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there were soon eleven missions and wireless transmitters on the ground. The SOE teams found themselves frustrated, because the partisans were indifferent to their proposals and advice, save about the mechanics of supply. The SOE’s internal historian observed laconically: “It is a little doubtful whether the Missions902 served any purpose save to give adventurous occupation to a number of very tough young men … half a ton of ammunition and explosives would have been more effective than half a ton of British Liaison Officers.” The allegiance of Tito’s people was unequivocally to their own Communist movement. From 1942 to 1945, paralleling the struggle against the Germans, a bloody civil war was waged between partisans and Cetniks, in which the balance of atrocities was about even.

The British were unable to influence this, though Churchill made repeated efforts to reconcile Tito to the exiled King Peter. Even in June 1944, when the partisan leader had to flee from a German surprise attack and accept airborne evacuation to sanctuary at the Allied headquarters in Bari, Tito became no more biddable. The obliging British thereafter dispatched him to the offshore island of Vis, where he was secure from German assault and could prepare for a renewed partisan advance. Yet Tito’s forces were unable to deliver a decisive blow against their occupiers, and were obliged to enlist the aid of the Red Army to dispossess the Cetniks of Serbia late in 1944. Unlike any guerrilla movement in western Europe, Yugoslav resistance diverted from the war’s main battlefields significant enemy forces—though considerably less, if Michael Howard’s interpretation of OKW documents is correct, than legend has suggested.

The political complexities of aiding resistance movements prompted exasperation among British ministers and field officers charged with reaching local accommodations. Harold Macmillan wrote in May 1944 that it was all very well for the prime minister to urge support for anti-German factions of widely varying political hues, but in an age of rapid communications, “the difficulty is that with … the universal listening903 to the radio, it is difficult [for the British] to be a Communist in Yugoslavia and a Royalist in Greece.” Though the Greek Communists wanted British weapons they hated Churchill, because they knew that he wished to restore their king. Almost all the arms shipped to the Balkans in the course of the war, and likewise those provided to nationalists in Southeast Asia, were used later to advance anti-Western, anticapitalist interests. Churchill told Eden, “I have come to the conclusion904 that in Tito we have nursed a viper … he has started biting us.”

Sir William Deakin has written: “Paradoxically, British influence on Resistance in Europe905 was at its strongest at the lowest point of our military strength and resources, and during the period of our own isolation [1940–42].” As resistance groups gained in confidence and the Germans began to withdraw, any gratitude they felt towards the British for supplying them with arms was outweighed by alienation from perceived British political objectives. A French historian of the Resistance, Henri Michel, has written: “Great Britain promised to the Resistance the return to a prewar Europe, which the Resistance had rejected.” This was an overstated generalisation, but reflected widespread sentiment.

By May 1944, during the approach to D-Day, 120 British and American heavy aircraft were committed to dropping arms to European resistance movements. An entire Balkan Air Force had been created, to supply Yugoslavia. The SOE had grown into an organisation staffed by more than eleven thousand soldiers and civilians, operating a network of training schools in Britain, the Mediterranean and India, and communicating with agents in some twenty countries. Its postwar internal history argued that no other force of its size contributed so much to the Allied war effort. Its agents and activities have stimulated a flood of postwar books and films, historical and fictional, which continues to this