`THE RIVIERA OF HADES'

John Jolliffe contrasts

heroes and villains in the Cossack repatriations after Yalta

THE great fanfare preceding the publica- tion, on Thursday this week, of The Repatriations from Austria in 1945 has trumpeted the verdict that Macmillan Was Innocent — in particular of the charge that he encouraged the surrender of Cossacks to Stalin, and a grisly fate, at the end of the war. Between 15 May and 2 June 1945,

about 41,000 Cossack prisoners and re- fugees were repatriated, and about 26,000 Croats and `Chetniks', i.e. assorted Serbs, Slovenes and Montenegrins.

True, the book's authors — Brigadier Cowgill, Lord Brimelow and Christopher Booker — appear to have succeeded in invalidating some of the more extreme

theories advanced by Nikolai Tolstoy ab- out the guilt of Harold Macmillan and various British officers in one chapter of his otherwise enlightening book Stalin's Secret War, and more obsessively through- out The Minister and the Massacres. But they certainly do not dispel the horrific impression conveyed by many of the de- tails in Tolstoy's first book on the subject, Victims of Yalta, which was praised to the skies by the relevant academic experts whenit was published in 1978. The present book does nothing to defend the imple- mentation of the policy agreed at Yalta in

February 1945. To quote a report made on 8 June by a British Red Cross Supervisor, Miss Jean Campbell Couper,

I think there is already clear evidence that (a) many people who are not Soviet citizens as laid down . . . are being forcibly sent into Russian territory; (b) families are being split up and force used on women and children and (c) sick persons, unfit to travel, have been included in the mass repatriation.

As a result of this the senior Red Cross representative was summoned by General McCreery, Commander of the 8th Army, who gave him an assurance that 'there would be no more forcible repatriation, and no more repatriation at all without proper screening'. With regard to the Yugoslays, this book admits that, among others, 5,140 Serbs had 'boarded the trans- ports' voluntarily because they were under the impression that they were being evacu- ated to Italy, as a result of having been lied to by the British troops to whom they had surrendered and whom they trusted. One notable exception to this was the attitude taken by General Horatius Murray, Com- mander of 6th Armoured Division, who gave the benefit of the doubt to those who surrendered to it, both Cossacks and Chet- niks. He 'had the gates of the camps left open overnight, and most of them dis- appeared'.

Of course, the fault for the inhuman and shameful betrayal of prisoners and civilian refugees lay primarily in the terms reached at Yalta, 'the Riviera of Hades', as Chur- chill presciently described it. Any chance that justice would have much of a look in there was wrecked by Roosevelt, who announced on his arrival that all American forces would be withdrawn from Europe within two years of peace being declared, and secondly that he himself was going home the following Saturday, as it hap- pened, to die. Stalin at once realised that he had only to bide his time in order to get everything he wanted in Eastern Europe, and Churchill was powerless to stop him.

Churchill had the gravest doubts about trusting Stalin's word about free elections after the war, and even reflected gloomily on his return from Yalta to London that he was trusting Stalin in much the same way as Chamberlain had trusted Hitler, however different the context. Yet he received a telegram from Stalin a month later, in reply to an inquiry about British PoWs liberated by the advancing Russians, that 'there are no longer any English prisoners in our camps — they are en route for

Odessa and the voyage home'. After that date, whatever anxieties Eden may rightly have suffered on this point in the previous July, there was no validity in the excuse often advanced that if we didn't hand over the Cossacks British prisoners might be endangered.

The form in which this book has been produced makes it formidably difficult to read. Its sonorous sub-title, 'The Report of an Inquiry', pompously ignores the fact that almost every work of serious non- fiction could be described in the same terms. Its character lies somewhere be- tween normal publishing and samizdat. The story is told through a multitude of documents, including political and military orders, though whether or not any have been quoted selectively or misleadingly would take almost as long to establish as the authors have spent on their inquiry. Its value as a source-book is also greatly (and incomprehensibly) reduced by the absence of an index, though the last third of the text, which consists of a summary of Key Papers, is more digestible and less confus- ing than the earlier chapters, in which the narrative, where it appears at all, brings back unhappy memories of the denser passages of Livy. The chapter of 'Conclu- sions' which immediately precedes it, though useful as a résumé of the authors' views, contains some special pleading and lame justifications which are sometimes unconvincing.

For example, one main conclusion is that the whole dreadful story falls into place if it is taken back up the chain of military command, from Division to Corps, in this case 5 Corps; from 5 Corps to 8th Army; from 8th Army to 15 Army Group; and thence finally to Field Marshal Alexander, Supreme Allied Commander, at Caserta. We are asked to believe that the entire process of repatriation was carried out because Alexander needed to deploy the 25,000 troops in 5 Corps in readiness to expel Tito and his army from Austria, if and when he entered it and tried to incorporate parts of that country into a `Greater Carinthia' under his own rule. And that to make this possible, tens of thousands of surrendered prisoners and civilian refugees, many of them entirely innocent, had to be sent back to their doom, to which many of them preferred suicide.

If this strange hypothesis is correct, why on earth was it not put forward by Harold Macmillan when he was repeatedly ques- tioned on the matter by his official biog- rapher Alistair Home, with whom he was on the friendliest terms? It seems incon- ceivable that Macmillan could have been unaware of such a requirement on the part of the Alexander, who had sent him as his political adviser to Klagenfurt to give advice on this very subject, namely the problem of Tito and Austria. And why did he three times refuse to explain it (or anything else) to Nikolai Tolstoy when he was at work on Victims of Yalta, thus leading Tolstoy to the very natural conclu- sion that he had something to hide? Mac- millan was not a disobliging man, and one of the great pleasures of his later years was to enlighten younger generations about the past. One of the later chapters of this book is called 'The Ordeal of Harold Macmil- lan', which to put it mildly as a minor one compared with that of the repatriated, and which, if these authors are right, was entirely self-inflicted.

However many documents they quote (and they have certainly worked hard at collecting them) the authors make no attempt to disprove the all-important fact that shameful policies were followed by the Allies even after the end of the war, the excuse now being the need to stop Tito in Austria, and that they were implemented in an inhuman and above all quite unneces- sary fashion by those lower down the chain of command, nearly all of whom preferred to stick ruthlessly to the terms of the Yalta agreement (and even to go beyond them) rather than to the terms of the Geneva Convention on the rights of prisoners of war.

Of course it is easier to see this in a book-lined room 45 years later than it was in the starving chaos of Austria in 1945, with the threat of a quite unpredictable Soviet army on the rampage only a few miles away. Without military discipline, heaven knows, the Allies would not have defeated the Nazis. On the other hand, the blind obeying of orders to commit crimes against humanity was not looked on with favour at the Nuremberg trials, and some of the British officers can count themselves lucky that they never had to face a similar tribunal. It remains astonishing that the great humanity shown by General Murray and, belatedly, by General McCreery, was so widely lacking in many others. The strong impression left by this book is that, if those who have been technically exoner- ated by the laborious findings of its compil- ers think they have anything to congratu- late themselves on, they should think again.

The Repatriations from Austria in 1945. Sinclair-Stevenson, 2 vols.- £19.95 and f24.95.