`WHO IS KILLING THE MOST GERMANS?'

Fitzroy Maclean defends his,

and Churchill's, war record in Yugoslavia

RECENT REPORTS from the Balkans lend relevance and topicality to Noel Mal- colm's intriguing article on 'How Britain failed Yugoslavia' (The Spectator, 11 July) and on Winston Churchill's and indeed my own role there. It is, however, also neces- sary to recall the situation as it was at the time, as well as some of the events of the Intervening half-century.

The directive I received from Mr Churchill in the summer of 1943 was quite clear. 'Your job,' he told me, 'is to find out who are killing the most Germans and how we can help them to kill more.' This may sound a rather brutal oversimplification, but remember that in 1943 the war was not Yet won and German casualties were still a relevant consideration.

My own experiences on reaching Yugoslavia, those of Sir William Deakin, who after being dropped there at the end of May had from the start been involved in heavy fighting against the Germans, and those of the other members of my mission, taken in conjunction with the reports from our missions to Mihailovic, left me in no doubt whatever that Tito's Partisans were (and had long been) killing far more Ger- mans than Mihailovic's Cetniks had ever done. These, it should be remembered, had long since reached what the Prime Minister called 'an accommodation with the enemy', of which enemy signals inter- cepted at the time and other German doc- uments now available provide irrefutable proof.

It was on these grounds that in Novem- ber 1943, two months after my first arrival in Yugoslavia, I recommended in my so- called 'blockbuster' report that we should urgently transfer our support from the Cetniks to the Partisans, who had up to then received no Allied support at all. In so doing, I was acutely conscious of the glaring anomaly that for two whole years the Special Operations Executive, brought into being to 'set Europe ablaze', had somehow managed to ignore what was probably the most effective resistance Movement of the second world war.

In making my recommendation, which I repeated verbally to Mr Churchill, I emphasised that Tito was a Moscow- trained communist and could therefore be expected to establish a communist regime in Yugoslavia on taking power there, which to my mind he was bound to do once the war was over. In reply the Prime Minister asked me whether it was my intention to make my home in Yugoslavia after the war and, on being told that it was not, said that he didn't propose to live there either and should we not therefore leave the Yugoslays to work their political future out for themselves.

It was, so far as I know, on this basis, as well as in the light of the far wider range of information available to the Govern- ment and Chiefs of Staff, that the decision was taken to drop Mihailovic and give all available support to Tito.

Mr Malcolm suggests that some of the information in my report concerning the relative strengths of Cetniks and Partisans and Cetnik collaboration with the enemy may have been inaccurate. I have, on the whole, been struck by the extent to which my conclusions on both subjects are borne out by the information from German and

Unlettered

A reader received this circular to Chief Education Officers from the Depart- ment of Education and Science, describ- ing national rules for testing the English of 14-year-old children in secondary schools:

RULES FOR DETERMINING SUBJECT AND PROFILE COMPONENT SCORES

Legend: TA = Teacher Assessment AT = Attainment Target PC = Profile Component English Step 1: Determining the PC scores a. For PC1 (Speaking and listening): The PC score is the TA score.

b. For PC2 (Reading): The PC score is the NC Test score.

c. For PC3 (Writing):

First examine the constituent AT scores, based on the NC Test results and the TA result in the case of AT4/5: — If the TA in AT4/5 (Presentation) is at level 7 and the NC Test result for AT3 (Writing) is at level 8, then PC score is the AT3 NC Test score;

— if the TA in AT4/5 is not at level 7,

but is higher than level 4, then the PC

score is worked out as follows: AT3 NC test score x 8 PLUS AT4/5 TA score x 2 Divide THIS TOTAL by 10.

— if the NC Test result for ATs 4 and 5 is at or below level 4; the PC score is worked out as follows:

AT3 NC Test score x 8 PLUS AT4 NC Test score PLUS AT5 NC Test score Divide THIS TOTAL by 10.

Step 2: Determining the subject score The subject score is worked out as fol- lows: PC1 PLUS PC2 x2 PLUS PC3 x2 Divide THIS TOTAL by 5 If you have an example of a crass, illiter- ate, ignorant, irrelevant or embarrassing letter or notice from a company or public body, send a copy to Unlettered, The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London, WC1N 2LL. £10 for each one printed. other sources now available. Any figures we received from the Partisans we natural- ly took with a grain of salt; nor could it ever be easy to reach an accurate estimate of the strength of a resistance movement in enemy-occupied country, usually on the move and much of it underground. As regards mutual charges of collaboration, it is surely not realistic to compare, as Mr Malcolm does, a single casual conversation which took place between Germans and Partisan officers authorised to negotiate an exchange of prisoners and concerned with purely hypothetical events, with the Cetniks' known readiness to place whole units under enemy command for pro- longed periods.

For my own part, I have no doubt what- ever that, in the circumstances, the War Cabinet's decision was the right one. Writ- ing half a century later, with the benefit, for what it is worth, of hindsight, Mr Mal- colm chooses to blame on it everything that is happening in the Balkans today. His reasons for doing so strike me as totally unconvincing.

Attempting to look into the future, I suggested as early as 1943 that Tito might, in the long run, prove less amenable than the Russians had reason to expect. In my experience, he displayed an independence of spirit and a resentment of Soviet atti- tudes, which, in the light of two instructive years spent before the war in Stalin's Moscow, I found not only refreshing but highly significant. As in fact they were. Historically, Tito's decision to defy Moscow in 1948 and his subseqpnt sur- vival were at least as important as anything he did in the war. They marked the first crack in the Soviet monolith. Indeed, it could be argued that they set off the train of events which ultimately led to the disin- tegration of the Soviet empire.

While attacking Churchill's decision to back Tito, Mr Malcolm does not, for his part, seem to have worked out the implica- tions of any alternative policy. The Gov- ernment's chief reason far dropping the Cetniks was the impossibility, despite the best efforts of the British officers attached to them, of inducing them to offer active resistance to the Germans. In spite of this, we could, I suppose, have continued to support them, however ineffective, to the exclusion of the extremely effective Parti- sans. Or we could have supported both, and backed both sides equally in what was already a civil war. Both these courses (however crazy) were certainly considered at the time. But, quite apart from dimin- ishing Yugoslavia's potential contribution to the war effort, either would inevitably have reacted disastrously on our relations with Yugoslavia once Tito took power, as, to my mind, he was bound to. Indeed, as I pointed out at the time, in what I intended as a reductio ad absurdum, if we had really been determined to stop Tito taking power, we would have needed to employ more than the 20 divisions the Germans had used — scarcely a practical proposi- tion in 1945. Moreover, the attendant civil war, complete with 'ethnic cleansing', would in all probability have been even worse and less controllable than what is happening today.

In the event, apart from the immediate post-war period, our relations with Yugoslavia continued uniformly good for more than 40 years, and in 1947 and 1948 memories of our wartime relationship undoubtedly encouraged Tito to take a tougher line with the Russians than he might otherwise have done.

For all its bizarre innovations, no one could claim that the system of government which the Yugoslays, under Tito's aegis, `worked out for themselves' was a particu- larly good one. At the start, there was undoubtedly much repression, mostly directed against those suspected of sympa- thising with Moscow. But, by the same token, Tito's regime entirely lacked the most objectionable characteristic of most communist regimes, namely subservience to Moscow. Indeed, until quite recently Moscow continued to provide the salutary external threat apparently needed to keep Yugoslays united. During his life- time, Tito relied on this and on popular memo- ries of his wartime leadership to hold his country together. Rather surprisingly, it stayed together for a dozen years after his death, remaining an open, relatively pros- perous, reasonably happy country, which, as millions of British tourists saw for them- selves, compared quite favourably with many other countries and even more with what is left of it today.

Under one system or another, each with its own relative disadvantages, Yugoslavia existed for around 70 years. It would, I think, be hard to argue that the 40-odd years for which Tito (or, indirectly, Win- ston Churchill) can be held responsible were the worst of these.