Guerrilla warfare is even more cruel than conventional war, the chances of surviving slimmer. Whoever joined up as a patriot or partisan signed their own death warrant.
MAX SALVADORI
In the spring of 1943 Switzerland was once again teetering on the brink of invasion. At the same time to the south-east of the republic in Yugoslavia and to the south-west in France, other Alpine dramas were unfolding. Long heralded and coming to pass much later than Churchill – amongst many others – had hoped, this was the story of resistance in the Alps.
It had begun with the ignominious evacuation from Dunkirk of the British Expeditionary Force in 1940, the first summer of the war. Thence, in Hitler’s eyes, there would be no return of a British army to Continental shores. General Gort’s forces would sit impotently on the sidelines of Nazi-occupied Europe for the next thousand years.
Even during the chaotic days that followed the Fall of France, the British thought otherwise. If it was true that the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg victories in Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France had been delivered through military might, they had been aided and abetted by fifth columnists in the defeated countries. These were the agents of sabotage, propaganda and subversion who had bombed civilians in Vienna, faked the attack on the radio station in Gleiwitz that had given Hitler the pretext for invading Poland in September 1939, and spread defeatism in France on the eve of her Fall. Commonplace today, at the outbreak of war these tactics were something of a novelty. It was true that in the wake of Anschluss, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service or MI6 had created a special unit for just such a purpose. Section D was based in Caxton Street in the medieval lanes around Westminster Abbey. It had dreamed up some wonderful schemes. They included sabotaging Swedish iron ore exports to the Reich, blowing up the oilfields in Romania and – best of all – blocking the blue Danube. None had come to fruition.
The Fall of France focused minds wonderfully. On 16 July 1940, the same day that Hitler signed Directive No. 16 ordering the invasion of Britain, a midnight meeting was held by Churchill in Downing Street. A plan was agreed to foment sabotage, subversion and resistance throughout Europe. Hugh Dalton, the blustering and belligerent Minister of Economic Warfare, was to be the political chief of the top-secret agency. It was to be called Special Operations Executive or SOE. Churchill’s parting shot to Dalton as he left Number 10 through a haze of cigar smoke has passed into legend: ‘Now set Europe ablaze.’
This was indicative of the high hopes that Churchill himself, Dalton and many others entertained at the time. The Executive was classed with strategic bombing and the naval blockade as amongst the country’s most powerful weapons, its role to foment popular uprisings in Europe of which a new expeditionary army would merely be a guarantor.1
In practice, nurturing resistance proved far more difficult than envisaged. In due course there grew sufficient will to resist in the occupied countries of Europe. It was rarely to be found in 1940. The populations of France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark and Poland were shocked, cowed, subdued and generally submissive to their new masters – be they Nazis, Italians or puppet governments. The Alps themselves, remote though they might be, at first seemed little different. As to what Churchill dubbed the ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’, SOE had to begin at the beginning. In 1940 this was not necessarily a very good place to start. Lord Selborne, a Tory grandee who replaced Dalton in 1942, recalled, ‘Underground warfare was an unknown art in England in 1940; there were no text-books for newcomers, no old hands to initiate them into the experiences of the last war … lessons had to be learned in the hard school of practice.’2 There was also the problem of MI6. Section D had been folded into SOE at its inception, and the intelligence service saw the new organisation as an upstart. This was understandable given that the two agencies’ interests were perpetually at odds. Clandestine activities were undercover: silent, secret and inconspicuous. Sabotage and subversion were the polar opposites. A bomb here, a derailed train there, an assassination ‘pour encourager les autres’. Visibility was all.
At once this conflict arose in the Alps.
As Switzerland’s General Henri Guisan regularly made clear, the republic’s very existence hinged on the Alpine railway tunnels that welded Italy and Germany into the Axis. When the British discovered that a third of Mussolini’s coal requirement was trucked from the Ruhr and Saar coalfields through the St Gotthard and Simplon, they became an obvious object of interest to SOE. An operation was drawn up to destroy the marshalling yards, sabotage the bridges and block the railway lines. The Executive claimed that such an action ‘might conceivably result not only in holding up [Italy’s] coal deliveries but also military supplies or even, in certain circumstances, offensives’. It would shake the foundations of the treaty between Italy and the Reich. Dalton was delighted. ‘So act!’ he told his staff. ‘I will gladly snap for this!’3
The plan was duly tabled with the Foreign Office and MI6. Both gave somewhat qualified support. MI6 regarded Switzerland as its own backyard and the FO pointed out that the operation might perhaps compromise Anglo-Swiss relations. The Swiss were protective of their tunnels, even if their railway had been an English idea. Moreover, both agencies had a general embargo on operations that might endanger Swiss neutrality. On 8 October 1940 it was nevertheless agreed that an SOE officer, John ‘Jock’ McCaffery, should be sent to reconnoitre.
McCaffery was a thirty-eight-year-old Glaswegian of Irish extraction. A Catholic who trained for the priesthood in Rome and subsequently settled in Italy, he married, retrained as a teacher and ultimately found himself head of the British Council in the Ligurian port of Genoa. The Council peddled British culture and acted as a cover for intelligence operations. McCaffery, with his grasp of the intricacies of central European politics, was briefed to explore the practicality of the railway scheme, source explosives, and recruit Swiss railway workers. This took time. It was spring 1941 before the Scot had been sent to Switzerland, discovered quite how much dynamite would be needed, quite how closely the Swiss policed the tunnels, and quite how reluctant were the railway workers to blow up their own country’s infrastructure. By then the mood in London had also changed. The pressure on Italy had briefly eased because of Hitler’s momentous decision to invade the Balkans, the move that buttressed the Italian forces in Greece. The chance of detaching Mussolini’s state from the Axis had temporarily slipped away. At the same time, over the winter MI6 agents in Switzerland had unearthed a rich vein of intelligence. This London was loath to lose. In these circumstances the FO and MI6 confirmed that no exception was to be made to the general policy about compromising Swiss neutrality. Dalton stopped snapping.
Yet in other ways the passage of time played into the hands of the SOE. By the summer of 1941, the Executive had settled into its secret headquarters at 64 Baker Street in London’s West End, parachuted its first agents into France, and established a modus operandi. ‘SOE’s objects’, related its historian M. R. D. Foot, ‘included discovering where these outbursts [of resistance] were, encouraging them when they were feeble, arming their members as they grew, and coaxing them when they were strong into the channels of greatest common advantage to the allies.’4 Likewise, the more enterprising, courageous and resourceful inhabitants of the occupied countries had familiarised themselves with the Nazis and their agents and determined to get rid of them.
In the Alps, principal amongst the naysayers were the French in the west, and in the east the patriots and the partisans of Yugoslavia.
In France, as in all the occupied countries, resistance began in the form of virtually spontaneous and very largely incidental activity; only later did it coalesce into a unified, national resistance ‘movement’ of any substance.
Its figurehead was of course General de Gaulle. Born in Lille in French Flanders in 1890, Charles de Gaulle was an officer who had distinguished himself in the First World War in the trenches, in the thirties as an exponent of motorised warfare, and in combat once again during the brief period of fighting before the Fall of France in June 1940. In those torrid weeks he was promoted first to brigadier general, on 5 June 1940 to under-secretary of state for war. A fervent patriot, he was horrified by Pétain’s proposal to seek an armistice with the Reich. On 17 June 1940 de Gaulle and a handful of other senior French officers flew to London. The following day the General issued his great rallying cry on the BBC from his London exile, the appel du 18 Juin. This called on the French people to reject the proposed armistice, to fight on, and to form the Free French Forces which – very soon – would oppose those of collaborationist Vichy. ‘Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’ Few heard this bidding in the darkness of France’s Occupied Zone, and fewer still responded.
In the French Alps, the range that ran from Nice to Geneva, the appel fell on rather more fertile ground. North of the Jewish sanctuary of Nice and the Alpes-Maritimes lay the Alpine province of Dauphiné; further north beyond Dauphiné, the Alps that reared up to Mont Blanc overlooking the southern shores of Lake Geneva. This was the Haute-Savoie, where in 1943 Guido Lospinoso’s Jewish charges would find sanctuary in Megève and St Gervais. From July 1940 these eastern borders of France had been designated part of the Zone Libre. Here homage was nominally paid to Vichy, but Pétain’s way of collaboration was by no means to everyone’s taste, and political persecution had proved scarcely less virulent under Vichy than under the Nazis in the Occupied Zone. Moreover, in the same way as Switzerland lived under the constant threat of Nazi invasion, so too did France’s Zone Libre – something that throughout France was more conducive to resistance than passivity. In the Alps the people were also of an independent spirit, not always as regardful as they surely should have been of directives from Vichy or Paris or Berlin.
After the initial shock of the events of 1940 had subsided, the Alpine people began to stir. If not all had heard or registered de Gaulle’s original appeal of 18 June 1940, many now began to listen to his regular broadcasts from London on the BBC; in August 1940 it had done the General a power of good to be sentenced by Vichy to death for high treason. In Savoie, the Dauphiné and the Alpes-Maritimes the people also began to realise how admirably their surroundings lent themselves to the purpose of the réfractaires: those who refused to submit to the Vichy regime. They might be combed out in street-to-street, house-to-house searches in France’s towns and cities; they were far more difficult to track down in her mountains. These offered levels of cover that made it very difficult for the Wehrmacht to find, let alone to attack any erring réfractaires. They were bandit country.
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One day in the summer of 1941 – it was the glory days of Operation Barbarossa when the Wehrmacht swept the Red Army before it – a small group of men gathered in the Café de la Rotunde near Grenoble station. Its immediate environs were grubby, but beyond lay the inspiration of the great mountains of the Rhône-Alpes towering over the Alpine city: the Chartreuse to the north, the Belledonne to the east, and to the south-west the Vercors. This was a limestone plateau sixty miles long and thirty broad, the size – say – of the county of Surrey: less populous, though, less stuffy, more rugged, more wooded, and at the time still supposedly the home of wild bears.
Among the men in the café were a forty-one-year-old engineer called Pierre Dalloz, and forty-seven-year-old Eugène Chavant. Dalloz was a distinguished Alpinist and pioneer of winter mountaineering who had climbed extensively in the Vercors. Chavant was a cobbler’s son, born in Colombe just north of Grenoble. Both saw the plateau as a sanctuary, for it was accessible only by a few steep and narrow roads, easily blocked and readily defended. The pair’s idea was to turn this to advantage. They would set up camps to provide refuge for those persecuted by Vichy.
Like most of the resistance in occupied Europe, they also had an ulterior motive. The Third Republic had failed. Chavant was a socialist who wanted to build a more just society on its ruins. The Soviet spy H. A. R. ‘Kim’ Philby, who had worked briefly for SOE before joining MI6, commented that the aim of the SOE, ‘in Churchill’s words, was to set Europe ablaze. This could not be done by appealing to people to co-operate in restoring an unpopular and discredited old order.’5
Chavant screened candidates for the haven. Those selected were then taken up to the plateau. By the beginning of 1942 there were around a hundred distributed in makeshift camps situated in the woods within reach of the scattered villages. They came to be known as the Montagnards, a subspecies of the rural resistance throughout France beginning to be called the maquis. Funding was obtained through the SOE in London’s Baker Street, a system of food distribution set up, and a sentinel system arranged using the plateau’s electricity station. If the lights went on and off three times, trouble was on its way. Many of the Montagnards were French and foreign Jews who would otherwise be bedded down in Auschwitz.
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Three events added impetus to the affairs on the plateau.
First came Operation Anton, the invasion by Axis forces of the Zone Libre. As we have seen, in the south and west of France this had meant takeover by the Wehrmacht; on the eastern Alpine border by General Vercellino’s Italian Fourth Army. The Pusteria Alpine Division detrained in Grenoble in November 1942. The result might have been anticipated: the eruption of a plethora of resistance organisations of various political shades: Combat, Franc-Tireur, Armée secrète, Organisation de résistance de l’armée. Second came the perception that – with victory at El Alamein and the Allied landings in North Africa that had precipitated Operation Anton – the tide of the war was now turning against the Reich. Third, in the New Year of 1943, there came Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO). Set up by the Vichy government on 16 February 1943 to provide workers for German industry, STO entailed dispatching skilled workers to the Reich in exchange for French prisoners of war in Germany. It proved an excellent agent of recruitment for the maquis among those presented with the choice of working for the Nazis or joining the resistance, of turning themselves in or escaping to the mountains. This, it should be said, was no casual choice. As the senior SOE liaison officer Max Salvadori later put it, ‘Guerrilla warfare is even more cruel than conventional war, the chances of surviving slimmer. Whoever joined up as a patriot or partisan signed their own death warrant.’6 In the first few months of 1943, the numbers in the Vercors camps nevertheless doubled or tripled.
The Pusteria Division soon realised that they had a problem on their doorstep. From the maquis established in the Vercors, the Belledonne and the Chartreuse came a steady drip of sabotage and subversion throughout the Dauphiné. Les Allobroges – the ancient term for the Alpine inhabitants of both the Savoie and the Dauphiné – was the resistance news-sheet started in the spring of 1941. Eighteen months later, explosives were being stolen, power lines and transformers being destroyed, and the personal details of prospective STO victims were being seized and burned. Something needed to be done. During winter, with snow on the narrow roads that accessed the plateau, the Vercors was virtually inaccessible, an island more than a plateau. With the spring thaw of 1943 came calling the Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell’Antifascismo (the Organisation for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism or OVRA). Founded in 1927, this was Mussolini’s equivalent of the Gestapo, indeed the organisation that provided a model for Heinrich Himmler’s Secret State Police.
In mid-March 1943 the OVRA seized fourteen of the Montagnards on the Vercors. They talked, one of them induced to do so by being forced to sit on a red-hot frying pan. A second series of raids followed in which the OVRA headed straight for the secret camps. The electricity station warning system worked, and in each case the Italians found the camps deserted. In May, disaster followed. An attempt by the Montagnards to seize a petrol tanker at Pont de Claix, at the bottom of the plateau’s eastern escarpment, was botched. A dozen men were seized, tortured, and talked. In the purge that followed the plateau’s unofficial system of administration collapsed, six tons of explosive were seized, a number of the camps were broken up, and the survivors had to retreat to the most remote parts of the Vercors.7 The Montagnards needed professional help.
This came in the form of Capitaine Alain Le Ray.
Born in 1910 in Paris, Le Ray was an ambitious young officer and an expert skier and mountaineer. Once commissioned, he was attached to the elite Chasseurs Alpins mountain light infantry, headquartered in Grenoble. Captured in northern France in June 1940, he had escaped from his first POW camp and was sent to Colditz. The legendary ‘escape-proof’ castle in Saxony held him for three weeks. Following his flight on 11 April 1941 he became the first Colditz prisoner to make it to freedom, to achieve a ‘home run’. Le Ray’s track record and his familiarity with Grenoble made him a good choice as the first military leader of the Vercors. He was also good-looking, bold and courageous, and he had the impeccable social credentials of being the son-in-law of François Mauriac. He took charge in May 1943, just as the plateau lurched into crisis. In summer 1943, as the maquis emerged once again from their refuges, Le Ray began turning them into a fighting force.
He also did something more. For Operation Montagnards, as it would soon be called, was little less than a secret plan to turn the whole course of the war in Alpine France.
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At the same time, the maquis further north in the Rhône-Alpes were acting under the same stimuli in similar ways.
In the Savoie, the maquis leader was Colonel Jean Vallette d’Osia. Born in 1898, Vallette d’Osia was a professional soldier who had been decorated in the First World War, wounded three times, and ended up graduating from the elite military academy at Saint Cyr. Captured during the Battle of France in 1940, he escaped twice. He then turned to General Weygand, who had replaced Gamelin as the French military leader too late in the day to prevent the Fall of France. Weygand persuaded d’Osia to follow the call of de Gaulle and take a hand in the renaissance of the French nation. In August 1940 d’Osia became commanding officer of the 27th Mountain Infantry Battalion in Annecy. This was part of L’armée d’armistice, a force of 100,000 that Vichy retained under the armistice terms. The post was a cover that enabled the Colonel to establish links with the nascent maquis in Savoie.
After Operation Anton in 1942 and the dissolution of L’armée d’armistice that Anton entailed, d’Osia became the formal leader of the resistance in Savoie. A small, fiery man and a fierce disciplinarian, he conceived the idea of creating a secret Alpine army as a response to the occupation of the Zone Libre. This meant not simply assembling the maquis – as had been done in the Vercors – but properly training them in the way that his colleague Alain Le Ray would soon be doing on the Grenoble plateau. For this purpose d’Osia set up an instruction camp on the Col des Saisies, a 5,436-foot pass close to what is now the skiing resort of La Saisies. This dated from March 1943, the very beginnings of STO. It was the germ of a series of training camps in the Savoie and Haute-Savoie where maquis leaders were inculcated into the theory and practice of mountain warfare. To many of the recruits brought up in the highlands of Savoie on the flanks of Mont Blanc, the basics of climbing and skiing were second nature. They were now taught how to deal with glaciers, cut steps in ice slopes, use ice axes and crampons: to become proficient, professional mountaineers. Once again, this maquis was armed and funded by the Allies, both by the SOE and, later, its fresh-faced US equivalent, the OSS – the story of which appears in the next chapter.
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.
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’.
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 appointed 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
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’.
1. Mark Wheeler, Britain and the War for Yugoslavia, 1940–1943 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1980).
2. David Stafford, Britain and European Resistance, 1940–1945: A Survey of the Special Operations Executive, with Documents (London: Macmillan, 1980).
3. Neville Wylie, Britain, Switzerland and the Second World War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
4. M. R. D. Foot, SOE: The Special Operations Executive 1940–46 (London: BBC, 1984).
5. Kim Philby, My Silent War (London: Grafton, 1989 [1968]).
6. Malcolm Tudor, Special Force: SOE and Italian Resistance 1943–1945 (Newtown, Powys: Emilia Publishing, 2004).
7. Michael Pearson, Tears of Glory: The Betrayal of Vercors, 1944 (London: Macmillan, 1978).
8. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Dictatorship, 1915–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2005).
9. Shirer, Rise and Fall.
10. Bosworth.
11. John Pimlott, Rommel and His Art of War (London: Greenhill, 2003).
12. David Irving, The Trail of the Fox (London: Papermac, 1977)
13. Irving.
14. Basil Davidson, Special Operations Europe: Scenes from the Anti-Nazi War (London: Gollancz, 1980).
15. Marko Attila Hoare, Genocide and Resistance in Hitler’s Bosnia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
16. Hoare.
17. Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches (London: Penguin, 1991 [1949]).
18. Bosworth.
19. Shirer, Rise and Fall.