Parish History: The 1940's - A Time of War and Upheaval

By the beginning of the decade of 1940, most immigrant members of the parish had given up any plans to permanently return to their homeland. With families established here, and children born in this country, they had come to understand that their future was now inextricably bound with the culture of America. Although they still followed political developments in Greece with avid interest, the issues there no longer held the power or resonance of the past. Mindful of the discord of the preceding years, moreover, they avoided entangling the affairs of the church with personal political opinions.

The political instability caused by the royalist-republican controversy made the institutions of Greek governance extremely fragile. On August 4, 1936, the royalist former general, Ioannis Metaxas, led a successful military coup that overthrew the republic, and together with King George, recently returned from exile, formed an authoritarian regime that suspended political parties and civil liberties.

The Metaxas regime sought to maintain a policy of neutrality that was tempered with cooperation with Britain in the face of the growing European crises of the late 1930s. This attempt to protect the country from the growing menace that loomed on the horizon ended in failure. On October 28, 1940, General Metaxas was awakened in the middle of the night by the arrival at his home of the Italian Ambassador. Upon receiving the diplomat, he was handed an ultimatum-to surrender Greece’s sovereignty or face imminent invasion from the Italian army massing on the borders. The general’s reaction was immediate and unambiguous. “NO!” was his reply. The next morning war was declared, and the invading armies crossed into Greece. In the first weeks of the invasion, the Italians made considerable advances. But as the Greek nation mobilized its resources, the tide turned. What the Greek soldiers lacked in material and equipment they made up for in courage and strategy. In short order, the advances of the Italians were stopped. As the Greeks mounted fierce counterattacks, the invaders were thrown into chaos and confusion. In their haste to retreat, they abandoned their weapons which the Greeks seized and turned against them. The invasion became an Italian debacle.

As these events unfolded, the Nazi regime saw the need to rescue their Fascist allies from complete humiliation. Diverting troops destined for the Russian front, the Nazis came to the rescue of the Italians. In spite of fierce resistance, the Greek nation was unable to prevail over the overwhelming numbers and weaponry of the German army and was occupied by Italian and German forces.

During the four-year occupation that ensued, the British navy enforced a blockade of all food and supplies to Greece that might be of help to the enemy. It was the Greek people, however, who paid a high price for the blockade’s success. To worsen its effects, the German occupiers seized all food stores, olive oil, new crops and livestock to feed their troops and shipped any surplus back to Germany to feed German civilians. The effect was immediate-famine stalked the land and the most vulnerable began to die of starvation.

These events provoked an immediate reaction among Greek-Americans. Within hours of the Italian invasion, they were meeting informally to decide on a course of action. Numerous Greek service organizations, as well as over 120 major voluntary associations, convened under the leadership of Archbishop Athenagoras and Greece’s Ambassador to the United States, Kimon Diamantopoulos. They formed the Greek War Relief Association and were granted a charter by the American government to raise funds for relief of the Greek people.

Churches throughout the country played a vital organizing role in this extraordinary effort. St. Vasilios Church, like many others, devoted every possible resource to the vital effort. Parishioners knew that they were saving family members in Greece from unspeakable suffering and death, and they responded without hesitation. Philoptochos women stood on street corners asking for donations and Greek businesses displayed collection cans requesting spare change. Clothing drives sought to collect 20 million garments, shoes and pieces of bedding, primarily blankets. Within a short time, millions of dollars of food, clothing, medicines and heating fuel were purchased or donated to alleviate the suffering. In April of 1941, an additional $3,336,700 was cabled to the War Relief committee in Athens for the purchase of ambulances, the funding of soup kitchens, the construction of bomb shelters and for assistance to the destitute families of slain soldiers.

It was not long, however, before St. Vasilios would become profoundly more involved in the war effort. With the attack on Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war against the Axis powers, St. Vasilios would no longer lend only material support to war relief; it now had to send its precious sons into the fierce battle for victory. Nor was it found lacking in this regard.

When the war was finally over, 472 members of the parish had served. Of that number, 16 fell heroically in battle and did not return. When a final accounting was offered, St. Vasilios Church had the highest percentage of men who served and the highest percentage of men lost of any church or ethnic group in the City of Peabody. Of the total killed in action from Peabody, 22.5% were members of St. Vasilios Church.

The war, however, also had far-reaching social and economic consequences that deeply affected the people and the character of the St. Vasilios community. As was noted earlier, the parish sent 472 of its finest sons to serve in the war. They left for battle young, untested and with a world view proscribed and influenced by the immigrant culture in which they were raised. They returned as heroes whose sacrifice had saved the world and whose experiences had changed them in profound ways. Tempered by battle, exposed to comrades in arms who came from widely different backgrounds and cultures and filled with visions of the wider world they had seen and experienced, these men also returned to change the character and ethos of the community where they lived.

The toil of the leather factory which had consumed their fathers was no longer their only option. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, also known by its popular name, “The G.I. Bill,” offered opportunities for education and advancement. Leaping at these opportunities, young men began to enter the colleges and universities of the area, enrolled in technical schools, schooled themselves for civil service examinations and gained coveted apprenticeships in numerous skilled trades.

The war had also wrought sweeping changes in the attitudes of those who remained on the home front. The women of the nation had been called upon to leave their homes and to enter the work place to maintain vital war production and to replace male workers who had gone off to battle. When the war ended, women were no longer content to return to the traditional roles assigned them by the immigrant culture of their parents. Young women, emulating their male peers, began entering colleges and secretarial schools, acquiring the skills to enter the professions, the business world and the civil service.

The processes of assimilation and acculturation were vastly accelerated. The rate of intermarriage of parish youth with people of different ethnicities and religions grew dramatically. The parish of Greek-speaking leather workers was being transformed into a community of doctors, lawyers, teachers, tradesmen, firefighters, police officers and business owners. Those men who remained in the leather industry became owners rather than workers. Members of the parish began to enter the local power structure, becoming active in politics and running for public office. When the decade of the forties ended, the parish had begun a process of transformation that, at the beginning of the decade, could not have been imagined.

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