Finest Years (62 page)

In Greece and other occupied countries, the Germans economised on their own manpower by recruiting local collaborators for security duties. In France there were several brutal Pétainist militias, which until the summer of 1944 were notably more numerous than the
maquis
. The Croat Ustashi in Yugoslavia became a byword for savagery. Cossacks in German uniform, later the objects of much sympathy in the West for their enforced repatriation to Russia, played a prominent role in suppressing resistance in northern Italy and Yugoslavia, where their brutality was notorious. The Athens puppet government deployed its own ‘security battalions' against the guerrillas. A million Greeks lost their homes in consequence of German repression, and a thousand villages were razed. More than 400,000 Greek civilians died in the war, albeit most by mere starvation.

Bloodshed became relentless. Hitler's OKW headquarters ordered that fifty to a hundred hostages should be killed to avenge each German victim. At the end of October 1943, guerrillas in the northern Peloponnese achieved a notable coup, capturing and then killing seventy-eight men of 117 Jaeger Division. In consequence, 696 Greeks were executed, twenty-five villages burned. On 1 May 1944, 200 hostages were shot in Athens after an attack on a German general.
On the 5th, 216 villagers were massacred in Klisura. On the 17th, a hundred more hostages were executed in Khalkis. The tempo of such atrocities rose until the last day of the German presence in Greece. As the Wehrmacht withdrew, British officers sought with limited success to persuade the rival armed factions to harass the retreat. ‘We didn't inflict as much serious damage as we might have done,' wrote Monty Woodhouse of SOE. ‘
But by that time
, certainly in the case of EAM and ELAS, their sights were set on the future and not on the immediate future.' It can convincingly be argued that much of what did and did not take place reflected domestic strife between Greeks, together with spontaneous acts of opposition to the occupiers, over which the British could exercise negligible influence.

In Italy, partisan warfare began to gather momentum after the Rome government's surrender of September 1943. Again, there were deep divisions between communist and non-communist bands. In June 1944, amid the euphoria of the breakthrough to Rome, broadcasts from Alexander's headquarters urged guerrilla bands, by now reckoned to be over 100,000 strong, to attack the Germans in their rear. The consequence was a surge of local assaults, followed by ghastly reprisals. As the armies' offensive in Italy bogged down in the autumn rains, on 13 November a new broadcast was made in Alexander's name, this time urging discretion. It was perceived at Allied headquarters that the call to arms had been delivered prematurely.

In the early spring of 1945, partisans resumed their harassment of the Germans, and played a noisy part in the last phase of the Italian campaign. They sabotaged bridges, power and phone lines, and attacked German lines of communications. Alexander nonetheless felt obliged to issue a directive on 4 February, formally abandoning any aspiration to create a mass partisan army, and substituting a commitment to selective sabotage. The problem was that resistance groups proved chronically resistant to direction from SOE missions: ‘
self-organised bands
…are already getting out of hand'. It was decreed that weapons should thereafter only be provided to those who could be trusted to use them against the Germans, rather than to promote their own local political ambitions. HQ 15th Army
Group noted ruefully: ‘
A Resistance movement may
suddenly transfer itself from the credit to the debit side of the Allied ledger.' Here was the nemesis of Churchillian hopes, though in the last weeks of the war Italian partisans seized many towns and villages on their own initiative.

Russia and Yugoslavia were the only countries where partisan warfare significantly influenced Hitler's deployments. In Russia, the Red Army sponsored large irregular forces to harass German lines of communication. Such Soviet operations were assisted by Stalin's indifference to casualties or victims of reprisals. In Yugoslavia, almost from the moment of their conquest in April 1941 the Germans faced local opposition. Field Marshal von Weichs ordered that German troops should shoot male civilians in any area of armed resistance, regardless of whether there was evidence of individual complicity. That October, after suffering a dozen casualties in a clash with partisans, the Germans massacred the entire 2,000-strong male population of the town of Kragujevac in Serbia. Men and boys were shot in batches of a hundred, through a single day. Even wholesale brutality failed to suppress the communist guerrillas, however, which grew to a strength of some 200,000. Hitler was determined both to secure the right flank of his eastern front, and to maintain his hold on Yugoslavia's mineral resources. To achieve this, by 1944 twenty-one Axis divisions were deployed.

Michael Howard
, historian of British wartime strategic deception, believes that this commitment was far more influenced by fears of an Allied amphibious landing in Greece or Yugoslavia than by partisan activity, which could have been contained by much smaller forces. He argues that the German high command was importantly misled by a deception operation, codenamed
Zeppelin
, which suggested an Allied army group in Egypt poised to move against the Balkans. As late as the spring of 1944, OKW in Berlin estimated that there were fourteen Allied divisions in Egypt and Libya, instead of the real three. At the time, however, it was the guerrillas' alleged successes which captured Churchill's imagination. News of Tito's doings, considerably exaggerated in the telling, excited him. Back in January 1943, when he was
first briefed about Yugoslavia by his old researcher Bill Deakin, he had perceived possibilities which now seemed to be maturing. Here, at last, was the sort of popular revolt from which he hoped much.

In the autumn of 1943 the British, who had hitherto been supporting General Draza Mihailovic's royalist Cetnik forces, concluded that Tito's partisans were conducting much more effective operations against the Germans, notably in Bosnia and Herzegovina. With persistent naïveté at best—and possibly deceit aforethought, since one of SOE's Cairo officers, James Klugmann, was an NKVD agent and others held strongly left-wing views—they convinced themselves that Tito's people were ‘not real communists'. At the Tehran conference, the ‘Big Three' agreed that maximum support would be given to the Yugoslav partisans. It suited Stalin's interests to soft-pedal the ideological allegiance to Moscow of ‘the Jugs', as British soldiers called Tito's people. The Soviet warlord urged a partisan delegation—unsuccessfully—to forgo the red stars on their caps ‘to avoid frightening the English'.

Churchill, in Cairo on his way back from Tehran, reasserted his enthusiasm for the Yugoslav commitment. Ignoring protests that it was inconsistent to support royalists in Greece and ‘reds' in Yugoslavia, he embraced the simple view that Tito's army would kill more Germans than Mihailovic, and in this he was surely right. The axis of British effort shifted ruthlessly and dramatically. Beyond air drops and Dakota landings, in 1944 it became possible to ship arms by sea to the Dalmatian coast. Tito's forces began to receive supplies in large quantities, transforming their capabilities. Between 1943 and 1945, 16,470 tons of Allied arms were provided to Yugoslavia, against 5,907 tons dropped into Italy, and 2,878 tons sent to southern France.

A high-powered British mission, led by Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean MP, took over Bill Deakin's liaison role at Tito's headquarters in September 1943, and was soon joined by Major Randolph Churchill MP. The partisans, while implacably ideologically hostile, recognised that the prime minister had sent his brightest and best to represent him in their camp. Partisan leader Milovan Djilas wrote: ‘
Deakin was outstandingly intelligent
…We found out that he was a secretary
of a sort to Churchill and this impressed us, as much for the consideration shown to us as for the lack of favouritism among the British top circles when it came to the dangers of war.' As for the dissolute Major Churchill, ‘
we of course felt honoured
, though it did occur to us that Randolph might be the grey eminence of the mission. But he himself convinced us by his behaviour that he was a secondary figure, and that his father had decided on this gesture out of his aristocratic sense of sacrifice and to lend his son stature. Randolph soon enchanted our commanders and commissars with his wit and unconventional manner, but he revealed through his drinking and lack of interest that he had inherited neither political imagination nor dynamism with his surname.'

Djilas's perception of British behaviour, after almost three years in which the partisans had conducted an unaided struggle, was unsurprising and not unjust: ‘
The British had no choice
but either to carry out a landing in order to fight the Partisans, or else to come to an agreement with them on a rational, mutually profitable basis. They chose the latter, cautiously and without enthusiasm…Our own dogmatic ideological distrust kept us from understanding them, though it also preserved us from any hasty enthusiasm.' The Americans never shared British warmth towards Tito. In April 1944 they angered Churchill by dispatching a mission to Mihailovic, which he ordered to be delayed in transit for as long as possible: ‘The greatest courtesy being used to our friends and Allies in every case,' he wrote on 6 April, ‘but no transportation.' The US team eventually reached the Cetniks, but the British were successful in deflecting Washington from dispatching supplies to them.

Tito's partisans never had the training, organisation or weapons and equipment to defeat German forces in head-to-head combat. They were unable to evict the occupiers from any substantial towns. Nonetheless, they achieved control of large rural areas of Yugoslavia. Repeated German offensives, supported by the Luftwaffe, inflicted heavy casualties, above all on the civilian population, but failed to destroy Tito's army. More British officers were dropped to local headquarters, so that there were soon eleven missions and wireless
transmitters on the ground. The SOE teams found themselves frustrated, because the partisans were indifferent to their proposals and advice, save about the mechanics of supply. SOE's internal historian observed laconically:‘
It is a little doubtful
whether the Missions served any purpose save to give adventurous occupation to a number of very tough young men…half a ton of ammunition and explosives would have been more effective than half a ton of British Liaison Officers.' The allegiance of Tito's people was unequivocally to their own communist movement. From 1942 to 1945, paralleling the struggle against the Germans a bloody civil war was waged between partisans and Cetniks, in which the balance of atrocities was about even.

The British were unable to influence this, though Churchill made repeated efforts to reconcile Tito to the exiled King Peter. Even in June 1944, when the partisan leader had to flee from a German surprise attack and accept airborne evacuation to sanctuary at the Allied headquarters in Bari, Tito became no more biddable. The obliging British thereafter dispatched him to the offshore island of Vis, where he was secure from German assault, and could prepare for a renewed partisan advance. Yet Tito's forces were unable to deliver a decisive blow against their occupiers, and were obliged to enlist the aid of the Red Army to dispossess the Cetniks of Serbia late in 1944. Unlike any guerrilla movement in Western Europe, Yugoslav resistance diverted significant enemy forces from the war's main battlefields—though considerably less, if Michael Howard's interpretation of OKW documents is correct, than legend has suggested.

The political complexities of aiding resistance prompted exasperation among British ministers and field officers charged with reaching local accommodations. Harold Macmillan wrote in May 1944 that it was all very well for the prime minister to urge support for anti-German factions of widely varying political hues, but in an age of rapid communications, ‘
the difficulty is that
with…the universal listening to the radio, it is difficult [for the British] to be a Communist in Yugoslavia and a Royalist in Greece'. Though the Greek communists wanted British weapons they hated Churchill, because they knew that he wished to restore their king. Almost all the arms shipped
to the Balkans in the course of the war, and likewise those provided to nationalists in South-East Asia, were used later to advance anti-Western, anti-capitalist interests. Churchill told Eden, ‘
I have come to the conclusion
that in Tito we have nursed a viper…he has started biting us.'

Sir William Deakin has written: ‘
Paradoxically, British influence
on Resistance in Europe was at its strongest at the lowest point of our military strength and resources, and during the period of our own isolation.' As Resistance groups gained in confidence and the Germans began to withdraw, any gratitude they felt towards the British for supplying them with arms was outweighed by alienation from perceived British political objectives. The French historian of resistance, Henri Michel, has written: ‘Great Britain promised to the Resistance the return to a pre-war Europe, which the Resistance had rejected.' This was an overstated generalisation, but reflected widespread sentiment.

By May 1944, during the approach to D-Day, 120 British and American heavy aircraft were committed to dropping arms to European Resistance movements. SOE had grown into an organisation staffed by more than 11,000 soldiers and civilians, operating a network of training schools in Britain, the Mediterranean and India, and communicating with agents in some twenty countries. Its post-war internal history argued that no other force of its size contributed so much to the Allied war effort. Its agents and activities have stimulated a flood of books and films, historical and fictional, which continues to this day. The romance of the story is indisputable, though service with SOE in the field—again, contrary to popular myth—was actuarially less hazardous than fighting with an infantry battalion, never mind flying with Bomber Command. For instance, of 215 SOE personnel dropped into Yugoslavia, only twenty-five died. ‘F' Section lost a quarter of the 400 agents dispatched to France, but even this percentage compares favourably with the casualties of rifle companies in many campaigns.