The Second World War (81 page)

An even more murderous element in the civil war developing in Yugoslavia came from the virulently anti-Serb and anti-semitic Croat Ustaše. The Croat state of Ante Paveli
was a loyal ally of the Germans, and the Ustaše brought a reign of terror to the region. Well over half a million Yugoslavs were killed in the factional fighting between rival forces during the war.

Other German massacres followed further skirmishes, including several thousand Serb civilians shot to meet the reprisal quotas. Some German officers began to see the stupidity of their policy, which targeted only the people who had not fled and who therefore had nothing to do with the attacks on their men. After some 15,000 people had been killed, and with few Jews and ‘Gypsies’ left to shoot, the reprisal quotas started to dwindle, without the knowledge of Berlin.

The drastic reduction in the numbers of their imprisoned hostages began in March 1942, when a large gas van arrived in Belgrade. Some 7,500 Jews in the camp at Semlin were asphyxiated while being driven through the Serbian capital to a mass grave dug by a shooting range on the edge of the city. The German ambassador was deeply embarrassed by the conspicuous way in which such measures were carried out, but on 29 May 1942 the head of the security police felt able to boast to Berlin that ‘
Belgrade was the only great city
of Europe that was free of Jews.’

Warfare in Yugoslavia became increasingly cruel as the Germans launched one offensive after another into the Bosnian mountains. Partisan wounded taken by German troops were crushed to death with tanks. Tito organized his forces into thousand-strong brigades, but was wise enough
not to attempt conventional military tactics. Discipline was strict, and no fraternizing was allowed between the men and the large number of young women fighting in their ranks. By the autumn of 1942, Tito’s partisans had virtual control in their mountainous region extending across western Bosnia and eastern Croatia, and he set up his headquarters in the town of Biha
, after expelling the Ustaše.

Having recognized the royalist Yugoslav government-in-exile in London, the British provided aid to Mihailovi
, who was its appointed representative. Moscow did not object, since it too formally recognized the Yugoslav government. But during 1942 Ultra intercepts and other reports indicated that Tito’s forces were attacking the Germans, while the
tniks waited. Attempts by SOE liaison officers parachuted in to persuade the rival resistance movements to work together had little success. So as Allied interest in the Mediterranean increased, once the Germans had been vanquished in North Africa, the British made contact with Tito.

The Germans, afraid of a landing in the Balkans and determined to protect the coast and secure their mineral supplies, launched new offensives with their own forces and Italian troops. Tito conducted a fighting retreat into Montenegro, narrowly avoiding encirclement on the Neretva River. With his forces largely intact, and soon with British aid parachuted in or landed on secret airstrips, the strength of Tito’s partisans grew rapidly. Mihailovi
, abandoned by the Allies after failing to carry out specifically requested actions, was bound to lose the parallel civil war.

Albania, to the south, was still occupied by Italian troops. Abbas Kupi, a supporter of King Zog who had fled when Mussolini invaded the country in 1939, started resistance on a small scale in the spring of 1941. Once the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Albanian Communists led by Enver Hoxha began their own much more aggressive campaign in the south. As in Yugoslavia, the British decided to aid the Communists on the grounds that they were fighting harder. Little support was provided to Abbas Kupi, to the disgust of the British SOE liaison officers, and eventually Hoxha’s Communists were able to eliminate their rivals.

Greece was of much greater interest to the British. Churchill was a firm supporter of King George II and was not prepared to surrender the country to the Communist EAM-ELAS guerrilla movement. Embarrassingly for the British, however, many monarchists collaborated with the Germans and Italians out of a mixture of anti-Communism and opportunism. The authoritarian rule of General Metaxas had exacerbated anti-monarchist feelings, and the small Greek Communist Party rapidly extended its influence.

The Axis looting of the country, compounded by an incompetent Italian occupation, left the Greeks to suffer a terrible famine in the winter of 1941.
The ruthless Communist leader, Aris Veloukhiotis, began to assemble a partisan force in the Pindus Mountains in 1942. His main rival was General Napoleon Zervas, a jolly, bearded character who formed EDES (the Greek National Republican League), a left-of-centre, non-Communist organization. Zervas’s forces were much smaller and concentrated in Epirus in the north-west. As Communist strength grew, they became isolated from the rest of Greece, while other small resistance groups, such as EKKA, were eventually taken over by the Communist-controlled EAM-ELAS.

Two British SOE officers, parachuted into Greece in the summer of 1942, made contact after many difficulties with both Zervas and ELAS. Their main task was to organize an attack on the main railway line which brought supplies south from Germany for Rommel’s Panzerarmee in North Africa. They managed to persuade Zervas and ELAS to unite in an operation to blow up the great Gorgopotamos railway bridge. While the partisans assaulted the Italian positions at each end, a demolition team flown in from Cairo attached large charges of plastic explosive to the piers which supported the bridge. It was one of the most successful sabotage missions of the war, cutting the railway line for four months.

In March 1943, German forces and the SS began rounding up 60,000 Greek Jews, mainly from the city of Salonika where their large community had existed for hundreds of years. Although they sheltered the few escapees, the Greek resistance were unable to stop the railway traffic taking them to concentration camps in Poland, where many were subjected to the most horrific medical experiments.

After the rare example of co-operation between ELAS and EDES in the Gorgopotamos operation, SOE liaison officers found themselves in a minefield of political rivalries as Greece too became embroiled in a civil war between guerrilla groups. Zervas was much easier to work with, but the British had to arm ELAS as well for Operation Animals. This was a campaign of attacks in the summer of 1943 prior to the invasion of Sicily. Combined with the deception plan Operation Mincemeat, which consisted of dropping the body of what looked like a Royal Marines officer with important despatches off the southern Spanish coast, the objective was to persuade the Germans that the Allies were about to land in Greece. Like all effective campaigns of misinformation, it played to Hitler’s own idea of what his enemy’s intentions were and strengthened his belief that the British plan was to invade southern Europe via the Balkans. His Austrian background made him obsessive about the region. A panzer division and other forces were consequently diverted to Greece just before the landings in Sicily.

The ELAS leadership were divided over how to deal with the British. They wanted the support and legitimacy which an alliance with the
Allies would bring, but they were intensely suspicious of British motives. In August 1943 partisan delegates were flown out to attend a meeting in Cairo. The Communists, like most Greeks at the time, were opposed to the restoration of the monarchy. They argued that King George should not return to the country unless a plebiscite permitted it. The Greek government-in-exile and the British, at Churchill’s insistence, refused to accept this and unfairly blamed SOE for allowing such a political stand-off to develop. The ELAS partisan representatives returned with a grim resolve to defeat their rivals, establish a provisional government and pre-empt any British attempt to reinstall the monarchy.

The resistance on Crete, however, presented few political problems. Most of the guerrilla leaders known as
kapitans
accepted British guidance and, although not monarchist, were strongly anti-Communist. Only insignificant groups in the east of the island supported EAM-ELAS.

In France the vast majority of the country, including republicans, had welcomed Pétain’s armistice with relief. They had no idea that German plans at that stage were to reduce France to the level of a ‘
tourist country
’ and to take Alsace and Lorraine for the Reich, thus forcing its men to serve in the German army.

Keeping their heads down, the French carried on with their daily lives as far as was possible in the new circumstances, although this was extremely hard for the wives of the 1.5 million prisoners of war still held in Germany. The depredations of occupation, with the Germans taking a considerable proportion of French agricultural output for themselves, produced great hardship in the towns and cities, especially for those with no relations in the countryside. The average height of boys dropped by seven centimetres and of girls by eleven centimetres in the course of the war.

Small resistance groups began to publish underground newspapers towards the end of 1940, in many cases inspired by de Gaulle’s broadcasts from London declaring that the fight continued. They included people from different backgrounds and parties. At this stage, few acts of overt resistance against the Germans took place. Only after the invasion of the Soviet Union were armed attacks carried out by followers of the French Communist Party. Having lost face and many members during the Nazi–Soviet pact, it now began to develop an effective underground organization.