The Trigger (15 page)

Yugoslavia, the country created in the Western Balkans after the First World War, had fallen to the advancing Nazis in 1941. The Germans were quick to deploy a ‘divide and rule’ strategy, chopping the territory into parcels that were run by Nazi-sympathising proxies. Hitler’s occupation of the Western Balkans was as brutal as anywhere, with resistance sympathisers shot, Jewish communities destroyed and indigenous fascists given free rein. In one section of occupied Yugoslavia ultra-nationalist Croats were handed power, running a death-camp at a town called Jasenovac, where not only Jews and Gypsies, but rivals from within the local community, mostly Serbs, were put to death in huge numbers.

Initially, the Western powers believed local resistance to Nazi rule came from troops loyal to a commander named Draža Mihailović, a Serbian officer who had served in the 1930s Yugoslav army. As a result he enjoyed what little support the Allies could then offer: small-scale air drops of military supplies to his Serb-dominated resistance, fighters who proudly called themselves Chetniks. This low level of assistance was overseen by a series of middle-ranking British liaison officers smuggled into his underground headquarters. As these Allied operatives were constantly harassed by enemy patrols, their grasp of the complete military picture was sketchy.

Over time, suspicions emerged to change the way the Allies regarded the Chetniks. First, it became clear that another group of resistance fighters – communist partisans under a shadowy figure called Tito – might be inflicting more damage on occupying Axis forces. Second and even more important, in many places rivalry between partisans and Chetniks had erupted into full-blown combat, in effect civil war. Instead of fighting the occupiers, the two groups had begun to fight each other, cutting deals with German and Italian troops at the local level, and in some cases collaborating. The situation had got so bad in the early summer of 1943 that some Chetnik units fought alongside Italian troops in a joint operation that attempted to wipe out the partisans. The partisans, in turn, were accused elsewhere of making cosy arrangements with the occupiers.

To clarify this murky situation Winston Churchill demanded better intelligence, and this is where Glamoč enters the story. I had read extensively about the various Allied agents covertly deployed across the region. Some arrived by parachute, others by rubber dinghy launched at night from submarines operating off the Adriatic coast. It was exciting stuff. What intrigued me most was the way these accounts revealed the rivalries in the 1940s between local factions – partisans, Chetniks, fascists. The picture was a complex one, something that does not make for easy recreation by storytellers. While many people are familiar with The Guns of Navarone, a wartime novel set in Greece by the British author Alistair MacLean, which was later turned into a popular film, his sequel failed to capture the public imagination. It was called Force 10 from Navarone and even though it would also be made into a feature film, with a full roster of stars including a young Harrison Ford, its popularity was nothing in comparison to its predecessor. It was set amidst the opaque factionalism, plotting and double-crossing of wartime Yugoslavia.

But while film-goers might demand the one-dimensional moral clarity of good against evil, I came to relish what I learned about Yugoslavia in the Second World War. Sliding moral values, human fallibility and cynical opportunism seemed much more real than Hollywood heroics. Eagerly I sought to untangle local history from the 1940s, not least because it seemed to mirror so well the complex war I wrote about fifty years later.

The most renowned British agent deployed to Yugoslavia was a namesake of the Navarone author, although no relation. Fitzroy Maclean, a Scottish warrior–diplomat, had been a founding member of the Special Air Service (the SAS) in the deserts of North Africa, a quixotic figure, tall and lean, often photographed in the kilt of his Scottish highland regiment uniform. The British press dubbed him the ‘Kilted Pimpernel’ and after his wartime exploits were publicised he came to symbolise the courageous, debonair secret agent. Ian Fleming was never able to dissuade the many people who believed that Maclean was the man on whom James Bond was based.

In the late summer of 1943 Maclean was summoned to meet Churchill to discuss Yugoslavia. In his wartime memoir, Eastern Approaches, Maclean recounted how he received his briefing from the British Prime Minister in the early hours of the morning, but not until a Mickey Mouse cartoon film had been forced on the assembled group of top brass. Churchill was famous for relaxing by watching films. In spite of lobbying by advisers who still favoured the Chetniks, the British Prime Minister already sensed that the partisans were a serious fighting force, writing a personal minute in July 1943 in which he described them as ‘these hardy and hunted guerrillas’. When the potentially sensitive issue arose of which of the various Yugoslav factions were to receive British military support, Churchill gave simple and clear instructions. ‘My task was simply to find out who was killing the most Germans and suggest means by which we could help them kill more,’ Maclean wrote in his memoir.

After being dropped by parachute into central Bosnia, Maclean and his small team of Allied agents were led to the old fortress town of Jajce, briefly held by the communist resistance as its headquarters, and there he met their leader. He was named Josip Broz, but he would become known around the world by his partisan nom de guerre, Tito. What I found fascinating was how much Tito had in common with Princip. Born within two years of each other – Tito was the older – they were both southern Slavs brought up under colonial rule, both committing their lives to winning freedom for their people. Whereas Princip was born in 1894 in the Serb community of Bosnia, only recently absorbed within Austria–Hungary, Tito came from Croat and Slovene stock, born further north in Croatian land that had been under Austro-Hungarian rule for centuries. Where they differed was in their political vision. Princip focused no further than the short-term, on revolutionary acts intended to remove through assassination titular symbols of occupation. Tito looked further into the future, being a committed communist who saw the socialist model as the way not just to win freedom for all south Slavs, but to form a united country once the latest occupiers left.

Maclean spent several autumn weeks in 1943 with the partisans in Bosnia, dodging German patrols and seeking to build up as accurate an intelligence picture as possible of the resistance effort of the rival Chetnik and partisan formations. I tracked down his wartime diary with its colourful snapshots of life on the run deep in enemy territory: long treks, washing in rivers, being sniped at by Chetniks, daily language lessons, coming down with a ‘gippy tummy’. The diary could have been written by many of the British soldiers who served here as UN peacekeepers fifty years after Maclean.

He was soon convinced that Tito’s movement was the worthier recipient of British military support, writing a report that urged Churchill to switch from the Chetniks. It was a decision that still angers members of the Serb community, who grumble that the Chetniks were the victims of a dark plot by leftwing, communist sympathisers within British intelligence. In the 1990s I was once harangued by a Serbian petrol-pump attendant when I told him I was from Britain. ‘Fucking Winston Churchill, Fitzroy Maclean and all their commie friends,’ the man shouted.

While it is true that there were communist supporters within British intelligence – this was the period before Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean
et al.
were exposed as Moscow’s agents – I don’t believe their involvement settled the issue of where British support in Yugoslavia should go. Within the last few years it has been revealed that British code-breakers at Bletchley Park were able to decrypt German military communications emerging from the Balkans during the Second World War. These messages showed that the Wehrmacht took the threat from the partisans more seriously than that from any others.

What Maclean recommended, however, was a policy shift that would have a huge impact on the Balkans, a consequence that the warrior-diplomat was aware of at the time. By backing the partisans, Yugoslavia would be pushed firmly into the communist sphere then dominated by the Soviet Union. Maclean raised these concerns with Churchill who, as recorded in Eastern Approaches, had a typically direct response:

The Prime Minister’s reply resolved my doubts.

‘Do you intend,’ he asked, ‘to make Yugoslavia your home after the war?’

‘No, Sir,’ I replied.

‘Neither do I.’

Within a few weeks of Maclean’s report being prepared, in December 1943 Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin put their initials to a memorandum spelling out the ‘Military Conclusions’ of the Tehran Conference. This was the first of the great meetings of the ‘Big Three’ Allied leaders, one at which the future of the post-war world was addressed. The first clause of the document, preceding the commitment to the D-Day landings in France, was the result of Maclean’s work:

The Conference agreed that the Partisans in Yugoslavia should be supported by supplies and equipment to the greatest possible extent, and also by commando operations.

The question then became how to deliver support at a time when Tito’s troops were in control of only tiny parcels of territory. This is where Glamoč starts to be mentioned, as its wide valley floor offered the best site for the construction of a covert airstrip where Allied planes might be able to land. Maclean passed the task to a member of his mission, Major Linn Farish, an American combat engineer with pre-war experience of building aerodromes. Farish, an Anglophile Californian who won an Olympic gold medal for rugby union and preferred to go by the disarming first name of Slim, soon got to work, as described in Eastern Approaches:

Farish, the expert airfield designer, found himself back at his peace-time occupation sooner than he had expected, helped in his work by the men, women and children of Glamoč who, under his direction, toiled away with pick and shovel, making the way smooth for the Dakotas which we fondly imagined would land there when all was ready … We signalled endless measurements and details to RAF Headquarters in the hope of overcoming the scepticism and distrust which in those early days they still displayed towards amateur-run improvised landing-strips. When not actually at work, Farish and his party carefully replaced the bushes that they had uprooted, so as to cover up their traces and thus avoid exciting the curiosity of passing enemy aircraft.

Eventually the order came to use the improvised strip to fly out a party of senior partisans so they could meet Churchill’s military planners. The delegates gathered on the valley floor close to Glamoč in the chill of a November morning as the aircraft that was to fly them to Italy warmed up its engines, but disaster was to strike. Maclean described what happened:

It was at this moment that, looking up, the little group round the aircraft saw, coming over the crest of the nearest hill, a small German observation plane. Before they could move, it was over them, only a few dozen feet above their heads, and, as they watched, fascinated, two small bombs came tumbling out.

The bombs exploded with devastating effect. They destroyed what was at the time the only aircraft in the partisan air force. More importantly, they killed two of Maclean’s agents as well as Ivo-Lola Ribar, one of the partisan delegates, and wounded several others. For the partisans it was a huge blow. Ribar, a Croat and committed communist who enjoyed the full confidence of Tito, was young enough to be regarded as a potential successor as leader of the movement. He would later be venerated by the communist party of Yugoslavia as a national hero. A few days later Maclean made sure he was on board the RAF Dakota that touched down at the improvised strip near Glamoč, to pick up the wounded and a reassembled partisan delegation – the first successful Allied landing operation in occupied Yugoslavia. It was all very touch-and-go. Within a few weeks the Germans had overrun the area and the Allied air bridge was broken.

During the 1990s I had only been able to read about Glamoč, trying to picture the terrain where partisans, peasants and a rugby-playing American had worked so secretly. At that time the Bosnian Serbs held the area, making it unreachable for a foreign journalist like me. But now the situation was different and I wanted to visit the spot where Britain’s Second World War flirtation with the Balkans had momentarily been blown off-course. And when I reread Maclean’s account I noticed a name that had a strong connection to Princip. Maclean recorded that among the wounded men collected by the Dakota was Vladimir Dedijer, a man Maclean reported as being in need of emergency surgery for a serious head wound. Dedijer, a former journalist who later became a renowned author, would survive the hardest years of wartime service with the communist resistance movement, fighting in some of the group’s most important battles. With his own hands he had to bury his wife, Olga, killed on a remote hillside when the partisans came under attack by German forces. After the war Dedijer was to write the authoritative history of Princip’s shooting of the Archduke, The Road to Sarajevo, which had been a foundation stone for researching my journey.

With help from Zdravko, the hotelier in Glamoč, I was able to find the Second World War-era airstrip where all this drama had played out. It was just a few miles outside town and as we approached in Zdravko’s jeep Arnie began to nod in recognition at a stand of fir trees on the flat of the valley floor.

‘I’ve been here before,’ he began. ‘Of course, I have. Of course, I have. How stupid not to remember. Back in my schooldays in the Eighties, when Yugoslavia was still communist, they brought us here for a day trip to see where the partisans had done secret things in the fight against the Germans. It was part of the glorification of all things red. I don’t remember much about them mentioning British or Americans being involved in the air operations. They preferred to keep it simple and claim all the credit for the partisans.’