142 World War Two and the Partisan Struggle
he added: “It means that we cannot do anything without them, and they cannot
do anything without us.” “This was for us a further admonition,” commented
Kardelj, “that we had to be independent in our decisions.”^476
In this difficult situation, the British once more dusted off their plan to land
in the Balkans, a plan on which Churchill had been working hard for the past
two years without being able to implement. The same thing happened this
time, but the Yugoslavs were highly alarmed, especially because British troops
sent to Greece at the beginning of October clashed on 3 December 1944 with
the local Communist resistance in order to assure the return to the throne of
King George II, the Hellenic monarch who, like Petar II, lived in exile under
British tutelage during the war. Unlike Stalin, who followed an extremely pru-
dent policy, Tito encouraged the Greek left to continue fighting and promised
them military assistance.^477 In Belgrade, the bloody events in Athens strength-
ened the suspicion that Churchill was preparing a similar coup in Yugoslavia,
repeating the imperialist attempt to suffocate the Bolshevik revolution in Rus-
sia after the First World War.^478
King Petar II tried to take advantage of the growing crisis between the Brit-
ish and Tito, refusing to renounce to his sovereign rights. Churchill, however,
with his conservative Tory royalism, although convinced he had nursed “a viper
in his bosom,” was realistic enough to understand that the only possibility to
save at least a trace of the monarchy in Yugoslavia was to accept the regents.^479
It took the stubborn monarch two months to capitulate—because of his ob-
structionism, the regents were not named until 2 March 1945. At the Confer-
ence of Yalta, organized between 4 and 12 February, however, Stalin, Roosevelt,
and Churchill decided that the Tito-Šubašić agreement should be implemented
in Yugoslavia and that—pending the Constitutional Assembly—a provisional
Parliament should be installed, composed of the members of the AVNOJ and
those deputies who had been elected before the war and who had not compro-
mised themselves by collaborating with the enemy.^480
This decision was an attempt to strengthen the bourgeois forces who were
foreign if not hostile to the resistance and Tito declared it to be “a real crime
against Yugoslavia.”^481 His anger was directed more against the Soviets than
the British and the Americans, since he reproached them for having been too
subservient to Roosevelt and Churchill and having neglected to inform him in
advance about their Yalta deliberations. With the fourth-strongest army in
Europe (eight hundred thousand men) at his disposal, he was increasingly con-
fident of his importance, going so far as to offer the Allies a task force in their
final assault on Berlin in order to be among the great victors.^482 This was why