Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [245]
Churchill, in Cairo on his way back from Tehran, reasserted his enthusiasm for the Yugoslav commitment. Ignoring protests that it was inconsistent to support royalists in Greece and “reds” in Yugoslavia, he embraced the simple view that Tito’s army would kill more Germans than Mihajlović’s, and in this he was surely right. The axis of British effort shifted ruthlessly and dramatically. Beyond air drops and cargo plane landings, in 1944 it became possible to ship arms by sea to the Dalmatian coast. Tito’s forces began to receive supplies in large quantities, which transformed their capabilities. Between 1943 and 1945, 16,470 tons of Allied arms were provided to Yugoslavia, against 5,907 tons dropped into Italy, and 2,878 tons sent to southern France.
A high-powered British mission, led by Brig. Fitzroy Maclean, MP, took over Bill Deakin’s liaison role at Tito’s headquarters in September 1943, and was soon joined by Maj. Randolph Churchill, MP. The partisans, while implacably ideologically hostile, recognised that the prime minister had sent his brightest and best to represent him in their camp. Partisan leader Milovan Djilas wrote: “Deakin was outstandingly intelligent899 … We found out that he was a secretary of a sort to Churchill and this impressed us, as much for the consideration shown to us as for the lack of favouritism among the British top circles when it came to the dangers of war.” As for the dissolute Major Churchill, “we of course felt honoured900, though it did occur to us that Randolph might be the grey eminence of the mission. But he himself convinced us by his behaviour that he was a secondary figure, and that his father had decided on this gesture out of his aristocratic sense of sacrifice and to lend his son stature. Randolph soon enchanted our commanders and commissars with his wit and unconventional manner, but he revealed through his drinking and lack of interest that he had inherited neither political imagination nor dynamism with his surname.”
Djilas’s perception of British behaviour, after almost three years in which the partisans had conducted an unaided struggle, was unsurprising and not unjust: “The British had no choice901 but either to carry out a landing in order to fight the Partisans, or else to come to an agreement with them on a rational, mutually profitable basis. They chose the latter, cautiously and without enthusiasm … Our own dogmatic ideological distrust kept us from understanding them, though it also preserved us from any hasty enthusiasm.” The Americans never shared British warmth towards Tito. In April 1944, they angered Churchill by dispatching a mission to Mihajlović, which he ordered to be delayed in transit for as long as possible: “The greatest courtesy being used to our friends and Allies in every case,” he wrote on April 6, “but no transportation.” The U.S. team eventually reached the Cetniks, but the British were successful in deflecting Washington from sending supplies to them.
Tito’s partisans never had the training, organisation or heavy weapons to defeat German forces in head-to-head combat. They were unable to evict the occupiers from any substantial towns. Nonetheless, they achieved control of large rural areas of Yugoslavia. Repeated German offensives, supported by the Luftwaffe, inflicted heavy casualties, above all on the civilian population, but failed to destroy Tito’s army. More British officers were dropped to local headquarters, so that