CHAPTER 14
NONE of Hitler’s European victims fought the war solely with the idea of defeating Germany and getting back to their pre-war circumstances. Even Great Britain, the most conservative of the countries involved, by turning massively to the Labour Party at the end of the war in spite of the risk of seeming ungrateful to an extremely popular national leader, recorded its dissatisfaction with the past. On the continent similar feelings were universal, but they differed greatly from place to place. Broadly speaking there were peoples who wanted to change the institutions under which they lived, if need be by force, and peoples who were content to retain their institutions but wanted to improve what went on within them. Again broadly speaking, it was in eastern Europe that the revolutionary current was strongest, while western Europeans aimed rather at reform – excepting perhaps the French (a case specially difficult to categorize and best considered separately). Thus the war against the Germans and Italians was crossed with civil wars, actual or incipient, whose roots lay in the pre-war past but which developed during the war because wars make men look more critically at their state and accustom them to action in pursuit of political goals.
Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands were relatively stable and united countries. They looked forward to the full restoration of their monarchies and parliamentary institutions. They participated in the war beyond their borders as well as by resistance at home. The Norwegian government had commandeered the Norwegian merchant fleet, 85 per cent of which was outside Norwegian waters at the time of the German invasion; it thus became the largest merchant shipping concern in the world. It was very much in the fight and also comfortably in funds. Contact with Norway was maintained by the so-called Shetland bus which conveyed persons to and from Norway and also several hundred tons of war supplies. Of the smaller but nevertheless appreciable Danish merchant navy over 60 per cent served with the allies. The Dutch also provided fighting men for the allied forces, and the Queen of the Netherlands, who escaped like the King of Norway to London, contributed to the unity and steadfastness of her occupied country by her broadcasts to them.
Belgium’s case was superficially different because of its linguistic and racial divisions and because the king became an object of controversy. He was criticized for surrendering himself into captivity instead of accompanying his government to London, he was suspected (unfairly) of undue partiality for the Germans, and his re-marriage during the war was unpopular. The Germans exploited the differences between Flemings and Walloons (as they had done in the First World War) and exacerbated the social tensions in a country in which the monarchy had become a reflection of division instead of a symbol of unity. After the war the king obtained a popular vote of confidence but by so narrow a margin that he found himself obliged to abdicate within a few days of the resumption of his full functions. Yet here too there was no serious challenge to the country’s political institutions, other than the monarchy. There was, however, in all four of these countries an intensified concern with social questions. The discussion of such questions was a long-established feature of western European political life, but during the war they became more real when different sorts and conditions of men shared their experiences – in fighting the enemy and helping one another, in receiving the same food rations and facing the same firing squads. War made Europe more egalitarian and more leftward inclined.
In eastern Europe this shift to the left occurred in situations in which social reform was barely conceivable, or at any rate not at all likely, without political revolution. Hence the special importance of the communists with their uninhibited attitude to violent revolution, an importance which is in the first instance distinct from the proximity of these countries to the Soviet Union. In the countries which were allied with Germany – the central strip comprising Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria – opportunity did not present itself until the Germans and the governments under their protection began to fail, and when the opportunity came it came not to reformist or revolutionary groups but to the Russian conquerors and the account of what happened belongs to the story of the defeat of Germany and not of European Resistance. In Poland and Czechoslovakia too the decisive factor proved to be not an indigenous Resistance movement but Russian power. Czechoslovakia, less in need of reform than Poland and the other countries of eastern Europe, had a moderate government under Beneš which aimed to pursue a broadly based, middle of-the-road policy in post-war Czechoslovakia and to maintain friendly relations with both Moscow and the western democracies; it succeeded only up to 1948.
The Polish government, established in exile in London, was a right-wing government which feared popular revolution and had every reason to fear the Russians as much as it hated the Germans. Its policy was to wait. It hoped, not unnaturally from its point of view, that the Russians and the Germans would exhaust and maim one another. It aimed therefore to build up a secret army in Poland but not to use it until German and Russian strength had been sapped and the pre-war régime could be restored with British and American help. Still less did it wish to provoke a national rising which would develop on similar lines to Tito’s and leave the London government in exile for ever. Resistance to the Germans was therefore discouraged and until mid-point in the war was conducted almost entirely by Polish Jews and escaped Russian prisoners of war.
The secret army, or Home Army (AK), built up by the London government, was an amalgam of remnants of the old Polish army with bands which came into existence under German rule. Some of these bands were socialist, others consisted of right-wing Nationalists, yet others were affiliated to the Peasant Party. The socialists agreed in 1942 to become part of the AK, and the Peasant Party groups, although on the whole more hostile to the A than friendly to it, accepted its authority the next year. Not all the Nationalist bands joined the AK. Some did so in 1944 after prolonged negotiation; others collaborated with the Germans. There were also left-wing groups which remained separate from the AK. Most of them were socialist and they created a small army of their own in 1944. The Communist Party, which had been harried by pre-war Polish governments and dissolved by Stalin before the war began, was being re-formed by Wladislaw Gomulka but it remained weak until the Russians began to send it arms at the end of 1943. In that year the London government’s waiting policy was upset by the military successes of the Russian armies which destroyed the prospect of a long Russo-German bloodletting and also by a peasant rising in eastern Poland where Himmler, having discovered here the homeland of the ancient Burgundians, was creating a pure German colony – with Volksdeutsche from Rumania who had forgotten the German language. Owing to the AK’s disinclination for risings the credit for supporting this rising against the SS went to the Peasant battalions and also to the communists who were able to score some anti-German successes in one or two areas including the country round Lublin. (Hitler’s idea of reviving a Burgundian kingdom for Himmler was a typical piece of Nazi medievalism. Such schemes, although they may be dismissed as ridiculous extravaganzas, testify also to the hold of the romantic past on the German imagination. Historians – specially Treitschke who was as eloquent as he was eminent – had written excitingly about the way the Teutonic Knights had colonized and controlled eastern lands and had fired a new generation with the zeal to go out and do likewise. But Hitler was not unique in his historical romanticism. Roosevelt toyed with the idea of creating ‘Wallonia’ by putting together parts of Belgium and northern France, Luxembourg, Alsace and Lorraine.)
In south-eastern Europe revolution had freer play. In Greece and Yugoslavia civil war in fact occurred, in Greece hesitantly and ultimately unsuccessfully for the insurgents, in Yugoslavia on a full scale and successfully; in neither with Russian help. Albania, where various Resistance groups united against the Italians but then fell out and started a civil war from which the communists ultimately profited, was shifted from the Italian to the Yugoslav sphere of influence.
In Greece, General Ioannis Metaxas, who had been appointed Prime Minister by the king in 1936 and quickly converted his power into a dictatorship, had been placed in a dilemma by the unsolicited British guarantee of 1939. This guarantee, a promise of aid against Italo-German aggressiveness, ran counter to Metaxas’ policy of relying on Hitler to keep Mussolini away. This policy failed when Mussolini attacked without telling Hitler and so forced Metaxas into a fight which he had neither wanted nor foreseen. By responding stoutly to Mussolini’s ultimatum he made himself a national hero and temporarily united Greek monarchists and republicans, whose feud was the mainspring of Greek politics. But he was slow to accept British aid, which he did not relish, and his sudden death in January 1941 did not entirely remove the obstacles to British collaboration first against the Italians and subsequently against the Germans.
When the brief German campaigns against Greece and Crete ended, the king and his government had disappeared to Egypt leaving behind a political void which was filled by a pro-Axis puppet government, consisting mostly of generals who not implausibly believed that the war was over and won by the Germans. This government had little authority. The country was divided and roughly, sometimes very roughly, administered by German, Italian and Bulgarian occupiers. Away from the towns guerrilla bands began to form in the hills which constitute so much of Greece and make it unattractive to regular military formations. These bands were all predominantly left-wing and republican. Their members were largely uninterested in or contemptuous of the old struggle between royalists and Venizelist republicans and saw in the exile of its protagonists an opportunity to refashion Greek politics on less sterile lines. Few of them were communists, and at first they gave communism little thought, for it seemed hardly conceivable that the Greek Communist Party could play a leading part in Greek affairs.
Founded shortly after the First World War the Communist Party had had a difficult row to hoe. It could make little appeal to the peasants, who formed the bulk of the population, because Venizelos had broken up big estates and given the peasants land of their own. Its anti-clericalism was equally lacking in appeal. Even more damning was its advocacy of separate Macedonian and Thracian states, which it had been forced to adopt by the international communist movement and which was regarded by practically all Greeks as the purest treason. After 1936 it was virtually destroyed by one of the few intelligent and sophisticated policemen to be produced by twentieth-century authoritarianism, Constantine Maniadakis, Minister of the Interior under Metaxas. Maniadakis’ devices included the creation of a bogus Communist Party under his own wing and the publication of his own edition of the communist newspaper Rizospastis to the confusion of all concerned, especially communists. When the war came the party’s principal leaders were either in prison or exile. But in the next three years they prepared to take over the country and came within measurable distance of success.
They did this in disguise. They created the National Liberation Front (EAM) which, with its armed bands (ELAS), became the principal symbol of Greek resistance to the occupiers and, carefully suppressing regular communist propaganda, provided the communist leaders with broad popular support on a basis of patriotic nationalism, calls for unity against the enemy and hopes of social reform after the war. Their aim was to establish their organization as the natural successor to the occupiers and the government of post-liberation Greece. There were three threats to this programme: the legitimate government which would try to return from exile; other patriotic Resistance movements which might thrive sufficiently to challenge EAM; and the British who appeared on the scene unexpectedly in order to organize sabotage of Axis lines of supply to North Africa.
The British military mission (it later became Anglo-American) was both an embarrassment and an opportunity. The leaders of EAM and other Resistance groups were ambivalent about waging war on the occupiers. Many of their followers were filled with a patriotic fury which they wanted to vent in action, but harrying the occupiers meant bringing down reprisals on the innocent country people upon whose goodwill the bands relied for sustenance and who were in any case their compatriots. Reprisals were exceedingly fierce. Hostages were taken and executed and whole villages were wiped out; 1,000 people were killed in a single incident at Kalavryta, 250 women and children were burned to death at Klisura. The total number of hostages executed in Greece has been put at 45,000. In addition the Germans, Italians and Bulgarians executed another 68,000. (But the greatest killer in Greece was famine. Nearly half of the Greeks who died in the war starved.)
The bands had moreover a further reason for avoiding engagements with the occupiers. Each band was suspicious of its neighbours, usually rightly, and did not want to waste its energies and endanger its survival before the day of reckoning which would come when the occupiers withdrew. On the other hand the British mission had arms and golden sovereigns to give away and these precious supplies had to be earned. The price was cooperation with the British against the occupiers. The principal military result was the destruction of the Gorgopotamos railway viaduct, already mentioned – a feat of diplomacy as well as daring, since ELAS and its chief rival EDES were persuaded to work together for the first, and last, time. A joint band of 150 Greeks engaged and destroyed an Italian force while British saboteurs blew up the bridge. Its destruction and the consequent interruption of the German supply line to Africa for a few weeks may have been militarily marginal. On the other hand an accumulation of marginals may be greater than the sum of the parts. Politically the operation had consequences that are easier to define, if contradictory. Its success heartened the Greek communists who began in the next year to construct a major movement of their own. Equally, however, their opponents derived from the same success an assurance of their continued separate existence, thus ensuring that the Greek resistance would not be unified under communist control.
The Anglo-American mission contrived to enlist the bands in further, if separate, activities in 1943 when an extensive railway sabotage plan was put into execution in order to deceive the Germans into expecting an allied landing in Greece rather than Sicily. This plan caused the diversion to Greece of a Panzer division and hampered its return. The Greek communists were also deceived. Thinking that the allies were about to arrive in Greece and that the war was ending, they attacked the anti-communist resistance and so started the first civil war which during the winter of 1943–4 they lost. But their miscalculation was not fatal to them owing to the fortuitous gains which they had already reaped from the Italian surrender to the allies in September 1943. This event gave ELAS all the arms it needed and so made it independent of the Anglo-American mission. It so happened that ELAS predominated in the areas of Italian occupation, and although captured Italian arms were meant to be allocated between all the bands, ELAS was able – as a result of this piece of luck and of some high-paced intrigue – to keep the lot. It became an armed force of about 19,000 effectives, ten times the size of EDES. It had already attacked and destroyed some smaller bands and earlier in 1943 it had captured Colonel Stephanos Saraphis, one of the ablest non-communist leaders, and had persuaded him to become commander-in-chief of ELAS. Saraphis’ ready acceptance, which surprised the communists, showed how far ELAS had established itself as the only band worth belonging to. Its most serious rival was EDES, a group formed by the republican Colonel Napoleon Zervas (its repute was later tarnished when it was joined by some shady right-wing characters seeking to escape the stigma of collaboration with the occupiers, and Zervas himself modified his republicanism partly to please Churchill); but EDES was confined to a small region in the west and as early as July 1943, when the allied mission persuaded the bands to sign an agreement establishing a joint headquarters, this was located at ELAS headquarters. From this year onwards the communists were less concerned with their rivals inside Greece than with the Greek government in exile and its army and navy.
The leaders of EAM aimed to sow division in the military and political ranks of the exiles and above all to delay the king’s return until they could make it impossible. First mutinies in the Greek army occurred in February 1943. The king broadened his government (in Egypt) to the Left, whereupon a number of royalist officers resigned their commissions in protest. In order to assert its authority the Greek government asked the British to arrest these officers. The net result was a diminution of right-wing influence in the army. The king agreed in July to submit the issue of the monarchy to a referendum after the war but, when pressed also to undertake not to return to Greece before the question had been put to the vote, he refused. In this he was strongly supported by Churchill and Roosevelt. Churchill further advised him to refuse a request from EAM for seats in the government. EAM, influenced perhaps by the news that Great Britain had decided to back Tito and his communists in Yugoslavia and by the false hope that the Italian surrender heralded a general Axis collapse, made its first bid for power and opened operations against rival bands. But EDES survived, the war went on and this premature bid contributed to the ultimate defeat of ELAS by sowing dissension in its own ranks and stimulating the puppet government in Athens to recruit anti-communist security forces.
In March 1944 EAM established a provisional government inside Greece and so formally set up a challenge to the government in exile. In April more mutinies – this time in the navy as well as the army in Egypt – occurred and the conservative Prime Minister, Emmanuel Tsouderos, resigned under pressure from his left-wing colleagues. But his successors were no more able than he had been to control the situation and the British had to intervene again. Thus the government in exile disintegrated at the same time as EAM had set up a rival to it. But EAM now changed its tactics and instead of insisting on its own creation as the only legitimate government it entered into negotiations for a share in the government in exile which had again been reconstituted under a new Prime Minister, George Papandreou, the political heir of Eleutherios Venizelos. After murdering Colonel Psaros, the leader of a smaller but not inconsiderable band, AM sent representatives to a conference in Lebanon convoked by Papandreou in order to form a coalition between the exiles and the Resistance organizations. The upshot was a new government which included communists, but some of these feared that Papandreou had outsmarted them and reduced them to a subordinate role instead of the dominant one which they might attain by steering clear of all the politicians in exile. They were, however, under pressure from the Russians to put national and anti-fascist unity before communist power and they even agreed in September that all the bands should be subordinated to the new government and placed under the command of a British general. A few weeks later, in October, when Papandreou and his colleagues moved to Athens on the heels of the retreating Germans, it looked as though he and the British had pre-empted a communist take-over. A small British force followed in December.
But EAM controlled most of Greece outside the capital and in December, very probably on Tito’s advice, it reversed its policy and made a second bid for power. (An alternative but less easily acceptable version is that EAM was provoked into hostilities by the British, so that it might be destroyed. There is evidence for the proposition that the shooting in the main square of Athens which opened the fighting was not begun by EAM.) EAM was without outside help. A Russian mission had gone to Greece in 1944 but reported that the Greek communists were not worth helping. In any case Stalin, as he told the Yugoslav communist Edvard Kardelj at the time, was convinced that the Americans would not allow Greece to be taken over by communists. Accordingly he had agreed to allot Greece to Churchill in return for a free hand in Rumania, a bargain which was sealed when the two of them drew up spheres of influence at Moscow in October 1944. EAM was therefore trying to emulate Tito’s success in winning power for communists without external aid. It began by attacking EDES, whose forces had to be evacuated by the British to Corfu, and openly assumed control of all Greece except a few islands and a small area in the centre of Athens from which the British could not be dislodged. The British, with tacit Russian support (evinced by the appointment of an Ambassador to the Papandreou government) and in spite of fierce criticism in the United States and in Great Britain itself, sent reinforcements and defeated the insurrection after six weeks’ fighting. ELAS was not trained for regular as opposed to guerrilla fighting and its political leaders were probably divided: in some parts of Greece ELAS did not go over to the offensive and there were still those who preferred the tactics of coalition to a coup. The failure of the insurrection was accompanied by communist atrocities which left an indelible mark on a whole generation of Greeks.
In the face of these events Churchill compelled the king to delay his return until it could be legitimated de novo by a plebiscite. The archbishop of Athens was appointed regent while the British defeated EAM and negotiated a truce. A year later, in March 1946, the royalists scored heavily in elections and six months afterwards King George II was summoned back by a popular vote of more than two to one in his favour. The communists then renewed their insurrection with help from Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania. They were not defeated until 1949 when the re-equipment and training of the Greek army by the Americans and the defection of Yugoslavia from the communist block sealed their fate. The communist domination of EAM and ELAS, the bitterness engendered by the atrocities of 1944 and the subsequent onset of the Cold War altered the nature of the political and social struggle which many Greeks had taken to the hills to prosecute in the early days of the war. For Greece the Second World War was an opportunity for change which came and went. Greeks who wanted social change but not communism discovered that they could have both or neither.
One of the many differences between the Greek and Yugoslav Resistance movements was the appearance in Yugoslavia of a commanding figure, Josip Broz, later known to all the world as Tito. No national Resistance fighter inside occupied Europe achieved anything approaching his eminence; outside it only de Gaulle surpassed him. He possessed courage, tenacity, intelligence, personal authority, and organizing experience gained in Moscow and the Spanish civil war (though he did not actually go to Spain). He created the independent communist state of Yugoslavia. He was helped by the divisions and weaknesses of his political adversaries at home, by the disorders of the times, by the terrain of his country and by outsiders – notably the British and Americans and to a small extent the Russians – but of all the elements in his victory his own personality was the outstanding one.
A second major difference between Yugoslavia and Greece was the fact that Tito fought his enemies during the war instead of waiting. This policy brought him into conflict with the other principal Resistance figure, Draza Mihailovič, and eventually earned him the support of the western allies who had begun by backing Mihailovič.
Mihailovič was the accredited representative in Yugoslavia of the government in exile, which conferred on him the rank of general and the titles of Commander-in-Chief and Minister for War. He was also early in the field. But he failed to become a national leader for two main reasons: he was not truly national and he refused to lead. He was an impassioned Serb rather than a Yugoslav, as compared with Tito who, although half Croat and half Slovene, insisted on Serb-Croat cooperation and a federated Yugoslav state. Mihailovič too was reluctant to court disaster for his movement and reprisals for his compatriots by embarking on large-scale operations before the Germans were weakened by outside events. He and his followers, who were called četniks and were mainly former Serb army officers, were ready to undertake limited daring exploits but they had no thought of starting a national rising such as was in the minds and in the teaching of communist leaders. Mihailovič aimed to re-create a regular army against the day of German withdrawal and meanwhile, isolated exploits apart, to wait. In the course of waiting his hostility to Tito and to communism developed to the point where he opted for collaboration with Yugoslavia’s national enemies in order to save it from communism. And in so adjusting his priorities, he destroyed himself.
The beginnings of the communist Resistance movement were small but professional and immediate. Tito began to organize resistance as soon as the Germans invaded Yugoslavia and in spite of the fact that Stalin was at that time still one of Hitler’s allies. He himself moved from Zagreb to Belgrade in May 1941 and was ready with a call for action by the end of June when the German armies attacked the USSR. He had the beginnings of regional organizations, sabotage plans and groups of followers who, although critically short of arms, included some three hundred veterans of the war in Spain. They inherited the traditions of the hajduks, heroes like the pig-breeder Karadjordje who had become the leader of the Serb revolt of 1804 against the Turks and the founder of the modern Serbian state. Although the Communist Party was small (it had about 12,000 full members in 1941) it had non-communist contacts and sympathizers as a result of following the Popular Front policy adopted by the Comintern in 1935. By the autumn of 1941 these partisan groups had grown strong enough to undertake operations in Serbia and establish a headquarters at Užice where they ran an arms factory and a printing press. These successes led to discussions for joint operations with the četniks (some of whom were being attracted to the communist side), and until attacked by the četniks the partisans supplied the četniks with arms from their Užice factory. Mihailovič, however, had been directed by the government in exile, whose grasp of the situation was naturally imperfect, to assume command over the communist partisans. This Tito was neither prepared nor obliged to accept in spite of chidings from Moscow whence Stalin, anxious above all for allied cooperation, was urging him to forget about communist revolution for the time being and concentrate on a common anti-Axis front with all friends of the western allies. Fighting broke out between četniks and partisans. The četniks tried but failed to evict the partisans from Užice and suffered a series of defeats. These events eliminated all possibility of cooperation and induced Mihailovič to accept arms from the Italians to continue the struggle. The immediate gain went to the Germans who took the opportunity to clear Serbia of all Resistance groups.
In the following year the partisans were hard pressed by the Germans and Italians. Hitler had become aware of their potential danger, and they were forced to suspend operations and seek refuge in the mountains of Bosnia and Montenegro. A number defected. But thanks to Tito’s leadership, reinforced by the professionalism of the Spanish war veterans and of former officers of the Yugoslav army who joined the partisans, the movement’ survived, recuperated and re-emerged as a well-ordered army of four brigades. It also began to assume the functions of a civil administration in the areas which it controlled, fixing prices and decreeing social changes as well as keeping order. In November 1942 an Assembly at Bihac foreshadowed the partisans’ claim to become the government of Yugoslavia.
In 1943, when their strength had risen to about 20,000, they were attacked by forces about six times as large, lost half their equipment and a quarter of their men killed in battle or massacred afterwards, but they escaped once more from Bosnia to Montenegro in the spring and back from Montenegro to Bosnia in the summer. Their losses were all the more grievous because the wounded either died or had to be shot until this grim and tragic burden was relieved by British medical supplies and a medical airlift to British hospitals in Italy. Their enemies in these operations were a combination of Germans, Italians, Bulgarians, četniks and ustachi. (The last were organized brigades of toughs who clustered round Pavelič’s court in Croatia in an atmosphere described by Ciano as ‘cowboy’. They massacred Serbs and Jews on a scale which horrified most other Croats; hated the Orthodox church and the Cyrillic alphabet with pathological intensity; and became so corrupt that even Pavelič felt constrained to have two of their leaders shot.)
A few months after their defeat in Montenegro the fortunes of the partisans were transformed by the general Italian collapse. They gained control of most of Croatia including the Dalmatian coast and islands, seized large quantities of Italian arms and were able to recruit and equip an army of 250,000. They were now a formidable force, a nation in arms, and at the end of the year Tito was proclaimed Marshal of Yugoslavia and President of the Council for the Liberation, which was in effect an interim government. The king’s return was to be conditional on a plebiscite in his favour.
For much of this time the outside world knew little about what was going on in Yugoslavia. A first British mission arrived in Montenegro in September 1941 with the dual purpose of getting information and giving such help as could be spared from the scant resources available in North Africa. It was assumed that help would go to Mihailovič, for although the British were already aware of the country’s internal dissensions, they clung to the hope that Mihailovič could unite all opposition to Germans and Italians. Towards the end of the year a British officer who had visited the headquarters of both Mihailovič and Tito advised that no help should be delivered to the former pending the outcome of talks which were then going on between the two (Tito was receiving no aid at this date), but this advice was not followed and Great Britain, partly out of loyalty to the Yugoslav government in London which was an ally, decided to build up Mihailovič by broadcast propaganda and military aid. Then for a year all communication between the British authorities and their man in Yugoslavia was cut by Mihailovič. Among the British counsels were divided, as SOE in London continued to repose in Mihailovič a faith which SOE in Cairo no longer held, but by the end of 1942 Ultra revealed (to the select few entitled to see it) that the two leaders were fighting one another and, during 1943, that Mihailovič was collaborating with the Italians and then with the Germans also. Further emissaries sent to Yugoslavia, owing to the growing importance of the Balkans in overall strategy, told the same story and when the reconciliation which the British (and the Russians) desired was shown to be plainly impossible Great Britain decided to drop Mihailovič and his friends in London (who did not disown him until August 1944) and support Tito. This reversal of policy was influenced by the delayed discovery that Tito could be much more useful than Mihailovič (thus confirming simultaneous Russian arguments that Mihailovič had become no better than a collaborationist) and by the coincidence that a British mission to Tito in May 1943 arrived during a great battle in which 20,000 partisans, although defeated, proved that they were a disciplined army under skilled command and not a random collection of guerrilla bands. This engagement also provided first hand proof of the četniks’ collaboration with the Germans as well as the Italians.
From this point aid to Tito became the largest item in the Anglo-American aid programme. A naval and air base was established on the island of Vis with a small naval detachment and a squadron of Hurricanes. Another air base was opened at Bari for operations in the Balkans. Yugoslav pilots and tank crews were trained in Egypt, and Yugoslav prisoners in Italy were collected and formed into a Yugoslav legion. Yugoslav wounded were flown to hospitals in Italy. Great quantities of equipment were sent to Tito, mainly by the Americans – 100,000 rifles, 50,000 machine and sub-machine guns, 1,380 mortars, 630,000 grenades, 700 wireless sets, 175,000 uniforms, 260,000 pairs of shoes. (The first Russian supplies did not arrive until April 1944.) When the Germans launched another major offensive against the partisans in May 1944, allied air forces came to their support, flying 1,000 sorties a day. Later in the year these air forces cooperated with the partisans in attacks on the Germans’ lines of communication and harassed their retreat – in spite of Tito’s suspicions that this cooperation was intended to pave the way for an allied occupation of the Balkans. In London King Peter dismissed Mihailovič and instructed the četniks to put themselves under Tito’s command, but Tito made it clear to Churchill that the king could not return unless recalled by a plebiscite. Mihailovič made a final bid to retrieve his fortunes by an understanding with Pavelič, but the partisans engulfed all opposition and on 20 October 1944 they entered Belgrade. The Russians who had entered the country as allies from the north-east departed again (in accordance with a prior agreement between Stalin and Tito) and Tito ruled unchallenged. For nearly four years the Germans had been obliged to hold down Yugoslavia by force of arms instead of ruling it indirectly through complacent nominees. After the Italian collapse this necessity had cost them a standing force of fifteen divisions. Most of these were German, although they had some help from Bulgarians, četniks and the puppet régime in Belgrade. As the Russians advanced in central Europe the main concern of the Germans was the Russian front bearing down on Yugoslavia from the north-east but their troubles were increased and their forces distracted by the guerrilla fighters who had engineered a national uprising. The human cost to Yugoslavia was a population almost precisely decimated.
The final stage in the transfer of power to the communists was accompanied by some transient formalities. In an attempt to save the monarchy Great Britain forced King Peter to appoint a new Prime Minister, Dr Ivan Subasič, who went to Yugoslavia and concluded in December 1944 an agreement with Tito which provided for an interim regency and a parliament containing pre-1941 parliamentarians (provided they had not collaborated with the enemy) as well as members of the wartime communist assembly. A provisional government, formed in March with Tito at its head, included leaders of other parties, but they did not last long and before the end of the year the monarchy too was formally abolished after elections which the communists could hardly fail to win and did win. Yugoslavia had become a communist state and an independent one, the first since 1917. In this its war fortunes were unique, although the establishment of other communist states in eastern Europe at this time led many people to confound Yugoslavia with these under the generic name of satellites.