Someone had blundered

Richard Lamb

One of the great horrors of the second world war occurred in Austria in the spring of 1945: 70,000 Cossacks and Yugoslays were sent back to Stalin and Tito after they had surrendered to the British. Nearly all the Yugoslays were placed in pits and shot, while the Russians summarily executed a great number of Cossacks and sent the remainder to Siberia without trial, where many died. These massacres are a shocking reflection on British conduct.

Nothing about it came out at the time, and the events did not become public knowledge until Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974 published The Gulag Archipelago, and Nicholas Bethell in the same year took up the tale in The Last Secret. Both books showed that many Cossacks who had been returned to death and imprisonment were not Soviet citizens, and Bethell claimed that British V Corps had defied orders from higher authority by not screening and protecting the non-Soviets and in particular the emigre White Russians. Two BBC tele- vision programmes at mass viewing time blamed Harold Macmillan and Anthony Eden; this caused grief to both statesmen in their final days.

In 1978 Nikolai Tolstoy in Victims of Yalta uncovered a mass of evidence from recently released documents in the Public Record Office. Much indignation was aroused by the vivid official accounts of grim scenes when British soldiers forced the Cossacks with their families at bayonet point on to trains, and how at the handover at Judenberg a number committed suicide by jumping from the bridge into the gorge below. Tolstoy wrote factually and with restraint. It was his first book and he had allowed his editor at Hodder, Scott Rivers, to cut many purple passages.

Seldom has a book had a more dramatic effect. The public believed that British gen- erals, the Foreign Office and Harold Macmillan had behaved inhumanely and that orders from Field Marshal Alexander that only Soviet citizens should be repatri- ated and no force used had been dis- obeyed. In addition Tolstoy established that German officers with the Cossacks had been sent to death at the hands of the Rus- sians in flagrant breach of the Geneva con- ventions about prisoners of war.

In 1979 an article in Encounter revealed the terrible fate of 20,000 anti-communist Yugoslays who, after surrendering to the British, had been handed over to Tito and summarily executed. The prominent Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas asserted that the British cover-up of the massacres was 'profoundly shocking' and that there should be 'a public enquiry' so that those responsible 'should be made to speak'.

In 1981 Tolstoy published Stalin's Secret War and followed it up with an article in Encounter, 'The Klagenfurt Conspiracy', and a further book, The Minister and the Massacres. By now he was well known and in place of the restrained, convincing lan- guage of his first book he threw out wild accusations of conspiracy and treachery. His extravagant language almost destroyed his own case.

The facts are plain. There was a crisis in Austria in May 1945 because it looked as if British and American forces would have to fight against Tito in order to throw Yugoslav troops out of Austria and the Trieste zone of Italy, both of which they had occupied in defiance of an agreement with the Allies. Austria was cluttered with 200,000 German POWs, plus 70,000 sur- rendered Cossacks and Yugoslays. The decks had to be cleared, and on 14 May Alexander ordered that all Soviet citizens amongst the Cossacks should be returned to the Russians but force was not to be used, and that all Yugoslays who had been fighting with the German army should be repatriated 'and they were not to be told of their destination'. Alexander quickly countermanded these orders. Instead he wanted to send all the Yugoslays to Italy, and planned to send the Cossacks to Ger- many. Yet 70,000 Cossacks and Yugoslays were repatriated, many to certain death.

This takes a lot of explaining. Tolstoy's accusation of conspiracy and treachery does not hold water. Still, there must have been ruthlessness, muddle, lack of liaison and probably delay in decoding signals, together with a desire to take the easiest Way out by keeping the Russians and Yugoslays friendly.

Mitchell and Booker describe all the events and come to diametrically contradic- tory conclusions. Mitchell argues cogently that Alexander had ordered the exact Opposite of what occurred and that V Corps' behaviour was 'an unambiguous act of insubordination'. Booker emphatically denies that V Corps disobeyed orders and claims what happened was 'a military necessity'. Lord Aldington was head of staff at V Corps and issued the fatal repa- triation orders, so his reputation depends on whether one believes Mitchell or Book- er.

The controversy was simmering when Tolstoy brought it to the boil in 1988. Nigel Watts was castigating Aldington for his conduct in 1945 solely because of an unpaid insurance claim by Sun Alliance. Tolstoy offered to write a pamphlet for Watts and expressed himself:

Lord Aldington has been repeatedly charged ... with being a major war criminal whose activities merit comparison with those of the worst butchers of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

The pamphlet was so violent that Alding- ton had little alternative but to sue for libel. Then in an almost unprecedented move Tolstoy rashly asked to be joint defendant, convinced that in court he could establish the correctness of his allegations, little realising that a court of law is an unsuitable place for establishing historical truth.

Thus the famous libel case took place in 1989 and both books follow it closely. Mitchell says that the defence were severe- ly handicapped by not having access to Public Record files which were available to Aldington, and is positive that the lack of V Corps' war diaries and one crucial For- eign Office file prevented Tolstoy's counsel in his cross-examination of Aldington establishing that Alexander at the moment of the massacres wanted to move the Cos- sacks to Germany and the Yugoslays to Italy, and that Aldington was well aware of this when he issued the fatal orders. In this context Mitchell makes devastating use of letters between Aldington and his friends Lord Younger (Secretary of State for Defence) and Lord Trefgarne (Minister of State for Defence Procurement). During further court hearings following the libel case the judge ordered that this correspon- dence should be produced, and the letters strongly suggest that at Aldington's request key files were removed from the PRO at Kew and taken to Westminster solely for Aldington's convenience provided that 'the source of the documents should not be revealed'. Tolstoy, who applied for the doc- uments at Kew, was told repeatedly that they were not available. Mitchell claims that if skilfully handled by the defence these files might have led to a different ver- dict.

The Earl of Portsmouth, who sponsored Mitchell's book after mainstream publish- ers had rejected it on account of possible legal consequences, tells me he is pressing for a public enquiry and that he and his local Conservative MP, Andrew Hunter, expect to interest William Hague. Of course the present government cannot take action over alleged misdeeds by the former administration. Still, if Hague will interest himself in this the whole affair may come to the boil again.

Nothing can erase the British feeling of guilt over the massacres. Aldington was awarded £1.5 million damages. He has received nothing, although his costs have been paid by Sun Alliance. Tolstoy is now a discharged bankrupt but his successful career as a writer has been seriously inter- rupted. Although Tolstoy lost in court, the general opinion of the media is that he has won the war. Both these well argued and readable books can be recommended to anyone who wants to take sides and wallow in the intricate detail of these shameful events.