Eastern Approaches

by Fitzroy MacLean

  Such was the background of the negotiations which were now opened between Tito and Šubašić for the formation of a united Jugoslav Government. From the first Tito had all the cards in his hand. All the cards, that is, save one, for he attached considerable importance to obtaining Allied recognition for his regime.

  On October 27th I had my first interview with Tito in Belgrade. It took place in a villa on the outskirts of the city which up to a few days before had been the residence of some high German functionary. Originally, I suppose, it had belonged to some merchant prince. The furniture and decorations were dark, heavy and shiny; they had clearly cost a great deal. On Tito’s desk, I noticed, stood a small bronze bust of Napoleon.

  I had not seen him since his disappearance from Vis. He began by telling me that he and Dr. Šubašić, who had arrived in Jugoslavia shortly before and joined him in the Vojvodina, had agreed in principle to a solution on the following lines. The Anti-Fascist Council would remain the supreme legislative body, but a united Government would be formed, which would include the leading members of both Tito’s National Committee and the Royal Jugoslav Government. It would in due course fall to this united Government to hold elections by which the future form of government of the country would be decided. Meanwhile, the form of government would in theory remain a monarchy, but the King would remain abroad and be represented in Jugoslavia by a Council of Regency. In telling me this, Tito made it quite clear that his only object in accepting a compromise of this kind at all was to secure immediate recognition by the Allies.

  This was important news. At the same time I was determined not to leave Tito in ignorance of the annoyance which had been caused by his clandestine departure from Vis.

  Earlier in October, Mr. Churchill had visited Moscow and, being curious as to Tito’s movements after he had levanted from Vis, he had asked Stalin point blank whether he knew what had happened to him. To this straightforward question he had received the equally straightforward reply that Tito had been to Moscow. The mystery of Tito’s clandestine departure had thus at last been solved. Armed with this knowledge I could not resist the temptation of asking Tito how he had enjoyed his visit to the Soviet Union. At first he seemed slightly put out and asked me how I knew he had been there. Then, on learning the source of our information, he laughed and launched into a long account of his visit. It had been, he said, the first time that he had met Stalin. I asked him what he thought of him. ‘A great man,’ he said, ‘a very great man.’ There could be no doubt of the genuineness of his admiration, but was it not, I wondered, tinged with something very like emulation?

  The chief purpose of his visit, it seemed, had been to discuss with the Soviet High Command the part which the Red Army was to play in the liberation of Belgrade and the surrounding areas. As he put it, he had given the Red Army his permission to enter Jugoslav territory. On his return he had gone to the Vojvodina, thence to co-ordinate operations.

  I told Tito that Mr. Churchill had been greatly offended by the way in which he had gone off. I told him, too, of the unreasonable behaviour of his subordinates, of the friction and endless minor difficulties which had arisen in his absence.

  At this he seemed genuinely distressed. He said that he was sorry to hear that his subordinates had been unreasonable. Matters would be put right at once. He was also sorry to hear of the friction and would do his best to eliminate its causes.

  I replied that I was glad to hear this. ‘But,’ I added, ‘you don’t seem to understand that what did the most harm of all was the way in which you yourself slid away without letting us know you were going.’ But Tito could not or would not see this. ‘Only recently,’ he replied innocently, ‘Mr. Churchill went to Quebec to see President Roosevelt, and I only heard of this visit after he had returned. And I was not angry.’ I decided that it would be better not to report this particular remark to Mr. Churchill.

  Meanwhile Dr. Šubašić had also arrived in Belgrade. He was accommodated in the Hotel Majestic, and there I went to visit him. I thought he looked a little worn. Sitting amongst the shiny yellow furniture in his bedroom, we discussed the prospects of reaching agreement. He seemed pleased with the way things were going, though he said he found the Partisans tiring to negotiate with. I knew what he meant.

  By November 2nd a draft agreement on the lines indicated to me by Tito had been drawn up and accepted by both parties. It remained to see what the Allies and King Peter would think of it. Dr. Šubašić and Tito suggested that I should take it to London and show it to Mr. Churchill. An aeroplane was provided and I flew home at once with the draft agreement in my pocket, while Šubašić and Kardelj flew to Moscow to consult Marshal Stalin.

  When, a week or two later, I returned to Belgrade, I brought with me a message to Tito from Mr. Churchill, which, while showing no particular enthusiasm for it, accepted the draft agreement as a possible basis for an understanding.

  Dr. Šubašić had by now also come back from Moscow, having seen Marshal Stalin and obtained his approval of the agreement. Stalin, he said, had been particularly insistent on the need for genuine democratic institutions. ‘None of your rigged elections!’ he had shouted merrily to Kardelj, and they had all laughed heartily. Thus encouraged, Dr. Šubašić, after some further talks with Tito, now flew on to London to lay the draft agreement before King Peter.

  Meanwhile, not particularly relishing this new life, I settled down in Belgrade to conduct what was in effect the business of a full-sized Embassy on top of our work as a Military, Naval and Air Mission, which had also increased enormously. That I was able to get through it at all was due in the first place to the keenness and adaptability of a staff, who, coming straight from a relatively active and exciting life in the woods and hills, now converted themselves in the space of a few weeks to a chair-borne force of exemplary efficiency. Vivian Street was now back with his regiment in Italy and Andrew Maxwell acting as my second in command in Belgrade, while John Clarke commanded my Rear Headquarters in Italy. John Selby, who had returned to me after helping to train the nascent Jugoslav Air Force in North Africa, was again in charge of all air matters, and a number of my other officers from different parts of Jugoslavia had been absorbed into the Headquarters Staff: Richard Keane from the Vojvodina, Stephen Clissold from Croatia, Toby Milbanke from Bosnia. Freddie Cole took over our administration. Sergeant Campbell and his wireless operators were in charge of the wireless communications with London and Italy, and now handled the signal traffic of a large Diplomatic Mission. Sergeant-Major Charlie Button and Sergeant Duncan, resplendent in new suits of battle-dress, had transformed themselves into Major-Domo and Head Chancery Servant respectively.

  Belgrade, like all newly ‘liberated’ towns, was a strange place to live in.

  There was no lack of reminders of the recent past. Torn notices, signed by the German Commandant, still flapped from the walls, proclaiming mass executions of civilians as a reprisal for Partisan activities. Outside the town lay the grim hutments of a vast German concentration camp. Burnt-out tanks, destroyed in the battle for the city, still littered the streets and here and there little wooden crosses in the squares and public gardens, or by the side of the street, marked the scattered graves of Partisans and Russians who had been killed in the fighting. Every fourth or fifth house, too, in the tree-lined stucco fronted avenues, bore signs of damage, for Belgrade had suffered badly from air-bombardment, both at the hands of the Luftwaffe in 1941 and in subsequent Allied raids during the German occupation, and there had been further destruction during the recent fighting. The royal palace, from the windows of which the bodies of King Alexander Obrenović and Queen Draga had been thrown by supporters of the rival dynasty forty years before, had received a direct hit from a German bomb and lay in ruins.

  Nor was the ruined palace our only reminder of dynastic difficulties. Soon after we reached Belgrade, an elderly gentleman, wearing a beret, called at my Headquarters. He introduced himself as Prince George Karadjordjević, King Alexander’s elder broth
er and the uncle of the present King. Then he plunged straight into his life history. It was, he said, an exaggeration to say that he had murdered his valet. His enemies had made unfair use of the incident. If he had his rights, he would be King of Jugoslavia today.

  Someone asked him if, apart from this, he had everything he needed. Yes, he said, everything. The Partisans had been very kind. They had given him back his car which had been requisitioned during the fighting, and now Tito had sent him a present of food. It was nice to find someone who appreciated him. And he stumped off, a mildly disgruntled royalty, his beret set at a jaunty angle over one eye.

  For several weeks after our arrival the streets were enlivened at night by periodic rifle shots and bursts of machine-gun fire, as stray Germans, who had been left behind in the retreat and had gone to ground in attics and cellars, emerged and sought to fight their way out. The Russians, too, were apt to let off their weapons from sheer joie de vivre, and, one day, as some of my officers were sitting in the mess, listening to the wireless, a drunken Red Army soldier lurched in, unannounced, and laughingly discharged his tommy-gun into the loudspeaker.

  Then there was the incident of the jeeps. The American Mission kept their jeeps outside their door. Having, like so many of their countrymen, a generous faith in human nature, or perhaps because they were just rather careless, they did not bother to padlock the steering wheels. We of the British Mission, belonging to an older civilization, took a more cynical view of humanity; our jeeps were heavily padlocked and hidden away in a garage. The very first night all the American jeeps disappeared, while ours remained intact. We condoled with our American colleagues, and congratulated ourselves rather smugly on our foresight. We also took the additional precaution of asking the Partisans to post sentries outside the garage. This precaution turned out to be fully justified. Next day, when we went to fetch our jeeps, we found our Partisan sentry contemplating, not without pride, the body of a soldier in Russian uniform, whom he had apparently shot in defence of our jeeps. We hoped that this drastic remedy would at any rate put a stop to this epidemic of jeep-stealing. But our hopes were not justified. Next morning early when we went to the garage, our jeeps were gone. Lying on the floor were the padlocks, neatly filed through, and the body of the Partisan sentry. It was, we were assured, the work of ‘Fascist provocateurs’.

  Bit by bit conditions became more normal. Gradually the debris in the streets was cleared away by enthusiastic gangs from the various Communist Youth Organizations and considerably less enthusiastic townspeople detailed for compulsory labour service. The last Germans were winkled out and disposed of. The bulk of the Red Army moved on to fight fresh battles further north. The exuberance of the remainder was curbed by savage disciplinary action. Food supplies, which in the early days had threatened to fail owing to lack of transport, were reorganized. Shops, schools, churches, theatres and a solitary night club called the ‘Tsar of Russia’ and much patronized by Red Army officers, reopened. Slowly, very slowly, all kinds of citizens who had thought it wiser to lie low at first began to emerge.

  It would be a mistake to suppose that the liberation of Belgrade from the Germans had been a welcome event to the whole of the population. Many, it is true, had cheered the Partisans and the Red Army when they entered the city. But some, convinced by constant German propaganda or by what they had heard from other, less suspect, sources, went in terror of the ‘Bolshevik hordes’, fearing for their lives, their religious beliefs and their property. Others had consciences that were far from clear. It had not, it must be remembered, been easy to survive in Belgrade under the Germans, unless you were prepared to collaborate with them to some extent, and those citizens who for the past three and a half years had worked for the enemy were not unnaturally inclined to view with apprehension the victorious return of their compatriots who had spent the same three and a half years fighting them in the mountains and forests.

  Tito, meanwhile, had moved into the White Palace, Prince Paul’s former residence on the outskirts of the city, and there, almost daily, I repaired to confer with him.

  Whatever may be said of Prince Paul’s political judgment, his taste in matters of this kind was excellent. The White Palace had been built by him a few years before the war in the style of an English Georgian country house at home. It was charmingly furnished and contained a remarkable collection of books and pictures. These had not suffered at all at the hands of the Germans, and Tito had had the good sense to leave them as he found them. He explained meticulously that Prince Paul’s property had been confiscated because of his treasonable behaviour. King Peter’s on the other hand had as yet not been touched.

  The first time that I visited him in his new surroundings, he had only just moved in and together we explored the palace, literally from attic to basement. Upstairs we found Olga, temporarily combining the functions of housekeeper with those of private secretary, busily engaged in having the royal cipher unpicked from the bed-linen. As she pointed out, it would hardly have done for a man of the Marshal’s political views to sleep between sheets embroidered with a crown. After admiring the furniture and books and pictures, we went down into the cellar which we found stacked with great black boxes. These, on inspection, proved to be full of gold plate. ‘What can this be?’ said Tito, pulling out a great gilt pot with a heavily embossed lid. After I had diagnosed it provisionally as a soup tureen, we pushed on still further.

  The cellar, we discovered, masked the entrance to a labyrinth of underground passages elaborately fitted up with bathrooms and air-conditioning apparatus, and designed apparently both as an air-raid shelter and as a means of escape from an angry mob, for one of the passages had a secret outlet a mile or two away in the woods. Not perhaps an altogether superfluous precaution, when it is considered how many of the Regent’s predecessors had met violent ends. On my way up, I had already noticed the great square blocks of barracks which surround the hill on which the royal palace stands — a piece of town-planning which also possessed a certain political significance. In the Balkans the tradition of violence is old-established and deep-rooted.

  Tito, with his natural liking for the good things of life, soon settled into his new surroundings as if he had lived in palaces all his life. His suits and uniforms were made by the best tailor in Belgrade; his shirts came from the most fashionable shirt-maker; he ate the best food and drank the best wine; the horses he rode were the finest in the country. But amidst all this magnificence, it is only fair to say that, to those of us who had known him before, he remained as friendly and as simple in his approach as ever.

  But, now that Belgrade had fallen, most of my Mission felt that the original purpose for which we had been sent to Jugoslavia had been fulfilled, and were already on the look out for some new guerrillas to attach ourselves to in some other part of the world. I myself had asked to be allowed to leave Jugoslavia as soon as a united Government had been formed and regular diplomatic relations established, and this had been agreed to.

  Meanwhile, it remained to form a united Government and establish regular diplomatic relations — which was easier said than done. In London, Dr. Šubašić, supported by Ralph Stevenson and Vlatko Velebit, was trying to find a formula which would reassure King Peter, satisfy Tito and provide the Allied Governments with a convenient way out of the dilemma in which they found themselves. It was a difficult and thankless task. King Peter, quite naturally, was not easy to reassure, and Tito, sitting in Belgrade with all the cards in his hand, was not easy to satisfy. The Allied Governments, for their part, confined themselves to emphasizing the need for haste and the importance of truly democratic institutions. From Moscow, from time to time, came a casual hint from Marshal Stalin that he was getting sick of the whole thing. I was kept informed by telegram of what was happening and, in turn, passed the information on to Tito.

  In the meantime there was plenty to keep us busy in Belgrade. With the advance of the Allied armies into northern Italy, we needed naval and air bases on the eastern side o
f the Adriatic. Of late, local Partisan commanders had shown themselves highly suspicious of our intentions in such matters, and extremely non-co-operative, and in Tito’s absence this had given rise locally to considerable friction. Clearly what was needed was a comprehensive understanding regulating this side of Anglo-Jugoslav relations, and I now opened negotiations with Tito which, after a great deal of hard bargaining, eventually ended in the conclusion of an agreement giving us a temporary air base at Zara, another opening the Dalmatian ports to the Royal Navy and a third regulating the distribution of U.N.R.R.A. supplies in Jugoslavia.

  With the enormous increase in administrative and other work which had resulted from the sudden liberation of enormous areas of country, he had been obliged to delegate more and more responsibility to subordinates often lacking in experience and judgment, and this had had unfortunate repercussions at any rate as far as Anglo-Jugoslav relations were concerned and no doubt in other respects as well.

  But, fortunately, for the whole of the time that I was in Jugoslavia I enjoyed complete freedom of access to Tito and I did not hesitate to use this to take up and eliminate as far as possible the innumerable minor grievances and sources of irritation which already threatened to embitter our relations with the Partisans, however trifling they might seem. We would hammer these problems out in the White Palace as we had in less civilized surroundings elsewhere, and our discussions, though often stormy, generally led to some kind of an understanding being reached in the end.

  In London, meanwhile, Dr. Šubašić had still not succeeded in persuading King Peter to accept the terms of the proposed agreement for the formation of a united Jugoslav Government. Indeed it began to look as if he never would.

  And so, in Belgrade, Tito began to turn on the heat. The Press, which had up to now scarcely mentioned the negotiations, came out with violent attacks on the King, and, as though by magic, crowds of demonstrators suddenly appeared in the streets, shouting: ‘Hočemo Tito; nečemo Kralja’ — ‘We want Tito; we don’t want the King.’ Tito asked me if I had heard them. I said I could not help hearing them as they spent most of their time shouting their heads off immediately outside my window.