HISTORY
Max Hastings
Resistance The Underground
War in Europe, 1939-45
by Halik Kochanski
Allen Lane £35 pp960
In the spring of 1942 SAS and
SBS parties landed in Crete to
attack airfields from which
supplies were being flown to
Rommel’s Afrika Korps: 25
aircraft were duly destroyed.
The Germans knew that Allied
soldiers had executed the
operation because they
captured four. They shot 50
Cretan hostages anyway.
The consequent question
extends to all behind-the-lines
resistance against an enemy
as merciless as the Nazis:
was the game worth playing
on such terms? Most people
in occupied countries
concluded that it was not, at
least until 1944, when Allied
victory was obviously
imminent. They collaborated
with the Germans, in many
cases influenced by a
loathing for the communists
who were playing a
prominent part in the
underground war after Hitler
invaded Russia in June 1941.
The author writes of the
near-collapse of resistance
that took place across much of
Europe in 1943. Action by the
occupiers “effectively brought
it to its knees as key leaders
were arrested. The German
successes came about through
a combination of skill, luck
and treachery.” The only
country in which German
repression failed was the
Soviet Union, where, at a
horrific cost in civilian lives,
partisan warfare achieved its
most significant strategic
success, notably by attacking
rail links.
This is the most
comprehensive and best
account of resistance I have
read. It addresses the story
with scholarly objectivity andan absolute lack of
sentimentality. So much
romantic twaddle is
still published, especially
about Britain’s Special
Operations Executive and
particularly about its female
agents, that it is marvellous to
read a study of such breadth
and depth, which reaches
balanced judgments.
It is not iconoclastic —
indeed, pays effusive tribute
to the courage of those who
resisted. It merely seeks to
address sometimes
unpalatable realities.
For instance: two British
officers who served with Tito’s
partisans in Yugoslavia,
Bill Deakin and Fitzroy
Maclean, eulogised
communist heroics — the latter
achieved celebrity in postwar
Britain. Halik Kochanski,
already author of a widely
praised history of wartime
Poland, argues that the two
officers, who had Churchill’s
ear because Deakin was his
prewar researcher andMaclean an MP, were
monumentally naive. What
they claimed was a Titoist
onslaught on the Germans was
mostly a Yugoslav civil war,
waged by Croats against
General Draza Mihailovic and
his Serbs. Yet the SOE men
secured huge arms drops to the
communists, and the cut-off of
aid to Mihailovic, who was
later shot by Tito. Kochanski
writes, devastatingly:The harsh truth
about resistance
This is the best book on the wartime partisans that our
reviewer has ever read — and is blessedly free of sentimentality
“Maclean never saw any action
by the Partisans... Deakin had
not travelled widely around
the country but had instead
received all his information
from Tito’s confidant, who
closely controlled whom
Deakin met and what he
learned.” She castigates
“the sheer dishonesty with
which the British government
and authorities in Cairo dealt
with Mihailovic”.High
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