by Jim Ring
From March 1943 the BBC, at the behest of the SOE’s Baker Street propaganda section, began to talk of major groups of maquisards in the Haute-Savoie. Swiss radio also began to run stories of risings in the Savoie – which adjoined the republic’s Canton Valais. It was this activity – and publicity – that gave the movement in the Haute-Savoie a reputation that inspired resistance throughout France. Similarly, from the summer of 1943 onwards, such was the extent of the resistance around Grenoble that it became known by both General de Gaulle’s Free French Forces and – critically – the BBC as the ‘capital of the maquis’.
The resistance in the French Alps had arrived.
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Meanwhile, only a few miles to the north-east of the Savoie, Switzerland survived. The March Alarm that had sounded on 19 March 1943 had again proved false.
Four weeks earlier, Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein had launched a fresh attack on the Eastern Front. By the end of March, the Soviet Voronezh Front was back on the east bank of the Donets river, the Red Army had abandoned nearly 6,000 square miles of the territory it had won after Stalingrad, and the cities of Belgorod and Kharkov were once again in the hands of the Wehrmacht.
In the Berchtesgaden Berghof, Hitler’s warlords celebrated; every day the sun in the deep valley rose earlier and set later; every day the snow receded and sometimes the warm föhn wind blew from the south. Now there was spring in the air and – with this news from the east – all thoughts of Fortress Europe and the invasion of Switzerland were shelved. General Guisan’s forces in Switzerland, hastily mobilised, were once again stood down.
In the place of the invasion of Switzerland, quite another plan was conceived in Berchtesgaden. This was Operation Citadel, the Wehrmacht’s ambitious plan to destroy the Soviet Central and Voronezh Fronts 280 miles south of Moscow in the Kursk salient.
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Yet if Hitler could once again look with satisfaction to the Eastern Front, he was less happy with his southern flank, with Italy. Here, Il Duce’s regime was clearly crumbling. The Italians had entered the war trailing on the coat-tails of the Nazis. They had done so without enthusiasm, hoping at best for some ill-gotten spoils. As it so turned out, the country had gained little and lost a great deal in the conflicts in the Alps, the Balkans, in the Soviet Union and in North Africa. Casualties would soon amount to over 204,000. Of these, 67,000 had been killed, 111,000 were missing and 26,000 had died of disease. Hungry workers in Milan and Turin were now demonstrating for ‘bread, peace and freedom’; Venetian women now spurned the propaganda suggestion that they looked their best in coats made of tabby cats’ fur.8
Il Duce needed support. Now firmly ensconced for three months in the Berghof, the Führer summoned Mussolini up from Rome to the Reich.
On 7 April 1943 Hitler drove down from the Berghof to meet Mussolini in Salzburg. In the city’s baroque Schloss Klessheim the Führer unfolded his plans for two operations intended – among other things – to put heart into his ally. The first was Operation Citadel in Kursk; the second Fall Schwarz. This was the Axis’s fifth offensive against the resistance in Yugoslavia, Mussolini’s north-eastern neighbour. According to Goebbels, the enthusiasm and energy with which Hitler set out these operations won over the faltering Mussolini. ‘By putting every ounce of energy into the effort, he succeeded in pushing Mussolini back on the rails … The Duce underwent a complete change … When he got out of the train on his arrival, the Fuehrer thought, he looked like a broken old man; when he left he was in high fettle, ready for any deed.’9 At the end of the meeting Mussolini exclaimed, ‘Fuehrer, the Berlin–Rome Axis will win.’10
Nevertheless, Hitler thought it wise to put in place a contingency plan. If Italy withdrew from the Axis, the Reich would at best have a neutral country on its southern doorstep; at worst it would have one newly contracted to the Allies. After all, as 1914 approached Italy had been the third player in the Triple Alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary; she came into the war in 1915 allied to the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia. There was little to stop her doing something similar now. Should that happen, disaster beckoned for Germany. The Alpine passes of Italy were the southern gateways to the Reich. Obviously, neither the passes nor northern Italy could be allowed to fall into enemy hands. On 21 March 1943 Hitler summoned Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel, the hero of the Afrika Korps, to the Berghof.
Hitler briefed Rommel to set up a new army group to take control of northern Italy in the event of Mussolini’s collapse. The lightning seizure of the Alpine pass routes was critical to the whole operation: the Brenner, the Reschen forty miles to its west, and the Tarvis seventy miles south-east. Rommel – as experienced in mountain as desert warfare – accordingly sketched a plan to infiltrate four army divisions into Italy to hold these passes. The spearheads would be followed by sixteen more divisions ready to penetrate beyond the triangle of Italy’s industrial heartland of Turin, Milan and Genoa. The scheme was to be called Operation Achse (Axis). To his wife Rommel wrote succinctly, ‘It is better to fight the war in Italy than at home.’11
In the course of developing these plans with Hitler, Rommel would present himself at noon at the Berghof for the daily war conferences. From the picture window in the great hall that overlooked Berchtesgadener Land, the General enjoyed a scene that he found breathtaking every time he turned to it: a paradise of serrated peaks, green valleys, tumbling streams, gingerbread houses and bright blue skies. The red marble conference table told a very different story. The meetings brought Rommel up to date with the position on the various fronts on which the Reich’s forces were operating: the trouble in North Africa, the aftermath of Stalingrad, the destruction of German cities by the USAAF and RAF, the U-boat losses running at thirty a month in the Battle of the Atlantic. This was the regular warfare. Now, resistance – irregular warfare – was showing its hand in the French and Yugoslav Alps in the hitherto subdued occupied countries. Where would it all end?
One day Rommel drew Hitler aside and volunteered an appreciation of the military situation, the tour d’horizon of which the Führer himself was a master. ‘Hitler listened to it all with downcast eyes,’ Rommel later told his family.12 ‘Suddenly he looked up and said that he, too, was aware that there was very little chance left of winning the war. But the West would never conclude peace with him – at least not the statesmen who were at the helm now. He said that he had never wanted war with the West. But now the West would have its war – have it to the end.’13
On 1 July 1943 Hitler flew back to Rastenburg to oversee Operation Citadel. Rommel headed the ninety miles north to Munich, where, away from the prying eyes of the Italians, he completed his preparations for Operation Achse. If they were to be executed Rommel would be sent a codeword. The infiltration of the Reich’s forces into northern Italy was the first task; the second was to turn on the Italians in the event of Italy decamping to the Allies. The word was ‘Achse’.
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This was timely, for it coincided with the failure of one of the two operations over which Hitler had enthused with such effect to Mussolini: Fall Schwarz, the fifth offensive against the partisans in Yugoslavia.
When the Axis forces had invaded the Balkan state in April 1941, Croatia had been hived off as a Nazi satellite under the fascist Ustaše; the remainder of the country had been divided between German, Hungarian and Italian forces. In this ragbag of provinces and statelets riven with age-old racial and religious rivalries, resistance had emerged almost at once.
Josip Broz, who went under the nom de guerre of Tito, had set up a resistance cell in Belgrade in June 1941. Born in 1892 in modest circumstances in Croatia, Tito had trained as a mechanic, worked briefly as a test driver for Daimler, was conscripted, and in 1915 became the youngest sergeant major in the Austro-Hungarian army. Wounded and captured by the Russians, his imagination was fired by the Bolshevik revolution. On his return to Yugoslavia after the war he joined the tiny Yugoslav Communist Party. On 27 June 1941 the Party’s Central Committee ap
pointed him commander-in-chief of the liberation forces. He dubbed his supporters the partisans.
They were rivalled by the Chetniks, a Serbian group led by Colonel Dragoljub (Draža) Mihailović. A year younger than Tito, Mihailović was a Serb with a similarly distinguished military record to Tito’s but with diametrically opposed political opinions. He supported the exiled King Peter, and his followers were mainly drawn from the Royal Army. Based in the mountains of Ravna Gora in western Serbia, Churchill called them the patriots.
With King Peter’s government in exile in London, Churchill’s sympathies, British policy, and the parsimonious delivery of war materiel by the RAF lay with the Chetniks. Goaded by the SOE in Baker Street, the RAF eventually began dropping more arms to Mihailović. Then, in the course of 1942 the question arose in London as to which of the two resistance groups was doing most on behalf of the Allied war effort to pin down the Axis. In 1941 SOE had set up a station in Cairo, where the British still maintained bases in the former protectorate, to co-ordinate its activities in the Balkans and Middle East. In the autumn of 1942 – the autumn of Operation Torch and its consequence, Operation Anton – word reached Cairo that the partisans were greedier of Axis resources than the Chetniks. Cairo was also told of fighting in places amounting to civil war between the Chetniks and the partisans. Was Mihailović really the best man to set the Alps of Yugoslavia ablaze? To answer this question, on Christmas Day 1942, an SOE colonel, S. W. (‘Bill’) Bailey, was parachuted into Italian-occupied Montenegro to make an assessment of Mihailović.
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Colonel Bailey was somewhat surprised to encounter a man who set himself above the sartorial and tonsorial standards of Sandhurst. There was a tradition in the Serbian Orthodox Church of its adherents neither shaving nor cutting their hair until the country had been rid of its current invaders. This Mihailović followed: his long hair, beard and thin wire spectacles made him look like an elderly cleric. He and his staff also dispensed with uniform in favour of a homespun outfit that included slippers. They did not dispense with plum brandy, or rather they dispensed the local eau de vie so liberally that Mihailović – in Bailey’s presence – roundly denounced the British for failing to supply him with sufficient arms. The Colonel was a formidable figure: a metallurgist, gifted linguist, excellent at handling explosives. He reported to Cairo that there was little prospect of prodding Mihailović into action against the Axis and less of him co-operating with Tito.
A bitter war now broke out in London and Cairo over whether support should be withdrawn from the right-wing Mihailović and extended to the left-wing – nay, communist – Tito. Basil Davidson was a peacetime journalist on the Economist who had joined MI6 at the outbreak of war. By late 1942 he was heading SOE’s Yugoslavia station. He wrote: ‘Something like battle lines were drawn … and soon the opposing sides began to face each other with all the passion that set the Children of Light against the Children of Darkness. Fighting alliances were made, recruits were sought, morality wavered, truth lowered her head. Paper came into its own again. Squadrons of memoranda were loaded up and launched.’14 In short, there was a fine old row. One of the supporters of the partisans was Davidson’s number two, Captain William Deakin. An Oxford don who before the war worked as Churchill’s research assistant on his life of Marlborough, he naturally had the Prime Minister’s ear. The upshot was that Churchill ordered Lord Selborne – now leading SOE – to find out exactly what Tito’s partisans were up to. In the end, on 28 June 1943, Deakin himself was parachuted into Tito’s headquarters; or, as it so turned out, into a maelstrom.
From the very beginning of the resistance movement in Yugoslavia in 1941, the Axis had mounted major operations against both Tito’s partisans and Mihailović’s Chetniks. These had begun in the autumn of 1941 with an attack on Užice, a territory in western Serbia liberated by Mihailović. There followed major offensives in January 1942, in spring 1942, and in the first four months of 1943 – the Battle of Neretva. This segued into the Battle of Sutjeska, into which Deakin plunged. This was the fifth of the major Axis offensives, otherwise called Fall Schwarz.
Here, in the Alpine area close to the Sutjeska river in south-eastern Bosnia, were encamped 22,000 of Tito’s forces. Though numerous, they were poorly trained, poorly armed, and incapable of holding off a major assault. Against them, under Generaloberst Alexander Löhr and Generalleutnant Rudolf Lüters, were ranged almost 130,000 Axis troops.
The Axis offensive began on 15 May 1943. Tito’s forces soon found themselves largely encircled on the Durmitor massif, an Alpine eruption with forty-eight peaks over 6,000 feet. This lent itself well enough to defence, but entailed a month’s long battle in the mountain terrain. Two days after Deakin’s arrival the Germans were on the cusp of descending from the mountains above Mratinje and cutting off the partisans’ last exit. ‘[O]ur lives’, remembered Vladimir Dedijer – Tito’s biographer – ‘hung by a thread’.15 The drama culminated on 9 June 1943. The weather cleared and Tito’s party was located by a Luftwaffe spotter plane and bombed in the Sutjeska gorge. Tito was injured, his bodyguard and dog were killed. (The latter was credited with saving Tito’s life.) Deakin’s radio operator, Captain William Stuart, also died, and Deakin himself was hit in the foot. Yet the partisans then managed to break out across the Sutjeska river through the lines of the German 118th and 104th Jäger Divisions, and 369th Croatian Infantry Division. The leading partisan units were trailed by three brigades and 2,000 wounded. In the tradition of the vicious Balkan engagements, Löhr ordered that all should be killed, including unarmed medical orderlies. Yet although this left more than a third of the partisans dead or wounded, the main force had escaped to fight another day. The German field commander Lüters described his opponents as ‘well organized, skilfully led and with combat morale unbelievably high’.16
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The Axis failure here marked the turning point in the war in Yugoslavia. In the first half of 1943 the two major campaigns in Neretva and Sutjeska to eliminate the heart of the partisan forces had failed. There would be further offensives, but none so ambitious. In the Alps of Yugoslavia the resistance – in a sense the whole notion of guerrilla warfare – had come of age.
The episode was also the crux of British policy in the Balkans. Deakin, despite his narrow escape, was as fulsome as Lüters about the virtues of the partisans. On 23 June 1943 Churchill met with his chiefs of staff in London to discuss the Balkan question. Henceforth, the British could not doubt the wisdom of the SOE supplying materiel to Tito; they did not as yet decide to stop supporting the Chetniks. It would take another mission to Tito in the autumn of 1943 to achieve this turnabout. This was an adventure that made the name of Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean and spawned his best-selling account, Eastern Approaches.17
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Meanwhile there was more trouble brewing for Hitler further west in the Alps, in Italy.
Within hours of the Axis opening its Fall Schwarz offensive on Tito’s forces in Sutjeska, its troops in North Africa were laying down their arms. In Tunisia, on 13 May 1943, the final surrender of Axis forces to the British Eighth Army yielded 275,000 prisoners of war. No sooner had this operation been completed than – on 10 July – Anglo-American forces led by General Eisenhower invaded Sicily. The island was defended by a force of 200,000 Italians and 62,000 German troops and Luftwaffe. In the Berghof, reports soon reached Hitler of the collapse of morale of the Italian army. Mussolini was once again summoned to see the Führer. This time the meeting was to be on Italian soil, in the Alpine garrison town of Feltre in the Dolomites. It was set for 19 July 1943.
The Duce proved to be in despair, scarcely capable of words, and the Führer as usual was left to do the talking. Once again he did his best to rally his demoralised ally. ‘If anyone tells me that our tasks can be left to another generation, I reply that this is not the case. No one can say that the future generation will be a generation of giants. Germany took thirty years to recover; Rome never rose again. This is the voice of history.’18
It was no use. Mussolini’s mood was blackened further when the news came through of the first heavy Allied bombing raid on Rome. A force of more than 500 Allied aircraft had caused extensive damage and thousands of casualties. The Duce could not steel himself to tell the Führer that Italy would – could – fight no longer. The tonic that the Führer had given him with such apparent success in Salzburg three months previously now failed utterly.
On his return to Rome from the Alps, Mussolini found his fate sealed. The Fascist Grand Council had not convened since December 1939. It met on the night of 24–5 July 1943. The Council demanded the restoration of power to the monarchy, the return of parliamentary democracy, and the reversion of the leadership of the armed forces from the Duce to the King himself: Victor Emmanuel III. On the following evening Mussolini was summoned to the royal palace, dismissed by the King, arrested and carted off to a police station to spend the night in a cell. The King asked General Pietro Badoglio to step in as Prime Minister.
News of the Council’s deliberations first trickled through to Hitler’s Rastenburg headquarters on the afternoon of 25 July 1943. ‘The Duce has resigned,’ Hitler tactfully told his astonished staff at the 9.30 p.m. war conference. ‘Badoglio, our most bitter enemy, has taken over the government.’19
Italy, Hitler assumed, would at once switch sides. Badoglio, in the glory days the Duce’s Chief of Staff, was indeed negotiating with the Allies. Hitler’s response was immediate, for he knew how vulnerable this made the German forces engaging Eisenhower’s invaders in Sicily. If the Italians blew the Alpine bridges and tunnels, the Wehrmacht lines of communication would be severed, the forces trapped. This was the contingency that Hitler had foreseen and on which he had briefed Rommel. Operation Achse needed no dusting off. Generalfeldmarschall Rommel stood at the shortest of notice to put it into effect. The only word he needed was ‘Achse’.