by Max Hastings
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 choice901 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 Mihajlović, 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 April 6, “but no transportation.” The U.S. team eventually reached the Cetniks, but the British were successful in deflecting Washington from sending supplies to them.
Tito’s partisans never had the training, organisation or heavy weapons 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. The SOE’s internal historian observed laconically: “It is a little doubtful whether the Missions902 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 from the war’s main battlefields significant enemy forces—though considerably less, if Michael Howard’s interpretation of OKW documents is correct, than legend has suggested.
The political complexities of aiding resistance movements 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 listening903 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 Southeast Asia, were used later to advance anti-Western, anticapitalist interests. Churchill told Eden, “I have come to the conclusion904 that in Tito we have nursed a viper … he has started biting us.”
Sir William Deakin has written: “Paradoxically, British influence on Resistance in Europe905 was at its strongest at the lowest point of our military strength and resources, and during the period of our own isolation [1940–42].” 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. A French historian of the Resistance, Henri Michel, has written: “Great Britain promised to the Resistance the return to a prewar 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. An entire Balkan Air Force had been created, to supply Yugoslavia. The SOE had grown into an organisation staffed by more than eleven thousand soldiers and civilians, operating a network of training schools in Britain, the Mediterranean and India, and communicating with agents in some twenty countries. Its postwar 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 postwar books and films, historical and fictional, which continues to this day. The romance of the story is indisputable, though service with the 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 25 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.
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 the SOE concerns the wisdom of its military policies. To the end of the war, while the Chiefs of Staff were eager for resistance groups 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 the 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 the SOE, strongly encouraged by the prime minister, since 1940. Nor did Churchill share the generals’ scruples. For instance, at a January 27, 1944, meeting with the Air Staff, 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 situation906 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 April 22, 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, an
d surely wrongly, 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.”907 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 the resistance movement must weigh the balance between moral benefit and human cost, acknowledging that the military achievement was small. Col. Dick Barry, chief of staff to Gubbins, admitted afterwards: “It was only just worth it.”908 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 the Resistance. In Crete in July 1944, against the orders of the SOE, local guerrillas embarked upon open attacks which provoked the Germans to execute a thousand innocent civilians, and burn thirty villages. The SOE’s own historian wrote ruefully: “The game was not worth pursuing909 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 the SOE did not directly encourage the Polish initiative. But, in the absence of support from Allied regular forces, the Polish 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 enough910 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, postwar 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 Germans911 we had roused and armed most dangerous Communist forces in Greece itself.” Churchill’s wartime enthusiasm for resistance groups 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, the former diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick, “gave a damning account912 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 the 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 knew enough of the 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,”913 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 historian Thomas Arnold declared in 1842: “If war, carried out914 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 Germans, 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 the 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 the 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 the SOE’s aid to resistance movements was significantly greater upon postwar societies than on military outcomes in the struggle against the Germans. Churchill came to recognise this. David Reynolds notes the remarkable fact that915, in the six volumes of Churchill’s war memoirs, the SOE is mentioned only once, in an appendix. “‘Setting Europe ablaze’ had proved a damp squib,”916 says the historian. It was fortunate for the peoples of many occupied countries that this was so.
SEVENTEEN
Overlord
IN THE FIFTH YEAR of Britain’s war, all those concerned with its direction were desperately tired: “It’s not the hard work, it’s the hard worry,”917 said Robert Bruce Lockhart, head of the Political Warfare Executive. To the British public, the wait for D-Day, the decisive milestone in the war in the west, seemed interminable. The Ministry of Information, in one of its regular opinion surveys, described domestic morale in the spring of 1944 as “poor,” not least because of public apprehension about invasion casualties. “Spirits remain at a low level,”918 reported the ministry’s monitors on April 14. More and more workers flaunted disaffection. Industrial stoppages soared. February found 120,000 miners on unofficial strike in Yorkshire, 100,000 in Wales, and several hundred thousand more elsewhere. Even the president of the miners’ union suggested that Trotskyite agitation was playing a part.
Miners’ strikes abated in April after wages were increased, but there were also st
oppages among gas workers and engineering apprentices. Some 730,000 man-hours were lost in one Scottish aircraft factory. At another firm in August 1944, 419,000 hours were lost when workers rejected a management proposal that women should manufacture textile machinery—the firm’s normal business—while men continued to make aircraft components. On April 8, 1944, the British embassy in Washington reported to London about American public opinion: “Considerable disquiet919 is being evidenced over general political situation in England. This has centred mainly round Churchill’s demand for a [parliamentary] vote of confidence, through continuing coal and shipyard strikes, alleged evidence of failures of party truce … are being taken as indications that all is by no means well. Press reports give impression that there is deep dissatisfaction over domestic policy and that British public no less than American is apprehensive over apparent lack of Allied unity.”
The British and American peoples would have been even more alarmed had they known of the acrimony which overtook relations between Churchill and his Chiefs of Staff in the spring of 1944. Ironically, given that the prime minister’s interest in the Japanese war was desultory, this was provoked by argument about operations in the Far East. Churchill became obsessed with the desire to commit all available British forces, including the powerful fleet earmarked to join the Americans in the Pacific, to a “Bay of Bengal” strategy for the recapture of Burma and Malaya. He was especially enthusiastic about a prospective landing on Sumatra, to provide a stepping-stone. He threatened to impose this plan on the Chiefs of Staff, against their implacable opposition, by exercising his prerogative as minister of defence. On March 21, Brooke wrote of a meeting with Cunningham and Portal: “We discussed … how best920 to deal with Winston’s last impossible document. It is full of false statements, false deductions and defective strategy. We cannot accept it as it stands and it would be better if we all three resigned sooner than accept his solution.”