106 World War Two and the Partisan Struggle
empty mind. In fact, during their first meeting, he was unable to resist Tito’s
charisma, automatically recalling Napoleon’s famous phrase: “In war it is not
the men, but the man who counts.”^301 Whereas Tito and his comrades consid-
ered Deakin an anti-communist and a spy, having been sent by the SOE, they
discovered a friend in Maclean, the Scottish aristocrat. Being an adventurer, he
was immediately captivated by the Partisans’ epic feats, seeing himself as a
reincarnation of Lawrence of Arabia. It did not take him long to realize that
the situation in Yugoslavia was completely different from what the British gov-
ernment and Allied military circles imagined it to be, and that the Foreign
Office’s plans of a possible arrangement between Mihailović and Tito were an
illusion. After a stay of only two weeks, he decided to return to Cairo to report
what he had seen, or believed he had seen, and to recommend that his superi-
ors, as he wrote in a memorandum at the beginning of November, “stop the aid
to Mihailović and... substantially improve their aid to the Partisans.”^302
In this “blockbuster” memorandum, Maclean did not go into whether
Mihail ović was personally responsible for collaborating with the enemy, but
stressed his anti-Croat and reactionary politics, as well as his Serb chauvin-
ism and his inability to unite the Yugoslav peoples and lead them against the
occupiers. It reached London along with news about the changing attitude of
the Germans toward the Chetniks due to their growing lack of manpower. On
1 November 1943, the Wehrmacht’s Headquarters for Southeast Europe wrote
a document asserting that the Partisans were extremely dangerous. As a result,
the main task of the German forces would no longer be that of policing the
Balkans in the eventuality of an Allied landing, but the destruction of Tito’s
troops. This obviously meant a change in their attitude toward the Chetniks,
which was soon confirmed. On 22 November, the British decoded a message
relating to an agreement between the German command and Mihailović’s rep-
resentative in Montenegro concerning an armistice in the territory east of Sara-
jevo aimed at coordinating forces in a common fight against the Partisans.^303
Maclean’s memorandum, and the information gathered by British Intelli-
gence, had a decisive influence on Winston Churchill. At the Tehran Confer-
ence with Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the end of November 1943,
he declared that Tito had done much more against the Germans than Mihail-
ović, and that the British intended to aid him in whatever way they could. He
began speaking of a possible landing in the northern Adriatic, which would
allow English and American troops to penetrate Central Europe. The Soviets
pricked up their ears, although they did not, at the time, seem particularly
interested in the Yugoslav question. The secret agreement reached in Tehran by
the three statesmen pledged to support the Partisans by sending “supplies and
equipment and also by commando operations.” Roosevelt readily agreed, as he