East Wind: The Different Flavors of Communism
When the Germans invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, the country was broken up into pieces. Mussolini took Slovenia—the region closest to Italy—Kosovo, and most of the Adriatic coast, including almost all of its islands. The Germans occupied Serbia and created the Independent State of Croatia, which covered much of modern-day Croatia and Bosnia. Bulgaria and Hungary occupied parts of the north and east. Josip Broz Tito’s Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which had been banned since just after the First World War, set up a vast multiethnic partisan army. This was referred to as the National Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia. For ease of reference in a region used to lengthy acronyms, it was called the Narodno Oslobodilačka Vojska, or NOV, simply meaning the National Liberation Army. They fought against the Germans and the Croats, as well as the Serb nationalist Chetnik guerrillas, who wanted to bring back the Serbian monarchy. According to Tito, the national composition of the partisan army in May 1944 was 44 percent Serb, 30 percent Croat, 10 percent Slovene, 5 percent Montenegrin, 2.5 percent Macedonian, and 2.5 percent Bosnian Muslim.1
In partitioned Yugoslavia, partisan resistance as a multiethnic, popular front developed as a matter of physical necessity and survival. The Slovenes in German-annexed Slovenia engaged mostly in small-scale sabotage. In Serbia, a nationalist Chetnik resistance organization developed under a former Yugoslav Army colonel, Draža Mihailović, intent on bringing back Yugoslavia’s deposed monarchy: it initially received support from the British SOE and MI6, but in June 1941, the Germans killed dozens of them in an uprising that completely deflated any thoughts of confrontation. The Communist-dominated popular partisan organization under the leadership of Marshal Tito was a multiethnic resistance force—it included, as noted, Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Jews, and Slovenes.
By 1943, the Allies were supporting the National Liberation Army in two main ways—through direct parachute drops of arms and equipment, and by sending liaison and training officers from the Special Operations Executive. British support to the nationalist Chetniks evaporated after about 1942, when it became apparent that their approach to the Germans had become largely collaborationist. The Germans and the ultra-right-wing Croatian extremists, the Ustashe, were responsible for the deaths of up to 80,000 Serbs, Muslims, and gypsies in the concentration camp system set up at Jasenovac. The Germans frequently commented that the Ustashe were their most willing collaborators, even compared to the anti-Semitic nationalists in the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania, who had assisted the SS einsatzkommando groups in 1941 and 1942 after Operation Barbarossa. Serb Chetniks killed tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in eastern Bosnia, and the Germans killed thousands of Serbs and gypsies in northern Serbia, on the banks of the Danube. For most Yugoslavs, belonging to the partisans was about living.
Based primarily in Bosnia and northwestern Serbia, Tito’s partisans fought the Germans and Italian Fascists most consistently and played a major role in driving the German forces out of Yugoslavia in 1945. By April 1945, there were some 800,000 soldiers in the partisan army. Tito went to great lengths to portray the NOV as a multiethnic people’s army—which it was—instead of a Communist militia. It had an air force and a small navy, fought in large, highly disciplined units, and was very much a force to be reckoned with.
The Yugoslav partisans could almost be called a mixture of Socialists and protonationalists, since they too were a multiethnic collective defending their homeland, their families, and their livelihoods against a wide range of threats from the Germans, Italian Fascists, Chetniks, and Ustashe. Without belonging to the NOV, most people in Yugoslavia could not have survived. They were as far as it was possible to be from the Marxist-Leninist doctrines of the Red Army and the Soviet Union, and this made Stalin extremely uncomfortable. The British and Americans understood that their “communism” was in fact populist, people’s socialism, in the same way that Italian “communism” among the partisans was more of a direct antireaction to Mussolini.
Tito’s partisans wanted to take the territory of Slovenia and the Adriatic islands back from the Italian Fascists, and as they watched the Germans and Fascists defeated by the Allies in 1945, they saw an opportunity to regain territory they saw as theirs. Tito was far too clever, too populist, and too wily a leader to let the Red Army and the Soviets occupy and control Yugoslavia, so he simply told Stalin that he would function as a Soviet-friendly buffer state between him and the Allies in Italy and Austria. He knew how to keep the simmering cauldron of volatile ethnic tensions that was Yugoslavia under control, off the boil. Stalin knew this too and was happy to let him govern the country. As an ethnic Georgian, Stalin was under no misapprehensions as to how small, and probably bloody, a welcome the Red Army would receive from newly liberated Yugoslavs who had suffered so harshly under the Croats and Germans. Two-thirds of Stalin’s army was not Russian, hailing from Mongolia or Tatarstan or Turkmenistan or Siberia: if the Yugoslavs were prepared to turn on each other, he thought, quite correctly, what would they do to outsiders who tried to impose their authority? Stalin understood the Balkans.
On August 12, 1944, in the Bay of Naples, Churchill had welcomed Marshal Tito to lunch. His guest wore a magnificent gold-and-blue uniform, which was very tight under the collar and singularly unsuited to the blazing heat, wrote Churchill. The Russians had given him the uniform, and the Americans the gold lace. Tito insisted on having two armed bodyguards in the dining room, for fear of assassination during the meal. Eight months later, in April 1945, after the death of Roosevelt, Churchill prioritized the imperatives of the United States as sevenfold: the first was that “Soviet Russia had become a mortal danger to the free world.” The seventh was that “Marshal Tito’s aggressive pretensions against Italy must be curbed.”2 So when it came to the actions of his partisans approaching Trieste, and their cross-border operations with Italian Communist partisans, the Allies were understandably nervous. Two particular operations showed how badly things could go wrong, how all sides could misunderstand each other, and how the actions of friends and allies, like Tito and the British and Americans, could fragment into perceived aggression when the common unifying factor of the enemy—the Germans—was removed, and a rogue other—the Soviets—introduced. Tito was also very dissatisfied with the Allies for not breaking through the Gothic Line in the winter of 1944, and then liberating Yugoslavia. He said that this failure always pushed him closer to the Red Army.
In northern Italy there were four major antifascist groups: Socialists, Action Party, Christian Democrats, and Communists, as well as the smaller autonomous groups. Operation Chrysler had parachuted into this volatile partisan mix to establish a show of authority and liaison in the area in anticipation of an early German surrender. The mission was then changed to help the partisan units with parachute drops of arms and supplies. The Germans knew that the OSS mission forces were operating in the area of Lake Orta, forty miles northwest of Milan in the foothills of the Alps. They used direction-finding technology to try to pinpoint the OSS radio transmitter and managed to do so one day to within a hundred yards, but partisans intercepted three Germans and a Swiss interpreter with their own direction-finding gear and shot them. But in December, an independent partisan leader called Cinquanta betrayed the Chrysler men to the Germans. Cinquanta was later assassinated. The OSS team had no idea this had happened. On December 2, Major Holahan sent Lieutenant Icardi to meet with the local Communist commander, Vincenzo Moscatelli, a partisan leader who operated in the mountains above the lake. This was arranged by a middleman who also wanted the arms drops funneled through him. The Communists, who made up about three-quarters of the partisans in the Chrysler area, were supposed to receive equal allocations of the two arms drops, but they frequently stole weapons and equipment intended for rival groups. Into this operating environment, Holahan’s men thought he too was determinedly anticommunist.
On December 6, 1944, the OSS men were hiding in Villa Castelnuovo on Lake Orta when two friendly Catholic priests arrived and warned them they should leave the villa as quickly as possible. As the Americans ran out of the building in the darkness, automatic gunfire burst out. Holahan, Icardi, LoDolce, and two Italian agents fired back. The team had made a plan that, if attacked, they would split up and meet separately at the Communist Party headquarters. But when all the men finally reunited, Holahan was missing. Icardi radioed a message to headquarters about the incident. The American major did not reappear. Two weeks later, an OSS man from Milan visited Lake Orta and investigated Holahan’s disappearance. At the villa, the officer found spent 9mm shell casings and, on the beach, one of Holahan’s hand grenades. The surviving Chrysler men continued to arrange supply drops to the partisans, but of Holahan himself there was no sign. In February 1945, the Chrysler mission was ordered to Milan. Their commander was still missing.
The suspicious circumstances surrounding his disappearance were of huge concern to the OSS and SOE, but in terms of complicated relations with the Communists, they were overshadowed by an event in the small mountain village of Porzûs at the beginning of February. The hamlet sits above the city of Udine, the most northeastern in Italy before the port of Trieste and the Slovenian—then the Yugoslav—frontier. A British SOE operation code-named “Coolant” was operating around Udine, on anti-scorch operations as well as trying to stop the Germans from demolishing road and rail links that could prevent the Allies from advancing. The Germans had also established a defensive line near Tarvisio, and the Coolant mission spent as much time as possible trying to destroy parts of it. The leading partisan group they were operating with was an independent Catholic group called Osoppo. The Slovenian Communist partisans operating with the Patriotic Action Group, from across the border—which was only three miles away—were territorial, idealistic, and material rivals with Osoppo and their British SOE liaison officer. They made it clear they equated them with Italian Fascists, and that it was only a matter of time before a confrontation broke out between the two sides. They delighted in spreading pro-Tito and pro-Soviet propaganda in the Italian border area.
On February 7, a group of about a hundred Slovenes gathered outside the Osoppo headquarters in the village of Porzûs—they had already betrayed the location of the partisan headquarters to the local German-recruited forces, who were a company of Cossacks. Claiming that they were in danger of being attacked, the Slovenes tricked their way into the Osoppo compound, which had about twenty partisans. Once inside, their leader accused the Osoppo brigade of hindering the collaboration with the Yugoslav NOV, of hindering cooperation over the distribution of arms drops, and of being in contact with the Fascist government. Their final point was that the British-supported Catholic partisans were going to try to prevent the annexation of the Istria, Giulia, and Friuli border area once the Germans were defeated. Over the following week, the Slovenes proceeded to hang, and then shoot, all twenty of the partisans. Once the SOE liaison officer discovered what happened, he and the OSS realized it could be a clear and terrifying precursor of what was to come in northern Italy. And what could happen once the unifying enemy—the Germans—were defeated, the Russians were advancing westward, and Tito’s partisans were in the ascendancy across the border, only five miles away.