in the streets of the Greek capital.

 

The Greek Army, mostly loyal to the royal government, was largely disarmed and obliged to retreat to the Peloponnese, while the warships of the Greek navy were impounded and manned by French crews. Still, King Constantine, who as a fellow royal and relative enjoyed the protection of the Russian Tsar, could not be removed until after the February Revolution removed the Russian monarchy from the picture.

 

In June 1917, King Constantine abdicated from the throne, and his second son, Alexander, took the throne as King. Venizelos assumed control of the entire country, while royalists and other political opponents of Venizelos were exiled to France and Italy. Greece officially declared war against the Central Powers on 30 June 1917, and would eventually raise ten divisions for the allied effort, alongside the Royal Hellenic Navy.

 

The Macedonian front stayed mostly stable throughout the war. Bulgaria had occupied Thrace in northern Greece from Allied forces before Greece's entry into the war. In May 1918, Greek forces under French General Adolphe Guillaumat attacked the Bulgarian forces and defeated them at the Battle of Skra-di-Legen on 30 May 1918.

 

This was the first major involvement of Greek forces in the war. Later in 1918, the Allied forces upped up their offensive from Greece into occupied Serbia. In September of that year, Allied forces (French, Greek, Serb, and British troops), under the command of French General Franchet d'Esperey, broke through German, Austro-Hungarian, and Bulgarian forces along the Macedonian front. The offensive into Bulgaria was stopped when on 18-19 September 1918, the British and Greek armies were decisively defeated by the Bulgarians at the Battle of Doiran.

 

The outcome of this battle saved Bulgaria from being occupied. Bulgaria later signed the Armistice of Thessalonica with the Allies in Thessaloniki on 29 September 1918. By October, the Allies including the Greeks under General Louis Franchet d'Espérey had taken back all of Serbia and were ready to invade Hungary until the Hungarian authorities offered surrender.

 

Being on the winning side, Greece acquired the remaining Bulgarian territory on the Aegean Sea in the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine, Eastern Thrace and the Smyrna area in the Treaty of Sèvres. The Greek military suffered an estimated 5,000 dead from their nine divisions that participated in the war.

 

This information was taken from ‘Wikipedia’. The original article and details of the authors can be found here. It is reproduced on this web-site under the ‘creative commons’ licence which can be found here.

 

The Entente Powers - The Entente Powers or Allies were the countries at war with the Central Powers during World War I. The members of the Triple Entente were the French Republic, the British Empire and the Russian Empire; Italy ended its alliance with the Central Powers and entered the war on the side of the Entente in 1915. Japan, Belgium, Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, Romania and the Czechoslovak legions were secondary members of the Entente.

 

The United States declared war on Germany in 1917 on the grounds that Germany violated U.S. neutrality by attacking international shipping and because of the Zimmermann Telegram sent to Mexico.

 

The U.S. entered the war as an ‘associated power’, rather than a formal ally of France and the United Kingdom, in order to avoid ‘foreign entanglements’. Although the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria severed relations with the United States, neither declared war.

 

Although the Dominions and Crown Colonies of the British Empire made significant contributions to the Allied war effort, they did not have independent foreign policies during World War I. Operational control of British Empire forces was in the hands of the five-member British War Cabinet (BWC).

 

However, the Dominion governments controlled recruiting, and did remove personnel from front-line duties as they saw fit.

 

From early 1917 the BWC was superseded by the Imperial War Cabinet, which had Dominion representation. The Australian Corps and Canadian Corps were placed for the first time under the command of Australian and Canadian Lieutenant Generals John Monash and Arthur Currie, respectively, who reported in turn to British generals.

 

In April 1918, operational control of all Entente forces on the Western Front passed to the new supreme commander, Ferdinand Foch.

 

The only countries represented in the 1918 armistice which ended the combat were Britain, France and Germany.

 

This information was taken from ‘Wikipedia’. The original article and details of the authors can be found here. It is reproduced on this web-site under the ‘creative commons’ licence which can be found here.