Douglas Dakin was a British historian, academic and professor emeritus of Birkbeck. He was only 32 years old when war was declared and had just published Turgot and the Ancien Régime in France (1939), which reviewers had hailed as “one of the best studies of French eighteenth century history to come from England in many a moon”.
His research interests then moved to Greece, especially the revolution of 1821-29. When war was declared, Dakin had joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and then served in Egypt and Greece as a liaison officer to the Royal Hellenic Air Force. During the “Dekemvriana” or the 3rd of December event, in which police fired into a crowd of ELAS (the Greek People’s Liberation Army) demonstrators in Syntagma Square, Athens, Dakin was arrested. However, his love of English democracy and his persuasive argumentative style resulted in him converting an ELAS colonel to support the British.
Dakin’s time in Greece, in which he was probably a British agent although he was later described as an “anarchist of the right”, led him to shift much of his intellectual interests after the war to modern Hellenic studies. It was a field in which he subsequently became a world-expert.