The Second World War

by John Keegan

  Russia’s attitude was determined by its political differences with the government in exile and the Home Army, which persisted even after the signing of the agreement in August 1941 which released Polish prisoners held in Russia to join the British armies in the Middle East. Stalin had politically identified the Home Army as a potential opponent of the Polish Communist Party, through which he began to sponsor his own army in exile in the Soviet Union after June 1941. This was the only negative effect of Barbarossa on the development of resistance to German occupation inside Hitler’s Europe. Almost everywhere else the efforts were positive. The European communist parties, through the persisting control of the Comintern, had been restrained from joining in resistance to occupation as long as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact remained in force. As soon as it was broken, all European communist parties were ordered to initiate subversive activity, with a marked increase in the efficiency of resistance groups of whatever political colour. This effect was due either to collaboration by the communists, whose habits of secrecy were far superior to those of recently formed clandestine groups, with the non-communist resistance, as notably in Holland, or to creative competition between left and right, as in France: there de Gaulle, alarmed by the prospect that ‘Free France’ might fall under communist leadership on home territory, succeeded in creating a pan-resistance ‘Secret Army’, commanded by a National Resistance Council under his authority. The marriage it imposed between communist and non-communist groups was one of convenience. The French Communist Party privately reserved the intention to operate to its own political advantage as soon as opportunity offered, and it did indeed institute local reigns of terror against its committed opponents during the interregnum which followed liberation in August 1944; but from June 1941 to July 1944 the marriage worked to unify and strengthen the resistance as a whole.

  Objectively, however, it must be recognised that the principal achievement of resistance in western Europe during the years of Hitler’s strength was psychological rather than material. The most visible symbol of resistance was the underground newspaper (120 separate imprints were circulating in Holland in 1941) and the most seditious activity the transmission of intelligence, of varied value, via clandestine networks to London. Some of these networks fell into enemy hands and were ‘turned’; the North Pole network, for example, was ‘run’ by the Germans between March 1942 and April 1944. Such setbacks did little harm to the Allied war effort but resulted in numbers of brave men and women (SOE judged that women made better agents than men) being parachuted straight into the hands of the Gestapo. The publication of underground newspapers and the running of intelligence networks, whose subsidiary activities included the smuggling of crashed aircrew out of occupied territory, occasional acts of sabotage and sporadic assassinations, did a great deal to sustain national pride during the occupation years, but none of the activities shook the German system of control, which was both efficient and remarkably economic. Historians of the resistance are naturally reluctant to put figures to the size of the German security forces (civilian Sicherheitsdienst, military Feldgendarmerie) which were the resistance groups’ enemies, but it is probable that their total strength in France did not exceed 6500 at any stage during the war; the German police garrison of Lyon, the second largest city of France, comprised about 100 secret policemen and 400 security troops in 1943. The divisions of the German army stationed in France (sixty in June 1944) took no part whatsoever in security duties, and, since they were almost exclusively stationed in coastal districts, they were not in a position to do so. Against the German security forces the resistance deployed at most 116,000 armed men, a figure established in July 1944 when the arrival of the Allied liberation armies raised their strength to its maximum. During the occupation proper, the number and size of armed groups were small and their activities consonantly limited; in the first nine months of 1942 the total number of assassinations of German security officers was 150, while major acts of sabotage throughout the war did not exceed five (interference with the railway network was extensive, but was largely confined to the months before and during the D-Day landings).

  The popular idea of western Europe ‘ablaze’ under German occupation, first promulgated in John Steinbeck’s inspirational novel The Moon is Down (1942) and fed by an army of authors since, must therefore be recognised as a romantic, if understandable, myth. Western Europe’s urban and pastoral regions, where the population was so vulnerable to reprisals, were quite unsuited to the sort of sustained partisan activity which, when supplied and supported by external regular forces, is the only form of guerrilla warfare which constrains a conqueror to divert appreciable military effort from the battlefront. During the whole course of Hitler’s war, he was confronted with such effective guerrilla resistance in only two areas of operations: in the rear of the Eastern Front, where Stalin, after an initial hesitation, supported, supplied and eventually reinforced partisan formations centred on the impenetrable Pripet Marshes; and in Yugoslavia.

  The Soviet partisan formations were initially based on fragments of regular divisions isolated by the German advance through White Russia and the Ukraine in the summer of 1941, survivors who retained the will and some of the means to fight on after they had been cut off from their higher headquarters and sources of supply. For recruitment, however, they depended upon volunteers from the White Russian and Ukrainian populations, both suspect in Stalin’s eyes as undependable minorities and as potential collaborators with the occupation authorities. From the outset he put the partisan formations under NKVD (secret police) control; the command structures, infiltrated through German lines to the partisan bands, were known as orgtroika (tripartite organisations) consisting of state, party and NKVD officers. As late as the summer of 1943, their members in the Ukraine did not exceed 17,000. In January 1944, when the partisans were returned to Red Army control, thirteen partisan brigades in the Ukraine numbered 35,000; on the eve of Operation Bagration in June 1944, when partisans carried out 40,000 railway demolitions, their numbers were 140,000. They had grown as a result of Soviet support, despite ferocious German repression. From the spring of 1944 onwards, specialist SS anti-partisan units, to which German formations ‘resting’ from operations at the front were regularly attached, carried out sweeps through ‘band-infested’ areas, burning and killing without pity; ‘kills’ of up to 2000, including women and children as well as men, were regularly reported for each operation. Post-war investigations by historians with access to German records suggest that such sweeps were extremely effective, that Soviet estimates of the achievements of partisans were wildly exaggerated, and that the losses inflicted by partisans, whether on the personnel or the material of the Wehrmacht, were a fraction of those claimed by the Soviet authorities. The Soviet estimate that 147,835 German soldiers were killed by partisans in the Orel region, west of the River Don, has been challenged by a Western scholar, J. A. Armstrong, who suggests a figure of 35,000 killed and wounded.

  The Yugoslavian Partisans

  It is to Yugoslavia that historians ultimately turn in arguing for the effectiveness of partisan warfare and in estimating the contribution of resistance forces to the defeat of the Wehrmacht in Europe in the Second World War. Yugoslavia is unquestionably a special case. Its mountainous terrain, intersected by deep valleys and bounded by a coastline that gave easy access to SOE’s air and sea supply units, is ideally suited to irregular warfare. Its Serbian population was accustomed by resistance to the Turks and by the Austrian invasion of 1914-15 to fighting on its home territory. Hitler’s aggression of April 1941 had outraged the national pride and by its suddenness left hundreds of military units in possession of weapons and ground which provided the basis for irregular operations. The first to raise the standard of revolt were Serbian monarchists commanded by a Serbian regular officer, Draza Mihailović. His Chetniks, so called from the Serbian word for opponents of the Turkish occupation, were at odds from the outset with the Croatian Ustashi who made common cause with the Italian occup
ation forces in Slovenia and Croatia; they also understandably opposed the Hungarian, Bulgarian and Albanian appropriations of Yugoslav border areas on the northern and eastern frontiers of the kingdom. Properly, however, their quarrel was with the Germans, who had imposed a puppet government on the territory of historic Serbia and against whom they initiated partisan warfare as early as May 1941.

  The Special Operations Executive made contact with the Chetniks in September 1941 and began to supply them with weapons and money in the summer of 1942. However, SOE’s original emissary to Mihailović, Captain D. T. Hudson, had also come across groups of anti-monarchist guerrillas who called themselves ‘Partisans’ and were led by an experienced Comintern agent, Josip Broz who used the nom de guerre Tito. Hudson early formed the impression that Tito was a more serious opponent of the Axis occupiers than Mihailovicü, whom he suspected of wishing to build the Chetniks into a Serbian ‘Home Army’ on the Polish model and preserve its strength against the day when external circumstances would allow him to liberate the country from within. His suspicion did Mihailović less than justice, for the Chetniks were conducting a guerrilla war against the Germans in 1942 and (as Ultra revealed) were regarded by them as troublesome enemies as late as 1943. It was undoubtedly the case, however, that Mihailović was an extreme Serb nationalist, that he refused to co-operate with Tito in creating a national resistance movement, that his Chetniks had begun to fight the Partisans for control of western Serbia in November 1941, and that he early entered into local truces with the Italians to acquire arms for the prosecution of this burgeoning civil war.

  A principal motive of Mihailović’s policy was to spare the Serb population from reprisal and atrocity at the hands of the occupiers – an estimable aim in view of the appalling consequences of the internal war which none the less ensued, costing as it did the lives of nearly 10 per cent (1,400,000) of the pre-war population. Tito made no such reservations. In the classic tradition of revolution, he committed the Partisans to waging war against the occupier to the bitter end. By late 1943 he had established himself in the eyes of SOE (whose Yugoslav section was dominated by officers with left-wing views) as the most effective of the Yugoslav guerrilla leaders. From the spring of 1944 onwards all British aid was sent to Tito’s Partisans and withdrawn from Mihailovicü. Although some officers of the American Office of Strategic Services remained in contact with the Chetniks, their abandonment by the British had the effect of driving them into closer co-operation with the Germans, with whom Mihailović agreed to a local armistice in November 1943 as a means of continuing the civil war against Tito, thus confirming the Allied prejudice against them which Hudson had voiced at the outset.

  Tito meanwhile had been building up his army and instituting increasingly ambitious attacks against the Germans in central and southern Yugoslavia. When these attacks began to threaten the Germans’ exploitation of the country’s mineral resources and their line of communication with Greece, Hitler was forced to commit sizeable forces and mount large-scale pacification operations against them. Until the collapse of Italy in September 1943 twenty Italian divisions were permanently stationed in Yugoslavia and Albania (where SOE also sponsored a minor guerrilla movement), together with six German divisions. After the dissolution of the Italian occupying force, the German was reinforced with an additional seven divisions, together with four from the Bulgarian army. A Partisan offensive at the Neretva river in Bosnia in February 1943, defeated at some cost to the Italians and Germans, prompted them to launch Operation Schwarz in the following May. It involved over 100,000 German and satellite troops and drove Tito out of Montenegro, where he had retreated. Similar offensives cleared western Bosnia in December, while in May 1944 Operation Knight’s Move in southern Bosnia was so successful that Tito was obliged to seek rescue at British hands and fly to Bari in Italy – even though at the time of the September armistice he had acquired large quantities of Italian weapons which allowed him to raise the number of armed men he kept in the field to about 120,000.

  The Royal Navy quickly returned Tito to Yugoslavia, though only as far as the island of Vis, where it had established a base to support Partisan operations. Meanwhile the British Balkan Air Force, set up at Bari in June, was flying vast quantities of (largely American) weapons to the Partisans in the interior of the country. In August Tito left Vis to visit Stalin, who until February 1944 had been tepid in his support for Tito’s campaign; in Moscow Tito granted ‘permission’ for Soviet troops to enter the country and they began to cross the border from Romania on 6 September. Their arrival, and Hitler’s decision to evacuate Greece in October, transformed the Partisans’ position. Army Group F, outflanked in the Balkans by the Red Army and along the Adriatic coast by Allied Armies Italy, immediately beat a hasty retreat into central Yugoslavia. Belgrade, the capital, fell to a joint force of the Red Army and the Partisans on 20 October. Stalin, at his August meeting with Tito in Moscow, had given a guarantee that the Red Army would evacuate Yugoslavia as soon as its presence was no longer militarily necessary, and his promise was indeed kept after the German surrender of May 1945.

  Mihailović ended the war a tragic figure. Tito’s ascendancy had driven him deeper into complicity with the Germans; his belated efforts to reingratiate himself with the Allies totally failed, and after having hidden from Tito’s troops in the mountains of central Serbia for over a year he was caught in March 1946, tried in Belgrade in June and executed by firing squad on 17 July. His plea of exculpation, ‘I wanted much, I began much, but the gale of the world swept away me and my work’, has entered into the memorabilia of the Second World War. ‘Destiny’, he said, had been ‘merciless’ to him, and hindsight, by which many of his judgements have been forgiven, accords weight to that view. His tragedy was to have been a nationalist leader in a state composed of minorities, whose differences Hitler cynically exploited in order to divide and rule.

  Hindsight has also greatly diminished Tito’s achievement. At the end of the war he was widely hailed as the only European resistance leader to have liberated his country by guerrilla effort. Many strategic commentators further credited him with having diverted such numbers of German and satellite troops from the eastern and Mediterranean battlefields as to have materially influenced the outcome of the war in those theatres. Realistically, it is now accepted that the liberation of Yugoslavia was the direct result of the arrival of Russian troops in the country in September 1944. What now seems most surprising about the Tito era is that Stalin should have so unwisely agreed to remove the Red Army from Yugoslav territory at the moment of victory – a misjudgement which robbed Soviet post-war control of eastern Europe of consistency from the outset. Strategically, estimates of Tito’s diversion of force from Hitler’s main centres of operation are now seen to be exaggerated. The principal army of occupation in Yugoslavia was always Italian. After the Italian collapse Hitler was indeed obliged to double the number of German divisions deployed in Yugoslavia from six to thirteen; but few were suitable for use against the Red Army or Allied Armies Italy. Only one, the 1st Mountain Division, brought from Russia in the spring of 1943, was first class; the rest, including the SS Prinz Eugen and Handschar Divisions and the 104th, 117th and 118th Divisions, were composed either of ethnic Germans from central Europe or of locally enlisted non-German minorities, including a high proportion of Balkan Muslims from Bosnia and Albania. They were quite unsuitable for war against Russian, British or American mechanised formations; their presence in Yugoslavia, even their existence, was in itself evidence that fighting there partook more closely of the character of civil rather than international war. In a sense, Hitler’s cunning in setting Serb against Croat and monarchist against communist rebounded on itself; for, though his only real interest in the country lay in the exploitation of its resources and the free use of its lines of communication to southern Europe, he eventually became a party to its internal quarrels. In objective military terms, his involvement cost him little, but it would have simplified his politico-milit
ary arrangements if he had taken the trouble, after his whirlwind victory of April 1941, to establish a pan-Yugoslav satellite administration, charged with maintaining order within the country, rather than cynically bribing Yugoslavia’s neighbours with portions of its territory to impose occupation policies which rapidly proved ineffectual.

  The Special Operations Executive, though puffed by a powerful lobby of historians, some of whom were its former officers, largely fails in its claim to have contributed significantly to Hitler’s defeat, since its achievement in Yugoslavia, its principal theatre of operations, was ambiguous. The same verdict holds true for the activities of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), set up in June 1942. Through an agreement allocating responsibilities between OSS and SOE signed on 26 June 1942, OSS took the major role in supporting the Italian partisans and the Johnny-come-lately resistance movements in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Italian resistance activity discommoded the Germans very little, the Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian subversives scarcely at all. SOE’s and OSS’s parallel effort in psychological warfare (sponsored in Britain by SOE’s parent organisation, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, through its Political Warfare Executive) afforded high excitement to the journalists and intellectuals who staffed it; its effect on opinion in the occupied countries was marginal and on German civilian morale negligible. ‘Black propaganda’, transmitted by radio stations purporting to operate within the boundaries of the Reich, understandably convinced no German who could daily witness the absolute control the Gestapo exercised over German society. The only non-military manifestation of internal resistance to Nazi rule, the Catholic Bavarian White Rose group, was pitilessly liquidated almost as soon as it appeared in February 1943. Allied efforts at economic warfare were equally unavailing; the principal success, the purchase of future production of Swedish ball-bearings, was negotiated so late in the war (mid-1944) that victory had been won by conventional military means before it could take effect.