Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  Churchill loved to meet British agents and Frenchmen returned from their hazardous missions. He entertained at Downing Street Wing Commander Edmund Yeo-Thomas—‘the White Rabbit’—Jean Moulin and Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie. Such encounters invariably prompted him to urge the RAF to divert more aircraft to aid their struggle. His personal enthusiasm for Resistance was critical in overcoming the scepticism of conventional warriors. It was sometimes said of the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’ that Britain was tipped on its side, and everything loose fell into SOE. Many of its personnel, unsurprisingly, were individualists and eccentrics. Their perspicacity often failed to match their enthusiasm. They cherished extravagant faith in their unseen protégés in occupied Europe. A sceptic remarked of Col. Maurice Buckmaster, chief of SOE’s French Section: ‘He believed that all his geese were swans.’

  SOE’s most conspicuous security lapse was its failure, despite many warnings, to perceive that the Germans had so deeply penetrated its Dutch operations that almost every agent parachuted into Holland in 1942-43 landed into enemy hands. The revelation of this disaster, at the end of 1943, precipitated a crisis in the organisation’s affairs. Its Whitehall foes, of whom there were many, crowded forward to demand curtailment of its operations and calls on resources. Menzies and his colleagues at SIS argued that the débâcle reflected the chronic amateurishness and lack of tradecraft prevailing at SOE’s Baker Street headquarters and pervading its operations in the field. They were by no means wrong. SOE since 1940 had indeed been learning on the job, at severe cost in life and wasted effort. Meanwhile in September 1943, the army’s exasperation with SOE’s Balkan operations, which it claimed were out of control, caused the C-in-C Middle East to demand that the organisation should be brought under his orders. This issue was still unresolved when the Dutch scandal broke.

  On Churchill’s return from Marrakesh in January 1944, he found the row appealed to himself. He renewed SOE’s mandate (though rejecting its presumptuous demand for a seat on the chiefs of staff committee), confirmed its independence, and ordered the RAF to release more aircraft for arms-dropping. The organisation’s internal historian wrote later: ‘There is no doubt that, in this critical phase of its development, SOE and the Resistance movements which it led were sustained very largely by the personal influence of Mr Churchill.’ The prime minister took the view that SOE’s enthusiasm and activism outweighed its deficiencies. It was too late in the war to undertake wholesale restructuring. Much of the criticism of SOE, he believed, derived from Whitehall jealousies. It was impossible to conduct a secret war of such an unprecedented kind without misfortunes which cost lives, as do all mistakes in conflict.

  Thus, in the last months before liberation, relatively large quantities of arms—though pathetically small quantities of ammunition—began to reach resisters. The British estimated that some 35,000 active maquisards were in the field, though De Gaulle claimed a strength of 175,000 for France’s secret army. SOE believed that its parachutages provided weapons for 50,000. The intoxicating confidence thus created persuaded some groups to conduct disastrous pitched battles with the Germans. At Montmouchet on 20 May 1944 the regional Armée Secrète commander, Emile Coulaudon, ordered a mass concentration of his groups, 6,000 strong. On 10 June the Germans attacked them. At least 350 maquisards perished, while the remainder dispersed and fled. Local communities suffered devastating reprisals.

  Another act of folly, the brief liberation of the town of Tulle in the Corrèze by the communist FTP for a few hours on 9 June, caused SS Panzergrenadiers to hang ninety-nine innocent hostages from the lampposts in reprisal for the alleged Resistance massacre of the elderly Wehrmacht reservists who had garrisoned the town. At Oradour-sur-Glane next day 642 men, women and children were slaughtered, in reprisal for the abduction by maquisards of a popular SS battalion commander. That day from London General Pierre Koenig, commander of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, ordered a ‘maximum brake on guerrilla activities’. Such a demand was at odds both with the mood of the moment and all previous briefing. It created confusion in the ranks of Resistance. On 17 June, Koenig issued a new order: ‘continue elusive guerrilla activity to the maximum’, while avoiding concentrations. This did not prevent the madness of the Vercors on 21 July, where 640 maquisards and 201 local civilians were killed as the Germans assaulted another ill-judged gathering of resistance forces.

  Around 24,000 FFI fighters died during the struggle for France. Thousands more, most of them civilians, perished in reprisals and executions of prisoners, for instance 11,000 in and around Paris, 3,673 in Lyons, 2,863 in the Limoges area, 1,113 in Lille, and similar proportions in lesser cities, together with thousands of others deported to German concentration camps, from which most never returned. It seems doubtful whether it was useful or prudent to arm the French Resistance on a large scale. Churchill’s enthusiasm caused the maquis to become dangerous enough to enrage the Germans, but insufficiently powerful to defend themselves or their communities. Most maquisards had only pistols or Sten sub-machine guns, with two or three magazines apiece. They lacked heavy weapons, ammunition and radio communications for sustained or large-scale engagements.

  The courage and sacrifice of those who supported the Resistance, or even withheld support from Vichy, deserves the profound respect of posterity. But the moral achievement must be detached from cool analysis of the military balance. Post-war claims for the damage inflicted on the enemy by the French Resistance and its SOE sponsors were grossly exaggerated, as German war diaries make plain. Resistance historians, for instance, have claimed that the maquis inflicted hundreds of casualties upon the 2nd SS Das Reich armoured division on its march from southern France to Normandy in June 1944. German records, by contrast, reveal only thirty-five killed. The impact of maquis attacks on German communications that summer was infinitesimally smaller than that of Allied air attacks. Resistance fulfilled a striking moral function, especially important in resurrecting the post-war self-respect of occupied nations. But one of the best historians of the period, Julian Jackson, has written: ‘In the history of France, Resistance is more important as a social and political phenomenon than a military one.’

  The Balkans, however, were different. There, the terrain was much more favourable to guerrilla warfare. In Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia and also Italy, the prime minister perceived political circumstances and military opportunities which might yield dramatic benefits. New Zealand premier Peter Fraser urged caution on Churchill, sensibly observing that the Balkans was a region ‘of seething factions, who would turn to whoever would give them most support’. But the prime minister believed that local passions could be harnessed to Allied purposes. It was often remarked by critics that the enthusiasm of the prime minister and SOE’s agents reflected a ‘T.E. Lawrence complex’, wild delusions about the prospect that a few personable British officers might influence the behaviour of entire Balkan societies in support of British foreign policy objectives. American suspicions that imperialistic motives underpinned SOE caused Roosevelt in October 1943 to advance to Churchill a clumsy request, swiftly dismissed by the prime minister, for Colonel Donovan of the American OSS to assume authority for all Allied special operations in the Balkans.

  From 1943 onwards, SOE lavished much effort upon Mediterranean countries, with mixed results. Some of its most flamboyant British officers, men such as Billy Maclean and David Smiley, were dropped into the mountains of Albania to work with local partisans. Almost without exception they loathed the country and its people. They found the Albanians far more eager to accept weapons and to steal equipment and supplies than to fight the Germans. ‘How pleased I shall be to return to civilisation again,’ a British officer confided to his diary, ‘to be among people one can trust and not to be surrounded by dirt, filth and bad manners…It is not as if one was doing anything useful here or could do so. There is so little charity among these people that they cannot believe anyone would come all this way just to help them…They are boastful and vain with
nothing to be boastful or vain about. They have no courage, no consistency and no sense of honour.’

  Enver Hoxha, the Albanian communist leader who dominated guerrilla operations, was chiefly concerned to secure his own power base for a post-war takeover. It is easy to see why the Albanians, mired in poverty and a struggle for existence, showed so little enthusiasm for supporting the activist purposes of British missions. Guerrilla activity provoked the Germans to reprisals which SOE’s teams were quite incapable of deflecting. Young British officers in Albania hazarded their own lives with considerable insouciance. Local peasants, however, saw their homes, crops and families imperilled, for no discernible advantage save to pursue a misty vision of ‘freedom’. Beyond a few useful acts of sabotage, in Albania the military achievements of Resistance were slight.

  Throughout the Balkans, internal political rivalries dogged British efforts to mobilise societies against their occupiers. In Greece and Crete, the population was overwhelmingly hostile to the Germans. The country had a long tradition of opposition to authority. Unfortunately, however, Greek society was racked by dissensions, the ferocity of which bewildered British officers thrust into their midst. There was no love for the king, nor for the Greek exile government backed by Churchill. Each guerrilla band cherished its own loyalties. Col. Monty Woodhouse, one of the most celebrated SOE officers who served among the Greeks, reported to Cairo: ‘No one is ever free from the struggle for existence; everything else is secondary to it. That is why no one outside Greece can speak for the Greeks.’ The British, on instructions from Cairo and ultimately from Churchill, were predisposed to support royalists. When Napoleon Zervas, leader of the relatively small republican group EDES, told SOE in 1943 that he backed the restoration of King George, he was rewarded by receiving twice the arms drops provided to the communists of EAM/ELAS, even though the communists were six times more numerous, and were doing all the fighting. Zervas repaid British largesse by establishing a tacit truce with the Germans, and biding his time to pursue his own purposes. As so often in occupied Europe, political and military objectives pulled British policy in different directions.

  In 1944, realities on the ground seemed to make it essential to provide arms to the communists of ELAS, only some of which were employed against the Germans. Monty Woodhouse was recalled to Britain during the summer, and visited Churchill at Chequers to make the case for sustaining aid to ELAS. Woodhouse told the prime minister that if supplies to the communists were cut off, ‘I very much doubt whether any of my officers will get out of Greece alive.’ Churchill brooded for a moment, then took Woodhouse by the arm and said, ‘Yes, young man, I quite understand.’ As the British officer left Chequers, the prime minister said at parting: ‘I am very impressed, and oppressed and depressed.’ Albeit hesitantly, Churchill directed that aid to the communists should be maintained. British agents strove to persuade the Greeks to make common cause, but mutual hatreds were too strong. Moreover, every Resistance attack on the Germans provoked reprisals on a scale as dreadful as those in Russia and Yugoslavia, overlaid upon widespread starvation.

  Nevertheless, Resistance in Greece became a more widespread popular movement than in Western Europe. Some spectacular acts of sabotage were carried out by SOE teams, notably the 1942 destruction of the Gorgopotamos viaduct. But ‘pundits overestimated what guerrillas could achieve’, in the words of Noel Annan, who served on the joint intelligence staff of the Cabinet Office. He asserts that such successes as the destruction of the Gorgopotamos came too late to be strategically useful, and made the planners in London over-optimistic. ‘It took months for our liaison officers to persuade ELAS to blow up the bridge. Had it been destroyed earlier it would have cut one of Rommel’s supply lines when he stood at El Alamein. But it was not…The difficulties with ELAS should have warned the Foreign Office that ELAS’s first objective was less to harass the Germans than to eliminate other guerrilla forces and their leaders.’ Nick Hammond, a British officer with the Greeks, wrote afterwards: ‘Armed resistance in the open countryside is something rarely undertaken. Only men of extreme, even fanatical enthusiasm will undertake the initiation and leadership of such a resistance, because it invites terrible reprisals on one’s family, friends and fellow-countrymen.’

  In Greece and other occupied countries, the Germans economised on their own manpower by recruiting local collaborators for security duties. In France there were several brutal Pétainist militias, which until the summer of 1944 were notably more numerous than the maquis. The Croat Ustashi in Yugoslavia became a byword for savagery. Cossacks in German uniform, later the objects of much sympathy in the West for their enforced repatriation to Russia, played a prominent role in suppressing resistance in northern Italy and Yugoslavia, where their brutality was notorious. The Athens puppet government deployed its own ‘security battalions’ against the guerrillas. A million Greeks lost their homes in consequence of German repression, and a thousand villages were razed. More than 400,000 Greek civilians died in the war, albeit most by mere starvation.

  Bloodshed became relentless. Hitler’s OKW headquarters ordered that fifty to a hundred hostages should be killed to avenge each German victim. At the end of October 1943, guerrillas in the northern Peloponnese achieved a notable coup, capturing and then killing seventy-eight men of 117 Jaeger Division. In consequence, 696 Greeks were executed, twenty-five villages burned. On 1 May 1944, 200 hostages were shot in Athens after an attack on a German general. On the 5th, 216 villagers were massacred in Klisura. On the 17th, a hundred more hostages were executed in Khalkis. The tempo of such atrocities rose until the last day of the German presence in Greece. As the Wehrmacht withdrew, British officers sought with limited success to persuade the rival armed factions to harass the retreat. ‘We didn’t inflict as much serious damage as we might have done,’ wrote Monty Woodhouse of SOE. ‘But by that time, certainly in the case of EAM and ELAS, their sights were set on the future and not on the immediate future.’ It can convincingly be argued that much of what did and did not take place reflected domestic strife between Greeks, together with spontaneous acts of opposition to the occupiers, over which the British could exercise negligible influence.

  In Italy, partisan warfare began to gather momentum after the Rome government’s surrender of September 1943. Again, there were deep divisions between communist and non-communist bands. In June 1944, amid the euphoria of the breakthrough to Rome, broadcasts from Alexander’s headquarters urged guerrilla bands, by now reckoned to be over 100,000 strong, to attack the Germans in their rear. The consequence was a surge of local assaults, followed by ghastly reprisals. As the armies’ offensive in Italy bogged down in the autumn rains, on 13 November a new broadcast was made in Alexander’s name, this time urging discretion. It was perceived at Allied headquarters that the call to arms had been delivered prematurely.

  In the early spring of 1945, partisans resumed their harassment of the Germans, and played a noisy part in the last phase of the Italian campaign. They sabotaged bridges, power and phone lines, and attacked German lines of communications. Alexander nonetheless felt obliged to issue a directive on 4 February, formally abandoning any aspiration to create a mass partisan army, and substituting a commitment to selective sabotage. The problem was that resistance groups proved chronically resistant to direction from SOE missions: ‘self-organised bands…are already getting out of hand’. It was decreed that weapons should thereafter only be provided to those who could be trusted to use them against the Germans, rather than to promote their own local political ambitions. HQ 15th Army Group noted ruefully: ‘A Resistance movement may suddenly transfer itself from the credit to the debit side of the Allied ledger.’ Here was the nemesis of Churchillian hopes, though in the last weeks of the war Italian partisans seized many towns and villages on their own initiative.

  Russia and Yugoslavia were the only countries where partisan warfare significantly influenced Hitler’s deployments. In Russia, the Red Army sponsored large irregular forces to harass German li
nes of communication. Such Soviet operations were assisted by Stalin’s indifference to casualties or victims of reprisals. In Yugoslavia, almost from the moment of their conquest in April 1941 the Germans faced local opposition. Field Marshal von Weichs ordered that German troops should shoot male civilians in any area of armed resistance, regardless of whether there was evidence of individual complicity. That October, after suffering a dozen casualties in a clash with partisans, the Germans massacred the entire 2,000-strong male population of the town of Kragujevac in Serbia. Men and boys were shot in batches of a hundred, through a single day. Even wholesale brutality failed to suppress the communist guerrillas, however, which grew to a strength of some 200,000. Hitler was determined both to secure the right flank of his eastern front, and to maintain his hold on Yugoslavia’s mineral resources. To achieve this, by 1944 twenty-one Axis divisions were deployed.

  Michael Howard, historian of British wartime strategic deception, believes that this commitment was far more influenced by fears of an Allied amphibious landing in Greece or Yugoslavia than by partisan activity, which could have been contained by much smaller forces. He argues that the German high command was importantly misled by a deception operation, codenamed Zeppelin, which suggested an Allied army group in Egypt poised to move against the Balkans. As late as the spring of 1944, OKW in Berlin estimated that there were fourteen Allied divisions in Egypt and Libya, instead of the real three. At the time, however, it was the guerrillas’ alleged successes which captured Churchill’s imagination. News of Tito’s doings, considerably exaggerated in the telling, excited him. Back in January 1943, when he was first briefed about Yugoslavia by his old researcher Bill Deakin, he had perceived possibilities which now seemed to be maturing. Here, at last, was the sort of popular revolt from which he hoped much.