A few days after the Italian surrender, Britain sent two high-powered military missions into Yugoslavia, one to Mihailović under a regular soldier, Brigadier Charles Armstrong, the other to Tito under a wartime soldier, Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, who plays an important part in the story. A former diplomat to the Soviet Union, where he acquired fluent Russian, a Tory Member of Parliament and a volunteer who had risen from private to brigadier through his gallantry in North Africa, Maclean had caught the attention of Winston Churchill, who shared his love of politics and adventure.
In Maclean’s subsequent books Eastern Approaches and Disputed Barricade, his exploits in Yugoslavia sound like those of his childhood heroes Bonnie Prince Charlie, Lawrence of Arabia and Richard Hannay, the Scottish soldier and secret agent in John Buchan’s Greenmantle. But happily for the fate of his team, Maclean’s Highland romanticism was tempered by Lowland prudence, industry and ambition. His assignment to Tito, although it did not alter the fate of Yugoslavia, succeeded in helping to defeat the Germans in south-eastern Europe.
On the early morning of 18 September 1943, when Maclean ‘jumped out and down, into the breath-taking tumult of the slipstream’, almost exactly two years had passed since the first British officers had landed in Yugoslavia, bound for the Chetnik headquarters in Serbia. On the way through Montenegro they had encountered a band of Partisans who had to be ordered by Djilas not to murder these capitalist intruders. Tito himself believed that the British attached to the Chetnik forces were working with the Italians for the restoration of the monarchy. In the paranoiac fantasies that he transmitted to Moscow, Tito reported that on Mihailović’s staff there were ‘about twenty-five Englishmen dressed in Serbian national costume’, by which he presumably meant that they were wearing round caps, embroidered waistcoats, knee-breeches and sandals with curled-back toes. In March 1943 Tito was ready to join the Germans in fighting the British.
Between the fourth and fifth German offensives, that is in April or early May 1943, Tito appears to have changed his mind, for he let the British send in an officer from its organisation in Cairo dealing with occupied Europe, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). This was Major William Deakin, an Oxford don who before the war had been a research assistant to Winston Churchill, who was then writing his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Although this had nothing to do with Deakin joining the SOE, the Partisans thought he was Churchill’s secretary, in the Balkan sense of a counsellor or chef de cabinet. Even those who were most Anglophobic warmed to this friendly and highly intelligent officer. Their liking turned into admiration when Deakin behaved with outstanding courage during the Fifth Offensive, the first occasion in which he had been in battle. Deakin was hit by a chunk of the shell that wounded Tito, and this created a bond of friendship between the two men that lasted until Tito’s death.
During the summer of 1943, more British officers parachuted into the territory held by the Partisans, while the RAF started to drop in supplies of clothing and food for the ragged and hungry guerrillas. Tito had not yet lost his fear and suspicion of British political machinations; nor had he cut off his ties with German agents such as the engineer Hans Ott. Even in late November 1943, when Britain was pouring in arms and supplies to the Partisans, Tito’s transport department obtained a herd of horses from the Germans, in return for allowing shipments of chrome to enter the Reich.1
After the war, with Tito’s establishment of a Communist Yugoslavia, Fitzroy Maclean was often accused of having enabled him to defeat the Mihailović forces. These accusations did not diminish when, after Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948, Maclean and his friends could claim that they had recognised Tito’s independence of mind from the outset. When, in the 1950s, Maclean started to revisit Yugoslavia and re-establish his friendship with Tito, his critics accused him of hob-nobbing with Communists and even of being a fellow-traveller. In Eastern Approaches Maclean recalls his warning to Churchill that Tito intended to set up a Communist state, to which Churchill replied with the cynical question: ‘Do you intend to make your home in Yugoslavia after the war?’2 Critics reminded Maclean of the exchange when during the 1960s he became one of the few foreigners granted permission to own property in Yugoslavia, and bought a villa on the island of Korčula.
One of the most persistent hounders of Fitzroy Maclean was the late Michael Lees, who had served as a British liaison officer with Mihailović’s forces in eastern Serbia from 1943 to 1944. In The Rape of Serbia, published in 1990, Lees offered fresh evidence to support the accusations that Tito, assisted by Communists in the SOE, had duped Maclean into thinking that the Partisans and not the Chetniks were really resisting the Germans. As Yugoslavia started to fall apart in 1991, Lees’s book became a bestseller in Belgrade.
The argument over Britain’s role in Yugoslavia had raged for more than thirty years before historians learnt the full truth about why Churchill supported Tito. This came out with the release of the mass of documents known as Ultra, the decodifications of German Wehrmacht Enigma cipher, broken in 1940 by cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park. Thanks to the men and women decoding the Ultra signals, Churchill and the Imperial General Staff enjoyed until the end of the war an invaluable insight into the minds of their opposite numbers in Germany. It was information from Ultra, and not from Deakin or Maclean, that persuaded Churchill to give his support to Tito. Moreover, since knowledge of Ultra was strictly confined to those at the highest level of military planning, and banned to anyone liable to capture, Fitzroy Maclean was himself supposed to be in the dark.3
Ultra’s first, and isolated, contribution to Balkan intelligence came on 17 January 1943 when three signals gave an advance warning of ‘Operation Weiss’, correctly stating that it consisted of four German, four Italian and two Croat divisions. More Ultra messages on ‘Operation Schwarz’ confirmed the reports of Deakin on the battle in which he had fought. Before the Chiefs of Staff Committee discussed the situation in Yugoslavia late in June, Churchill called for a summary of the recent Balkan Ultra, ‘as I wanted to have an absolutely factual presentation of the whole scene and balances’.4 With the benefit of Ultra, the Chiefs of Staff in London, as well as the Middle East Defence Committee in Cairo, were turning against Mihailović.
Ultra revealed that, after the fall of Italy, Tito had managed to acquire enough arms and equipment ‘to double the size of his field army and to make it so much more formidable than hitherto, that he was able to enlarge the area of territory he controlled very considerably’. By the end of October, the German General von Weichs told Hitler that ‘Tito is our most dangerous enemy’, and that defeating the Partisans was more important then repelling an Allied landing.5
The ever more voluminous Ultra reports on Yugoslavia in late 1943 and early 1944 revealed both astonishing Partisan progress and von Weichs’s terror of losing his 750-mile line of retreat to the Reich.6 Thanks to Ultra, Churchill knew more about the military situation in Yugoslavia than Tito did himself. By sending missions to both the Partisans and the Chetniks, Churchill was able to give the impression that their reports had caused him to change his mind. It was the kind of subterfuge that the British employed successfully until the end of the war, to prevent the Germans suspecting that their Enigma code had been cracked.
Although Maclean played only a minor part in Tito’s rise to power, which was already well assured by September 1943, he remains invaluable as a chronicler of the man and his career. Unlike the other two main sources on Tito – Djilas and Dedijer – Fitzroy Maclean has an ironic sense of humour and, moreover, remained a friend of Tito’s after the other two had fallen from favour. Besides being himself a colourful personality, Maclean introduced into Yugoslavia two grotesques, Randolph Churchill and Evelyn Waugh, who gave to the gory drama a welcome moment or two of farce.
Although it is not true that Maclean and his British colleagues converted Tito from Stalinism and imbued him with his later more liberal views, they certainly made a strong impression. In spite of his Marxism, Tito was always inclined to rate people by their behaviour rather than by their ideas. He was an excellent judge of character both in individuals and in organisations. When Djilas returned from the ‘March Consultations’ in 1943, Tito was eager to hear what he thought of the German officers, noting with interest that the spirit of chivalry was not dead. And he studied the British officers both as individuals and as representatives of their class and country. As we shall see, he compared the British favourably with the Russians.
By the time Maclean arrived in Bosnia, Tito had made his headquarters at Jajce (pronounced Ya-i-tse), which means literally ‘small eggs’ and in popular parlance ‘testicles’. The town had been important in medieval Bosnia, and Tito made his home there in part of an underground Bogomil church next to the castle on the hillside. On his first evening, Maclean was invited to dinner with Tito, of whom he later wrote:
He was sturdily built, with iron-grey hair. His rather wide, smooth-skinned face with its high cheek-bones showed clearly enough the stresses and strains he had endured … his regular, clearly defined features were haggard and drawn and deeply burned by the sun. His mouth was ruthlessly determined. His alert, light-blue eyes missed nothing. He gave an impression of great strength held in reserve, the impression of a tiger ready to spring. As he spoke, his expression changed frequently and rapidly, in turn illumined by a sudden smile, transfigured with anger or enlivened by a quick look of understanding. He had an agreeable voice, capable of sudden harshness.7
After some formal discussion about how the British could help the Partisans, Maclean and Tito grew more friendly over the slivovitz. Tito talked of his early life, his conversion to Communism and how the Germans had put a price on his head of 100,000 gold marks. He did not mention that the Germans had put an equal amount on the head of Mihailović. They talked about Tito’s relationship with the Soviet Union, a country they both knew well, for indeed they were speaking in Russian. Tito complained of Moscow’s recognition of the Yugoslav government in exile, and told how he had been reproached for trying to obtain an exchange of prisoners with the Germans. Maclean saw this as Tito’s cynical view of Russian motives. Tito was probably watching Maclean to find out whether the British knew what had really taken place in the ‘March Consultations’ that year.
When Maclean asked outright if the new Yugoslavia would become a Soviet satellite, Tito said haughtily that the Partisans had not fought and suffered to hand over the country to someone else. When Maclean raised the question of King Peter, Tito said the matter would have to wait until after the war. According to Djilas, the Yugoslavs got the impression from Maclean that the British ‘would not insist very much on the King’.8
After several days of discussion, Maclean arrived at this very favourable view of Tito:
He was unusually ready to discuss any question on its merits and to take a decision there and then, without reference to a higher authority … There were other unexpected things about him: his surprising breadth of outlook; his apparent independence of mind; his never-failing sense of humour; his unashamed delight in the minor pleasures of life; a natural diffidence in human relationships, giving way to a natural friendliness and conviviality; a violent temper, flaring up in sudden rages; an occasional tendency to ostentation and display; a considerateness and generosity which constantly manifested themselves in a dozen small ways; a surprising readiness to see both sides of a question; and finally, a strong instinctive national pride.9
During this first six-week visit, Maclean travelled back and forth between Jajce and the Dalmatian coast, which was still almost entirely controlled by the Partisans. He went to Split where most of the shipyard workers as well as the ‘Hajduk’ football club were now in the Proletarian Brigades. He went to Korčula, his future home, then on to the outermost island of Vis, and from there to Bari in Italy, which later became the Allied base for operations in Yugoslavia. In early November Maclean flew back to Cairo.
Maclean’s official report on 6 November 1943 caused great excitement in Cairo and London. Dealing first with military matters, he said that the Partisans controlled large parts of Yugoslavia and that Tito’s forces comprised twenty-six divisions, totalling 220,000 men, of which 50,000 were in Bosnia, 15,000 in the Sandjak, 50,000 in Croatia, 10,000 in Slavonia, 50,000 in Slovenia and Istria, 25,000 in Dalmatia, 10,000 in Vojvodina, and 30,000 in Serbia and Macedonia. He estimated that Tito’s forces pinned down fourteen Reichswehr divisions.
Turning to political questions, Maclean reported that in the areas run by the Partisans there was freedom of religion, no interference with private property, no class warfare and no mass execution. He said Tito wanted a federalist system to solve what he called the ‘nationalities problem’. Dismissing the Chetniks, Maclean said that the Partisans were between ten and twenty times as numerous, infinitely better organised, better equipped and better disciplined. Moreover they fought the Germans, while the Chetniks ‘either help the Germans or do nothing’.10
The Maclean report caused consternation among those in Britain who wanted to see King Peter back on the throne of Yugoslavia. To the present day it is blamed by Serb nationalists for helping Tito to power. The report was indeed grossly unfair to the Chetniks. Mihailović had begun the anti-German insurrection in May 1941, while Tito was still inactive because of the Hitler–Stalin pact. Savage reprisals, such as the massacre at Kragujevac in October that year, had convinced the Chetniks that further attacks on the Germans would lead to the wiping out of the Serbian people. However, there were in Serbia probably 200,000 men able and willing to take up arms for the Allies when the occasion arose, and it is doubtful if there were even 30,000 Partisans, as Maclean alleged.
Outside Serbia, the Partisans were probably almost as strong as Maclean suggested, and growing stronger all the time. This was confirmed by Ultra. While Maclean had guessed that Tito was holding down fourteen Reichswehr divisions, Ultra disclosed there were thirty divisions of German, Croatian and Bulgarian troops, most of whom were deployed against the Partisans. The Joint Intelligence Committee took particular note of an Ultra interception of a German claim to have killed 6,000 Partisans and only fifteen Chetniks, during a period when there were twice as many Chetniks taken prisoner. While the Foreign Office argued the case for King Peter and Mihailović, the military wanted to back the Communist Tito. The Commander-in-Chief Middle East Command, General Maitland ‘Jumbo’ Wilson, was so impressed by Maclean’s report coming on top of Ultra that he proposed that Mihailović should be left ‘to rot and fall off the branch, rather than be pushed’.11
Maclean’s diplomatic skill and his good connections certainly helped in putting the case for Tito. His arch-enemy Michael Lees believes that Maclean would have made an equally brilliant case for Mihailović, had he been sent to Serbia. The historian Mark Wheeler makes the point that men such as Bill Bailey on the Mihailović staff did not have a golden background: ‘These people didn’t have access, hadn’t been to the right schools, were not part of the Establishment. A class interpretation is possible. Bill Bailey was Emmanuel School, Wandsworth; Deakin and Maclean were Winchester and Eton products.’12
However, it has to be pointed out that many of Churchill’s protégés in the two world wars, from Lawrence of Arabia to the peculiar Zionist Orde Wingate, did not come from the top drawer. Moreover it was Bill Bailey who more than anyone helped to wreck the career of Mihailović. He reported back to the British the outburst of 28 February 1943, when Mihailović said that he wanted to liquidate all his enemies, Partisans, Croats, Muslims and Ustasha – in that order – before he dealt with the Axis forces.13
While Maclean was in Cairo promoting the cause of the Partisans, Tito convened a second meeting of AVNOJ in order to set up a new Yugoslav government with himself as President. Delegates came from all over the country by car, on horseback or on foot, but all of them armed in case they should encounter the Germans, Ustasha or Chetniks. When Djilas arrived at Jajce after a tour of Croatia and Slovenia he noticed a spirit of triumph and animation. There were military bands and parades including Muslim girls in baggy pantaloons; there was a ballet and a production of Gogol’s play The Inspector General. The Serb littérateur Radovan Zogović had arrived in town and, according to Ranković, he was writing an ode to Tito. The Croat sculptor Antun Augustinović was making a bust of Tito in clay in front of the Bogomil church. Djilas noticed a change in the object of all this adulation. ‘Tito had suddenly become heavy, never again to regain that look of bone and sinew which made him look so distinguished-looking and attractive during the war.’14
Djilas suggests in his memoir Wartime, published in 1977 when Tito was still alive, that in 1943 the Communist leader changed his headquarters because it was vulnerable to air attack. In his later biography, Djilas suggests that, in Jajce and later on, Tito was much concerned with his personal safety and spent much of the time in a cave. Certainly Tito moved from the fragile Bogomil church to a headquarters close to an air-raid shelter. Perhaps having come so far and achieved so much, Tito was more than ever aware of his responsibilities, and felt that he should not take the risks of a junior, front-line soldier. But he certainly did not lead a sheltered life, even at Jajce. On the eve of the AVNOJ convention, German bombers raided the town, and afterwards Tito assisted at an operation on one of the wounded, a Partisan whose stomach had been partly blown away:
I was holding the head of the boy. He was sweating. The operation was done without anaesthetics. The wounded Partisan did not want to show how much he suffered. I told him: ‘Never mind, you’ll get through all right.’ A few seconds later his head dropped and so he died in my hands.15
A few days before the AVNOJ convention, the Party leaders met to discuss the various plans for a federal Yugoslavia after the war. This involved the delicate ‘nationalities problem’ dividing the Serbs and Croats in Croatia itself and in Bosnia-Hercegovina. It was the very question that fifty years later would plunge Yugoslavia back into civil war. Although most of the Communists refused to admit the fact, the ‘nationalities problem’ was the cause of their rise to power. The Ustasha massacre of the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, followed by Serb reprisals and ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Croats and, still more, Muslims, had caused a horrendous three-way civil war and then a revulsion in favour of Yugoslavia. This was the strength of the Partisans. However, they could not admit this even to themselves, for the ‘nationalities problem’ did not fit their Marxist theory. They thought of themselves instead as ‘anti-Fascists’ battling against the Axis occupation.
Although the Communists talked of a ‘nationalities problem’, they knew that the only real difference between the Serbs and the Croats lay in religion. But religion also did not fit into the Marxist scheme of things, which divided people according to class. The account of their meeting given by Milovan Djilas shows the embarrassment caused to the Communists, even Tito, by this delicate ‘nationalities problem’.
The debate was opened by Moša Pijade who, according to Djilas, ‘had the reputation of being the most zealous Serb among us’. Since Pijade was a Jew he was obviously not a Serbian nationalist of the kind who would celebrate the Battle of Kosovo and eat his portion of wheat on the name-day of his saint. He was a zealous Serb in that he feared the bigotry of the Croatian Catholic Church, as shown by the recent Ustasha pogroms. Pijade had gathered a mass of statistics on population to back up his plan for a series of semi-autonomous Serbian enclaves in Croatia. According to Djilas, Pijade’s plan was received with embarrassment:
Everyone was silent, perplexed. I think I saw dejection even in Tito’s face; perhaps as a Croat he found it awkward to oppose the idea … I was the first to come out against Pijade’s proposal; the segregated territory was unnatural, lacking a centre of viability, and moreover provided fuel for Croatian nationalism. Kardelj immediately agreed … Ranković squelched [Pijade] by remarking that the Serbs and Croats were not so different that the Serbs and Croats had to be divided.16
The Party leaders then turned to the question of Bosnia-Hercegovina. It had been assumed in the past that this central region should not become a republic like Serbia or Croatia but should have autonomous status. However, now it was felt that this would imply autonomy under Serbia. As most of the people present knew, the behaviour of the Chetniks in eastern Bosnia-Hercegovina had made the very name of the Serbs unpopular with the Muslim population. As Djilas says: ‘Autonomy under either Serbia or Croatia would have encouraged further strife and deprived the Muslims of their own individuality. The Bosnian leadership, too, like every authority that grows up out of an uprising, insisted on their own state, and later even on their own historical outlet to the sea. But the republican status of Bosnia-Hercegovina was not decided at the time.’17
At the second session of AVNOJ, the delegates became a legislative assembly under the Presidency of Tito, who was proclaimed Marshal. The birthday of the new Yugoslavia, 29 November 1943, remained a national holiday until the death of the federation almost fifty years later. But, as if to remind the Partisans that their infant state was born in a world of mortal danger, disaster and tragedy struck on the eve of the celebrations. A deserter from the Croatian air force had recently brought to the Partisans a German light bomber, a Dornier 17, which now was waiting at Jajce’s makeshift airfield. Tito decided to use the plane to transport to Cairo the Yugoslav military mission that Fitzroy Maclean had asked him to send. The man chosen to head the mission was Ivo Lola Ribar, the youngest man in the leadership and the dearest to Tito personally. Just as the mission were boarding, a German bomber appeared and scored a direct hit on the plane, killing most of the people inside, including Ivo Lola Ribar.
On the very day of this tragedy, Lola’s father, who had left the safety of his retirement to join the Partisans the previous year, returned to Jajce from a stay in Slovenia. He knew neither of Lola’s death nor of that of his only other son, Jurica, who had been killed one month earlier. The Partisan leaders decided that Tito himself must break the terrible news. When Dr Ribar called to pay his respects, Tito told him of Lola’s death. The old man held back his tears but asked only: ‘Is Jurica far away and has he been told of Lola’s death? It will be a heavy blow for him.’ Tito was silent for a moment, wondering what to do. Then he approached Ribar, took him by the arm and said gently: ‘Jurica was killed too, fighting the Chetniks in Montenegro a month ago.’ Old Ribar embraced Tito, saying: ‘This fight of ours is hard.’18
At the memorial service, during which even hardened fighters like Milovan Djilas wept uncontrollably, the oldest Party leader Moša Pijade was called on to give an oration about the youngest. For once the garrulous Moša fumbled for words, so great was his own emotion. Then he fetched from the mental storehouse of all he had read the words of a French political combatant: ‘Revolutionaries are dead men on leave.’19
The sufferings of the Ribar family were not at an end. Ivan’s wife, the mother of Lola and Jurica, was arrested and executed by the Gestapo for helping her husband to join the Partisans. Before Lola was killed he had written to his fiancée, Sloboda Trajković, who was a Belgrade student, a letter to be shown to her only if he was dead. ‘I love you very, very much, my own!’ it concluded. ‘And I hope you will never receive this letter, but that we shall greet the hour of victory together.’ The letter was never delivered. Sloboda Trajković, together with her father, mother, sister and brother, was taken by the Gestapo and killed in one of their gas-chamber lorries. Soon after the war Dedijer took Lola’s letter to show to Tito but found him in a mood of despondency over the human tragedy of the war, so ‘after his words about the one million, seven hundred thousand dead, I refrained. Tito had dearly loved Lola Ribar ever since the first day they had met in the autumn of 1937.’20
The death of Ivo Lola Ribar gave added solemnity to the acclamation of Tito as Marshal the following day. The title had been proposed by the Slovene delegates, and their leader Kardelj broke the news to the Politburo beforehand. When he heard of the honour, Tito blushed, whether from pride or modesty we cannot know, although Djilas suggests he may have been wondering what the Russians would think. The delegates to the second AVNOJ conference gave tumultuous, overwhelming approval to Tito’s new status. This loyalty was absolute in the highest rank of the leadership. Djilas says that among the triumvirate of his immediate entourage, Kardelj had been bonded to Tito during their stay in Moscow in the 1930s while Ranković was ‘unconditionally devoted to Tito, sentimentally and ideologically’. And what about Djilas himself? He may have begun to suspect in his deep subconscious that Tito had weaknesses but he seems to have been unaware of them on a conscious level. Not once during the forty years since his own disgrace and rejection, has Djilas ever denied Tito’s power as a leader of men.21
During the winter of 1943–4 the Germans carried out ‘Operation Kugelblitz’ (‘Thunderbolt’), which the Partisans called the Sixth Offensive. Its aims were to retake the former Italian zone of southern Slovenia, the Adriatic coast and the islands, and also to smash the three Partisan divisions in north-east Bosnia. By the end of the year the Germans commanded the towns on the coast and all the islands except Vis, where the Royal Navy and RAF offered protection. After the war Maclean expressed his regret that the British had not established a base on the coast, for example at Split, during the autumn of 1943, but Tito would not have welcomed them. In north-east Bosnia, the Germans recaptured the town of Tuzla but failed to destroy the Partisans north of Sarajevo.22
During ‘Operation Kugelblitz’ Tito thought it prudent to move his heaquarters south from Jajce to the small town of Drvar, also in western Bosnia. He established his base in a cave on the mountainside, lending support to Djilas’s view that Tito was anxious about his safety, but events were to prove that Drvar too was vulnerable to German attack. In January 1944 Fitzroy Maclean came back to Bosnia with two remarkable proofs of Winston Churchill’s regard for Tito. One was a personal letter expressing warm admiration and support. The other was Winston’s son Randolph Churchill, who was now an officer in the British military mission. The fact that one of the ‘Big Three’ Allied leaders had sent his only son to fight on the side of the Partisans was a staggering propaganda triumph for Tito. It enormously strengthened both Tito’s and Maclean’s position when, in February 1944, the Russians finally sent a military mission to join the Partisans they had so long slighted.
The head of the Soviet Mission was the Red Army’s General Korneyev who had lost a foot at Stalingrad and therefore could not parachute into Yugoslavia, coming instead with the rest of his staff in a pair of American gliders. On their arrival the aircraft were found to contain not only General Korneyev and numerous colonels, but case upon case of caviare and vodka. With his habitual cynicism, Stalin had sent the Partisans a man he despised. ‘The poor man is not stupid,’ Stalin later told Djilas, ‘but he is a drunkard and an incurable drunkard.’23
General Korneyev and his team were resplendent in gaudy uniforms with gold epaulettes and tight, shiny boots. The Partisans were amazed to be asked the whereabouts of the General’s lavatory. ‘But the British don’t have a lavatory,’ came the reply; ‘the British general [Maclean] goes behind the nearest tree.’ The Russians insisted, so the Partisans dug a deep hole, erected a wooden hutch, whitewashed it and left the excavated earth in a mound outside. Not surprisingly, the first German plane to spot this gleaming object flew in low, strafed and then bombed it.24
Tito took a dislike to Korneyev, as did his wolfhound Tigger, which was always trying to bite him. Tito would watch this, chuckle and say: ‘Anti-Russian dog’. In a dispatch to Churchill, Maclean suggested that Tito was playing off the British against the Russians: ‘Marshal Tito has, in his reception of the newly arrived Soviet Mission, gone out of his way to emphasise that their status here is to be exactly the same as that of my mission. There can be no doubt that they have seen the advantage of maintaining good relations with other Great Powers beside the Soviet Union.’ Because Maclean spoke Russian, Korneyev would call on him and pour out his woes. He confided that he had hoped for a comfortable job as defence attaché in Washington but instead had been sent to Yugoslavia. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve to be posted to this awful country with all these horrible Balkan peasants,’ he would complain. ‘Who are these Partisans anyway? Do I command them or do you?’ Maclean replied that he certainly did not, but Korneyev could try if he liked and see how he got on.25
Tito now had the backing of two of the ‘Big Three’ powers but not, as yet, that of the United States. An American engineer, Major Linn ‘Slim’ Farish, had joined Maclean’s mission in late 1943 and helped in building the airstrips. His initial support for the Partisans was turned to disgust by their lies and boasting, by their routine killing of prisoners, and most of all by the way that they hounded the Chetniks.26 American policy towards the warring factions in Yugoslavia was influenced by professional rivalry between the Office of Strategic Services (OSS – the forerunner of the CIA) and the British SOE. The director of the OSS, General William Joseph ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, had tried to establish his own mission to Tito, independent of Maclean’s. In January 1944 he turned down a British proposal that all American officers should be based at Drvar, and therefore under Maclean’s control. Instead, Donovan sent a series of high-level missions to Mihailović, inspiring him with the hope that the United States would rescue him from the Communists.
Although Donovan’s interference was mostly to do with the empire-building common to all intelligence services, politics also played a part. In 1944 President Roosevelt was seeking re-election for a fourth term in office and did not want to offend any substantial body of voters, such as for instance the Jews, Italians, Irish and Poles. Although neither the Serbs nor the Croats formed an important vote on their own, they both stood for Roosevelt’s principle of national self-determination. Roosevelt appeared to believe that Yugoslavia was an unreal state, formed by committee, and that Serbs and Croats should be allowed to go their separate ways. He did not share Churchill’s enthusiasm for Tito, and in December 1943 he announced his continued support for King Peter. To emphasise this commitment, he made a gift of four US planes to the Royal Yugoslav Air Force.
President Roosevelt wanted to rid the world of empires, whether that of the British in India or of the French in Indo-China, and this attitude may have coloured his outlook on Yugoslavia. Fitzroy Maclean’s biographer Frank McLynn suggests that Donovan and his State Department backer Robert Murphy were Irish-American enemies of the British Empire who thought the British wanted control over Greece and Yugoslavia in order to safeguard the route to Suez and India. McLynn goes still further:
The problem was that at bottom American decision-makers of the time were not interested in whether the Russians overran Eastern Europe. Their main target was the British Empire, which they were determined to prevent from emerging stronger than ever after the war. There was always in American plans for the post-war world a concealed economic agenda, and it was no accident that the important figures of the US corporate structure were also the important foreign policy decision-makers. It is not an exaggeration to say that corporate America was running the war – in the shape of the ‘six wise men’ and figures like Donovan and the financier John J. McCloy.27
These are the views of Maclean’s biographer and not necessarily those of Maclean himself. However, his record in politics after the war shows Maclean to have been a strong advocate of Britain’s continued imperial role, and one of the most gung-ho supporters of Eden during the Suez crisis of 1956.
As the Communists were on the verge of taking power in Yugoslavia, millions of Christians looked to their churches as a way of preserving their freedom of mind and sense of nationhood. The Croatian Catholic Church boasted of 1,300 years of connection with Rome and thus with hundreds of millions of fellow believers throughout the world. The Serbian Orthodox Church, created by Sava during the thirteenth century, embodied his slogan that ‘Only Unity Saves Serbs’. After the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and throughout the centuries of Ottoman rule, the Church was the voice and leadership of the Serbian people. Although the Church created by Sava was formally independent of Constantinople, it maintained liturgical and doctrinal unity with the parent Church as well as with those of Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. For both the Serbs and the Croats the Church was at once an expression of nationhood and a bond with an international Christian community. However, in 1944 the Serbian Orthodox Church faced hardship and peril far greater than those confronting the rival Croatian Catholic Church.
The suffering of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the Independent State of Croatia has already been told in earlier chapters. In Serbia itself the Patriarch Gavrilo Dožić was put on trial by the Germans for having supported the coup d’état of 27 March 1941. He was kept in prison in Yugoslavia until August 1944 when he was taken in an exhausted and sick condition to Dachau and other concentration camps in Germany. Throughout his imprisonment, Patriarch Gavrilo sternly refused to collaborate with the enemy occupation. A few Serbian priests joined the Chetniks or the Partisans but the great majority stuck to their pastoral duties, which now included looking after the refugees from the NDH.
Unlike the Catholic Croats, the Orthodox Serbs had virtually no support from the outside world. The Bolshevik revolution had tried to abolish religion in Russia and the Ukraine, killing most of the clergy and sending millions of Christian believers to the Gulag Archipelago. Although Stalin had eased the persecution during the war, the Church had little power to protect its flock in Russia and the Ukraine, and none whatsoever to help the Serbs. After the war, when Romania and Bulgaria also fell to Communism, the Serbian Orthodox Church had no sympathetic hearers outside the country. The story of its suffering under the Ustasha in the NDH, from 1941 to 1945, was to remain unknown for the next fifty years.
At the Orthodox Easter in 1944, the Serbian Synod sent out a message that spoke of the sacrifice made at Golgotha and prayed ‘that every Serb home and family be morally and spiritually renewed and born again, be in itself a small Church of God in which our fatherland and government have always rested …’28 Over that Orthodox Easter the Anglo-American Balkan Air Force carried out carpet-bombing attacks on Belgrade for three days running. On St George’s Day, a very important feast of the Orthodox Church, the Balkan Air Force bombed the Montenegrin towns of Nikšić, Danilovgrad and Podgorica.
In his book The Rape of Serbia Michael Lees suggests that British officers sympathetic to Tito may have chosen the targets for the Balkan Air Force: ‘It is claimed today in some Serbian circles that the Allied air support was exploited by Tito to turn the people against Britain. The theory is that strikes by Western Allied aircraft of the Balkan Air Force were called down specifically against Serbian towns and villages, cynically choosing Serbian Orthodox religious holidays for the bombing.’ Lees offers no proof to support this suggestion but points out that ‘the files of the Balkan Air Force are permanently closed … one wonders why’. Lees is probably right when he says: ‘I feel certain that the Allies would never have contemplated a blanket bombing of Paris, for example, on Easter Sunday – or any other day – however many German tanks were passing through.’29
The pro-British, anti-German demonstration on 27 March 1941 had brought down on the Serbs and their capital city the terrible Palm Sunday bombing. Three years later the British themselves bombed Belgrade over Easter. In 1941 the Croats had welcomed the Germans into Zagreb and then declared war against Britain. But when the Balkan Air Force bombed Zagreb on 22 April 1944, killing seven Dominican priests and harming two churches, Archbishop Stepinac denounced the raid as a blow ‘to the living organism of the Croatian people, who have been called by the Pope the outer bulwark of Christianity’. While Stepinac proclaimed that there were no military targets in the area of the cathedral, other witnesses spoke of a lorry depot and fuel dump next to the theological faculty.30 The closer the NDH came to defeat, the fiercer Stepinac grew in his denunciation of Communism. Back in 1942 he had told the British agent Rapotec that he wanted a reunited Yugoslavia after the war, but in 1944 he had gone back to praising Croatia’s ‘struggle for freedom over the centuries’.31
Archbishop Stepinac had come to believe that America favoured the Independent State of Croatia. Although the Pope had always been well disposed to the Ustasha regime, the Italians and even some of the Germans condemned its brutality. The Americans who were now installed in Rome were better disposed to Stepinac and Croatia. By far the best friend of Croatia’s cause was Cardinal Francis Spellman, the Archbishop of New York, a strong anti-Communist and an influential voice in Washington. Throughout the war, Spellman served as a trouble-shooter and close adviser to President Roosevelt, whom he had known as a New York politician.
In March 1943, when Italy was still at war with the United States, Spellman visited Rome to talk with the Pope and other functionaries in the Vatican. There he met Count Erwin Lobkowicz, the NDH emissary to the Holy See. After their meeting on 6 March 1943, Count Lobkowicz sent back to Zagreb a resumé of Spellman’s remarks. While reading it, one should remember that at this time the NDH was an ally of Hitler’s, at war with the United States, and engaged in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Gypsies and Jews. The report from Lobkowicz was certainly read by Archbishop Stepinac as well as the Ustasha leaders:
Accompanied by the office secretary, Wurster, I was able to visit the Archbishop of New York, Spellman. As is known Archbishop Spellman has been in Rome for about a fortnight … At present he is completely in President Roosevelt’s confidence … Spellman received us very politely and said straightway: ‘There’s not much you can tell me about your affairs that I don’t know. I’m well informed on everything and know the Croatian question well. A few years ago I travelled through your country, and even then the difference between Belgrade and Zemun [on the other side of the Danube], not to mention Zagreb, told me enough. There are two worlds. They cannot co-exist.’ We pointed out that the present State is now in a very special position in the context of its Catholicism and especially through its position between East and West, that the frontier of the Drina guarantees the maintenance of the Catholic position in that sector; and that the rebuilding of Yugoslavia would mean not only the annihilation of the Croat people but also of Catholicism and western culture in those regions. Instead of a western frontier on the Drina, we would have a Byzantine frontier on the Karavanke. Spellman agreed with these observations and added that President Roosevelt wants freedom for all peoples and that obviously includes the Croats.32
From this astonishing interview, Archbishop Stepinac and the Ustasha leaders learned that President Roosevelt wanted an independent Croatia stretching as far as the River Drina, that is, including all Bosnia-Hercegovina. The interview also helps to explain why Stepinac later refused to accept the new Yugoslavia, and why the Ustasha leaders escaped all punishment for their crimes.
In May 1944, when the Allies were preparing for the invasion of France, the Germans unleashed their seventh and final offensive in Yugoslavia, this time directed at Tito personally. The first inkling of danger came on 22 May, when a German reconnaissance plane made a long and careful surveillance of the Drvar valley, keeping well out of range of ground fire. The acting head of the Anglo-American mission thought that this was the prelude to a bombing attack, and he therefore moved equipment and staff to a nearby hillside. The reconnaissance was in fact a preparation for ‘Operation Rosselsprung’, which was to involve the killing or capturing of Tito by a paratroop attack, followed by a drag-net through the Dinaric Alps, from Bihać to Šibenik on the coast. ‘Operation Rosselsprung’ was planned as a nasty surprise for Tito’s official birthday on 25 May, when at 6.30 a.m. two Focke-Wulfs came in low over Drvar. Then fifty bombers flattened the town, followed by six Junker transport planes dropping paratroopers, then thirty gliders bringing in more soldiers with heavy equipment, making a total of 1,000 crack troops. A second parachute drop made the capture of Drvar complete.
The attackers made straight for Tito’s cave, spraying the entrance with machine-gun fire, so that no one could leave. However, Tito and his companions, with the wolfhound Tigger, managed to climb up the watercourse of the falls at the back of the cave, then up through a tunnel to the top of the cliff. There Ranković and his squad held off the attackers while Tito went to the nearest Partisan unit at Potoci. He linked up with the British and Russian missions, then marched for a week through the forest to Kupresko Polje. Although Tito had escaped from ‘Rosselsprung’, his wireless communication system was no longer working so that he could not control operations throughout the country. Reluctantly he took the advice of the Russians and left on one of their planes for Bari, in Italy, and from there to the island of Vis. The near catastrophe of the Seventh Offensive led to recriminations between the British and Tito, who now became cooler towards Maclean.33
The Seventh Offensive showed that the Germans regarded Tito as a serious, even potentially deadly, foe. Himmler said in a speech later in 1944: ‘He is our enemy, but I wish we had a dozen Titos in Germany, men who were leaders and had such great resolution and good nerves that though they were constantly encircled they would never give in.’34 For everyone besides the German and British military leadership, Tito remained an enigmatic figure, as can be seen from an article in the Spanish paper Madrid reporting on ‘Rosselsprung’ on 15 June:
Tito escaped on a horse he had stolen that morning from a farm near the town. Passing through villages and settlements, Tito is committing every possible crime. A captive gave an account of the incredible crimes committed by Tito, who kills for the sake of killing … Tito wears a long, utterly unkempt beard, his features are hard.35
Even among the Allies in Cairo and Bari there was mystery surrounding the identity of Tito. Rumour described him variously as a Russian officer, a Ukrainian, a Polish count or a Polish Jew, while many believed that he did not exist at all and that TITO was an acronym for Third International Terrorist Organisation. The New York Times correspondent Cyrus Sulzberger first put into print the story that Tito was really a woman, an idea that appealed to the novelist Evelyn Waugh, who arrived at Vis in July 1944. Randolph Churchill had pleaded for Waugh to join the mission because he was bored and wanted someone to talk to from White’s, his London club. Maclean agreed but later came to regret the decision as Waugh became insubordinate. From his diaries we know that Waugh took an instant dislike to Maclean: ‘dour, unprincipled, ambitious, probably very wicked; shaved head and devil’s ears.’36 Having decided at once that Tito was really a secret lesbian, Waugh hammered the joke with constant references to ‘her’. When the novelist and the Communist leader were first introduced, Tito had just emerged from a dip in the sea and was wearing exiguous bathing trunks. After shaking hands, Tito asked point blank: ‘Captain Waugh, why do you think I am a woman?’ For once, Waugh was abashed and silent.37
When he reached mainland Croatia, Waugh was put in charge of helping the displaced Jews who had joined the Partisans after Italy’s surrender. Later he served as a kind of British consul in Dubrovnik, the once independent city that never gladly accepted rule by Venice, Austria and the first Yugoslavia, and certainly did not like the Communists. Waugh’s experiences in Yugoslavia are brought into his pessimistic but grimly amusing novel Unconditional Surrender, the third part of the Sword of Honour trilogy. As a Catholic and reactionary, Waugh hated the Partisans and accused them of persecuting the Church in Croatia. He wrote a report on this for Maclean and, when it was not taken seriously, he circulated extracts in England, risking a court martial for breach of the Official Secrets Act. Although Waugh suppressed or never discovered the truth about the Church’s behaviour under the NDH, he was one of the first outsiders to sense the character of the Croatian Franciscans:
For some time the Croat Franciscans had caused misgivings in Rome for their independence and narrow patriotism. They were mainly recruited from the least cultured part of the population and there is abundant evidence that several wholly unworthy men were attracted to the Franciscan Order by the security and comparative ease which it offered. Many of these youths were sent to Italy for training. Their novitiate was in the neighbourhood of Pavelić’s HQ at Siena where Ustasha agents made contact with them and imbued them with Pavelić’s ideas. They in turn, on returning to their country, passed on his ideas to the pupils in their schools. Sarajevo is credibly described as having been a centre of Franciscan Ustashism.38
In July 1944, when Evelyn Waugh encountered a near-naked Tito, the island of Vis was a busy military base, its road jammed with lorries and jeeps, its new airstrip filled with traffic, its shores surrounded by Royal Navy vessels. British, American and Russian officers vied for the attention of Tito at his headquarters, once again in a cave. The Hollywood actor Douglas Fairbanks, one of the US ‘beachjumpers’ on Vis for joint operations with British commandos, recalls how Tito came to inspect them and afterwards promised some token of his esteem. The commandos and ‘beachjumpers’, hoping to get a ribbon or even a Partisan star, were disappointed when Tito gave them each two tins of anchovies.39
Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden persisted in putting pressure on Tito to compromise with the government in exile. Tito persisted in his refusal to meet King Peter or let him return to Yugoslav soil. He at one time refused to meet the British in Italy because the young king was there at the time. It was not until the end of July that Tito agreed to visit General ‘Jumbo’ Wilson at his villa in Caserta. He took with him five staff officers, including his son Žarko, his interpreter Olga, the dog Tigger and two of his most frightening bodyguards, Boško and Prlja. These last took up positions during the formal lunch, the one behind Tito, the other pointing his sub-machine-gun at General Wilson, much to the terror of the Italian waiters.
The strain of passing the vegetables, under the baleful eye of a heavily armed and extremely grim-looking guerilla warrior, who clearly did not like Italians, was too much for the Italian mess waiter. With an exclamation of despair he let a large dish of French beans crash on the table, and at once pandemonium reigned. The trigger-finger of the bodyguard twitched menacingly; Tigger, roused from his uneasy slumbers beneath the table, let out a long wolf-like howl and started to snap at everyone’s ankles … It was then that General Wilson started to laugh. Gently, almost silently at first, and then more and more heartily, until his whole frame quaked and rocked … In a flash Tito was guffawing too, and soon the whole table was convulsed with merriment. Even the Italians sniggered nervously … while a grim smile spread over the stern features of the bodyguard.40
Churchill cabled to say he was coming to Naples the following week and wanted to meet Tito. For security reasons, Tito could not be told of this, so Maclean had the task of keeping him occupied with visits to military installations and then a sightseeing tour of Rome. Here Boško and Prlja once more created a problem. Since Tito insisted on wearing his dazzling Marshal’s uniform, drawing attention to himself in a country swarming with Germans, Chetniks, Ustasha and other potential assassins, the presence of a bodyguard was perhaps a wise precaution, but when Boško and Prlja, toting their sub-machine-guns, insisted on following Tito into St Peter’s Basilica, Maclean protested that this would offend the worshippers. Tito ordered the gunmen to leave but they would not budge from his side: ‘Comrade Tito, for more than three years we have protected you from Nazi attacks and we’re not going to fail you now.’ Tito shouted at them, a curious crowd appeared and, as Maclean says, ‘the situation could scarcely have been more embarrassing’.41
Tito’s first meeting with Churchill, at Jumbo Wilson’s villa, is seen by Maclean as a great occasion unfolding beside the Bay of Naples:
Tito, resplendent in gold braid, red tabs and tight-fitting grey serge, arrived first and was looking out across the glittering waters of the bay to where a plume of smoke rose lazily from the summit of Vesuvius, when suddenly he became aware of the Prime Minister of Great Britain advancing on him with outstretched hand.42
A haughty man from the Foreign Office, Pierson Dixon, observed that ‘Tito was cautious, nervous and sweating a good deal in his absurd Marshal’s uniform of thick cloth and gold lace’. It was, as they all agreed, a scorchingly hot day.43
The first topic of discussion was Tito’s claim to Istria, Trieste, Venezia-Giulia and southern Carinthia. Churchill warned Tito that Allied forces might liberate these places before the Partisans could. They discussed means of cutting the German retreat through the Balkans. They debated how to reconcile de jure recognition of King Peter and his government in exile with de facto recognition of Partisan power. Tito avoided committing himself on any of these matters.
Churchill read Tito a lesson on the collectivisation of agriculture: ‘My friend Marshal Stalin told me the other day that his battle with the peasants had been a more perilous and formidable undertaking than the battle for Stalingrad. I hope that you, Marshal, will think twice before you join such a battle with your sturdy Serbian peasantry.’ He said the Allies would lose interest in the Partisans if they turned their guns on the Chetniks instead of the Germans. When Tito showed signs of anger, his interpreter Olga toned down some of Churchill’s remarks.
Just before lunch the notorious bodyguards Boško and Prlja nearly caused a disaster. The two delegations had gone off to wash at bathrooms in different parts of the villa and five minutes later converged from different directions at the same corner. Suddenly the Prime Minister found himself looking into the barrels of two sub-machine-guns, and so, being a fan of Hollywood movies, Churchill drew out his gold cigar case, about the size of a Colt revolver and pointed it at Tito’s stomach. Maclean continues:
What he did not know (but I did) was that Boško and Prlja, after three years as guerillas, were men of lightning reflexes, who took no chances and who, if they thought their Marshal’s life was in danger, would gladly have wiped out all three of the Big Three with a single burst. For the space of a single second I saw their trigger-fingers twitch, and only had time to hope that I for one would not survive what came next. But then, Tito began to laugh. Winston, seeing that his little joke had been a success, laughed too.44
There were two more meetings, at which the leaders produced some vaguely worded statements about the future of Yugoslavia; but Tito had no intention of sharing power with the King. Churchill had nothing to offer Tito in return for concessions. The historian Mark Wheeler thinks that Tito ‘wasn’t as romantic and impressive as Churchill had expected and was proving reluctant to fit in with Churchill’s pet schemes – beating the Russians to Vienna by going through the Ljubljana Gap, or the landings in Dalmatia’.45 Naturally Tito opposed both schemes, which would have frustrated his territorial claims on Italy and Austria, and impeded his rise to power in Yugoslavia. Tito and Churchill had quite different and sometimes contradictory war aims. By the end of the summer of 1944, Tito was preparing to abandon his British allies and turn his mind to gaining two of the objects against which Churchill had warned him: crushing the Serbian peasants and winning the race for Trieste.
By September 1944 the Red Army was crossing Romania and approaching the Danube and the frontiers of Yugoslavia. Fitzroy Maclean drew up the plan code-named ‘Ratweek’, by which the British would join with the Partisans in a land, sea and air operation to disrupt the German withdrawal through Yugoslavia. Ultra signals showed that the Germans were in confusion. Hitler was still obsessed by his fear that the British would land on the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’, and therefore kept many divisions idle along the Dalmatian coast. The generals of Germany’s South-East Europe Command believed, correctly, that the main attack would come from the Russians and Partisans on Belgrade and then up the Danube and Sava valleys. In either event, the German retreat from Greece and Serbia would have to battle across the mountains of Bosnia-Hercegovina. Ultra also revealed that Draža Mihailović, in his rage at the British for having ‘handed the country over to Bolshevism’, was offering help to the German Army Group E’s retreat through Sarajevo.46
‘Operation Ratweek’ consisted largely of Flying Fortress raids on German lines of communication along the Sava and Morava valleys. Maclean himself watched the obliteration bombing of Leskovac where the Germans had a concentration of armour. For the remaining British officers with the Chetniks, such as the then Captain Michael Lees, this bombing of Serbian towns with a largely civilian population was wicked and unnecessary. He thought the Allies were trying to do from the air what the Chetniks could have achieved on the ground by sabotage and guerrilla raids. Indeed Lees himself had frequently blown up the Belgrade–Salonica railway. In The Rape of Serbia, Lees contradicts Maclean’s assertion that during the autumn of 1944 the Serbs were deserting the Chetniks to join the Partisans. Allied airmen forced down over Serbia found that the Chetniks controlled the countryside. Lees himself moved freely around south Serbia and even as far as the Ravna Gora without ever meeting or hearing about the presence of Partisans. The abandonment, or as some would say the betrayal, of the Serbs in the interest of realpolitik was especially repugnant to those who remembered their heroism during the First World War. The French, who had fought beside the Serbs on the Salonica Front from 1916 to 1918 were most unhappy. General Charles de Gaulle always honoured Mihailović.
Late in September, the British on Vis suddenly woke up to the fact that Tito had disappeared from the island. In Churchill’s phrase, he had ‘levanted’ to Moscow. At 11 p.m. on 21 September, Tito boarded a Russian plane in the greatest secrecy: ‘As he was leaving, his dog Tigger refused to keep still. He was kept close to his master and Tito had to take him on the plane. In case the dog barked when they were boarding the plane, a sack was pulled over his head.’47
After four years, Josip Broz was back in Moscow, not as a secret agent, a man in hiding from the police, who travelled on false passports and went by the code-name ‘Walter’, but as Marshal Tito, the President of the National Council. Yet when Tito asked for a tank division to help in the final assault on Belgrade, Stalin answered: ‘Walter, I shall give you not one division but a whole tank corps.’ Stalin agreed that, after taking Belgrade, the Red Army would move into Hungary, leaving the Partisans, or the People’s Army as they were now called, to drive the Germans out of Yugoslavia, as well as supporting the Russian left flank. Tito pointed out that the Red Army had only a limited role in Yugoslavia: ‘Otherwise, the first meeting was very cool. The basic cause, I think, was the telegram I had sent them during the war, especially the one I began with the words, “If you cannot send us assistance, then at least do not hamper us.”’ The Bulgarian Georgy Dimitrov, always a trusted friend, told Tito that when Stalin saw that message he stamped with rage.48
In another conversation, Stalin told Tito that he should reinstate King Peter:
The blood rushed to my head that he could advise us to do such a thing. I composed myself and told him it was impossible, that the people would rebel, that in Yugoslavia the king personified treason, that he had fled and left his people in the midst of their struggle, that the Karageorgević dynasty was hated among the people for corruption and terror.
Stalin was silent, and then said briefly:
‘You need not restore him forever. Take him back temporarily, and then you can slip a knife into his back at a suitable moment.’49
On his way back from Moscow, Tito crossed from Romania into north-east Serbia, from where he directed the Yugoslav troops in the joint attack on Belgrade. The Kalemegdan fortress at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers, the key to command of south-east Europe under the Roman, Austrian and Turkish empires, fell to the Russians and Partisans on 20 October 1944.
The capture of Belgrade occasioned the first open quarrel between the Yugoslav and the Soviet Communists. During and after the battle, the Red Army went on the rampage against the supposedly allied Serb population, raping more than 200 women, half of whom were afterwards murdered. One Soviet officer raped a woman Partisan as she brought him a message during a battle. When Tito made a complaint, General Korneyev, the head of the Soviet military mission, at first refused to listen and then grew angry, at which point Milovan Djilas intervened to say that enemies of the revolution were making propaganda out of the rapes: ‘They are comparing the attacks by the Red Army soldiers with the behaviour of the English officers who do not indulge in such excesses.’ Korneyev exploded with fury: ‘I protest most sharply against the insult to the Red Army in comparing it with the armies of capitalist countries.’50 The exchange was reported back to Moscow and rankled in Stalin’s mind.
By November 1944 Tito was also on a collision course with the British. The immediate point at issue was Churchill’s intervention in Greece on the side of the right-wing against the left-wing guerrillas. This reawakened Tito’s fear that Churchill would step in to save the Chetniks, or even the Croat separatists. Having earlier given permission for British troops to move inland from Dubrovnik to harass the German retreat, Tito ordered them back to the coast in November. Tito’s distrust of Churchill grew when he heard of plans for a large-scale British landing on the Dalmatian coast.
In spite of discord between the British and the Partisans, the German retreat through Bosnia-Hercegovina cost them about 100,000 dead and twice as many prisoners. In the wake of the Germans came thousands of Chetniks, harried on all sides by vengeful Partisans, Muslims and what remained of the Ustasha. In the flatlands of Slavonia, north of the River Sava, the Germans used tank and artillery fire to cover their slow retreat towards Zagreb, and the Reich itself. In the mountains of Bosnia and Hercegovina, they fought at close quarters, even in hand-to-hand combat. The SS and Ustasha Franciscans fought side by side and literally to the last man to defend the monastery at Široki Brijeg.
The Independent State of Croatia remained in existence into the spring of 1945. The Jasenovac concentration camp went on with its deadly work, and as late as March the Ustasha succeeded in murdering a hundred wounded Serbs at Knin. On 24 March 1945, only six weeks before the end of the war, Stepinac and four other bishops, including Archbishop Šarić of Sarajevo, met in Zagreb to draw up a pastoral letter. Rejecting any suggestion that the Church had itself been guilty of misdeeds, the letter protested against the ‘systematic torture and murder of innocent Catholic priests and people’, suggesting that accusations of war crimes now being made by the Partisans were ‘simply a means of destroying those people whom the Communists considered to be an obstacle to the creation of their party program’. The letter, published also in English and French, concluded with a reaffirmation of faith in an independent Croatia: ‘History is the witness that the Croatian people through its 1,300 years has never ceased to proclaim through plebiscites that it will not renounce the right to freedom and independence which every other nation desires.’51
On 10 April 1945, the fourth anniversary of the NDH, Stepinac celebrated Mass in Zagreb Cathedral and Te Deums were sung in praise of what remained of the Ustasha state. On Sunday, 15 April, as Pavelić, Artuković, Budak, Archbishop Šarić of Sarajevo and Luburić, the commandant of Jasenovac, were preparing to go into exile in Argentina, Spain or the United States, Archbishop Stepinac devoted his sermon to what he believed was Croatia’s worst sin, not mass murder but swearing. His lack of any sense of proportion amounted almost to madness. Stepinac could see no distinction in the degree of evil between cursing a neighbour and hurling that neighbour over the side of a precipice.
Archbishop Stepinac may well have continued to believe until the last weeks of the war that the Western powers would somehow step in to save Croatia from Communism. Because Tito feared the same thing, he refused to allow the British to land their troops on the Dalmatian coast. When HMS Delhi put into Split without any previous warning, the landing party was met by machine-gun fire.52 On the other side of the Adriatic, the Allied advance up the Italian peninsula met with stubborn German resistance. The British did not achieve their breakthrough at Bologna until April 1945, less than a month before victory in Europe.
When the breakthrough came, the New Zealand Division advanced at almost reckless speed up the coastal plain, turning east to take Padua, Venice and part of Trieste, where it confronted the Partisans. Within hours of their meeting, the two Allied armies faced each other at gunpoint. An intelligence officer with the New Zealand Army, Geoffrey Cox, describes in his book The Race for Trieste how he spent VE Day drawing up urgent plans for a war against Yugoslavia. In the subsequent forty days until 12 June 1945, the Partisans in their part of the city carried out a massacre of the defeated Germans, Italian police and officials and many anti-Fascists who thought that Trieste should be Italian. At the end of the ‘Forty Days’, as they are still recalled with horror by older Triestini, the Allied military government estimated that 2,000 people had disappeared, but locals put the figure at ten times as many. The gorge at Bassovizza, where the arrested were stripped, shot and toppled into a mass grave, was said to contain 500 cubic metres of corpses.
At the end of the ‘Forty Days’, Tito backed down from the confrontation and withdrew his troops to the hinterland, afterwards known as ‘Zone B’. The historian Cox deduces that Stalin abandoned Tito because he had learned of America’s atom bomb, and also because there were US troops in the part of Germany earmarked for Soviet occupation. This betrayal, as Tito saw it, played a part in the breach with the Soviet Union three years later.
Notes
For the first and last time in the story of Tito, some of the most revealing sources are in English. Many of the British people involved in Yugoslavia from 1943 until the end of the war afterwards published their reminiscences. They included such famous authors as Evelyn Waugh and Winston Churchill. The two books of memoir by Sir Fitzroy Maclean, the head of the British military mission to Tito, are excellent both as history and as entertainment. Maclean’s biographer Frank McLynn has done thorough and comprehensive research into Britain’s role in Yugoslavia during the war. His findings vindicate the decision to back Tito. He also understands that the British had little influence on the outcome of Yugoslavia’s civil war.
1 Peter Broucek (ed.), Ein General in Zwielicht: Die Erinnerungen von Edmund Glaise von Horstenau (3 vols., Vienna, 1988), vol. 3, pp. 38–9.
2 Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches, (London, 1949), pp. 402–3.
3 Maclean’s biographer believes that he was not ‘as ignorant of Ultra as (according to the rules) he should have been …’ (Frank McLynn, Fitzroy Maclean (London, 1992), p. 217).
4 Ralph Bennett, Ultra and Mediterranean Strategy, 1941–1945 (London, 1989), p. 338.
5 Ibid. p. 343.
6 Ibid. p. 347.
7 Fitzroy Maclean, Disputed Barricade (London, 1957), p. 233.
8 Ibid. p. 233; Milovan Djilas, Wartime (New York, 1977), p. 348.
9 Maclean, Disputed Barricade, p. 233.
10 McLynn, Fitzroy Maclean, pp. 158–9.
11 Ibid. pp. 157–61.
12 Quoted in ibid. p. 162.
13 Phyllis Auty and Richard Clogg (eds.), British Policy towards Wartime Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece (London, 1975), pp. 75–6; see also Milovan Djilas, Wartime, p. 251.
14 Milovan Djilas, Wartime, p. 346.
15 Vladimir Dedijer, Tito Speaks: His Self-Portrait and Struggle with Stalin (London, 1953), pp. 203–4.
16 Milovan Djilas, Wartime, p. 356.
17 Ibid.
18 Dedijer, Tito Speaks, pp. 204–5.
19 Milovan Djilas, Wartime, p. 363.
20 Dedijer, Tito Speaks, pp. 244–6.
21 Milovan Djilas, Wartime, 359–62.
22 Bennett, Ultra, p. 347.
23 Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, trans. Michael B. Petrovich (London, 1962), p. 103.
24 McLynn, Fitzroy Maclean, pp. 185–7.
25 Ibid. p. 187.
26 For Farish’s final report, see Michael Lees, The Rape of Serbia (New York, 1990), pp. 288–92.
27 McLynn, Fitzroy Maclean, p. 189.
28 Stella Alexander, Church and State in Yugoslavia since 1945 (Cambridge, 1979), p. 18.
29 Lees, The Rape of Serbia, pp. 300–2.
30 Viktor Novak, Magnum Crimen: Pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj (Zagreb, 1948), pp. 1033–4.
31 Ibid. p. 1000.
32 Carlo Falconi, The Silence of Pius XII, trans. Bernard Wall (London, 1970), pp. 371–2.
33 McLynn, Fitzroy Maclean, pp. 202–7. Apparently Ultra gave advance warning of the German attack, but this was not passed on to the British at Drvar, for fear of revealing that the code had been cracked.
34 Dedijer, Tito Speaks, p. 218.
35 Ibid. p. 219.
36 The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (London, 1976), p. 571.
37 Ibid. pp. 571–2; David Pryce-Jones, Evelyn Waugh and his World (London, 1973), p. 135.
38 F.O. 371/48910, Captain Evelyn Waugh to Brigadier Maclean, 30 March 1945. (Quoted by Anthony Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators, 1922–1945 (London, 1973), p. 328.)
39 McLynn, Fitzroy Maclean, p. 212.
40 Ibid. p. 195.
41 Ibid. p. 214.
42 Maclean, Disputed Barricade, p. 275.
43 Martin Gilbert, Road to Victory: Winston S. Churchill, 1941–1945 (London, 1986), p. 890.
44 McLynn, Fitzroy Maclean, pp. 215–16.
45 Ibid. p. 217.
46 Ibid. p. 219.
47 Dedijer, Tito Speaks, p. 231.
48 Ibid. p. 233.
49 Ibid. p. 234.
50 Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, p. 82.
51 Novak, Magnum Crimen, pp. 1038–9.
52 McLynn, Fitzroy Maclean, p. 234.