by Max Hastings
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 percentag
e compares favourably with the casualties of rifle companies in many campaigns.
It was unquestionably vital for the Allies to sustain contact between the free world and the occupied countries. The BBC’s broadcasts in many languages kept alight candles of hope which played a moving and critical role in the lives of millions of people enduring tyranny. There remains no doubt of the merits of dispatching agents to gather intelligence, contact anti-German groups, establish networks and assist escaping Allied personnel. In 1944-45, partisans were often useful as guides and intelligence sources for the advancing Allied forces, but this was a marginal activity.
The important question about SOE concerns the wisdom of its military policies. To the end of the war, while the chiefs of staff were eager for resistance to ‘make a mess’, as one SOE officer in occupied France interpreted his orders, no coherent strategy was promulgated, based on a realistic assessment of what guerrillas might hope to achieve. Though useful work was done in France after D-Day, attacks on communications and German garrisons almost invariably hurt local populations more than the enemy. What else could have been expected?
The British chiefs of staff in 1944 urged that local resisters should be warned against provoking pitched battles with the Germans. Maj. Gen. Colin Gubbins, military head of SOE, was formally rebuked when a bloody uprising took place in Slovakia, because his organisation appeared to have defied its orders and promoted it.
But the high command was thus attempting belatedly to reverse the policy pursued by SOE, strongly encouraged by the prime minister, since 1940. Nor did Churchill share the generals’ scruples. For instance, at a 27 January 1944 meeting with the air chiefs, the Minister of Economic Warfare, Ismay and others, he expressed the desire to promote large-scale clashes between the French Resistance and the Germans. ‘He wished and believed it possible to bring about a situation in the whole area between the Rhone and the Italian frontier comparable to the situation in Yugoslavia. Brave and desperate men could cause the most acute embarrassment to the enemy and it was right that we should do all in our power to foster so valuable an aid to Allied strategy.’ On 22 April, Churchill was urging on the chiefs of staff Operation Caliph, a scheme to land some thousands of British troops on the coast near Bordeaux simultaneously with D-Day. There was, he wrote, ‘a chance of a surprise descent into a population eager to revolt’.
Though Caliph was never executed, Churchill was still eager to incite guerrillas to strike wholesale at the Germans. A million Yugoslavs died in strife which he explicitly sought to replicate in southern France. Popular revolts, of which the last took place in Prague in May 1945, cost many lives to little useful purpose. Mark Mazower has written: ‘Only in the USSR did German counter-terror fail.’ Churchill’s grand vision for revolt by the oppressed peoples of Europe was heroic, but could play no rightful part in industrialised war against a ruthless occupier. Deliverance relied upon great armies.
Any judgement on Resistance must weigh the balance between moral benefit and human cost, acknowledging that the military achievement was small. Colonel Dick Barry, chief of staff to Gubbins, admitted afterwards: ‘It was only just worth it.’ The French people, for instance, took pride in the FFI’s flamboyant demonstration when they took to the streets of Paris as the Germans retreated in August 1944. But the German decision to quit the capital was quite uninfluenced by resistance. In Crete in July 1944, against the orders of SOE, local guerrillas embarked upon open attacks which provoked the Germans to execute a thousand innocent civilians, and burn thirty villages. SOE’s own historian wrote ruefully: ‘The game was not worth pursuing on these terms.’
The most disastrous Resistance epic of all was, of course, the Warsaw rising which began in August 1944. There, Churchill’s 1940 vision of an oppressed people breaking forth in revolt against their occupiers was dramatically fulfilled, though SOE did not directly encourage the Polish initiative. But, in the absence of Allied regular forces, the Home Army was comprehensively defeated. The British made much of their attempts, thwarted by Russian intransigence, to parachute arms to the Warsaw Poles. Gubbins was even rash enough to urge the chiefs of staff to accede to the urging of the Home Army’s leaders that a Polish parachute brigade then in Britain should be dropped to aid the rebels. Even beyond the practical difficulties, it reflected lamentably on Gubbins’s professional judgement that he endorsed such a romantic and futile notion. Parachute-dropped aid from Britain might have assuaged the frustration of Churchill and his people, but could not conceivably have altered the tragic outcome in Warsaw. Large-scale popular uprisings were doomed, unless conducted in concert with the advances of armies, which rendered them strategically irrelevant. The incitement of violent opposition in occupied countries made sense between 1940 and 1942, when every ruthless expedient had to be tried, to avert Allied defeat. But it became irresponsible in 1944-45, when Allied victory was assured.
Among the occupied nations, post-war gratitude to Britain for the promotion of Resistance was often equivocal. De Gaulle, with characteristic gracelessness, expelled SOE personnel from France as soon as he had power to do so. Georgios Papandreou, the Greek exile prime minister, told Harold Macmillan shortly before his country’s liberation that the British should not disguise from themselves the fact that their prestige in the Balkans had fallen, while that of the Russians had risen, despite Allied victories in France and Italy: ‘Moreover, in our desire to attack the Germans we had roused and armed most dangerous Communist forces in Greece itself.’ Churchill’s wartime enthusiasm for Resistance was soured in 1944 and thereafter by the triumphs of several communist and nationalist movements in their own countries. They seized power, or in some cases merely attempted to do so, throwing themselves into domestic struggles with greater determination than they had displayed against the Germans.
Towards the end of the war, Jock Colville describes how the controller of BBC European services, former diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick, ‘gave a damning account of the inefficacy of both SOE and PWE [Political Warfare Executive], both of which have been loud in self-advertisement’. Kirkpatrick observed that their failures confirmed his own beliefs in the importance of parliamentary scrutiny. Secret mandates rendered SOE and PWE immune from the sceptical oversight their activities would otherwise have received. This is a criticism applicable to most secret intelligence organisations in war or peace, but Kirkpatrick saw enough of SOE to render his view significant. ‘Special ops’ recruited some remarkable men and women, and could claim useful sabotage achievements. But its essential purpose was misconceived. ‘The occupied nations believed with passion,’ in the words of Sir William Deakin, ‘and fought to construct their secret armies in the interior and exterior Resistance which would play a leading part in the last stage of liberation of their countries. But this was an obsessive dream.’
The educator and historian Thomas Arnold declared sternly in 1842: ‘If war, carried out by regular armies under the strictest discipline, is yet a great evil, an irregular partisan warfare is an evil ten times as intolerable…letting loose a multitude of armed men, with none of the obedience and none of the honourable feelings of the soldier.’ It may be argued that Arnold’s idealised view of warfare was rendered anachronistic by Hitler’s tyranny, and by the need to mobilise every possible means of undoing it. Arnold, indeed, qualified his own assertion by saying that if an invader breached the laws of conflict, ‘a guerrilla war against such an invader becomes justifiable’. But nowhere, even in Yugoslavia, did Resistance operations avert the need for regular forces to defeat those of the Nazis. France would not have been liberated one day later had the maquis never existed. The case for Resistance, though by no means a negligible one, rests upon its contribution to the historic self-respect of occupied societies, to national legend.
The most baleful consequence of Resistance was that it represented the legitimisation of violent civilian activity in opposition to local regimes, of a kind which has remained a focus of controversy throughout the world ever since. Not only the Germa
ns, but also many citizens of occupied countries, endorsed the view that ‘One man’s freedom-fighter is another man’s terrorist.’ It is useful to recall that such a man as Portal perceived SOE’s personnel as terrorists. Though British agents were seldom directly concerned in the more ruthless actions of local groups, it was endemic to the nature of the struggle that partisans armed by London shot prisoners, sometimes wholesale; murdered real or supposed collaborators, and members of rival factions; and often supported themselves through institutionalised banditry. A precedent was set by the wartime democracies’ support for irregular warfare which could never be undone.
It would be an exaggeration to say that SOE enabled dissident elements of several societies to overthrow their traditional social orders. The collapse of the Balkan monarchies was inevitable, cause for lament only to a Victorian sentimentalist such as the prime minister. In Western Europe anti-communist governments, decisively assisted by the presence of Anglo-American armies, were able to prevail in 1944-45. But the impact of SOE’s aid to Resistance movements was significantly greater upon post-war societies than on military outcomes in the struggle against the Germans. Churchill came to recognise this. David Reynolds notes the remarkable fact that, in the six volumes of his war memoirs, SOE is mentioned only once, in an appendix.‘ “Setting Europe ablaze” had proved a damp squib,’ says the historian. It was fortunate for the peoples of many occupied countries that this was so.