Shadows on the Mountain

Marcia Kurapovna

Description

An in-depth look at a crucial, little-known World War II episode—the failed Allied policy in Yugoslavia and its ramifications in the Balkans and beyond

Winston Churchill called it one of his biggest wartime failures—the shift of British and U.S. support from Yugoslavia's Draža Mihailovic and his royalist resistance movement to Tito and his communist Partisans. This book illuminates the complex reasons behind that failure through the incredible story of what has been called the greatest rescue of Allied airmen from behind enemy lines in World War II history, a rescue executed, incredibly, with minimal official support from the United States and none such support from Great Britain.

• Recounts an unknown chapter of World War II history and the single largest rescue operation of the war
• Starting with Serbia's tragedy and triumph in World War II through civil war in Yugoslavia during World War I, focuses on the history of the Balkans, a tragically misunderstood part of the world
• Sheds new light on the OSS-SOE relationship and manipulations of intelligence that profoundly altered policy decision making
• Reveals how failed Allied policy set the stage for Yugoslavia's breakup in the 1990s
• Details the wartime camaraderie of unlikely warriors who became fast friends, outcasts, and heroes in executing the rescue

Written with the drama of a novel and the insight of serious history, Shadows on the Mountain is essential reading for anyone interested in World War II, European history, and the Balkans.
Preface.

Acknowledgments.

Prologue The Blue Graveyard.

1 Lawrence of Yugoslavia: An Allied Awakening inside a Civil War.

2 The Mountain at Dawn.

3 Lawrence of Yugoslavia II: Into the Partisan-Chetnik Quagmire.

4 The Balkan Prize.

5 Allied Rivals, Allied Destruction.

6 A Mission (Nearly) Impossible.

7 Legends of Blood and Honor: The Sad, Strange End of the British-Mihailovi? Relationship.

8 Their Brother’s Keeper: The Downfall of Soviet-Tito Relations.

9 Night into Death into Day.

10 The Unknown Soldier.

11 The Red Graveyard.

12 The Politics of Surrender.

Epilogue The Mountain at Twilight.

Notes.

Index.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Tito
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• Politics of Europe
• Allies
• Yugoslavia
• World War II
• World
• Yougoslavie
• History
• Josip Broz Tito
• Balkans
• Seconde Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 13 novembre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470615669
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
 
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Praise
Preface
Acknowledgements
PROLOGUE
 
Chapter 1 - Lawrence of Yugoslavia: An Allied Awakening inside a Civil War
Chapter 2 - The Mountain at Dawn
Chapter 3 - Lawrence of Yugoslavia II: Into the Partisan-Chetnik Quagmire
Chapter 4 - The Balkan Prize
Chapter 5 - Allied Rivals, Allied Destruction
Chapter 6 - A Mission (Nearly) Impossible
Chapter 7 - Legends of Blood and Honor: The Sad, Strange End of the ...
Chapter 8 - Their Brother’s Keeper: The Downfall of Soviet-Tito Relations
Chapter 9 - Night into Death into Day
Chapter 10 - The Unknown Soldier
Chapter 11 - The Red Graveyard
Chapter 12 - The Politics of Surrender
 
EPILOGUE
Notes
Index

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Copyright © 2010 by Marcia Christoff Kurapovna. All rights reserved
 
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
 
Map on p. xvi, UN Cartographic Section, map of Former Yugoslavia, no. 3689 Rev. 12 June 2007
 
Photo credits: pp. 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158 (top and bottom left), National Archives, College Park, Maryland, OSS Still Pictures, File 226; pp. 158 (bottom right), 159, 160, the Bildarchiv, World War II, Austrian National Library, Vienna.
 
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
 
Kurapovna, Marcia.
Shadows on the mountain : the Allies, the resistance, and the rivalries that doomed WWII Yugoslavia / Marcia Kurapovna.
p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-0-470-61566-9
1. World War, 1939-1945—Yugoslavia. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Underground movements—Yugoslavia. 3. Yugoslavia—History—Axis occupation, 1941-1945. 4. Yugoslavia—Foreign relations 1918-1945. 5. Great Britain—Foreign relations—Yugoslavia. 6. Yugoslavia—Foreign relations—Great Britain. 7. World War, 1939-1945—Diplomatic history. 8. Mihailovic, Draza, 1893-1946. 9. Tito, Josip Broz, 1892-1980. I. Title.
D802.Y8K85 2009 940.54’2197—dc22 2009009772
In memory of my forever loved and so much missed brother, Douglas
You shall read that we are commanded to forgive our enemies; but you never read that we are commanded to forgive our friends.
—COSIMO I DE’ MEDICI, D. 1574 (ATTRIBUTED)
 
 
Belgrade, which glistened in his nostalgia like human laughter through tears.
—ON THE HOMECOMING OF SERBIAN WRITER AND WAR VETERAN MILOš CRNJANSKI

 
  Serbia is a great mystery. The day doesn’t know what the night contrives Nor the night, what the dawn gives birth to; The bush doesn’t know what the next bush dreams Nor the bird what goes on Among the boughs. . . . In that land the enemy May not trust in the hare’s track Nor in the print of the oxen’s hooves There are perhaps secret resolutions In the Reapers’ songs And the strokes of the woodcutter’s axe And the hidden lullaby from the cradle
—DESANKA MAKSIMOVIĆ, A REMINISCENCE OF THE UPRISING (SPOMEN NA USTANAK), 1946
Preface
Since the 1990s international focus has shifted from the Balkans to the Middle East and other troubled regions of the world, but it is always a good time to write about Serbia—an extraordinary, young/old country whose modern history may be read as an indictment of the West’s own troubled twentieth-century identity. To write about Serbia, and the former Yugoslavia, is to undertake a fascinating journey into the heart of contemporary European history. Yet anyone writing about Serbia must remain constantly on the defensive—to respond to usually knee-jerk, ill-informed hostility toward the country and to the questionable tallying of its various abuses and atrocities as recorded by less than scrupulous international media. Rarely, if ever, can one discuss Serbia from an objective, respectful distance. Should one be motivated by the desire to treat this highly complicated country with fairness and an appreciation for its courageous contributions to the military victories of the West in World Wars I and II, one inevitably runs the risk of being labeled “pro-this” or “pro-that.” A writer and historian, whose interest in the country may be purely academic, and who has no political, personal, or financial relationship with Serbia or anyone or anything representing it, will still be viewed, by and large, as a kind of agent for Europe’s favorite rogue state.
And yet mysterious Serbia continues to attract interest from those able to see past the country’s isolated relationship to the modern West. These are the readers who come to understand the story of a country that heeded the call of Western values in two world wars, took up arms for those values unlike most of the country’s past and current regional neighbors—and all of it at catastrophic expense to Serbia’s own future as a state and the well-being of its people. Certainly, the aim of this book is not to present Serbia as a “victim”—the country’s deep historical, political, and strategic flaws are well documented in the narrative that follows. But the chronicle of this country teaches us a larger, more abstract lesson, one that shows a different dimension to a country so often misrepresented in newspapers and historical accounts.
The idea behind this book is to highlight how the story of modern Serbia raises questions about how one defines the meaning of loyalty and commitment to the ideals one is fighting for in wartime, and what it is that leads actors in a common cause to undermine one another through perverse political shortsightedness and outright treachery. Most World War II books concentrate on the battles and strategies of ally against enemy. This book is about the behind-the-scenes battles of ally against ally. It is a story about that simple, sordid, singular reason that outward “friends” maneuver in wartime in such a way as to ensure one another’s ultimate destruction: a complete and utter lack of trust.
As far as plot is concerned, this narrative describes, in a complicated nutshell, how a Royal government (Great Britain) betrayed a Royalist government (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) to exclusively support a Communist government (that of Tito) against the wishes of an ally and a Democratic government (the United States) in order to keep another Communist government (that of Stalin) from gaining control, while that Communist government (of Stalin) betrayed its own Communist partners (the Yugoslav Partisans) to support the Royalist government (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), which was then supported by this nominal Soviet ally, but later cut off, and all the while those Royalists officially remained an ally of the Communist government, though actively despising it. There was a Serbian resistance group called the Chetniks, which resisted German forces, Italians, Croatian-Ustaše, Albanian Muslims, and the Partisans, and collaborated with them all. There was a Communist-led Yugoslav group called the Partisans, who resisted the Serbian Chetniks, the Germans, the Italians, the Albanian Muslims, and the Croatian-Ustaše, and collaborated with them all. The Muslims longed for the rule of the old Catholic Austrian monarchy in Bosnia-Herzegovina, joined the Germans in the fight, and sought to slaughter the Chetniks, who sought to return the favor—later on, the two cooperated on occasion. Add to that American intelligence and British intelligence, which were ostensibly working together, yet all the while each spent more time guarding against the possibility that the other was going to slip a knife in its back.
In particular, this story is about a soldier who was executed by his fellow countrymen a year and some months after the close of the war. The soldier was accused of many things, some of them true, most of them not. In this story he is the personification of the theme of complete and utter mistrust among friends and allies. He is a casualty of all the mindless distortions; easy-come, easy-go commitments; and the tedious ruthlessness of powers compounded with his fight for freedom. His na