by Max Boot
OUTSIDE THE SOVIET UNION, guerrillas had the biggest impact in the Balkans. This should be no surprise because its rugged terrain, full of mountains and forests, had been home for centuries to irregular fighters who had battled Ottoman domination. Yugoslavia and its southern neighbors, Albania and Greece, all developed highly effective resistance movements that together tied down as many as 24 German divisions out of more than 270, and 31 more Italian divisions, along with Bulgarian, Hungarian, and locally recruited Axis forces—more than a million troops in all.113
Arguably the most illustrious resistance leader of the entire war, Josip Broz Tito, emerged out of this Balkan cauldron. An indifferently educated manual laborer with blue eyes, a handsome visage, and a taste for fancy clothes, he had been a labor organizer and operative of the Russian-run Communist International (Comintern) who had spent years in a Yugoslav prison for his subversive work. His original name was Josip Broz; “Tito” was a pseudonym that would cause the Allies much confusion in the early days of World War II—so little did the West know of him at first that some suspected it might not denote an individual at all but a Serbo-Croatian acronym for Secret International Terrorist Organization.
Tito was secretary-general of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia when the Germans invaded in 1941, his predecessor having been eliminated in a Stalinist purge. The Communists were as ill prepared as the rest of Yugoslavia to resist the Wehrmacht onslaught. But drawing on his World War I experience as a decorated sergeant major in the Austro-Hungarian army who had led a platoon that regularly penetrated Russian lines at night—the kind of foray that today would be dubbed “special operations”—Tito managed to organize his own resistance force, the Partisans, with scant outside support. He then outmaneuvered the other major guerrilla army in Yugoslavia, the royalist Chetniks, led by Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailović, a scholarly, long-bearded army colonel with a “mild manner,” an always-present pipe, and “gentle eyes that peered sadly from behind thick lenses.”114 A professional officer, he had the full backing of the Yugoslav government-in-exile and of its patrons in London. But Mihailović was also a political naïf and a Serbian chauvinist who had little appeal to Yugoslavia’s other nationalities.
Half Croatian, half Slovenian, and all politician, Tito was, by contrast, able to bridge his country’s deep sectarian differences and organize a truly national force that survived seven major offensives of “merciless annihilation,” in the words of an SOE adviser to the Partisans, mounted by the Germans between the fall of 1941 and the summer of 1944. In this war “with no front and no quarter” (to quote again from the SOE operative and Oxford don William Deakin), Tito’s headquarters was on the verge of being overrun on several occasions, but each time he managed to escape, sometimes with only seconds to spare. Having started with just 12,000 party members, Tito by the fall of 1943 commanded a force of over 300,000 fighters. And unlike the Chetniks, who were sometimes drawn into collaboration with the Germans and Italians, the Partisans had no compunctions about relentlessly attacking the occupation forces, notwithstanding the harsh reprisals inevitably suffered by nearby villagers. They knew that German atrocities would only drive more people into their camp—literally so because of the German habit of razing villages near the site of Partisan attacks, forcing villagers to take refuge with the guerrillas.
Acutely conscious of the need to wage political as well as kinetic warfare, Tito took care, noted an OSS operative, “to indoctrinate every group in the liberated areas, even the children,” who had to sing ditties such as “Tito Is My Mother and My Father.” Every major Partisan unit also had its own printing press to produce Communist propaganda, leading another OSS liaison officer to conclude that “the teaching of Communism has now become as much a part of their activities as fighting.” Much like Mao Zedong, Tito showed himself much more attuned to the demands of modern insurgency than the more narrowly military Mihailović or Chiang Kai-shek.
The turning point of the war came in 1944 when the British and American governments, despite their anticommunist leanings, decided to shift their support from the ineffectual Chetniks to the better-organized Partisans. Thereafter Tito’s men received copious supplies from the air—more, in fact, than either the French or the Italian resistance received. Tito even relocated his headquarters in 1944 to the Adriatic island of Vis, where, like some James Bond villain in his island lair, he spent the rest of the war under the protection of Anglo-American air and sea power. The Soviet contribution, by contrast, was negligible until the Red Army entered Yugoslavia in September 1944. Their troops were instrumental in the liberation of Belgrade but then moved on, leaving the final battles in Yugoslavia to be won by Tito’s forces, which by now had become a regular army.
“Yugoslavia,” notes Mark Mazower, “was the only place in Europe where a partisan movement seized control.” Tito did not relinquish that control until his death in 1980. He dealt harshly not only with his wartime rivals (Mihailović was captured and executed in 1946) but with all other contenders for power. Only his iron will kept alive the artificial nation of Yugoslavia, which was to expire in a blood-drenched cataclysm a decade after his demise.
Still, for all of Tito’s undoubted cunning, ruthlessness, and fortitude, if the Nazi high command had been free to concentrate its resources in Yugoslavia for a prolonged period of time, the Partisans in all likelihood would have been crushed. (The Arab Revolt in World War I would have suffered the same fate if the Ottomans had not been fighting General Allenby’s regulars at the same time.) As it was, the liberation struggle took a fearful toll on Yugoslavia: 1 million to 1.5 million people killed out of a prewar population of 16 million.115 Such are the wages of insurgency, successful or not.
Elsewhere, outside the Balkans, most resistance movements had little more than nuisance value. Admiration for these freedom fighters should not obscure the reality that their role in helping Allied armies was hardly decisive or indispensable.
42.
ASSESSING THE “SUPERSOLDIERS”
Did Commandos Make a Difference?
WHAT OF THE “supersoldiers,” the Western commandos who often operated in conjunction with local resistance fighters and garnered so much attention both from contemporaries and from posterity? What was their impact?
Their dramatic contributions cannot be denied. Heroic World War II special operations have provided rich inspiration for a long line of books, movies, and television shows, ranging from Alistair MacLean’s The Guns of Navarone (1957) and ABC’s The Rat Patrol (1966–68) to Hampton Sides’s Ghost Soldiers (2001) and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (2009). One would have to have a heart of stone not to chortle over escapades such as that carried out by two young SOE officers wearing German uniforms who in 1944 kidnapped a German general on Crete and drove him in his own staff car through twenty-two checkpoints to a hideout and an eventual transfer by sea to Cairo.116 But was this mission worthwhile? The loss of one general did nothing to shake the German hold on Crete. The loss of the brilliant field marshal Erwin Rommel might have been more significant, but an attempt by British commandos to kidnap or kill him in North Africa in 1941 was a “total failure” that resulted in the loss of thirty valuable men.117
Similar questions of cost-effectiveness could be raised about many other equally daring exploits. As could questions of morality. Operations in occupied territories inevitably subjected the local people to savage retaliation by the Germans or Japanese. They also implicated Britain and America in actions that were denounced by their enemies as “terrorism”—with considerable justification. Was it worth it?
Field Marshal Slim, one of the most respected commanders of World War II, wrote that “special units and formations . . . did not give militarily a worth-while return for the resources in men, material, and time that they absorbed.” He thought they were positively deleterious because they skimmed off the best men from ordinary units, thereby lowering “the quality of the rest of the Army.” Slim famously concluded, “Armies do not win w
ars by means of a few bodies of super-soldiers but by the average quality of their standard units.”118 Another British soldier groused about “anti-social irresponsible individualists” who contributed “nothing to Allied victory” and “who sought a more personal satisfaction from the war than of standing their chance, like proper soldiers, of being bayoneted in a slit trench or burnt alive in a tank.”119
Similar thinking was prevalent in the senior ranks of all the Allied armies at war’s end. Stalin naturally rushed to disband partisan formations that were not fully under his control and therefore could pose a threat to his regime. The Red Army and NKVD secret police were to spend several years after World War II suppressing nationalist guerrillas in Ukraine, the Baltic Republics, Poland, and other parts of the Soviet empire. In Britain, of all the special formations created during the war, only the Special Air Service, Special Boat Service, and Royal Marine Commandos survived and that only after an interregnum. (SAS was deactivated in 1945, reactivated in 1947.) The U.S. Marines, with their strong sense of egalitarianism, had disbanded their Raiders even before the war’s end and would not field discrete special operations forces for another sixty years. The U.S. Army likewise did away with its Rangers. They were briefly revived during the Korean War, then disbanded again, until being reactivated again for good in 1969 to fight in Vietnam. The OSS also was dissolved after the war but had a faster rebirth as the CIA in 1947. The “unconventional warfare,” that is, guerrilla warfare, mission—which before World War II had been performed by a combination of militia and regular soldiers on an improvised, ad hoc basis, and during the war had been carried out primarily by the OSS—was divided in the postwar era between the CIA and the Army Special Forces, which were established in 1952.
The post-1945 record thus reveals initial skepticism about the utility of special forces followed by their begrudging acceptance and eventually an enthusiastic embrace in the post-9/11 era. This ambivalence is not hard to explain. While the limited use of such operatives in World War I, most notably T. E. Lawrence, had been almost exclusively positive, the record in World War II was more extensive and more mixed. Missions behind enemy lines gathered valuable intelligence and kept enemy troops tied down on internal security duties. But raids also suffered heavy losses and left civilians vulnerable to retaliation. Even when successful, such pinpricks seldom had much of an impact on the course of the campaign. When asked after the war about the impact of the French Resistance on the German war machine, Armaments Minister Albert Speer scoffed: “What French resistance?”120
There were some sabotage operations that really hampered the Germans. In 1942 Greek partisans with the aid of the SOE blew up a portion of the Athens–Salonika railway that carried supplies to Rommel’s Afrika Korps, hampering its retreat after the Battle of El Alamein. In 1943 an SOE team disguised as students on a skiing holiday blew up a Norwegian heavy-water plant that was needed for Germany’s atomic-bomb program. In 1944 SOE agents in France replaced the normal axle oil in a train used to transport German tanks with an abrasive grease that gums up the works. This helped delay for seventeen days the arrival of a Waffen SS armored division in Normandy at the start of the Allied invasion. All those operations, and a few others, had genuine strategic significance. But such examples are rare.121
Against these successes must be weighed the more numerous failures, such as the infamous commando raid on the French port of Dieppe in 1942 or, on a lesser scale, the SAS attacks the same year on the Libyan port of Benghazi. In his rollicking memoir, Fitzroy Maclean, an aristocratic British diplomat turned soldier, described how he and a few other SAS operatives, including Randolph Churchill, were successfully escorted eight hundred miles across the desert to Benghazi in a specially modified Ford station wagon by the Long-Range Desert Group, only to find that, apparently having gotten advance warning, the Italian garrison was on its guard. They had no choice but to sneak out of town. On the way home, their vehicle overturned and Maclean woke up from a morphine haze to find himself with a “fractured collar bone, a broken arm and what seemed to be a fractured skull.” After recovering, he participated in another, even bigger raid on Benghazi that likewise caused scant damage to the Axis but inflicted considerable casualties on the SAS and its supporting forces. Maclean was lucky to escape what another participant called “a complete fiasco.” On a subsequent mission, David Stirling, founder of SAS, was captured by the Germans and spent the rest of the war a prisoner.122 To its credit, the SAS did manage to destroy nearly four hundred German and Italian aircraft on the ground.123 This was a serious but hardly mortal blow to the Afrika Korps, which could not possibly have been defeated save by the employment of conventional force.
Part of the problem in the war’s early days was that training and doctrine, coordination and planning for special operations were still in their infancy. Early operations were often amateurish. But even the more professional forces at war’s end still had a high rate of misfires. The Alamo Scouts, a small American outfit engaged in reconnaissance missions behind Japanese lines in the Pacific, was unique in having no fatalities.124 Most special-warfare units suffered heavily. Britain’s commandos, for example, saw nearly 10 percent of their men die in action—a far higher rate than in the regular army.125 Civilians in the areas where irregulars operated paid a particularly stiff price. Ray Hunt, an American guerrilla leader in the Philippines, concluded that his efforts were of “great value to the American army in the latter stages of the war,” but he nevertheless wrote that “the Filipino people would have been better off” had there been no uprising because so many of them “were killed, maimed, despoiled, and brutalized.”126 Hunt knew, of course, that the Filipinos would have been liberated eventually by the U.S. Army even if not a single guerrilla had taken up arms.
Perhaps the most important impact of behind-the-lines operations was psychological. Special operations were a bonanza for propagandists who portrayed every mission as a triumph against overwhelming odds—whatever the facts. (Fitzroy Maclean wrote after one of SAS’s forays into Benghazi, “We were gratified to find ourselves and our operation described in the popular press in such glowing terms as to be scarcely recognizable.”)127 The fighting spirit of the Western publics was thus boosted in dark times as was the pride of occupied peoples who were led to believe they had aided in their own liberation.
From the Western perspective the latter consequence was to prove a mixed blessing. Proxy armies are always difficult for their sponsors to control—often impossible. By arming and aiding indigenous resistance movements (SOE alone distributed a million Sten submachine guns around the world),128 Allied operatives were in many cases putting guns into the hands of people who would soon turn on them. The resulting “wars of national liberation” are the subject of the next section.
BOOK VI
THE END OF EMPIRE
The Wars of “National Liberation”
43.
THE WORLD AFTER THE WAR
The Slipping European Grip
GERMAN BOMBS AND rockets had ceased to fall on Liverpool and London, but for the people of Britain life did not improve markedly after the end of World War II. “People are suddenly realizing,” a New Yorker correspondent wrote soon after Japan’s surrender, “that in the enormous economic blitz that has just begun, their problems may be as serious as the blitz they so recently scraped through.” Some 750,000 houses had been destroyed or damaged, public debt was at record levels, the pound devalued, unemployment rising. Britain had to rely on a loan from the United States as a lifeline, even as the new Labour government was launching a dramatic expansion of costly government programs in health care, schooling, unemployment insurance, and old-age pensions.
Rationing remained in effect, covering everything from meat, eggs, and butter to clothes, soap, and gasoline. As one housewife noted, “Queues were everywhere, for wedge-heeled shoes, pork-pies, fish, bread & cakes, tomatoes—& emergency ration-cards at the food office.” Even in the House of Commons dining room, the only meat on
offer was whale or seal steak. The situation deteriorated even more in the harsh winter of 1947–48. Coal, gas, and electricity were all in short supply. Everyone seemed to be shivering and complaining, as the college student Kingsley Amis put it, “CHRIST ITS [sic] BLEEDING COLD.”
The inclement weather heightened the sense of ruin and decay that Christopher Isherwood, the expatriate writer, found upon his return to London for the first time after the war. He noted that plaster was “peeling from even the most fashionable squares and crescents,” that “hardly a building was freshly painted,” and that “once stylish restaurants” had been “reduced to drabness and even squalor.” He wondered, “Were there to be no fruits of victory?”1
The situation was profoundly worse in France, which at the end of 1944 was just emerging from the trauma of occupation and the death of more than 600,000 of its citizens. More than 10,000 women who were accused of having consorted with German soldiers had their heads shaved; many were beaten, even forced to run the streets naked with swastikas painted on their bodies.
Malnutrition was a serious problem, with the average height of children falling “dramatically.” There was panic buying in bakeries, as customers who took too many baguettes were being attacked by those who had to do without. Even wine, the most Gallic of beverages, was hard to get. And that was not the only humiliating shortfall. In the new government proclaimed by Charles de Gaulle, notes a recent history, “writing paper was in such short supply that they had to use up the remaining batches of Vichy letterhead, striking out ‘État Français’ at the top and typing in ‘République Française’ underneath.”2