Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [244]
In the early spring of 1945, partisans resumed their harassment of the Germans, and played a noisy part in the last phase of the Italian campaign. They sabotaged bridges and power and phone lines, and attacked German lines of communications. Alexander nonetheless felt obliged to issue a directive on February 4, formally abandoning any aspiration to create a mass partisan army, and substituting a commitment to selective sabotage. The problem was that resistance groups proved chronically resistant to direction from SOE missions: “Self-organised bands … are already getting out of hand.”896 It was decreed that weapons should thereafter only be provided to those who could be trusted to use them against the Germans, rather than to promote their own local political ambitions. Headquarters of the 15th Army Group noted ruefully: “A Resistance movement may suddenly transfer itself897 from the credit to the debit side of the Allied ledger.” Here was the nemesis of Churchillian hopes, though in the last weeks of the war Italian partisans seized many towns and villages on their own initiative.
Russia and Yugoslavia were the only countries where partisan warfare significantly influenced Hitler’s deployments. In Russia, the Red Army sponsored large irregular forces to harass German lines of communication. Such Soviet operations were assisted by Stalin’s indifference to casualties or victims of reprisals. In Yugoslavia, almost from the moment of their conquest in April 1941 the Germans faced local opposition. Field Marshal von Weichs ordered that German troops should shoot male civilians in any area of armed resistance, regardless of whether there was evidence of individual complicity. That October, after suffering a dozen casualties in a clash with partisans, the Germans massacred the entire two-thousand-strong male population of the town of Kragujevac in Serbia. Men and boys were shot in batches of a hundred, through a single day. Even wholesale brutality failed to suppress the Communist guerrillas, however, which grew to a strength of some 200,000. Hitler was determined both to secure the right flank of his Eastern Front and to maintain his hold on Yugoslavia’s mineral resources. To achieve this, by 1944 twenty-one Axis divisions were deployed.
Michael Howard, a historian of British wartime strategic deception898, believes that this commitment was far more influenced by fears of an Allied amphibious landing in Greece or Yugoslavia than by partisan activity, which could have been contained by much smaller forces. He argues that the German high command was importantly misled by a deception operation, code-named Zeppelin, which suggested an Allied army group in Egypt poised to move against the Balkans. As late as the spring of 1944, OKW in Berlin estimated that there were fourteen Allied divisions in Egypt and Libya, instead of the real three. At the time, however, it was the guerrillas’ alleged successes which captured Churchill’s imagination. News of Tito’s doings, considerably exaggerated in the telling, excited him. Back in January 1943, when he was first briefed about Yugoslavia by his old researcher Bill Deakin, he had perceived possibilities which now seemed to be maturing. Here, at last, was the sort of popular revolt from which he hoped much.
In the autumn of 1943 the British, who had hitherto been supporting Gen. Draza Mihajlović’s royalist Cetnik forces, concluded that Tito’s partisans were conducting much more effective operations against the Germans, notably in Bosnia and Herzegovina. With