Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [247]
It was unquestionably vital for the Allies to sustain contact between the free world and the occupied countries. The BBC’s broadcasts in many languages kept alight candles of hope which played a moving and critical role in the lives of millions of people enduring tyranny. There remains no doubt of the merits of dispatching agents to gather intelligence, contact anti-German groups, establish networks and assist escaping Allied personnel. In 1944–45, partisans were often useful as guides and intelligence sources for the advancing Allied forces, but this was a marginal activity.
The important question about the SOE concerns the wisdom of its military policies. To the end of the war, while the Chiefs of Staff were eager for resistance groups to “make a mess,” as one SOE officer in occupied France interpreted his orders, no coherent strategy was promulgated, based on a realistic assessment of what guerrillas might hope to achieve. Though useful work was done in France after D-Day, attacks on communications and German garrisons almost invariably hurt local populations more than the enemy. What else could have been expected?
The British Chiefs of Staff in 1944 urged that local resisters should be warned against provoking pitched battles with the Germans. Maj. Gen. Colin Gubbins, military head of the SOE, was formally rebuked when a bloody uprising took place in Slovakia, because his organisation appeared to have defied its orders and promoted it.
But the high command was thus attempting belatedly to reverse the policy pursued by the SOE, strongly encouraged by the prime minister, since 1940. Nor did Churchill share the generals’ scruples. For instance, at a January 27, 1944, meeting with the Air Staff, the minister of economic warfare, Ismay and others, he expressed the desire to promote large-scale clashes between the French Resistance and the Germans. “He wished and believed it possible to bring about a situation906 in the whole area between the Rhone and the Italian frontier comparable to the situation in Yugoslavia. Brave and desperate men could cause the most acute embarrassment to the enemy and it was right that we should do all in our power to foster so valuable an aid to Allied strategy.” On April 22, Churchill was urging on the Chiefs of Staff Operation Caliph, a scheme to land some thousands of British troops on the coast near Bordeaux simultaneously with D-Day. There was, he wrote, “a chance of a surprise descent into a population eager to revolt.”
Though Caliph was never executed, Churchill was still eager to incite guerrillas to strike wholesale at the Germans. A million Yugoslavs died in strife which he explicitly, and surely wrongly, sought to replicate in southern France. Popular revolts, of which the last took place in Prague in May 1945, cost many lives to little useful purpose. Mark Mazower has written: “Only in the USSR did German counter-terror fail.”907 Churchill’s grand vision for revolt by the oppressed peoples of Europe was heroic, but could play no rightful part in industrialised war against a ruthless occupier. Deliverance relied upon great armies.
Any judgement on the resistance movement must weigh the balance between moral benefit and human cost, acknowledging that the military achievement was small. Col. Dick Barry, chief of staff to Gubbins, admitted afterwards: “It was only just worth it.”908 The French people, for instance, took pride in the FFI’s flamboyant demonstration when they took to the streets of Paris as the Germans retreated in August 1944. But the German decision to quit the capital was quite uninfluenced by the