BRITONS IN THE BALKANS

After Fitzroy Maclean's death, Noel Malcolm

on the effect, for good and ill, of young adventurers now gone, or grown old

REBECCA WEST used to tell a story about an aristocratic lady who asked her, towards the end of the second world war, `Can you tell me how I can get my son sent out to Tito? I'm told it's the thing for a young man to do if he wants to get on.'

For some young men — notably the Scottish diplomat-turned-soldier, Fitzroy Maclean, who died this month — a visit to the Balkans was certainly a step on the road to fame and fortune. Those who had a 'good war' behind enemy lines could have a very good war indeed, particularly if they went on to publish vivid accounts of their adventures. Good fortune and colourful writing explain some of the glam- our which accumulated round these Balkan adventurers; but they are not the whole explanation. The plain truth is that the British officers who were dropped into the Balkans formed a constellation of indi- vidual talents which it would be hard to match in any other theatre of the second world war.

Apart from Sir Fitzroy, they included the young Oxford historian Bill Deakin (now Sir William), the future minister Julian Amery (now Lord Amery), the dashing young soldiers David Smiley, Billy McLean and Billy Moss, the actor Antho- ny Quayle, the Himalayan mountaineer Bill Tilman, the young intellectual Alan Hare (future chairman of the Financial Times), the journalist Peter Kemp, the reg- ular officers Eddie Myers and Monty Woodhouse (later a Tory MP), Winston Churchill's son, Randolph, and (at a late stage) Evelyn Waugh, the future diplomat and ambassador to France Reginald Hib- bert (now Sir Reginald), the journalist (and later left-wing authority on Africa) Basil Davidson, the classicist (now Profes- sor) Nicholas Hammond, and, if Crete can be counted at least politically as part of the Balkans, the young adventurer Xan Field- ing and the exuberant latter-day Byron, Patrick Leigh Fermor.

This list is nothing like a complete roll- call, of course, but it happens to contain most of the names of those who later wrote books about their Balkan experi- ences. The literary legacy of this corner of the second world war is not the least extraordinary thing about it. Oddly, one person who has never set down his memo- ries of the war in print is the most gifted writer of them all, Patrick Leigh Fermor; but his most famous exploit, the kidnap- ping of a German general in Crete, was fully described by his friend Billy Moss in his book III-met by Moonlight. Some, on the other hand, have written more than one book covering their Balkan experi- ences — such as Julian Amery, whose account of the war in Albania, Sons of the Eagle, richly deserves reprinting. And the flow of writings has barely halted over half a century: both Peter Kemp's autobiogra- phy and Sir Reginald Hibbert's account of the Albanian guerrilla war came out with- in the last five years.

Any readers who work their way through a whole shelf of these books will begin to feel that each new volume they open takes them back into a world they know well: places recur, characters reap- pear, and the entire atmosphere of this special type of Balkan warfare becomes hauntingly familiar. In some cases, there are so many overlapping accounts involv- ing the same central figures that the expe- rience is rather like reading one's way around other much-written-about group- ings such as Bloomsbury — though the setting here has caves instead of drawing- rooms, and it is bridges rather than liter- ary theories which get demolished.

The only group of officers which could be described as a coterie was the one which gathered intermittently at Tara, a house in Cairo presided over by an exiled Polish countess. Cairo was — before the taking of southern Italy — the base for all actions mounted by SOE (Special Opera- tions Executive) in the Balkans, so it was to Cairo that these adventurers would return between missions. At Tara, the reg- ular residents were the two young Etonian officers David Smiley and Billy McLean, and the three daredevils who operated in Crete, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Xan Fielding and Billy Moss. Between these men a spe- cial camaraderie developed. But the social world of the young officer class was a small one, and there were plenty of other friend- ships and connections linking officers in the Balkans. Julian Amery, for example, was an old school-friend of Smiley and McLean, and when he landed in Albania the first officer he met there was one of his closest friends from Oxford, Alan Hare.

Such interlinkings may give the impres- sion that the method of recruitment was the old school tie. In fact, most of those who got these jobs did so because of their own special abilities. Smiley and Billy McLean, for example, had already directed irregular warfare in Abyssinia and the Sudan; Amery had been organising Albani- an resistance from the British embassy in Belgrade; Kemp, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, had been conducting commando raids on Brittany; and Tilman's request to go to a mountainous Balkan country was not unreasonable, given that he was a mountaineer of worldwide repute. (In Albania, to keep himself fit, he would climb the local mountains before breakfast — causing dismay and exhaustion to his Partisan guards, who had been given strict orders not to let him out of their sight.) Bill Tilman was untypical in one respect, however: he was already in his late thirties, which made him, by the standards of most British liaison officers, an old man. From all the accounts of these wartime adven- tures, and from the photographs which so many of them contain (a Leica seems to have been an essential piece of equip- ment), the most striking thing to emerge is the sheer youth of the participants. Most were in their mid-twenties; some looked like undergraduates; and even Fitzroy Maclean, promoted to brigadier for his mission to Tito, was only 32 years old.

Their youthfulness explains why so many of them are only now reaching the ends of their lives, more than half a century later. And it explains why so many of them sur- vived. Not only did they have the physical strength and energy of young men, they also had the ability to learn new tricks, unlearn- ing some of the things they had had drummed into them at staff college. And at the same time they could still enjoy one of the privileges of youth: an indulgence in game-playing and swashbuckling. Both local adaptation and role-playing were combined in their choice of dress. In Albania, Billy McLean wore jodhpurs and a red cummer- bund, while David Smiley sported Albanian sandals, corduroy trousers and a white fez; in Crete, Patrick Leigh Fermor wore an embroidered jacket, riding-breeches, long black boots and a maroon cummerbund from which there protruded an ivory-han- dled revolver and silver dagger. As his friend Billy Moss recalled, 'Paddy did his utmost to keep up appearances . . . "I like them to think of me as a sort o' duke," he explained, striking a Byronic pose.'

Just how far the methods of irregular warfare diverged from those of the staff college was made clear to Smiley and McLean when their camp in the Albanian mountains was joined by Brigadier Trotsky Davies, a splendid, red-faced, bull-necked regular army officer twice their age. (The name 'Trotsky', a source of great puzzle- ment to the Communist Partisans, was a nickname he had been given at Sandhurst for being difficult and tolshie'.) To the amazement of the two younger officers, Davies brought with him the complete staff and equipment of a regular brigade headquarters, including camp furniture and an NCO with a typewriter.

His first complaint was about the absence of 'stand-to': a textbook proce- dure at military camps which involves mounting an armed guard before dawn and after dusk to repel enemy attacks. In future, he announced, there would be stand-to at one hour before dawn — and, by the way, what time was dawn? Smiley and McLean had no idea; they were not in the habit of getting up that early.

A soldier of Trotsky Davies's generation would assume that his job was to make irregular warfare similar in many ways to the regular variety; he would also suppose that there was a hierarchy of command, with all the locals treated as auxiliary `other ranks'. Today, when soldiers consid- er operations behind enemy lines, their first thoughts are probably about SAS-style exploits involving small units of utterly self-reliant men, who carry all their own supplies and have little or no contact with the local population.

But irregular war in the Balkans lay somewhere between those two extremes. These British officers certainly had to be tough and mobile; yet at the same time they always depended on local people, not only for military support, but also for food, shelter, transport (mules were vital: no one could live for long out of a rucksack) and intelligence.

When the surrounding population was sympathetic, as it was in most of Greece and many parts of Yugoslavia and Albania, there was little that could not be arranged with the outlay of a few gold sovereigns. (Sovereigns were the essential lubricant of all these British operations; some of them came from the Bank of England in boxes with Arabic markings, untouched since they had been prepared for Lawrence of Arabia during the first world war.) Houses could be rented in villages, mules and muleteers hired for a whole season, and peasants sent off into the local towns to buy large quantities of food and other sup- plies under the noses of the Germans.

It is their contact with the local people which provides so much of the atmosphere of the officers' later accounts. The old tra- ditions of courtly hospitality which they met with in the remotest mountain villages charmed and impressed them: a peasant might kill his last chicken to feed his visi- tors. Throughout the Balkans, men were reverting to the codes of behaviour of their traditional mountain fighters. Such behaviour included bravery, endurance and strict rules of personal honour; but it could also involve wholesale thieving, as the British officers noticed when half their precious parachute drops of supplies (especially the one containing gold sovereigns) went missing within minutes of hitting the ground.

As the officers also discovered, traditions of fighting which had evolved through gen- erations of highway robbery and occasional attacks on Ottoman gendarme posts were not perfectly adapted to the requirements of guerrilla war against the Wehrmacht. Without people such as David Smiley in Albania and Eddie Myers in Greece to plan the operations, badger the local leaders for support and plant the explosives themselves, many of the most important sabotage oper- ations against the Germans would never have been carried out.

The military and psychological problems of dealing with touchy local warriors were bad enough. But a far more serious worry overshadowed the activities of all the British officers: the danger of local politi- cal divisions between Communist and non- Communist resistance forces, and the ensu- ing threat of civil war. This problem seems to have taken most of the visiting British officers unawares, even though it loomed large over all the Balkan countries.

The general pattern was the same in each case. There was a Communist force (known as 'Partisans' in Yugoslavia and Albania, and by the acronym `Elas' in Greece): this had a secretive leadership which usually tried to camouflage its Com- munist intentions, and in some cases took control of other resistance forces by invit- ing them to join a so-called Popular Front. The Partisan leaders received encourage- ment and instructions from Moscow, but no physical support; they had to court the British for badly needed supplies of ammu- nition and equipment, while never forget- ting that Britain was an 'imperialist' power and therefore their long-term enemy.

On the other side of the political divide were various nationalist forces of a more traditional kind. In Serbia there was Gen- eral Mihailovic, who stood for the restora- tion of the royal (and Serb-dominated) government of Yugoslavia; in Greece there was General Napoleon Zervas, a well- known figure of the military Right; and in Albania there were a number of anti-Com- munist chieftains, of whom the most impor- tant was the northern clan leader Abas Kupi. One thing which all these men had in common was that they stood for the preser- vation of the old social order. This meant that they did not want to see the large-scale devastation of the countryside which would be caused by a prolonged uprising and mas- sive German reprisals. Their strategy was to husband their forces until the expected Allied landing, and only then to rise up en masse against the Germans.

The Communists, on the other hand, rejoiced in the destruction of the old order, and found that a population uproot- ed by war formed an ideal recruiting ground. From an early stage they had decided that their ultimate enemy would be not the Axis soldiers but the local non- Communist forces: these they denounced as 'collaborators', and as they increased their attacks on them, many of the non- Communist local commanders did indeed seek the -otection of the Germans.

The British officers were woefully ill- prepared for their encounter with this political vipers' nest. Of all the British liai- son officers, only Julian Amery had a solid grounding in Balkan politics from the months he had spent at the British embassy in Belgrade. Others who had some political savoir-faire (such as Fitzroy Maclean, who had been a diplomat in Moscow before the war) had no special knowledge of the Balkans. And those peo- ple who had been working at the SOE Balkan desk in Cairo, where much special knowledge was available, were usually too indispensable, or too much of a security risk should they be captured, to be sent in.

Most of the officers were trying to apply one simple rule of thumb, the rule express- ly stated to Fitzroy Maclean by Churchill: `Find out who is killing the most Ger- mans.' They regarded the local politics as a tiresome diversion from real military action, and many of them clung to the idea that if only they could get the rival political leaders round a table, they would be able to make them 'see sense' and work togeth- er. They also had a tendency, at first, to believe what they were told by the Com- munist commanders about such matters as their troop strengths: the figures reported by Fitzroy Maclean, for example, turn out to have been grossly inflated. The innate decency and honesty of these young Britons could at times come dangerously close to naivety; here the special qualities of youth, romantic adventurousness and a public school upbringing became more a liability than an asset.

Some learned their politics the hard way. Peter Kemp, although a man of dis- tinctly right-wing views (he had fought as a volunteer for Franco in the Spanish Civil War), seems to have taken little interest in Balkan politics until he learned that the Communists had deliberately passed on the news of his arrival in Kosovo to the Germans. In Greece, Eddie Myers became increasingly frustrated by the Elas leader- ship, as it refused to co-operate on the demolition of a crucial viaduct and devot- ed its energies instead to eliminating rival resistance movements. And in northern Albania, Smiley, McLean and Amery were hunted down by Communist forces and only just escaped with their lives.

Since British policy abandoned the nationalist forces in Yugoslavia and Albania and gave all its support to the Partisans instead, it is not surprising that many officers who owed their lives to nationalist guerrillas in those countries ended up with a bitter sense of betrayal. Some of them believed that they had lit- erally been the victims of treachery: they noted that some of their crucial signals had not been passed on by the SOE offi- cials in Cairo or Bari, and suspected a Communist plot.

One key figure at the Balkan desk in Cairo was indeed a prominent young Communist, James Klugmann (who after the war became editor of Marxism Today). The more evidence that emerges about Klugmann's work, the more it is clear that

he did have an influence on SOE activities which was much greater than his junior position there might suggest. But there were many reasons for the Allied backing of the Communists in the Balkans, and Klugmann can hardly have tipped the bal- ance on his own.

Reports from the ground were more important: here some of the most favourable comments on the Communists came from people such as Bill Deakin and Fitzroy Maclean, who were certainly not left-wing. Even Trotsky Davies sent in a message rec- ommending support for the Partisans. The only prominent British officer who could be called left-wing was Basil Davidson (a senior Yugoslav Communist described his views as `progressive'), but the decision to back Tito was not made by him alone. Although real suspicions remain about what was going on in Cairo and Bari, the idea that officers in the field were deliberately pursuing a pro- Communist agenda has never seemed plausi- ble. The only fellow-officer to make any claim of this kind was Rowland Winn, who, as Sir Reginald Hibbert has recently revealed, tried to halt Hibbert's career as a diplomat after the war, denouncing him as a dangerous Communist agent.

And yet there remains, if not a political division, then at least the embers of a long- burning resentment between those officers who supported the nationalists and those who helped the Communists to victory. On the one side are the Tara group, together with Lord Amery and several of the surviv- ing officers who served with Mihailovic in Serbia. On the other side have been David- son, Hibbert, Deakin and — until this month — Fitzroy Maclean. As the latter's death reminds us, the ranks of these old soldiers are dwindling now. Their fighting days are over, but the battle of arguments and recriminations continues in print. Here the writing of books, as Clausewitz might have said, has become the conduct of war- fare by other means.