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By Root 960 0

comfort, covering some 2300 miles in a flight of over 11 hours, a proportion of which was at over 11,000 ft., and there he was, as fresh as paint, drinking wine on top of two previous whiskies and 2 cigars!!” In Cairo, Churchill held significant conversations with his former historical researcher, the Oxford don William Deakin, now an SOE officer handling Yugoslavia. Deakin described the modest help being dispatched to the royalist Gen. Draža Mihajlović and his Cetnik guerrillas. He briefed the prime minister for the first time about the significance of Josip Broz, “Tito,” who led a rapidly growing force of some 20,000 insurgents whom SOE believed to be less Communist than they appeared. Deakin’s views were supported by Ultra intercepts, already known to Churchill, revealing German belief that the Communists represented a much more substantial military threat than the Cetniks.

The prime minister endorsed approaches to Tito, and Deakin himself was soon parachuted to the Croat leader’s headquarters. Unbeknown to the British, the partisan chief spent the spring of 1943 parleying with the Germans about a possible truce that would free his forces to destroy Mihajlović. Nazi intransigence, however, obliged the partisans to fight the Axis. The British, and especially officers of SOE, were guilty of persistent delusions about Tito’s politics. But they were right about one big thing: Hitler’s determination to defend Yugoslavia and its mineral resources caused him to deploy large forces in a country well suited to guerrilla operations. There, as nowhere else in occupied Europe outside Russian territory, internal resistance achieved a significant strategic impact.

The military contingent in Churchill’s party set off for neutral Turkey clad in borrowed and absurdly ill-fitting civilian clothes. Their visit to President Ismet Inonu on January 30 was no more successful than the Cabinet had anticipated. The Turks were full of charm and protestations of goodwill. Always fearful of Stalin, they valued British good offices to dissuade the Russians from aggression on their northern border. In the stuffy railway carriage in which the two sides met, the British were half embarrassed and half impressed by Churchill’s insistence on addressing the Ankara delegation in his fluent but incomprehensible French. It would have made no difference had he spoken in Chinese. The Turks were uninterested in joining the war. Why should they have done so? It might be true that the Allies now looked like winners. But, since the Anglo-Americans had no designs on Turkey, it was surely prudent for that impoverished nation to maintain its neutrality. Brooke fretted about the security risks to the prime minister on an ill-guarded train in the middle of nowhere. Local rumour had broadcast news of the visit far and wide. The CIGS searched out Churchill’s detective, whom he discovered eating a hearty supper in the dining car: “I told him that the security arrangements were very poor712 and that he and his assistant must make a point of occasionally patrolling round Winston’s sleeper through the night. He replied in an insolent manner: ‘Am I expected to work all night as well as all day?’ I then told him that he had travelled in identical comfort with the rest of the party, and that I was certainly not aware that he had even started working that day.”

But the visit passed off safely until Churchill’s Liberator, taxiing out on his departure, bogged down on the runway at Adana. The prime minister made comic personal attempts to direct recovery operations, with much gesticulation to the Turks about the plane’s sunken wheel, before having recourse to a spare aircraft. Back in Cairo on February 1, he learned of the surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Cabling to congratulate Stalin, he enthused about “a heavy operation across the Channel in August,” involving between seventeen and twenty British and U.S. divisions. The Russians could scarcely be blamed for adopting a cynical view of their allies when the prime minister sought to sustain this charade within