Radio London and Resistance in Occupied Europe: British Political Warfare 1939-1943

RADIO LONDON AND RESISTANCE IN OCCUPIED EUROPE

Radio London and Resistance in Occupied Europe British Political Warfare ‒

MICHAEL STENTON

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Michael Stenton  The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–820843–X           Typeset by J&L Composition Ltd., Filey, North Yorkshire Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., Guildford and King’s Lynn

For my Mother and in grateful memory of my Father at that time a sailor on the Arctic convoys

Preface TH I S is a study of how the British understood resistance in occupied Europe during the Second World War. It shows how resistance was analysed in the middle reaches of the wartime state; it traces what ‘London’—to use the Resistance abbreviation—imagined the opportunities to be; and it records how the BBC was used to speak to resistant Europe and unlock its potential. It is an account of interpretations, covert action, and propaganda known, collectively, as political warfare. The story is taken up to summer , the period before the prospect of victory displaced the fear of defeat. In – Germany overran or intimidated most of Europe. The war Britain had accepted in haste in  was lost. After Dunkirk Churchill had no plan but to save his country. The planners cast about for new strokes of warfare and political dexterity. Every unorthodox answer to Nazi military strength was suddenly more interesting. The claim that overwhelming Axis strength could be opposed had to be made vivid as ideas: hence ‘America’, strategic bombing, and resistance. If resistance was the least of these three hopes, it was not the least likely. Britain hoped to retie the threads of opposition to fascism that had snapped in Prague and Madrid, to recruit undefeated peoples in place of defeated states. ‘Occupied Europe’ was seized upon as a liability for Nazi Germany and as a strategic battlefield on which the war could be made to recommence. Resistance was a story, a meaning, which Radio London could transmit to others because the British told it to themselves. The ‘political warriors’ knew their interventions were dangerous; the BBC walked a tightrope between irrelevance and adventurism. Yet there was too much at stake, during the war or afterwards, for inactivity to seem masterly. The great hope was to raise secret armies, but the work was worth doing for less. Resistance offered the enemy a portent of defeat: it was always, to use the American expression, ‘psychological warfare’. Resistance was also politics. Force requires political translation: the importance of words, though suspended at one moment, can recommence the next. The Political Warfare Executive considered whether the Germans might as easily give up as be beaten, and they knew that politics never stops. Resistance might be a small battlefield advantage but a crucial political asset. The power of the resistance legend would be amply revealed in the post-war history of France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and even Poland. There had already been low-level discussion about ‘subversion’ as resistance was then called. The foreign policy community was expanding. The senior departments—the Foreign Office, the armed service ministries, and SIS—all

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made important preparations for political warfare in . The preparations became departments. Three wartime departments and the BBC are our principal concern. They need introductions. The Ministry of Information was already moving into the Senate House of London University on Malet Street when Chamberlain declared war, though the secret German section had a different London address until it moved to a ducal palace in Bedfordshire. The BBC European Service started life with the rest of the BBC in Broadcasting House but moved to Bush House on the Strand in ; it was joined there by a new supervising authority, the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). The Special Operations Executive started life as part of SIS, but SOE went independent in  and was lodged in Baker Street. Patriotic value at the BBC was called ‘propaganda’, inside SOE it was ‘subversion’, and in PWE it was ‘political warfare’. The Special Operations Executive found and equipped resistance movements; the Political Warfare Executive wrote leaflets, set up ‘black’ radio stations, and supervised the BBC European service. The call to fight or to wait, and to reject or tolerate certain forms of collaboration, raised questions which could surpass the military value of resistance itself. The Foreign Office under-secretaries and the directors of SOE shared their political interests with propagandists, that is with specialists responding more rapidly than themselves to daily events. Propaganda was war and diplomacy by other means. It infringed other responsibilities, and daily broadcasting was difficult to manage. It was impossible to speak to Europe without the enemy—or the allies––hearing what was not meant for their ears. The instinctive solution—to impose formal controls and make broadcasting tedious and empty—was not an acceptable remedy. It made no appeal in the Ministry of Information, which, until mid-, supervised the entire BBC output, and not much more in the Political Warfare Executive, which then assumed responsibility for broadcasting to occupied countries. The specialists in political warfare were neither civil servants of high rank nor obviously powerful, but they often supplied a trend. They were there, in the kitchen, stirring the pot, and in Churchill’s kitchen there were many cooks. Policy is often born as office propaganda. Such advocacy was the work of the leading specialists: the regional directors and country editors. These people were untroubled by MPs. Informed debate about occupied Europe was difficult. Even the Cabinet played little part. This is a good reason for taking a long look at the middle ranks. The specialists assimilated influences before decision-makers and they were often more passionate. When they asked for authority they were resisted; when they stopped pleading and turned to their microphones, they were heard by their superiors as well as their audience. If they were left in ignorance of essentials, their work was either damaged or damaging; more often their superiors were gently nudged towards decisions they anticipated. They expected events to throw up the chance of doing something important. Their scrutiny of events survives in the departmental

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records. In these archives, rich in problems and argument, is found London’s Europe: what was believed to be happening, what was wanted, and what was not. Political warfare was a search for opportunities which are not all evident in retrospect. Describing them means considering at length the predicament of individual countries. London broadcasting had its continental context as well its British base, just as resistance was both parochial and subject to the gravitational pull of the broader war. Any account of political warfare must show where different narratives intersect. Readers must jump from Whitehall to Bush House and thence to a secret meeting in Warsaw, a general election in Denmark, a killing at the Metro Barbès in Paris, and battle on the banks of the river Neretva in Herzegovina. The BBC directives are not self-explanatory; the intentions need to be teased out in country-specific studies. The scope and form of this book reflect this ambition. Scarcely half the countries in Europe were, strictly speaking, occupied. Indeed, enemy Europe should have been the main target of political warfare, but the war went so badly that occupied Europe took its place. The emphasis here is on occupied territory. Resistance is seen here chiefly in France, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Denmark: in the bands of public opinion which listened for British guidance about resistance, collaboration, and the Soviet alliance. PWE did not have to think very hard about the American alliance. For two years it was just a dream. In – American influence was unavailable for Poland, unsolicited for Denmark, obstructed in Yugoslavia, and very carefully opposed in France. The British adjustment to the American alliance belongs to a later period. Political warfare is examined until summer . Early resistance had little military effect, but the important investments were made before Stalingrad and the decisive moves were made shortly afterwards. The history of the twentieth century divides in –—pivoting on the military watershed between the Soviet counter-attack at Stalingrad and the Axis surrender in Tunisia. The liberation period deserves a separate study since success and two greater allies created a new framework for political warfare. This book takes the story a few weeks beyond the watershed to important decisions taken in the early summer. This extended first half of the war constitutes the period in which Britain was still an independent sea power trying to remake the balance of power in Europe. – marked the end of all that. Britain went to war as a free empire and found peace as the junior associate of the USA. The important British decisions had been taken, implicitly or explicitly, by August . Political warfare from thereabouts was more Anglo-American and was discussed in the joint military headquarters. Part I is about making new institutions and finding ideas for broadcasting— the London dimension. It touches on more countries than those selected for detailed examination. The next four parts combine analysis of what PWE

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knew as ‘regional’ problems with descriptions of collaboration and resistance. The French section—Part II—examines what was said about Pétain and Vichy in –, the attempt to reform Free France in , the response in , and the level of violence requested. It concludes with a discussion of the British part in Operation Torch and PWE’s response to the conscription of labour. Parts III and IV consider Denmark and Poland, the least severe regime of occupation and the worst. The Poles and Danes saw too plainly the difference between the general interest and their own. Should the Danes be told to break off the limited collaboration to which their leaders consented? Should the Poles embrace the Russians in return for British support, or be warned to expect none? Part V deals with resistance in Yugoslavia. It examines the reaction to the civil war of Chetnik and Partisan and follows it to the point at which British recognition and support was divided between two enemies. The four countries examined at length to represent occupied Europe include the three most important and one special case. France has precedence: a fully restored France was the most certain of Britain’s wartime preferences. But Poland—in  as in —was the crucial point in the balance of power. Few wanted Poland to be the acid test of Anglo-Russian relations, but everyone suspected it might be. Yugoslavia, on the other hand, was a usefully intermediate zone between Russian and British ambition; it was also where resistance was most active and challenging. Resistance in these three countries did not decide the war in Europe but the resistance outcomes did decide a great deal of its meaning. Denmark is the special case: the problem of collaboration in its most defensible instance. Wherever PWE looked in Europe there were always some reasons not to be unduly provoked by collaboration. In Denmark this was seen in its purest form: ‘co-operation’ was the policy of a democratic government. Britain wanted some resistance everywhere, but the problems were often bigger than the opportunities. Interest in seriously expanding active resistance tended to become narrower with time. In the four countries considered in Parts II to V it seemed possible, at least until , to master both the resistance opportunities and the political difficulties. As the difficulties grew worse London became more forceful: first with Pétain, then with the London Poles, the Danish government, and the Chetniks of Yugoslavia. The trend in most other occupied countries went the other way: for the Dutch expectations were always modest and for the Czechs they became so; Greece and Norway are discussed in Part I. The story of occupied Europe does not show that whatever goes wrong can be put right by popular action. It reveals how naked a nation is without its state. It displays the stubborn force of national and democratic feeling in Europe but also its limitations and destructive suspicions. This is not a cynical judgement on resistance—not on the communists nor on their rivals. Resistance would not have happened without all sorts of mental and physical

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courage; it was so rapid and precarious that it was vulnerable to political manipulation at every level. Making the second point leaves the first intact. It is the effort not the achievement which is exemplary. I am most grateful for all the help I have received in writing this book: to Professor Stevan Pavlowitch and to the late Professor Sir Harry Hinsley for help and encouragement at an early stage; to Mr Basil Davidson and Mr Elias Bredsdorff; to Dr Tony Hayter; to Hugh Prysor-Jones; to the British Academy for a research fellowship; to the director, assistants, and librarians at the Institute for European History in Mainz; to the President and Fellows of Clare Hall Cambridge; to my friends for their patience and to Miranda for her impatience. Cambridge and Leytonstone August 

Contents xv

Abbreviations I P U T T I N G O U T T H E F L AG S

. . . . . . . . . .

Chamberlain’s Information Information and Subversion Black and White The Birth of PWE Cairo Émigrés and Experts Propaganda and Dogmatics The Soviet Ally The Summons to Resist Propaganda and Political Warfare

         

I I F R A N C E : R E I N V E N T I N G A N A L LY

. . . . . . . . . .

First Thoughts The First Gaullism The Case for the Left Second Thoughts on Vichy Resistance and Leadership Violent Resistance Turning a New Leaf Torch Resistance by Radio Maquisards or Slaves

         

I I I D E N M A R K : T H E V E LV E T G L OV E

. The Status Quo . Scavenius and Koch . ‘A Rift Must Appear’

  

I V P O L A N D : C H I VA L RY O R S U S P I C I O N

. Partition Again



xiv

CONTENTS

. Friends and Allies . Katyn: ‘A Gift for Goebbels’

 

V Y U G O S L AV I A : R E C K O N I N G T H E O D D S

. . . . .

Disintegration Serbs, Croats, and Russians Pinpricks Mihailović Reconsidered Tito’s Breakthrough

    

Conclusions



Sources



Index



Abbreviations AC(O) AFHQ AK AS BCRA(M)

BOPA

C CD C(Eur.S) CFLN

CGT CH CHQ CIO CNF CNR C(O) COS CPGB CX D

Assistant Controller (Overseas), BBC Allied Forces HQ (Algiers) Armia Krajowa: Home Army (Poland) Armée Secrète Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (Militaire) Borgerlige Partisaner: ‘citizen partisans’ (Danish communists) Cryptonym for the director of SIS Cryptonym for the directors of SO/SOE Controller (European Service), BBC Comité Français de Libération Nationale (‒) Confédération Générale du Travail ‘Country House’, SO at Woburn Abbey, see EH Country HQ , also CH Chief Intelligence Officer, PWE Comité National Français (‒) Conseil National de la Résistance Controller (Overseas), BBC Chiefs of Staff Communist Party of Great Britain SIS intelligence material Section D, section of SIS; became SOE

DDG D.Eur.B. D.Eur.S. DG DMI DNI DPA

DPW DPW(E&S)

DPW(I) DPW(O) DSP DST

EAM EH

ELAS Eur.N.E F

FFC

Deputy Director-General Director of European Broadcasts, BBC Director, European Service, BBC Director-General Director of Military Intelligence, War Office Director of Navel Intelligence, Admiralty Directorate of Propaganda and Agents, SOE (Cairo) Director of Political Warfare, PWE DPW for Enemy and Satellite countries, PWE DPW for Intelligence, PWE DPW for Occupied territories, PWE Directorate of Special Propaganda, SOE (Cairo) Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (Vichy) National Liberation Front, communist-led (Greece) ‘Electra House’: Department of Enemy Warfare, later SO Military wing of EAM (Greece) European News Editor (BBC) F Section: SOE’s non-gaullist French section, see RF Forces Françaises Combattantes (‒)

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A B B R E V I AT I O N S

FFL FN FO FTP(F) FSO FTO GC&CS Gestapo GL

JIC KPJ MEW MI3b

MOI MUR NDH

NKVD

OKH

OKW

ONE ORA

Forces Françaises Libres (‒) Front National: PCF-led resistance alliance Foreign Office Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (Français) French Service Organizer, BBC French Talks Organizer, BBC General Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park Geheime Staatspolizei: German security police Gwardia Ludowa: People’s Guards (Polish communist) Joint Intelligence Committee Communist Party of Yugoslavia Ministry of Economic Warfare War Office military intelligence, Yugoslav section Ministry of Information Mouvements unifiés de la Résistance Nezavisna Dr˘zava Hvratska: Independent State of Croatia Narodny Kommissariat Vnutrennich Dyel: Soviet Security Service Obercommando des Heeres: Army High Command Obercommando der Wehrmacht: High Command of the Armed Forces Overseas News Editor, BBC Organisation de Résistance de l’Armée (Giraud’s)

OSS OWI PCF PID PID(EH) PPR PWB PWE RD RF

RU RSHA

SD SFIO SIME SIS SO SO SOE SS STO UPP ZWZ

Organiszation of Strategic Services (US) Office of War Information (US) Parti Communiste Français Political Intelligence Department, FO official cover name for PWE Polska Partia Robotnicza: Polish Workers’ Party Psychological Warfare Board, AFHQ Political Warfare Executive Regional Director, PWE RF Section: SOE’s support for the Free French, see F Research Unit: secret radio station (Woburn) Reichssicherheitshauptamt: HQ of state and party police Sicherheitsdienst: SS Security Service Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière Security Intelligence, Middle East Secret Intelligence Service, aka M Special Operations  (Woburn) Special Operations  (Baker Street) Special Operations Executive Schutzstaffel Service du Travail Obligatoire Union of Polish Patriots (Moscow) Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej: Union for Armed Struggle (Polish Army)

PART I

Putting out the Flags

 Chamberlain’s Information B E F O R E  few people in British government or politics declared a friendly interest in state propaganda. Though an exasperated minority thought ‘publicity’ was a proven tool of statecraft, there was reluctance to imitate the strident self-advertisement and abusiveness of the Bolsheviks and Fascists. However, the world grew more dangerous, and it was conceded that ‘propaganda’ there must be—and the pursuit of other unfair advantages. Two groups made modest beginnings. One group, first gathered around Sir Stephen Tallents in the Empire Marketing Board, examined ‘publicity’. Tallents thought that British prestige could no longer look after itself. He published The Projection of England (), a plea for the Government to communicate with the governed, and for state propaganda to tell the world that the Empire was a Commonwealth. The imperial publicists and their successors wanted a propaganda which communicated Englishness as well as argument. The Empire Marketing Board foundered in , but the film unit survived and re-emerged as the Crown Film Unit under the wartime Ministry of Information. This nursed the British documentary film movement through its infancy. By  MOI war documentaries were being shown by the Danish resistance in Copenhagen cinemas and to audiences of Yugoslav partisans. Another group, led by Sir Robert Vansittart, the Permanent UnderSecretary at the Foreign Office until , considered propaganda. His second Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, told the League of Nations in  that government propaganda was ‘one of the most pernicious features of modern life’. Hoare did not speak from a position of angelic detachment. He had been the SIS station chief in Rome during the Great War. But he preferred deception to orchestrated braying, and he resigned when caught out. Rex Leeper, head of the Foreign Office News department, belonged to the Vansittart group. He secured state subsidies to help Reuters compete with state-owned news agencies, launched the British Council, and lobbied for BBC propaganda in foreign languages. He became a known supporter of Churchill after a trip to Chartwell in  to discuss lifting Britain out of its attitude of defeatism about Germany. But the repudiation of propaganda was part of the moral armour of appeasement. Baldwin and Chamberlain would have preferred non-intervention in other people’s languages.



Ian Colvin, Vansittart in Office (), .



P U T T I N G O U T T H E F L AG S

If the term ‘propaganda’ was born in the Counter-Reformation, it was born again after . The liberal conscience detected an old enemy and refused to be reconciled. Arthur Ponsonby’s Falsehood in Wartime () was the classic radical renunciation of the sin. Newspaper lies about ‘Huns’ polluted the intellect and crippled the Peace. Ponsonby’s lesson was perhaps as striking as Orwell’s after the next war. All the totalitarians seemed to revel in propaganda work and their societies seemed impregnated with it. For many the word took on a modish but disreputable allure. Others were so fascinated by the idea of propaganda and mass suggestibility that they spoke as if the characteristic tools of totalitarianism were hypnosis, panache, and glitter not brutal policemen and implacable censorship. There was an accumulation of sinister insights. Capitalism’s weakest link was said to have been broken by something called ‘agitprop’: a thousand voices explaining the slogans of a revolution. Similar techniques could be used merely to cajole and manipulate. Commercial advertising revealed how. If the customer is always gullible so is the citizen. Agostino Gemelli, an Italian war chaplain and psychologist, was taken by the idea that courage was the product of illusions. According to his treatise Il nostro soldato (Milan, ), these illusions could be produced and exploited scientifically. Similar thoughts fascinated Hitler and Goebbels, and troubled Arthur Koestler after working in the Paris office of the Comintern under the direction of Lenin’s old comrade Willi Münzenberg. Münzenberg had been the director of communist ‘agitprop’ in Berlin when Richard Crossman had turned up to sit at the Master’s feet and learn the trade. Crossman would be the most skilful debater in PWE, undoubtedly one of the readiest wits of his day. He was a young Oxford don before the war, and his skills had been sharpened on Plato, the Berlin Left before , and colleagues at the New Statesman. He joined the secret German propaganda department in . In  he transferred to Eisenhower’s military bureaucracies— AFHQ and then SHAEF—to teach the Americans what he had taken from the world of agitprop and refined for HMG. Crossman had learnt a modern casuistry, and tried to turn the arts of the cynical Left into a professionalized knowledge for the armies of the West to employ. Cynicism has a universal, elite appeal whether as master or servant of ideology. Münzenberg and his Comintern associates had an excited view of propaganda as the political art. They spoke effectively to an expanding and teachable left-wing audience. Yet the Comintern always seemed to be on the losing side. That Stalin was not playing to win in the Berlin of  was apparent to some, that he was still only fishing and meddling in the Madrid of  was harder  Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing (), ; for Münzenberg as ‘the Patron-Saint of the Fellow Traveller’ see Babette Gross, Willi Münzenberg (); Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals (); R. H. S. Crossman (ed.), The God that Failed (), ; and Anthony Howard, Crossman: the Pursuit of Power (), ‒.

C H A M B E R L A I N ’ S I N F O R M AT I O N



to see. Münzenberg and a few associates knew better than most how Stalin’s mind worked. They enjoyed careers as anti-liberal apparatchiks farming the conscience of the decadent West—until they were considered to know too much. They were professionals studying potent themes, and quite ready to float their ideas on a raft of lies. The managers of the Popular Front agitation justified the vehemence of the Baldwinian repudiation of propaganda. In  however, Münzenberg was living on borrowed time; Stalin wanted him back in Moscow to join the procession from the court-room to the camps. Münzenberg guessed as much and looked to the Anglo-French for protection. When the war started he wrote scripts for a French-sponsored experiment in black broadcasting, ‘Deutsche Freiheitssender’, whose director, Carl Spiecker, retreated to England in May ; in October his broadcasts resumed as the first of the Bedfordshire ‘freedom stations’. Crossman found similiar employment in the same place. But Münzenberg vanished; his intelligence contacts failed to provide protection and he was killed during the French exode, presumably by the Russians. If Crossman had seen the end of Weimar, his superiors had seen as much or more. Bruce Lockhart had seen the Russian Revolution, Colin Gubbins had fought it, and Ivone Kirkpatrick had studied the Nazis from the Berlin Embassy. (‘Bertie’ Lockhart took charge of PWE at its inception in , Colin Gubbins became the leading light in SOE, and Kirkpatrick became Controller of the BBC European Service.) Like Crossman, Lockhart and Gubbins moved, at some point in –, from the edge of affairs to importance in British political warfare. So did the politicians who would compete for the control of propaganda: Duff Cooper, then Brendan Bracken at the Ministry of Information, and Hugh Dalton at the Ministry of Economic Warfare. So too did Kirkpatrick and Noel Newsome, the journalist who became Director of the BBC European Service. These men were all critics of appeasement, and they would replace Chamberlain’s ministers and officials. But they were promoted into a complex departmental contest which was not at first of their making. When the war began, Kirkpatrick was head of the Central department at the Foreign Office; Gubbins was a military observer in Poland; Lockhart had left Fleet Street for ‘somewhere in Bedfordshire’; Bracken was Churchill’s PPS and the most maverick of his circle; and Newsome was settling in at the BBC after coming from the Daily Telegraph to help the Overseas News Editor on the European side. After the annexation of Austria, the policy of appeasement was a citadel under siege. Chamberlain and his confidants—Sir Horace Wilson, Lord Halifax, Samuel Hoare, R. A. Butler—became very propaganda-conscious. Shortly after the Munich crisis, Butler complained that the public would not have inclined towards a ‘War of Jenkins’ Ear’ were it not for the fact that ‘the

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propaganda machines are so much in the hands of the sentimental people’. The rancorous edge of British appeasement—the willingness to dismiss serious, well-informed people as troublemakers and warmongers—was sharpened by a feeling that a sound but complex policy was about to be overturned by left-wing propaganda. Chamberlain understood publicity, but he was distrustful: a department of state propaganda might strengthen the assumption that Britain must meddle in central Europe. The appeasers said that Germany must be trusted up to a point. Since the implications disturbed them more than they could confess, they did not relish debate. ‘Propaganda’, as they disliked it, was the Devil’s good tunes, the exploitation of painful events to turn public opinion sour and dangerous. Chamberlain was, at all events, suspicious of Tallents, who rigged up a skeleton Ministry of Information during the Munich crisis. Tallents had the ear of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) and he joined the BBC to argue for overseas broadcasting. There was already a BBC Empire Service, but Arabic broadcasts—defensive anti-Italian propaganda—were started in . In  he joined forces with Rex Leeper at the Foreign Office. But this connection damaged his prospects. During the Munich crisis the BBC were asked to make broadcasts in French and German; but afterwards the powerful Sir Horace Wilson turned against Tallents. His advocacy had become uncomfortable, and he was removed as Director-General designate of the MOI. Moscow, Luxemburg, Italy, France, Czechoslovakia, and the Vatican were all speaking in tongues before Downing Street decided Britain should follow their example and broadcast to Europe. Nazi Germany was only a little more precocious. Tallents hung on to his position in the BBC, established an Intelligence Unit and the Monitoring Service, and duly became Controller (Overseas) in . Wartime state supervision of the BBC was thought by sophisticated but ill-informed people to be unnecessary, by good people to be bad, and by serious people to be unavoidable. The BBC had an Overseas Service, but the initiatives had come from Whitehall. The new transmissions of the Overseas Service would be known, in various languages, as ‘Radio London’. In  Rex Leeper took over a new Political Intelligence department (PID), but this was not yet the propaganda job he wanted. The PID, a Great War expedient repeated, was staffed at first by journalists and academics, and it promised to be an advisory backwater. (‘PID’ remained a real Foreign Office department but it later provided a cover name for PWE.) The interesting job was done elsewhere. Chamberlain had approved a ‘Department EH’ on the secret service vote and asked Sir Campbell Stuart, a director of The Times, to set it up in secret. This was another Great War revival: Stuart had been Northcliffe’s deputy at the Department of Enemy Propaganda where H. G. 

Butler to Baldwin,  Oct. , vol. , Baldwin Papers.

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Wells, John Buchan, and R. W. Seton-Watson had tried, with leaflets alone, to turn the peoples of two empires against their kaisers. In  Department EH wrote German leaflets and told the BBC how to speak to Germany. Stuart assured his cover by giving confidential briefings to newspaper proprietors at good restaurants. ‘EH’ started life in Electra House on the Thames Embankment but was later evacuated to Woburn Abbey, the ducal palace in Bedfordshire, where it started in the Riding School but later moved into the big house. Leeper’s PID also found its way to Woburn, and it became attached to ‘EH’. Chamberlain wanted to work on the German suspicion that the Nazis were crazy. The immediate objective was to persuade the German public that Germany could not win, and the ultimate goal was to make the non-Nazi nation yearn for a possible peace. It was a good plan started three years too late. In September  millions of British leaflets fluttered down onto German cities. Unfortunately, the leaflets were identified, in Fleet Street, as Britain’s only contribution to Poland’s fight for survival. An impatient, fretful press blamed the new Ministry of Information (MOI) for the absence of any other news. The MOI became a political buffer between the Government’s attentiste strategy and the irritation of its critics. The Ministry of Information sprang into existence fully staffed but with no instructions. The Senate House was excellent accommodation: the massive cement structure was considered almost bomb-proof. The first Minister was Lord Macmillan, a Scottish law lord. Chamberlain wanted someone above suspicion to preside over an unpleasant business. Lord Perth, recently the Ambassador in Rome, became the MOI Adviser on foreign publicity. The Ministry of Information had been cobbled together very quickly in the summer by Hoare, now the Home Secretary. Hoare was one of the trusted few who worked out the distinction between secret, subversive propaganda and the open, avowable kind. His experience during the Abyssinian crisis of running both a respectable official policy and a pragmatic covert policy had been uncomfortable, but plainly he thought the model was right. ‘Secret’ propaganda secured a lodgement in the Whitehall mind. The Scottish judge was irreproachable but not very useful. The Ministry had a huge overseas remit: the neutral and allied countries, which meant all the world except Germany. But a poor start confirmed Leeper’s view that the MOI should have been grown from a peacetime nucleus in the Foreign Office. Chamberlain kept Department EH behind the veil of wartime secrecy, and left the Ministry of Information equipped with nothing but clean hands. ‘Enemy propaganda’—nominal responsibility for BBC German broadcasts—was quickly cut out of the Minister’s portfolio. Department EH gave no assistance to the Foreign division at Malet Street. Since Chamberlain had his secret department, he could allow the new MOI to be chopped up and fed to the

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geese. The frustration released in berating Malet Street ‘censorship’ and the mock seriousness with which the front bench took this criticism kept Parliament entertained throughout autumn . The Ministry was purged, partitioned, and almost abolished. Lord Macmillan resigned before Christmas, and Chamberlain rather reluctantly asked Sir John Reith, the former BBC Director-General, to succeed him. The Opposition was sour and unsympathetic, and Chamberlain did not want a debate about war aims and the future of Germany. He foresaw difficulties about the BBC if its output did not conform to the principle of strict segregation: propaganda should be either irreproachable or unattributable. Curiously, all the Governors of the BBC, except Sir Allan Powell, the Chairman, and his Vice-Chairman, were deposed by Order in Council two days after the declaration of war. This had been written into the Cabinet Office ‘War Book’ by the CID planners long ago. But since the Minister of Information did not, as provided for in the War Book, simply take up the authority of the Governors— Horace Wilson took a sudden dislike to this arrangement—it no longer made sense. Chamberlain refused to clarify the legal position. If the Prime Minister was confused, so was F. W. Ogilvie, the BBC Director-General left in legal limbo. At the MOI Reith looked to Horace Wilson for inspiration. In March an MOI committee suggested some state control of BBC talks and bulletins, but Reith ordered the conclusion deleted from the minutes. The director of ‘broadcasting relations’ could not discover what he was meant to do. Even a request to transfer BBC staff to the MOI was refused by Reith. State authority over the BBC was inert. To have ‘Information’, but not quite to have a propaganda ministry, seemed appropriate for a war intended as a controlled demonstration that Germany had miscalculated. Reith had Lord Davidson at his side as a sort of Tory political monitor. He reshuffled the Ministry —- the divisions and directors were bundled into groups under high-rank ‘Controllers’ on the BBC model. The director of the Foreign division, E. H. Carr, decided to resign after a dispute with Davidson. His departure brought Ivone Kirkpatrick to Malet Street. Kirkpatrick had been First Secretary at the Berlin Embassy in . He returned in  to head the Foreign Office Central department, which covered Germany and France. Kirkpatrick’s first attachment to the MOI ended abruptly four months later, but his second was more important. In February  he was planted inside the BBC European Service, which then fell under his control. Within Whitehall the Ministry won small advantages from Sir Walter Monckton’s negotiations with other departments. Monckton, then Deputy Director-General (DDG), was a popular and well-connected English barrister, knighted for services to the Royal Family during the Abdication crisis. Trusting his skill as a legal negotiator he offered a sort of contract on news and censorship. Monckton’s statement of the Information problem was that wartime news policy must be governed by a ‘security factor’, favouring silence,

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and a ‘morale factor’, indicating publication even when the news was bad. He claimed that decisions went by default to security since intelligent juxtaposition of these considerations never happened. The Board of Admiralty were right to tell Monckton that Cabinet adjudication was unrealistic. Reith was warned that military liaison officers were not enough. What mattered, for example, in Censorship was that his officers of the watch should know what was happening and give quick decisions. The Chief Censor, Cyril Radcliffe, was another English lawyer. Radcliffe had a distinguished career before him— at the Ministry, adjudicating boundaries in Mountbatten’s India, then a memorable period on the Bench. At this point he was intensely annoyed by Reith’s unwillingness to confront ministers with obvious and immediate problems. Such was the talk in Malet Street as German warships approached Norway. When battle commenced, Whitehall could not supply consistent commentary and extemporized explanations which gave appalling hostages to fortune. There was a first-class disaster and a weak publicity machine. The Admiralty expected to be blamed and claimed that everything could be put right quickly. When the BBC tried to be sober and sensible, the Cabinet demanded optimism. There was a brief and hopeful interlude between the beginning of the Allied counter-attack in southern Norway and its failure. In the eye of the storm Reith again warned his officials that state control of the BBC was ‘not now a live issue’. He was wrong. Ministers grew nervous about the false assumptions fostered by their own silence. They blamed the BBC. Reith, flanked by Powell and Ogilvie, had to endure angry abuse from the Chancellor of the Exchequer delivered on behalf of the War Cabinet. The demand for controls on broadcasting was supported from Paris. The BBC’s bulletins were proving crucial to the way the Anglo-French press stated what was happening. Political attention was fixed on the management of expectations, and the Cabinet wanted to defend itself. The Ministry officials were instructed to bring the BBC ‘under Governmental control’ and all sorts of opportunities beckoned. Chamberlain and Churchill agreed that the authority of the Minister of Information must be enhanced. But Chamberlain’s critics guessed that he wanted to use Reith’s officials to prove that the Norwegian defeats were Churchill’s fault. Reith’s possession of what, in a crisis, was an important office could not survive Chamberlain’s fall from power. Churchill turned to a man considered a political heavyweight. Alfred Duff Cooper was famous and eloquent. Before entering Parliament, he belonged to the diplomatic service. He had resigned from the Cabinet after Munich, and featured prominently in Nazi propaganda as one of the three most dangerous   

‘Agreement . . . about News and Censorship’,  Mar. , INF /. Policy Committee,  Apr. , INF /. Policy Committee,  Apr. , INF /.

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Tory warmongers. Though not a member of the War Cabinet he could attend all its meetings. He relished the idea of becoming the antagonist of Joseph Goebbels. He met Powell and Ogilvie from the BBC and told them that he wanted ‘the closest possible control’. Wisely they offered no objection. The BBC question then came before the Minister’s Policy Committee with Ogilvie and Powell in attendance. Their impertinent assurance that ‘the closest possible contact’ already existed was rejected. Churchill asked for proposals for establishing ‘a more effective control’ of the BBC. (‘Now that we have a Government representing the Opposition as well as the Majority, we should have a much freer hand.’) Powell and Ogilvie and the senior BBC executives —- the ‘Controllers’ —- wanted to preserve the forms of corporate independence. These could not guarantee real independence, but they underpinned the BBC’s real monopoly. The wartime choice lay between, on the one hand, a complex and capricious dependence on many sources of official instruction and, on the other, reliance on a single department sharing BBC problems and open to counter-argument. Duff Cooper spoke of control as if it was simply a matter of authority. His senior staff knew little about broadcasting. The foreign policy officials were either about to leave —- Lord Perth and soon Kirkpatrick —- or arriving on the scene with everything to learn —- Oliver Harvey from the Paris Embassy and Sir Maurice Peterson from Madrid. Harold Nicolson, the talented writer —- and diarist —- who was Duff Cooper’s Parliamentary Secretary, identified ‘our difficulty’ at the MOI as the lack of skilled senior staff: ‘we have not got a trained civil service and cannot pay for the [Fleet Street] stars’. The worst weakness was at the top, and damage in the middle ranks was done by moreor-less pointless reforms which hindered people trying to learn on the job. At the BBC Newsome, the European News Editor, told his superiors that he resented being ‘used as a blind tool’ in concealing the phases of the Norwegian evacuation. The burden of his complaint lay more on ‘blind’ than ‘tool’. The BBC wanted better propaganda and less muddle. Ogilvie brought a team of three to the Ministry’s Policy Committee to head off criticism by making demands the Ministry could only approve. During the Dunkirk evacuation, Ogilvie criticized the war news of the previous three weeks, knowing that the Ministry believed that incompetence in handling news of defeat might create a fatal collapse of confidence. Duff Cooper and Harold Nicolson were warned not to take an apologetic tone in answering parliamentary questions about BBC news, and the Air Ministry was blamed for a version of operations in France that returning solPolicy Committee,  May , INF /. Churchill to Minister of Information,  May , INF /.  Nicolson diary,  Feb. .  Newsome to A. E. Barker,  May : Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, iii, The War of Words (), .  

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diers refused to believe. The Cabinet Office admitted that ‘the real culprits’ — - for ‘the almost complete lack of any news of what the BEF is doing’ —- were at the War Office where ‘lack of imagination seems impossible to overcome’. What the BBC now wanted was ‘aggressive propaganda’. Duff Cooper’s officials knew that until the Service ministries produced intelligent and prompt communiqués, the BBC would continue to stumble, offend, and mislead. Military statements were not produced by people thinking about what they might have to say next day. The Ministry and the BBC were now barking in unison. Since Norway BBC bulletins had been pre-censored by the Service departments. The BBC understood that only the MOI could save them from controls that would never apply to the press. Since the BBC Director-General presented himself as eager for instructions, the legal form of ‘control’ was set aside for the moment. The MOI failed to fix its new authority with legal rivets. The new MOI DirectorGeneral, Frank Pick, was a senior figure from London Transport. (He had been a patron of modern architecture: the application of art to corporate purpose must have seemed promising.) Pick wanted efficiency and fewer staff. Duff Cooper and Pick both came to Malet Street with the idée fixe that the MOI was an overstaffed monstrosity. Kirkpatrick, one of the few Whitehall heavyweights in the MOI, quickly lost confidence in his superiors. The Minister was driven on by his wilful Director-General while his best officials tried to resign. Pick had an aggressive confidence in ‘the truth’ unsupported by experience in journalism, broadcasting, or politics. He lectured the Prime Minister about the truth, which was rash, and sounded like a pavement preacher, which was fatal. Churchill accused Pick of being the most honest man since Jesus Christ and ordered that ‘the impeccable busman’ should never be readmitted to Downing Street. Random surgery stunted essential growth in the Ministry. Kirkpatrick resigned in September. Duff Cooper’s ‘Spitfire summer’ was soured by a personal quarrel with Beaverbrook and a press attack on MOI opinion research. The Ministry could not quite escape its original status as a joke with a sinister censorship department in the basement. The Service departments still refused to surrender control of military news to a department of publicity. Cooper had failed to strike when the iron was hot, and he became depressed. This was decisive for his Ministry, and bad for civilian Britain. In the post-war era the British seemed obsessed with war stories. The explanation may be simple. They had not really known what was happening and still wanted to be told. In ‒ the publicists in Malet Street stood by helplessly whilst the Services repeated familiar errors with frightening regularity. During the Battle of Britain, poor publicity  Memorandum for General Ismay,  May , CAB /; Policy Committee,  June , INF /.  Francis Williams, Nothing So Strange (), .

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seemed not to matter. But in  inept publicity could not be smothered in success. After defeat in Greece and Libya and the loss of Crete —- a welldefended island —- the MOI judged that national confidence in British military statements had hit rock bottom. When Brendan Bracken succeeded Duff Cooper in July, it was a rescue mission. There would never be a high-powered ministry for domestic propaganda or ‘information’. The political control of overseas propaganda remained unsettled until this was clear.

 Information and Subversion W A R can corrode societies and dissolve the bonds of convention. Then propaganda can feed hungry minds and fill empty ones. This potential, though rarely realized, is so great it makes the association of war and propaganda seem normal. But war-making and belief-making are extremely difficult to synchronize. The pursuit of rhetorical advantage, on other hand, is merely difficult. If words lose importance during a battle, they regain it as the dust clears. The Chiefs of Staff seemed to agree. In autumn  they said that Germany could be beaten by a combination of bombing, blockade, propaganda and subversion. This was a cocktail of what remained possible and it was very futuristic. But the Russians were breaking the blockade and German morale had just ceased to be a plausible target; subversion was purely conjectural. The biggest decision was to build a fleet of heavy bombers and to try to win the war from the air. But even if Germany were ablaze, occupied Europe might never know liberation unless a middleweight British army could be reinforced by some levée en masse. The ideas were intertwined. Heavy bombing, as a war-winning offensive, was untried; but the idea of armed patriots reinforcing a British army was as familiar as the Peninsular War. Occupied Europe displaced Germany as the chief object of political interest once German morale was encased in military success. The Woburn political warfare people had lost one function—Chamberlain’s German policy—and were looking for another. There had been no plan to help the Poles to fight an underground war. Poland was expected to be overrun, but ‘occupied Europe’ was not foreseen, at least not at the top. Yet the concept of resistance fighting was familiar enough from the Arab Revolt, the Irish Troubles, and even more recent events in Palestine, Spain, and China. Poles and Czechs in London were already—in winter /—asking British specialists to believe that something remained to be done in their homelands: a clandestine opposition combining violence and veiled agitation, which could be sustained by British resources. British officials, employed in sub-departments designated by unmemorable acronyms, had listened and started to lobby. Brigadier Colin Gubbins (MI R) listened to the Poles, and Robert Bruce Lockhart (PID) canvassed the idea of clandestine resistance in Czechoslovakia. After the fall of France the curators of the acronyms were summoned to appear from Whitehall’s dark places. ‘C’ of SIS was dragged forth and accused of total failure. As a result Gubbins and Lockhart would eventually preside over the memorable acronyms—SOE and PWE.

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The MOI was at the edge of the episode in secret service reform which concluded with Churchill investing Hugh Dalton with the new Special Operations Executive. The BBC, trying to embrace aggressive propaganda, were already proposing London broadcasts to give advice on sabotage in enemy-occupied countries. Duff Cooper called for a ‘campaign’. He did not realize what was at stake in a Whitehall discussion of ‘subversion’ which was explained to him as a problem about intelligence. The question of advocacy arrived before the idea of sabotage had been studied or the work allocated. But sabotage and propaganda were already linked ideas. In March  a ‘Section D’ was established by SIS to study the use of commercial contacts and facilities for sabotage of German economic interests. A year later Section D was licensed to introduce propaganda material into Germany. They spread into the Balkans, with a licence to agitate and bribe, and conducted a political struggle against German influence. This was called ‘subversion’. In the War Office a smaller organization, MI R, studied guerrilla warfare under the Director of Military Intelligence. These entities were later pulled together in SOE, but they were already active. Colin Gubbins, then of MI R, proved a point with his command of behind-the-lines operations in Norway; a Section D agent seized industrial diamonds in Amsterdam before the Germans arrived; and MI R tried but failed to destroy Romanian oil wells a few weeks later. As Europe fell into German hands, interest in high-grade sabotage expanded and remained linked to the heading ‘subversion’. These unusual or improper activities were loosely affixed to the secret service. But SIS in western Europe had just been rolled up like a carpet by the enemy. Cadogan, the Foreign Office Permanent Under-Secretary, was alarmed about SIS and Gladwyn Jebb, his Private Secretary, was very critical of Sir Stewart Menzies (‘C’) partly on account of the inadequate development of Section D. Oliver Harvey, director of the MOI French division, recorded ‘universal complaints’ about SIS: ‘Like everything else, that department went to sleep [before the war]. It was never centralised . . . Menzies . . . by all accounts is unequal to it. I hear changes may be made. But it is shocking that this was not done years ago.’ The prospects for subversion seemed good. In the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) it was held that a starving Europe would one day rise up against Nazi occupation. The Director of Military Intelligence considered that insurrection meant battle and proposed a new directorate of irregular activities under the War Office, bringing together sabotage expertise and exercising a certain control over Department EH. Anthony Eden, the new Secretary for War, supported the DMI, but Churchill asked for something even more substantial. Churchill had been thinking about irregular warfare when he suggested to the French ‘a guerrilla movement on a  

Policy Committee,  June , INF /. Harvey diary,  Sept. .

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big scale’—meaning that their army should ‘multiply its guerrillas’ as it broke up. An attempt was made to reorganize and perhaps redefine activities which were either in severe disrepair—SIS field intelligence—or on the drawing board—combined operations (‘raids’), resistance work (‘subversion’), and propaganda (including ‘black’). The first reform produced the Directorate of Combined Operations at the Admiralty. The second opened with a meeting of officials at the Foreign Office on  July  which decided there should be a Controller of Subversive Activities. All the secret organizations and ‘outfits’ were in the melting-pot. Unfortunately, SIS, Section D, and Department EH were all hauled back out of the melting-pot before much had happened, beyond changes of name and staff. Menzies beat off the attempt to reform SIS. His powerful assistant, Claude Dansey, was the spymaster whose networks had failed, but Dansey remained in charge of intelligence work in Europe. While SIS accepted the idea of a new arc of ministerial responsibility—‘subversion’—within the wider secret service, the construction of a wholly separate service came as a shock. Dansey became an opponent of SOE. All this had a bearing on Duff Cooper’s chances of getting a grip on foreign propaganda. Campbell Stuart’s ‘EH’ at Woburn found secrecy convenient and enjoyed a special relationship with SIS. But Reith’s legacy to Duff Cooper was Foreign Office agreement that enemy propaganda should pass to MOI control. Since ‘EH’ was a misnomer it became ‘Country House’ or ‘CH’. Stuart sent Valentine Williams, his senior German specialist, to represent him on Duff Cooper’s Policy Committee. CH were just starting their ‘black’ broadcasting and needed the technical support of the SIS radio signals service. Black broadcasts were intended to deceive their audience about the point of transmission. ‘Black’ therefore did not indicate a degree of mendacity, simply the wish to be unattributable. The output would not be discussed in parliament. ‘Black’ mattered in contemporary discussions not because the Woburn specialists were known to make useful propaganda but because real German expertise and the secrecy licence were political assets; there was, as yet, no special function which ‘black’ was to serve. The problem was how many distinct activities existed, how they should be defined, and how many departments should carve them up. Hugh Dalton was the politician in full pursuit of Section D and was the obvious Labour Party candidate for clandestine warfare; he had been at the Foreign Office in –, and was a fair linguist. He looked ahead six months and saw famine, starvation, and revolt ‘most of all in the slave lands which Germany has overrun’. Dalton made his opening bid at a Foreign Office meeting: ‘I object to putting everything under the DMI [Director of Military Intelligence]. What 

.

Paul Baudouin, Private Diaries (),  ( June ); Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill, vi.

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we have in mind . . . concerns Trade Unions, Socialists etc; the making of chaos and revolution—no more suitable for soldiers than fouling at football.’ Dalton’s suggestion that Campbell Stuart should be the head of any new organization indicates where Dalton had been taking his advice. But Churchill rejected Stuart—Chamberlain’s chief propagandist. Attlee too claimed that subversion was left-wing work and so almost blundered. The Chiefs of Staff began to make trouble. It is difficult to know whether they thought subversion would obstruct pure intelligence work or whether it was visceral. Hugh Gaitskell, Dalton’s private secretary, detected the class war; but it was normal to want ministerial authority kept away from the operational level. ‘Chaos’ was an uncertain requirement. But Attlee’s colleagues could not accept a war machine containing mysteries forbidden to them; so Dalton won ‘subversion’ by what he thought was prescriptive socialist right. His subsequent efforts to give SOE a left-wing political charge were not so much frustrated as nugatory. Dalton’s sentimental approval of working-class radicalism meant little, but there was some middle-class radicalism in the Section D pipeline. Menzies saw off the directors of military intelligence, and Dalton fought off opposition from Bracken and Professor Lindemann, Churchill’s scientific adviser. So Section D was cut out from SIS and became the core of SOE, but the rest of SIS stayed under the old management. Since SOE had a general brief to deal with ‘subversion’ overseas, Dalton could now argue that subversive propaganda belonged to SOE. SOE was born trespassing on turf already marked out by SIS, the Foreign Office, and the MOI. The reforms of July  left the secret service under existing managers while splitting it into two competing parts whose quarrels were probably worse than the record yet reveals. The lost alternative was a single service: no SIS morbidly determined to remain the senior organization, pretending a professionalism unknown to the ‘amateurs’ of SOE; no SOE obliged to sell itself with phrases about subversion; no confusion as to which was the real political service. There would also have been no temptation to shuffle, yet again, the foreign propaganda outfits—MOI and Woburn—into different ministerial boxes. Several considerations pointed to a single secret service organization under the Ministry of Defence. The initial intention had been to co-ordinate or unify all secret intelligence, although the official history regrets an absence of ‘prolonged thought’ on the matter. SOE was launched on a wing and a phrase. It should not have been an independent department. In wartime a place in the military hierarchy is extremely useful. SOE access to boats and aircraft was seriously deficient. SOE did have an initial need for a secret service shape— every frog must be tadpole first. Their role, once the talk of subversion subsided, was to train and support small fighting teams capable of deploying as  

Dalton diary,  July . F. H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War, 4 vols. (‒), i. .

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saboteurs, instructors and military liaison missions. The end product—wireless operators, commandos, and instructors moving into resistance groups behind pathfinders—really belonged with Combined Operations or, later, with the appropriate Army HQ possessing the military clout to procure equipment and secure aircraft. Instead, SOE started under a Labour Minister whom Churchill disliked. Gladwyn Jebb, a diplomat who was Dalton’s private secretary in , became ‘Chief Executive Officer’ and tried to tie together a propaganda department called SO and the new Section D called SO. SO was run by Sir Frank Nelson, an SIS veteran. Under-resourced and friendless, SOE grew up away from the centre of military affairs and the primary intelligence stream. Dalton considered he had won a famous victory by playing a political trump card, but he was master of a secret service with too few assets and he became part-owner of a propaganda centre with too few duties. An indistinct set of problems, some unfamiliar, were discussed in a hurry. Informed obfuscators could run rings round disinterested parties. Even in July , the politicians remixing the witch’s brew of petty departments and slender resources were Chamberlain, Hankey, and Halifax—the people who had been in charge for years. Propaganda work, subversive or not, required a single propaganda department with access to its own sort of intelligence—in the same way as the Foreign Office—and access to military planners. Like the secret services, the MOI needed to ensure that its lines did not get crossed. On  July, before SOE was off the drawing board, Duff Cooper inspected Woburn Abbey (‘Country House’) and was inclined to order the CH teams back to London to be merged with his foreign publicity departments in Malet Street. It was inconvenient to have one body out in Bedfordshire thinking about Germany and Italy—the new enemy—and a separate organization in London thinking about occupied Europe. He consulted Bruce Lockhart, then a marginal if distinguished figure in Leeper’s PID, who confessed that the work of MOI and CH was closely connected but foresaw ‘friction’ between Kirkpatrick in London and the senior men from the country. (This was prophetic. In , as chairman of PWE, he came off the fence and supported Kirkpatrick.) Next day, Dalton presented himself at Woburn as the potential Minister of Subversion. Rex Leeper recommended Vansittart as Chief Adviser and Vansittart later recommended Leeper to replace Campbell Stuart. He was the natural choice to take over the expanding secret propaganda world at Woburn. As director at Woburn (‘CH’ or ‘CHQ’) of the branch of SOE called ‘SO’, Leeper would preside over black broadcasting in the languages of occupied Europe. His staff soon included some Dalton promotions, but all were gifted people with the right languages—Denis Brogan for France,  K. Young (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, ii, 1939–65 (), – ( and  July ).

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Frederick Voigt and Richard Crossman for Germany, Thomas Barman for Scandinavia, R. W. Seton-Watson and Ralph Murray for the Danubian world. ‘Bertie’ Lockhart would have been underemployed at Woburn if the Foreign Office had not given him Bene˘s’s Czechoslovak Committee to look after. SOE was topped up with black propaganda, partly because it was ‘subversive’ but really because it was secret. It was spicy enough to be tempting to Dalton though only indirectly useful. Monckton was warned that it was ‘in the air’ that MOI might become ‘somewhat less responsible’ for secret propaganda since ‘all underground offensive action against the enemy’ was to be run by one Minister. At this point Duff Cooper had spent two full and interesting months as Minister and as one of Churchill’s advisers on French affairs. But Hugh Dalton was hungrier. Only a few broadcasting ‘projects’ were strictly secret: BBC German broadcasts were not. Dalton conferred with his advisers —Vansittart, Jebb, and Gaitskell—and then went to the Ministry of Information to negotiate about CH. The two ministers were both irascible and ambitious. Where Cooper was almost popular, Dalton was handicapped by what Bevin called his ‘concentrated gaze of unfathomable insincerity’. They were both Etonians who had fought as junior officers in the Great War. They shared strong anti-German feelings, but they were not meant for each other. Jebb was generous to both in his memoirs: Cooper was ‘a brave man and a real statesman’ but ‘no administrator’, and Dalton, ‘though immensely active’, also lacked ‘any great sense of organisation’. Lord Chatfield, an admiral who had known him as First Lord, warned that Cooper was ‘lazy and unimaginative’. Kirkpatrick records politely that, despite his good intellect and political experience, he lacked an ‘interest in the art of propaganda’. In any case, Duff Cooper showed no relish for Whitehall in-fighting. Dalton’s faith in himself was more unflagging. But his visits to Woburn were full of dreary discussions on personalities and administration. Country House staff dreaded these visits. Thomas Barman calls his former chief ‘a great booming bully’ who made jokes at breakfast and forced his staff to accompany him on long Sundays walks: ‘More than once I detected a look of embarrassment, and even shame, flash across Gaitskell’s face as Dalton indulged himself in one of his habitual tactlessnesses.’ Dalton disliked the long discussions about propaganda he encountered. Duff Cooper had the ministerial franchise for all foreign propaganda and Dalton whatever might be essential to subversion. Both ministers could claim ‘political warfare’ for themselves since the connection between propaganda Morton to Monckton,  July , box , Monckton papers. On Bevin’s verdict: Young (ed.), Lockhart Diaries, ii. ; Lord Gladwyn [Gladwyn Jebb], Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn (),  and .  Stephen Roskill, Hankey (), ; Ivone Kirkpatrick, The Inner Circle (), . Oliver Harvey liked Duff Cooper’s speeches: ‘What a pity he is so lazy! He might get to the very top’: diary,  Thomas Barman, Diplomatic Correspondent (), .  Apr. .  

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and subversion was undoubted. The Ministers invited their advisers— Vansittart and Sir Maurice Peterson—to suggest a division of labour. Black propaganda had to stay out of notice. MI preferred that what Jebb called ‘a zoo for foreigners’—including enemy aliens employed as script writers and presenters—should remain out of town. The decision was that the Minister of Information should keep all BBC broadcasting but, since the MOI had never really run black propaganda anyway, Dalton was given Woburn and granted the ‘black’ side, to be run by Leeper as Director of Subversive Propaganda. SOE appeared to be complete: SO under Leeper, SO under Nelson (‘CD’). The SOE Charter was then accepted by the Cabinet on  July. These divisions did not please the staff. SO did not relinquish their subversive projects and ‘operational propaganda’ assets, outside Britain, to a body of journalists and diplomats in Bedfordshire (SO). SO kept on subverting in the Balkans with little if any reference to Woburn. SO could not but remember their former dignity as the Department of Enemy Propaganda. Dalton came under pressure to secure for SO everything that once had been Department EH. The Woburn staff did not wish to be distributed—as whites and blacks—between MOI and SOE. Emissaries were sent to London to argue against splitting up what had been basically a German propaganda department. This seemed sensible, but the consequences of accepting the plea were peculiar. The site and the staff belonged to SO, but Leeper’s senior specialists remained the only means of supervising the BBC’s ‘white’ propaganda to Germany. Their most important work was done for the Minister of Information, who maintained his authority by sending Peterson down to Woburn to preside over the weekly ‘German’ meeting. Despite the brandishing of new brooms, the old Department EH and Section D continued with their work—renamed but not much the wiser. SO moved to  Baker Street in November. SO remained remote from SO and had less political authority than Stuart’s Department EH. It was all an example of the weakness of departmental reform when not supported by a full grasp of practical work. Churchill delighted Dalton with his injunction to ‘set Europe ablaze’. SOE was a gesture of faith that the war could still be fought, that the means existed to expand the contest. This was promising. But the decision badly needed a firmer allocation of resources to the project. Starting with no aircraft or boats, and no signals organization of their own, SOE never quite recovered from the neglect which followed the fine words. The ‘subversion’ secret service—Section D/SO—already existed. Their chance of importance was not improved by the excision from SIS and a very loose attachment  M. R. D. Foot sees more solid achievement—‘common agreement’ in ‘ the service stratosphere’: SOE in France (), . He later argued that the fusion of SO and SO was ‘too rational to be accepted’: Resistance (), .  Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years (), ; Churchill may have adapted a Bolshevik slogan: ‘Our mission is to set the East ablaze’: P. Hopkirk, Setting the East Ablaze (), p. iv.

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to Woburn. ‘SOE’ existed only because SIS could not strangle it at birth. SO was simply another attempt at getting on with clandestine sabotage, and its separation from SO in August  was less a retreat from logic than from rhetoric. When France collapsed it was clear that an extra effort at irregular warfare should be made. Section D needed new country sections. Something similar was felt about propaganda. The real gearing up accomplished—the creation of a French section at the MOI, a new French team in the BBC, and F Section in SOE—would have happened even if the Cabinet had not given these matters a moment’s thought. Later in the war it became clear that special operations needed to be attached to a military headquarters. This was achieved—without troubling the Cabinet—by administrative decisions in London and Cairo. It was the reform which had not happened in . Admittedly, no one could know what SOE would turn up. But the poor quality of the  decision is still masked by SOE’s regimental pride in the ‘Charter’. The directors of military intelligence were displeased about SOE and felt outmanoeuvred and underconsulted. Churchill’s intuition may have been that something was not quite right. He hesitated several days before allowing Attlee and Desmond Morton, the monitor of the secret world in his private office, to talk him into going through with the SOE plan. To help SOE, Duff Cooper gave up his brief ministerial authority over the ‘Country House’. This innocent attempt to be constructive caused the future trouble. The specialists in German affairs, who were essential at the BBC and acted under MOI authority, became Dalton’s officials because some of them were also required for ‘rumours’ or black radio projects hypothetically interesting to SO. Cooper explained that he gave ‘Country House’ to Dalton because he was told that ‘the Secret Service was not working satisfactorily, that it was controlled by too many departments and that all Secret Service projects should be handed over’; but he had believed Woburn would do ‘projects’ rather than increase their propaganda activities. This was genuine. SO would always argue that ‘black’ propaganda should be ‘operational’. Country House black activities were at this point of no direct value to SO, and in the Balkans SO did the job for themselves. Most of Woburn’s leaflets and all the BBC work was really MOI business. ‘Black’ resistance broadcasting could be worse than useless without close familiarity with ‘white’. The MOI staff soon understood that the Minister’s concessions had disorganized their work. Oliver Harvey’s MOI French division grew into the Enemy and EnemyOccupied Territories division. But the officials doing the German work stayed with another department. If the formal reason was the consolidation in the intelligence world which did not take place, the effective reason was that Chamberlain’s department of enemy propaganda, though shorn of its boss 

Memorandum by Duff Cooper,  Dec. , FO /.

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and its best prospects, was still ambitious and too proud for Malet Street. The Minister of Information’s portfolio consisted of all overt British propaganda done anywhere. It is not true that ‘the open propaganda element’ at Woburn was temporarily left with the MOI because Dalton with too busy with the ‘sabotage side of SOE’ or that Duff Cooper used a ‘technicality’ to block a transfer of authority to Dalton. Had sabotage and subversion, at this point, been much more than concepts, Dalton would not have been burdened with Woburn, and Woburn would not have been redefined as the home of covert propaganda. There was no intention, except in Woburn, that MOI responsibility for BBC broadcasting to occupied Europe would be temporary. Duff Cooper’s initial sacrifice of his German and Italian propaganda staff did little for SOE and nothing for political warfare. ‘White’ propaganda, which might have stayed out of contest about secret departments if Duff Cooper had been more alert, toppled into the departmental maelstrom. 

Charles Cruickshank, The Fourth Arm: Psychological Warfare ‒ (), –.



Black and White

I N October  bombs hit Broadcasting House and killed seven people. The Overseas Service was evacuated and, after a short time in an ice-skating rink, arrived in Bush House in , where the ‘European Service’ operated safely, though in  a V- flying bomb exploded by the Aldwych entrance. At the Ministry of Information, which was also hit, staff were not less anxious than their colleagues in Woburn to make propaganda. They were more numerous and closer to the press; they had a ‘Duty Room’ manned around the clock as a centre of immediate guidance for journalists and censors. SO was, by comparison, a high-powered seminar. They received less than the steady stream of information that flowed into Malet Street, although access to military intelligence was probably better. Some of SO’s propaganda officials came up from Woburn to work near their Minister in Berkeley Square. But when the Blitz started most of them returned to ‘the Country’. Brigadier Brooks, who ran the London office, was scathing about the preference of Leeper’s staff for the country life. Vansittart, Dalton’s most senior adviser, also lodged at Woburn. Sir Maurice Peterson, the MOI Controller of foreign publicity, and Oliver Harvey travelled to Woburn since the MOI was entitled to take the chair in German propaganda committees. Malet Street was not impressed by the Woburn cult of secrecy. It was too evident that black propaganda was a case of ingenuity in search of a purpose. The special position of the Woburn German section—the only one permitted to send directives to the BBC—was so attractive that an agitation began to extend the arrangement. Dalton held that his staff ‘underrated’ the case against further change. The people he really disliked were the ‘wretched knock-kneed officials’ in the Foreign Office. If any department achieved sole control of foreign propaganda work it would not be SOE. Dalton understood this, but his competitive streak overcame his better judgement. In the Foreign Office the French and Central departments were supervised by William Strang, an Assistant Under-Secretary. At Strang’s initiative Halifax and Duff Cooper had agreed on a royal message from King George to Pétain to be dropped as a leaflet. Nothing could be less clandestine. It was ‘white’ propaganda and MOI were asked to attend to the details. But leaflets had started the war in Woburn hands, when they were all in German, and for convenience leaflets had stuck with SO. Strang did not consult Leeper. When  

E. Butler, Amateur Agent (), . Dalton diary,  and  Oct. ; Dalton to Leeper,  Aug. , /, Dalton Papers.

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SO heard of the royal leaflet, they feared an attempt to break their monopoly of ‘leaflets’. Dalton threatened to go to the Prime Minister. Oliver Harvey, in charge of MOI occupied countries division, wanted to be friendly. He was delighted to find Dalton ‘very seriously anti-fascist’ and they shared a dislike of Foreign Office attitudes to Pétain. ‘I can’t help liking Dalton’, he wrote in his diary. ‘He is a very awkward customer, full of suspicions and angles, very unpopular both with his own party and everywhere else. But I’m sure he is a sincere and sound man. Yet he will always trip himself up.’ SO believed the BBC had too much independence and that the French broadcasts, though technically excellent, needed a stronger control. Jebb proposed that France be treated on the German model: senior figures could come down to Woburn where the real decisions would be taken. Harvey guessed the intention: We must watch MUW [Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare] carefully as they show a tendency to poach on our reserves whilst keeping us completely out of theirs. The truth is, I suspect, that they have at last discovered what I always thought to be the case myself, namely that in open broadcasting the MOI have control of the big propaganda gun whilst their weapons—leaflets and clandestine activity generally—are only subsidiary.

A mistake conveyed Harvey’s comments to SOE. Dalton gathered his entire clan to discuss the ‘attack’ on leaflets and Harvey’s ‘almost libellous minute’. He convinced himself that ‘they [MOI] have played into our hands’ and was advised to go to the Prime Minister to demand the control of ‘additional broadcasts’. Dalton was often egged on by SO staff. Lockhart had encouraged him, in Beaverbrook’s presence, to believe that he could win Cabinet battles against Duff Cooper. But Dalton found it difficult to talk to Churchill, and Churchill could not commit to memory the shape of the propaganda organizations. But he did obtain a War Cabinet discussion. Both Ministers offered proposals for replacing each other. Dalton persuaded Herbert Morrison to help him, and Morrison was on the Cabinet committee which would finally decide the legal form of state control of the BBC. Probably as a result, this committee recommended less than it had been set up to recommend—the replacement of the BBC Director-General by an MOI official. This ensured that the War Cabinet would not find unified MOI control of propaganda too obvious to resist. Churchill asked Sir John Anderson, the Lord President, to advise him. It was a sign that he did not want a fight in  Harvey diary,  Nov. . Harvey to Peterson and Hood,  Nov. , INF /. Dalton diary,  Nov. . Dalton was sometimes weary of this pressure: diary,  Dec. .  See J. Colville in Sir J. Wheeler-Bennett (ed.), Action This Day (),  and Wheeler-Bennett, Special Relationships (), : ‘I have never believed . . . that the PM really comprehended the mechanics of political warfare. I should not be suprised if, in the deep recesses of his mind, he had a vague conception of a man — or at most two men — standing on the white cliffs of Dover and shouting into a megaphone towards enemy-occupied Europe. But he was intrigued by its “cloak and dagger” aspect and warmly defended its status as an essential part of national security.’  

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Cabinet. Papers were presented arguing for unified propaganda under the MOI or for unified subversion under Dalton. Anderson took no notice. He came out strongly for the status quo and better liaison. There was little else to recommend. Dalton had virtually withdrawn his claim against Duff Cooper, and Dalton’s Labour colleagues closed ranks. The Foreign Office, especially R. A. Butler, preferred Woburn to Malet Street. Dalton, however, noticed that Orme Sargent, the Deputy Under-Secretary, was becoming a decided enemy of SOE. Anti-Dalton stories reached the Foreign Office through Leeper, who was anxious about Dalton’s clever protégés—Gladwyn Jebb, Hugh Gaitskell, and Richard Crossman. Anderson liked the ‘German model’. But the MOI Controller of Foreign Publicity, Peterson, pointed out that this could mean several things: The demand for a single directive means in practice that they [SO] want to work one out at CH and are ready to have me there as a liaison officer but without my experts. I think the right reply is that the Italian directive is worked out here but we will welcome their cooperation; they can take our directive away and need not tell us whether they use it or not. What they are doing does not in fact bear much relation to what we are doing. Their real aim is to control the BBC.

Dalton’s staff did not want ‘liaison’ to happen in Malet Street. However, Monckton was able to make Dalton promise to send representatives to the MOI’s weekly Italian meeting. Peterson’s view of the irrelevance of ‘black’ to BBC work was already true of some German black but it would be less true of broadcasts Woburn was preparing for occupied countries. (Most of the production teams—‘Research Units’ or RUs—had not yet begun to transmit.) Within SO it was admitted that much ‘black’ propaganda duplicated the BBC approach; within SO it appeared that Woburn had ‘no very clear idea of what they are doing’ and chased after open propaganda for that reason. The licence to make broadcasts unfettered by truth or taste was more intriguing in prospect than readily useful. Woburn long remained, at heart, a secret department for German planning. The interesting political work in the Balkans was done by SO. Duff Cooper now came under pressure from his civil servants. Monckton had recently succeeded Frank Pick as Director-General. He wanted to force SO to explain themselves and submit to a series of joint committees run by MOI. Duff Cooper was almost hemmed in by well-informed militants, except for his Controller of Foreign Publicity. Maurice Peterson was another example of the Ministry’s bad luck with personnel. In Madrid he had been a superb Ambassador, playing the Palmerstonian titan to a gallery of local fascists and standing on his dignity when they were insolent. But after his unexpected   

Dalton diary,  Dec. . Peterson to Minister,  Jan. , INF /. D/Q to ADI [Sweet-Escott],  Feb. , HS /.

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recall he appeared world-weary and ‘singularly uncommunicative’. Peterson believed he had lost his Embassy to provide a job for Sam Hoare, and was sulking: ‘he nursed his grievance with patience and devotion . . . [and was] known as Uncle Beastly’. Duff Cooper and Peterson would have allowed the propaganda controversy to die down. But Monckton was reinforced by Kirkpatrick, installed at the BBC as ‘Adviser’ on Foreign Affairs. Kirkpatrick’s job was to impose instructions on the BBC from within, and he was pleased to have a post with more executive scope than he had enjoyed as an MOI director. Harold Nicolson was probably right to think—for domestic reasons—that the Ministry was winning the respect of the House of Commons, even if the Minister was ‘idle and aloof ’, whereas SO remained a secret department without a reputation; and Dalton was considered, by Crossman and probably by Leeper, to spend insufficient time on ‘propagandology’. Despite the Cabinet committee’s sudden reluctance to suspend the BBC Charter, Duff Cooper’s control of white propaganda was taking shape. He told Dalton he would ‘tie up the Ministry and the BBC into what is really one team’. This shows the influence of Kirkpatrick, who became, in Peterson’s words, ‘the prime mover in this controversy’. The intention was not new—it had been the plan in —but with Kirkpatrick setting up in Bush House and with Monckton and Harvey battering at the gates of Woburn Abbey, the MOI were getting serious. Duff Cooper brought the pot back to the boil. He told Dalton to return all the German ‘whites’ to London whatever services they happened to perform for SO. The German work was SO’s juiciest plum. At the MOI Duty Room on  April, officials were expecting to examine an SO leaflet which had been praised by the Air Ministry, but SOE’s liaison officer confessed that his seniors refused to hand it over. The Duty Room committee resolved that this was the purest nonsense and Cyril Radcliffe, the Controller of Press and Censorship, recommended that the walls of SO secrecy be cast down, that all British leaflets be made available to the press, and that Country House representatives ought to be expelled from the Ministry since no pretence of sincere liaison was being made. Monckton thought that ‘battle had been joined’ and suggested that the services of Brigadier R. A. D. Brooks might become available. This was remarkable, for Brooks was the most wellconnected of Dalton’s officials. In December he had been granted the sort of access to the military planning machinery which the MOI was pleading for.  T. Barman, Diplomatic Correspondent (), . A Frenchman thought Peterson was pretending ‘to be very hard of hearing, nearly blind, and to have all but lost his memory’: R. Mengin, No Laurels for De Gaulle (), ; Monckton and Harold Nicolson thought that Peterson ‘must go’: Nicolson diary,  Jan., .  Nicolson diary,  Feb.  and  Apr. ; Dalton diary,  Jan. .  Duff Cooper to Dalton,  Mar. ; Peterson to Monckton,  Mar. , INF /.  Duff Cooper to Dalton,  Mar. , INF /.  Duty Room Guidance No.  and Monckton to Radcliffe,  Apr. , INF /.  Monckton to Peterson,  Apr. , INF /.

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Dalton imagined Brooks could turn the COS against the MOI, but Brooks became inter alia his chief liaison officer with the MOI. Under pressure Dalton discovered how to be co-operative. He seconded three officials to work in the BBC and offered that Crossman and Con O’Neill should work under Kirkpatrick on a shift basis. This was almost generous—a contemporary SO attempt to cut off MOI’s supply of intercepted press telegrams from Vichy was more typical—and Kirkpatrick wanted to give it a trial. But when Duff Cooper accepted these liaison officers as a temporary measure, he was in possession of a remarkable letter from Frederick Voigt. Voigt had been an impressive Berlin correspondent of the Manchester Guardian and Woburn’s senior German specialist. He was a serious figure, who had just discovered how ruthless Dalton could be in support of his young favourites—in this case Crossman. Voigt had resigned: I shall not bother you with my reasons except the one which I regard as absolutely decisive, namely, that in the last analysis our propaganda to Germany is according to my considered opinion, pro-German. I shall always be glad to serve under yourself for I am sure that you do not share the fallacies, as I regard them, on which our propaganda to Germany is based.

Monckton thought that once the MOI resumed control of BBC German broadcasts there would be resignations from SO by German specialists with no work to do. There was some danger the propaganda debate might get into the newspapers. Dalton told Anderson he was tired of ‘squabbles’ and wanted only what he had plus some Foreign Office protection. At a ministerial meeting Duff Cooper made his bid for SO but Dalton offered ‘co-ordination’. Anderson and Eden accepted this, and it seems likely that Duff Cooper left the meeting half conceding the point. Nevertheless, he returned to Malet Street, announced that Dalton had given in over German broadcasts—which was less than half true—and gave the order to start the MOI German section. Duff Cooper was under severe pressure. Monckton was frustrated by his Minister’s reluctance to punch like a heavyweight. The militancy over foreign broadcasting was only part of a campaign being fought by most of the Ministry’s leading figures for the right to decide how the War should be reported. The quality of Cairo communiqués during the fighting in Greece and Libya and the unending silence from the Admiralty left the MOI staff exasperated to the point of mass resignation. Monckton had even seen Churchill about the control of military news, only to be told that the Prime Minister himself was also ‘enraged’ at the inadequacy of his situation reports. Between  and  May Duff Cooper tried to persuade Churchill to permit a public statement about the extraordinary arrival of Rudolph Hess. He F. A. Voigt to Duff Cooper,  Apr.. , INF /. Conclusions of Conference on Propaganda to Enemy Countries,  May , INF /;  Dalton diary,  May . Nicolson diary,  Apr. .  

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had almost succeeded on the night before the ministerial conference on propaganda, but at . a.m. Beaverbrook intervened in favour of silence. Beaverbrook—then Minister of State—started meeting the press as an auxiliary Minister of Information. The next day Duff Cooper continued to put up a stiff fight for the right of his Ministry to say something about Hess that would be true. He failed. His struggles against Dalton, Anderson, Eden, Beaverbrook, and Churchill all on the same day proved too great a strain. He retreated to Bognor Regis and fell ill for the next three weeks. Before leaving London he threw a small spanner in the works by lifting an unofficial ban on Fleet Street guesswork as to what Hess was saying in captivity. Frustration inside the Ministry continued to rise. Monckton and Radcliffe prepared a document listing their grievances which they sent to Bognor with the warning that they must resign ‘unless something is done on the lines of our suggestions’. The Minister was forced to appeal to the Cabinet and withdraw his concession to Anderson or lose his leading officials. A ‘Grand Remonstrance’ on behalf of the MOI was prepared and the civil servants tried to drum up support. They obtained a friendly response from Beaverbrook and Bracken. Dalton refused to transfer any of his staff to the MOI German section. Monckton and his staff felt a patriotic duty to force the War Cabinet to have an information policy. Good propaganda needed sane publicity. Britain was plainly losing the war again after a flood of false optimism. Victory was out of sight and a very long war seemed the only hope. But when this was understood, the will to persist could deteriorate without intelligent reinforcement. Only a sober and consistent public estimate of what was possible could sustain the good sense and self-esteem of the nation: ‘the treatment of news and information’ would be absolutely critical in a long war fought from a position of comprehensive military inferiority. The neutral world might soon accept the German suggestion that British resistance was pointless. The Ministry believed that an American crisis of confidence in Britain had been triggered by the defeats in Greece and Libya. Accurate and prompt military news was indispensable for a state determined to maintain a claim to military seriousness despite a lengthening record of failure. When Duff Cooper returned to London on  June the War Cabinet knew about his staff. Duff Cooper rejected the ‘Anderson Award’ and accepted the contest prepared for him. He also delivered what Dalton called ‘an amazing harangue’ to the lobby correspondents attacking Eden and the Service Ministries and, ‘blazing with anger’, demanded a seat in the War Cabinet and full control of war news. The Prime Minister asked Beaverbrook to help, but  D. Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan (), – (– May) and Nicolson diary,  and  May .  Memorandum and covering letter, Monckton to Duff Cooper,  May , INF /.  Monckton/Radcliffe memorandum,  May  and  May, INF /.

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P U T T I N G O U T T H E F L AG S

Beaverbrook was never very good in committee and, although he was briefed by Monckton, let himself be blocked by Attlee, who appeared on the scene defending ‘unity of subversion’. Churchill’s main concern was to end the quarrel and to find a new Minister of Information if Duff Cooper resigned or became inconsolable. The Anderson Award—a grand committee of three drawn from the MOI, the FO, and MEW/SOE to co-ordinate all foreign propaganda—was made again. When the invasion of Russia began on  June, it was already likely that whatever concessions the MOI obtained from the Services would not be important. In any case, the invasion prevented the political crisis in Britain which Monckton had expected in the event of a closer Nazi–Soviet alliance. (Cripps had forecast that Hitler would make big demands and Stalin would accept them.) Instead of British isolation there was a major ally. No longer was the war a forlorn British assault on a Nazi–Soviet new order. Propaganda was now not so strictly tied to British military credibility, that is, to ‘news control’. Publicity policy was not a trifle. Weak publicity starved the emotions and abused the intelligence of a patient but passionate people who deserved better. After years of pre-war discussion and almost two years of war, the important questions about wartime propaganda remained unanswered. Good work could be done only by flowing past strangely persistent obstacles. The officials at the MOI were serious, relatively disinterested, and shrewd. They did not mind at all how problems were solved. Monckton, Radcliffe, Kirkpatrick, and Harvey were men on secondment. They had other lives, other professions, other loyalties. They wanted someone to be able to do the job they were coming to understand. Despairing of the prospects for their own department, they took their grasp of what was wrong out into Whitehall in search of solutions. They made Beaverbrook, Bracken, and Morton listen. The MOI agitation did not exactly succeed, but it put everyone under such pressure that Brendan Bracken could conjure up the Political Warfare Executive a few weeks later.  Dalton diary,  June ; Beaverbrook to Prime Minister,  June , PREM //; Nicolson diary,  [surely ] June .  Cripps to Monckton,  May , box , Monckton Papers.



The Birth of PWE

T H E MOI officials knew that the invasion of Russia terminated their moment of opportunity. Oliver Harvey left the Ministry for the Foreign Office in midJune and Peterson followed two weeks later, but the rest were trapped. Dalton heard that ‘Duff Cooper, screaming with anger, flings their resignations back in their faces.’ Harvey was still able to be useful. He had seen a good deal of Desmond Morton in the Committee on Foreign (Allied) Resistance, and Morton watched Information and Intelligence on Churchill’s behalf. Morton was not impressed by the distinction between overt and covert propaganda which the Anderson Award reaffirmed. He was aware that the formula ‘white’ = information and ‘black’ = subversion was wrong. Morton had a firm grasp of pre-war values: ‘ “Information” for Home, Dominion and Colonial consumption can be separated from “Propaganda” to foreign countries, whether allied, enemy, enemy-occupied or neutral.’ He explained to Churchill, by example, what infuriated Malet Street. British troops had entered Vichy-held Syria on  June. But the MOI did not know why they were there, or what to say about Syria, or what Cairo might be saying. The march to Damascus was a shoe-string assault—with Free French support—which might miscarry if the Vichy French fought hard. Morton had expected a propaganda barrage to dilute the pugnacity of the Vichy colonials. But no one had even put the problem to the MOI: ‘our foreign propaganda constitutes nothing but a danger to our own interests while this type of confusion reigns’. So he applied himself to the ‘Anderson Award’. Brendan Bracken, in Churchill’s private office, supported Monckton’s Grand Remonstrance. Monckton was already in touch with Brigadier Brooks and with Bruce Lockhart, whom Harvey recommended to Eden as the man to represent the Foreign Office on Anderson’s Committee of Three. Both Brooks and Bruce Lockhart still belonged to Leeper’s SO. In the next six weeks Brendan Bracken and these officials pulled the Anderson Award inside out and invented the Political Warfare Executive. The plot evolved from an innocent early stage. Brooks had dined with Eden on  May and presented the idea of organizing the ‘,, oppressed’ as Lockhart’s. When the Monckton/Radcliffe insurgency hit the brick wall of Cabinet mulishness on  June, Duff Cooper admitted he had been ‘beaten all along the line’ and   

Dalton diary,  July . Morton to R. A. Butler,  May , CAB /. Morton to the Prime Minister,  June , CAB /.

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told Churchill that in peace time he would have resigned. Monckton was disgusted. What remained was to work out what the Anderson Award meant. Since the new co-ordinating committee needed a senior Foreign Office chairman, the high rank of Deputy Under-Secretary was thrust upon Bruce Lockhart. Beaverbrook, recently Lockhart’s employer, had first offered him the post on  May, when its importance was entirely uncertain. Lockhart was doubtful. He wanted badly to be back in the heart of the foreign policy community and did not want to grasp at straws. Lockhart’s career had taken some curious turns, and his life was irregular and debt-driven. He had been a diplomat in Russia during the Revolution. He was arrested and sentenced to death after the attempt to assassinate Lenin in , but he was opposed, before and after his release, to military intervention. After Russia he had been posted to Prague, where he tried banking and commerce. He turned to journalism in —as chief writer for the Evening Standard’s ‘Londoner’s Diary’, which he endured as a sentence of hard labour. Lockhart was a melancholy man of the world. He accepted the inevitability of the ‘old diplomacy’ and balance-of-power politics, but underneath several layers of cold analysis he was a progressive of some sort. He was already worried that the Foreign Office would support a Tsarist ‘Free Russia’ committee when the Germans occupied Russia since he foresaw a titanic communist resistance. Lockhart warned Eden that Cooper and Dalton intended to weaken the Foreign Office; he recommended that the Anderson Award should be used to achieve the opposite effect. Eden, though very departmental, was not crudely acquisitive. The foreign propaganda question was somehow still open. Duff Cooper was sent to Singapore as Minister of State. (He escaped the Japanese and in  reached Paris as British Ambassador.) It may be that Bracken played kingmaker until Churchill hoisted him with his own petard and made him Minister of Information on  July. Bracken always denied that he had wanted the job. Brendan Bracken did not want to address the nation. He simply made himself available to Fleet Street. His public appearances were at press conferences, and he remained active in the Commons. He kept an office in Downing Street and saw Churchill too often for there to be much written correspondence between them. (When Bracken used correct procedure Churchill was surprised: ‘Now please leave off scolding me on paper, and if you have any griefs come and beat me up personally. You know perfectly well that you can see me almost any time.’) In Malet Street Bracken identified managerial skill and made deft quasi-proprietorial interventions. He transformed first his Ministry and then the BBC. He trusted his key officials—   

Nicolson diary,  and  June . Bruce Lockhart to Eden,  June , FO /. Churchill to Bracken,  June , INF /.

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Radcliffe and Kirkpatrick then Lockhart—to captain his ships and he reserved much of his time for Downing Street. He was unfamiliar with middle-rank officials outside Malet Street—he scarcely knew Newsome until late — but reinforced those he trusted and encouraged Kirkpatrick to seize power in the BBC European Service and change it. Bracken was a successful publishing executive who had not yet amassed a great deal of personal capital. He was intolerant of incompetence but valued good managers and good journalists and did not over-manage them. The staff at Malet Street were pleased to have a Minister who understood their work and made decisions. For the BBC Bracken was a friendly but severe ministerial patron whose attention to the higher management—Broadcasting House even more than Bush House—was timely and beneficial. Bracken arrived with a plan. He explained to Eden that neither he nor Lockhart liked the plethora of ‘regional committees’ which the Anderson Award envisaged as co-ordinating minor matters while the three senior officials co-ordinated major ones. He further proposed, without saying as much, to revise the War Cabinet’s commitment to the Anderson Award: ‘I very much hope that the committee [Lockhart’s] will work out a tidy scheme welding together the many agencies which are attempting foreign propaganda.’ Since Anderson had recommended a nest of committees to cope with the refusal to weld the ‘many agencies’ together, this was piquant. Eden, however, was supportive. Bracken’s technique was to avoid advertising his intentions and to concentrate important ideas in a single phrase. Dalton remembered that Bracken had not wanted him to have SOE and considered Bracken was ‘reactionary’. (He was certainly a Tory imperialist and would be a critic of Bretton Woods.) Six months earlier Bracken had saluted Dalton as ‘that great brute who, like his friend Mr Bevin tramples all opposition in the mud’. Dalton had been foolishly pleased with this menacing banter. Bracken’s real intentions appear in his exchanges with Desmond Morton. Both had long been members of Churchill’s inner circle. They contemplated a ‘Political Warfare Executive’ to control propaganda for enemy or enemyoccupied territory. Morton thought that Dalton’s empire made little sense. SOE could easily part company with MEW: SO to fall under Bracken’s Executive and SO joining the Directorate of Combined Operations. This latter idea, a possibility in , might have been the best solution to SOE’s problems. Morton saw Brooks as the strategic mind in the projected department of political warfare. Brooks was an authority on politics in military circles and an authority on strategy among civilians. He considered, correctly, that Russia’s   

Bracken to Eden,  July , INF /. Dalton diary,  July ; Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton (), . Morton to Bracken,  July , INF /.

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part in the war opened up huge political warfare opportunities. He refused to accept the talk in the Joint Intelligence Committee about Russia only lasting six weeks and insisted that the War Office knew little about Russian military potential. He held that to go deep into Russia Hitler would have to ‘remount a blitz’—a most difficult operation. Since the Luftwaffe was now tied up in the East, the RAF should begin a major bombing campaign ‘to demoralise the German civilians’, and propaganda ‘should express this quite clearly’. Churchill had just called for ‘the devastation of German cities’. If the war had started afresh, so could the propaganda. Bracken made his first impact inside the MOI. One Controller resigned just before he came; two more were removed on his arrival. Monckton found Bracken a congenial master, but still wanted to leave. He obtained missions to Moscow and Cairo in the autumn, and left Radcliffe as his successor. With Dalton, Bracken opened very quietly. He told Attlee that the Anderson Award should stand and that ‘he had no idea of asking for anything more’, but he asked Dalton for something new: [Bracken] says that he understands this Committee of Three is very important . . . He suggests that my General Brooks should represent him on it. . . . I see Brooks later that afternoon and he expresses deep horror at the idea of joining M. of I. staff. Indeed he says that nothing will induce him to go. Almost clings to me weeping: I say I regard him as one of my linchpins . . . If, however, Bracken were willing that my liaison officer with him should represent him on this Committee, I should have no objection.

Dalton should have been more suspicious of the clinging brigadier. A few days later Dalton lunched with Bracken, who renewed his request: [Bracken] says his chief interest is in Home news and in American propaganda. . . . He would like to tell the House of Commons that we three Ministers have decided to set up a Department of Political Warfare; that we have put it in charge of people we trust. He thinks this would make a great impression in Parliament and in the press, where ‘political warfare’ is a much beloved phrase . . . He thinks the P.M. would back such a plan . . . The Directorate of Political Warfare would then really have its headquarters down at Woburn.

Dalton was sorely tempted. Once Brooks represented the MOI on the Anderson Committee his tears dried rapidly. When Bracken’s proposals appeared on paper Dalton became anxious. Bracken’s memorandum alleged that at least eight departments had a hand in, or interfered with, foreign propaganda, and this dissipated the energy needed to cope with the new ‘military’ situation. (This sounds like Brooks.) The cure was a combination of SO and MOI which would ‘virtually amount to a secret department of Political Warfare’; the three officials ought to be  Standing Co-ordinating Committee minutes,  Aug. , INF /; Dalton diary,  July ; Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill, vi. .   Dalton diary,  and  July . Ibid.  July .

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joined by Morton and Kirkpatrick. Dalton reacted against Morton’s name since Morton was already powerful. He also preferred to speak of a General Staff not a department. For a moment everything hung in the balance. Dalton felt that Bracken was now seeking something too grandiose, but Bracken accepted Dalton’s reservations with good grace. A slightly amended version of the memorandum was accepted by the three ministers on  August and sent to Churchill, who approved it. Bracken now had the piece of paper he needed. The three officials were told to prepare a plan for the new ‘political warfare organisation’ over which the three ministers would exercise ‘joint ministerial control’. This was the phrase to which Bracken had clung like a limpet through various redrafts of his paper. It proved decisive. By this time Leeper had been recruited into the Bracken conspiracy and Leeper did not see PWE as a mere committee. For Bracken everything was a metaphor except ‘joint ministerial control’. Bracken had suborned the three officials. On  August Lockhart reported to Eden that Brooks had given him ‘valuable help’ during the ‘Dalton–Bracken Conversations’, and it was to Brooks that Leeper complained when Dalton seemed unconvinced about PWE. A week later, when the Lockhart Committee circulated a proposal for integrating SO, the MOI, and the BBC, Dalton finally saw the threat. Morton warned Lockhart that ‘the Doctor’ knew he had been ‘bounced by Brendan’ and would fight back. Dalton wrote to Bracken that he ‘could not possibly agree’ to the disappearance of half of SOE ‘created under my charter from the PM and the War Cabinet’: the PWE idea could not go beyond the Committee of Three with, perhaps, a few ‘key personnel’ working both for SO and the BBC. Next day Bracken made a more direct attempt to win Dalton over. He described his own sacrifices as Minister of Information in what Dalton called ‘a long, slightly emotional but apparently quite amicable speech’. He waved about a large wad of ‘niggling objections’ by Radcliffe to Lockhart’s scheme of complete fusion, cited the further objections of ‘a man called Kirkpatrick whom he had from the FO on a lease-and-lend basis’, but declared that he himself would ignore his advisers and ‘put everything in’. Dalton was implored to do the same; Eden, who had been advised not to discuss details, hoped that ‘our responsibilities’ were ‘really going to be joint’. This meeting lasted twenty minutes and no decision was reached. Dalton now understood just how exiguous his ministerial authority would be if confined to such brief encounters. Nothing else could be truly ‘joint’. To find out what was going on, Dalton descended on Woburn Abbey for the weekend bringing the faithful Gaitskell as his inquisitor. They uncovered the Minister’s memorandum,  July , INF /. Leeper to Brooks,  Aug. , FO /. His preference for ‘Brendan’ against ‘Dalton’ was  plain. Lockhart diary,  Aug. ; Dalton to Bracken,  Aug. , INF /.  Untitled memo,  Aug. , Dalton Papers /. 

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P U T T I N G O U T T H E F L AG S

plot: SO was to be ‘merged in a new amalgam’; Leeper and Brooks wanted Dalton to have no more control over CHQ than his ministerial colleagues. Leeper had wanted the battle with the MOI for supremacy. But the agreement of  August released him from a master who had failed. ‘Joint ministerial control’ meant that Dalton had lost control of Woburn, and three of his civil servants were now Bracken’s agents. Gaitskell then canvassed opinion among the regional directors in SO, of whom four—Crossman (Germany), Nigel Sutton (France), Barman (Scandinavia), and Ralph Murray (Eastern Europe)—would keep their positions in PWE. They were ‘all in favour of complete fusion, thinking that they will now run the BBC’. They claimed that Leeper’s underlying motive was that British propaganda was missing chances because Dalton lacked political muscle and that nothing would improve until other ministers took an interest. Someone had explained ‘complete fusion’ to the regional directors. Crossman alone went regularly into the BBC, and he knew that something drastic would have to be done before anyone—least of all SO—could get past Kirkpatrick and give orders to BBC editors. This was the most practical question at stake, but the conspiracy could not yet face it. Leeper tried to make Woburn’s authority the meaning of PWE, but he was told ‘gently but firmly’ by the other two that if he tried ‘Brendan would kick all the SO people out of the open broadcasting altogether’. The SO staff who were so delighted at the prospect of ‘complete fusion’ would have to wait. Dalton could only assume that the three conspirators, as he called them, had won over all his senior staff. But the Lockhart Committee knew he might still insist that his SOE charter took precedence over a ministerial working arrangement in flat contradiction of the Anderson Award. They were unwilling to press ahead with a PWE—although both Bracken and Eden told Lockhart to do so—until Dalton had given a sign of surrender. For several weeks neither Lockhart nor Dalton knew who held authority over SO. Lockhart did not want to push Dalton into appealing to the War Cabinet; Dalton did not want to discover whether his SOE charter would still hold good and whether Bracken had Churchill’s covert patronage. As Dalton weighed his chances, his civil servants counted for a good deal. On  August Bracken convened the first formal Executive Committee meeting in Malet Street. They were joined by Monckton and Radcliffe, enjoying the fruits of what they had started in April. Bracken told them to regard themselves as having an ‘absolute right to act as they thought fit in relation to any of the Departments dealing with political warfare in the war zone’, and to begin at once with the reorganization of the BBC and the MOI. There was Untitled memorandum,  Aug. , Dalton Papers /. Dalton diary,  Aug. . Lockhart diary,  Aug. . Next day Kirkpatrick told Lockhart that fusion would work provided that the SO regional heads did not ‘regard themselves as Commissars’.  Minutes of meeting on  Aug. , INF /.   

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then a disagreement about the committee’s authority over staffing. Lockhart argued that it would be inappropriate to consult the ministers about personnel, while Dalton refused to allow them to reconstruct SO without even consulting him. Bracken supported Lockhart on everything. Dalton had to work hard to get a joint instruction requiring the Three to submit to the ministers their plan for personnel, but in doing so he swallowed the principle of complete fusion. On handing this instruction to Leeper, Dalton was told that the relations of SO to SO would henceforth be no closer than between any other two departments of state. Dalton’s temper cannot have improved when the Three began to sermonize. They told the ministers that twelve months had been wasted in ‘inter-departmental intrigues and strife’. But the mutual education of broadcasting staff and their overseers could now come up to speed. Dalton gave up the idea of PWE as a small headquarters staff because he thought everyone else wanted something different. In fact Lockhart held a similar view, but he refused to be conciliatory because he needed to convince Dalton that his control of SO was at an end. The Three were not familiar with the BBC. Lockhart was new to broadcasting; Brooks was not a political specialist; and Leeper remained buried in the ‘country’. The PWE Executive Committee were free of Dalton but still faced a difficult decision about the powers of regional directors. Bracken did not do what he promised. He did not ignore Kirkpatrick and ‘put everything in’; he kept Kirkpatrick in control. Bracken kept the very authority over Bush House which Dalton surrendered in Woburn. Bracken’s hold on the Committee of Three was bound up with his ministerial authority over the European Service. Indeed, he suspended the nominal responsibility of the BBC Governors for European broadcasts. Kirkpatrick, hitherto the MOI ‘Adviser’, became the new Controller of the European Service. Rex Leeper moaned that Bracken ‘had no right’ to impose Kirkpatrick without consulting PWE, but he was ignored. On the other hand, an early attempt to make the Woburn regional directors subordinate to Kirkpatrick misfired. The PWE Committee received threats of resignation and withdrew their instructions. Dalton briefly took courage from this and he tried to order the SO staff to ignore Leeper and the PWE committee. Lockhart came close to panic. But since the Woburn staff could not ignore Kirkpatrick, they were not in a position to attempt a counter-coup in Dalton’s favour. Dalton tried to hang on to something at Woburn and argued that his ministerial visits were essential since the three officials were ‘not very dynamic people’. Eden now risked a strong line: it was a mistake not to have given Bracken sole authority from the first, and, failing this, PWE must be given ‘as free a hand as possible’. When Bracken echoed this phrase the battle was over. The PWE Committee had no  

Executive Committee, PWE, to Ministerial Committee,  Sept. , INF /.  Rex Leeper to Lockhart,  Aug. , FO /. Dalton diary,  Sept. .

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need of Dalton’s authority. Dalton grumbled to Attlee about Leeper and observed darkly that ‘a game was being played’, but nothing came of Attlee’s syllables of sympathy. If Bracken became brutal and abusive, it was to keep Dalton feeling defeated. Henceforth Dalton dealt with Bracken less as a colleague on the ministerial committee of PWE than as the Minister responsible for SOE (SO). Despite Dalton’s energy and anti-fascism, he was a tedious frondeur who deserved to be shunted aside. With Eden’s support on the ministerial committee, Bracken was now Minister for PWE in all but name. The price of victory was that PWE had to begin with a conciliatory promise not to operate overseas. Brooks was briefly considered both in SOE and SIS to be some sort of rival. ‘C’, the chief of SIS, assured Dalton that he would ‘go straight to the P.M. if a third show were attempted’. The way PWE would operate inside the BBC was not sorted out for some time. Kirkpatrick wanted editorial freedom. He claimed that European News was now better than the domestic BBC because Home News was ‘rigidly controlled’ while European News ‘has only been subject to a policy control, and has been free to execute that policy’. He refused to surrender what he and Newsome had won, and he was soon protesting that interference by regional directors in the BBC’s chain of command was ‘paralysing our broadcast propaganda’. Barman, lately of The Times, reported that Kirkpatrick ‘with all the enthusiasm of a neophyte’ imagined himself to be the editor of a great newspaper—‘telephone ringing, urgent conferences, dead-lines, scoops’—far more concerned with news—‘or, as Mr. Kirkpatrick would say, hard news’—than propaganda. But the editor was Noel Newsome, promoted to be Director of European Broadcasts (D. Eur. B.). In one sense Kirkpatrick took over the BBC European Service on behalf of the state, but in another, he defended its staff, and Newsome in particular, from direct subordination to the new regional directors. Newsome’s objections to orders from ‘experts’ varied over time. In , for example, he complained that the SO ‘Germans’ demanded bulletins ‘so devoid of tendentiousness that they are mere dry recitals of unembellished facts’. Newsome wanted to be ‘deliberately tendentious’—subject to the rule that propaganda be disguised as straight news. The further the specialists were from the microphone, the less they understood a large round-the-clock news service. What was needed inside the BBC, Newsome had suggested in , was an adviser with German expertise, a grasp of world affairs, experience of handling news ‘against the clock’, and a strong constitution. Kirkpatrick had    

 Dalton diary,  Sept. . Ibid.  Sept. . Kirkpatrick to Lockhart,  Nov. , FO /. Kirkpatrick to Lockhart,  Dec. ; Barman’s memorandum  Dec. , FO /. ‘BBC German Broadcasts: Tendentious News Items’,  July , Newsome Papers.

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arrived six months later—with three of these qualifications and eager to learn about ‘the clock’. Newsome thought his European Service was already capable of a controlled consistency of tone and argument, but he needed a clear chain of command to keep it. The regional specialists tried at first to impose themselves from Woburn. There was no firm decision about how they connected to Kirkpatrick’s chain of command in Bush House, but they could draw regional editors into disobedience. After a few months of this PWE system, Newsome was threatening to resign unless he could prevent the BBC from disintegrating into ‘a number of separate and often discordant voices’. The alternative to central editorial control was contradiction and bankruptcy: the absence of a ‘courageous, conscientious, progressive and consistent Voice of Britain’—except in the English language bulletins—and the rise of a ‘Babel of voices’ characterized by ‘timid deference to what it is thought the listener would like to hear’ and ‘not infrequently vitiated by cynical and antidemocratic attitudes of mind’. The regional directors pursued ‘a personal and capricious line independent of each other’ while Newsome and his assistants struggled to ‘cajole or force’ a central line upon BBC editors. PWE took six to twelve months to outgrow the habits of the Woburn talking-shop. Newsome was quite ready to accept authoritative instructions from PWE filtered by Kirkpatrick and passed to country editors through his central news desk. But he believed that only people present as the bulletins were being made could sense how much adjustment the news could carry. He knew that propaganda was won at the coal-face where bulletins were made. He wanted it understood that news-propaganda could not be produced to order, item by item, as a stream of bright suggestions from the PWE regions. It could be done well only by the broadcasting staff, who could be educated or replaced but whose judgements were crucial. He wanted the ‘regions’ to speak together. Newsome was fortunate: both Bracken and Kirkpatrick knew that the BBC European Service could not be run from outside Bush House. Kirkpatrick could see for himself that a pack of policy analysts with the ability to interfere at any hour would tear the output to pieces. He accepted Newsome’s claim that the bulletins must reflect the editorial choices of someone familiar with its entirety. Kirkpatrick’s grasp of ‘white’ broadcasting was a step ahead of the PWE Committee. His defence of journalism was sustained by a pugnacious personality, a brisk and efficient manner, a belief that on important questions his own experience was as great as anyone else’s, and few pre-conceptions about propaganda. Grisewood, his assistant, remembered Kirkpatrick operating in a no man’s land between Newsome’s ‘radical fervour’ and PWE’s preference for subtler propaganda and he found the spectacle both ‘edifying’ and



Newsome to Kirkpatrick,  Mar. , Policy File, Newsome Papers.

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‘moving’. Perhaps so, but he was more tolerant of his subordinates than of their PWE critics. After Selborne replaced Dalton as Minister for SOE in February , Bracken abolished the PWE Ministerial Committee. Henceforth Bracken was the Minister for PWE, although the Foreign Secretary had the right to determine policy when necessary. Lockhart became the Director-General of PWE. Brooks and Leeper became his deputies and, with the inclusion of Kirkpatrick, they formed the Propaganda Policy Committee, which could meet alone or with regional directors. Lockhart, Brooks, and some regional directors moved to Bush House on  March  to occupy the sixth floor. Problems of authority lingered until PWE matured. Barman claimed that even if Kirkpatrick wanted to work with PWE—he meant the regional directors— ‘neither Newsome nor Ritchie is going to let him do it’. On the other hand, Kirkpatrick could not easily prevent Bush House editors from side-stepping Newsome’s instructions if PWE offered support. Warnings were made about ‘editors being out of step with general policy through acting under what they erroneously supposed to be PWE instructions’. Technically, the point was good: BBC editors had to distinguish between instructions, written in directives or coming through Newsome, and ideas which happened to float in from the PWE regions. A London-based official of the US Office of War Information reported that Lockhart was an ‘outside operator’ who had once been personally ‘aggressive’ but, as Director-General, was ‘weak’ about ‘effective control’. Certainly, Lockhart handled Rex Leeper with care. He was often sick and made no show of executive bravura, but he obtained the arrangements he wanted. He was aware of being on trial before a Foreign Office he distrusted but hoped to impress. He was exhausted by his status as a buffer between ministers, governments, and regional directors. But once inside Bush House, he and Brooks learnt that in fighting shy of Newsome’s ‘centralised system’ of control the regional directors lost every battle that they could not win by a veto. There were few new faces in senior posts in PWE. Ritchie Calder was the main exception. He was a Daily Herald science journalist who was brought into PWE to study how to teach active resistance. He disliked Woburn and told Lockhart why: Says there is no team work in the country. Nothing but intrigue, and the only political warfare we wage is against ourselves. He is particularly annoyed at the treatment of Newsome  H. Grisewood, One Thing at a Time (), . Bracken was, of course, kept informed of ‘the left-wing fanaticisim’ of certain people in Bush House, especially in the News Department.  Barman to Lockhart,  May , FO /.  Circular from Eur. N.E.,  Sept. , box marked ‘French Service–Sabotage’, BBC Written Archive. ‘It is no defence to say afterwardsÑ“Oh, but Mr. X of PWE wanted this done”.’  ‘He depends slavishly on Eden . . . [and] is an essentially weak man trying to nip in the bud all possible competition’: Charles Cruickshank, The Fourth Arm (), .

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whom he knows well and whom he says we could have co-operated with. But the country was determined to be rid of him before they even knew him.

After months of committee work Calder could recall ‘no plan produced in conjunction with the regions which had any continuing reality after it had been through the mill of the Planners’. PWE only took its complete form when Ritchie Calder was promoted to lead the Directorate of Plans and Propaganda Campaigns in August . ‘Plans’ was a rather defiant departmental name. Calder’s plea was that ‘campaigns’ should become ‘the invisible staff college of Political Warfare’ gradually schooling others in the use of ‘plans’. He acted as Lockhart’s deputy for policy when the Director-General was absent through illness. He brought in Henry Lucas as his own deputy; Calder discovered him through ‘Tots and Quots’, a scientists’ dining club whose members preached ‘operational research’ to wartime Whitehall. The ability to sustain campaigns improved when the Directorate of Plans took custody of the ambitious ‘central directive’. The PWE central directive was binding on the BBC whereas the regional directives were advisory. The machinery worked: Ritchie Calder put Newsome on the drafting committee. Eventually the regional intelligence officers were brought from Woburn to Bush House. Leeper’s country house empire was thus reduced to the black propaganda ‘Research Units’, and he was allowed to resign in protest. By  Bush House contained most of PWE, although the French Region had to move across the road to Ingersoll House in April. The pattern was then complete. The BBC European Service made the broadcasts with Kirkpatrick, Newsome, or Douglas Ritchie serving as officers of the watch; PWE adjusted the propaganda content and wrote the main directives; the broadcasting staff were still paid by the BBC, but the Controller of European Services—C (Eur. S)—was directly responsible to Lockhart. If Bracken was decisive for the European Service he was just as active at Broadcasting House, where the pre-war BBC hierarchy kept company with the Home Service and the Empire Service. The formal independence of the Home Service was preserved. Duff Cooper had already reactivated the Board of Governors: the explicit state control used in Bush House was superfluous for Broadcasting House. But Bracken still put in new executives and demanded heads. The head of Ogilvie, the Director-General, rolled in due course. The two BBCs did not work together, despite the existence of a large audience in Europe for the Home Service. But both developed a similar grasp of essential points. Straight news was not a ‘disguise’ for propaganda, it could be indistinguishable—not through skill but in principle. News is selected when gathered in, and filtered when put out again. The search for compression and significance must encapsulate the question of propaganda content. 

Lockhart diary,  Feb. ; Ritchie Calder to Brooks,  Aug. , FO /.

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Kirkpatrick and Newsome tried to run the European Service as a single multilingual newspaper. Kirkpatrick was not a grandee among hacks; he went native in Bush House and liked to snatch his sleep curled up on the conference table in his office. He was right to put news bulletins under Newsome’s central control, and no one in PWE possessed a livelier sense of propaganda. The Woburn legacy was for PWE to be regionally devolved and to emphasize black considerations. The MOI contribution, which will be clearer in Part II, was lighter in personnel but survived in certain aspects of Bush House radicalism. Resistance policy could not, of course, be dictated from Bush House even when PWE moved in. Policy, as distinct from broadcasting authority, remained a concern distributed between four departments of the Foreign Office, PWE, and SOE. The creation of PWE realized Monckton’s idea that the BBC should use Woburn expertise but be controlled by regional directives written in London and issued by the Minister of Information. Bracken’s achievement was an unexpected political contribution to good government. An expedient whose time might have come in  took shape in . Whitehall was slow, but not, absolutely, beyond redemption.

 Cairo GHQ C A I RO was saddled with the vast scope and fragility of imperial power. Its political and military remit covered the area of the Ottoman empire—from the Atlas mountains to the Caucasus, from the Danube to the upper Nile. Even in —before Germany, Italy, and Russia had staked out their interests— GHQ were studying the Balkans. When Abyssinia became the first enemyoccupied country to be liberated special operations played a useful part. Subversive leaflets were sprinkled on the Italian Army. The material in Amharic and Tigrean worked well: the native levies deserted. General Wavell was very pleased and special propaganda was considered a proven quantity. GHQ Cairo was more political than the London Chiefs of Staff; the Foreign Office were represented by diplomats in the office of the Minister of State. Egypt itself was officially neutral. The British Ambassador tolerated the wilful King Faruq until his patience snapped and British troops secured a new government in February . In Cairo imperial and liberal elements of the British psyche were thoroughly jumbled up. Even in modern minds the mood was still the Great Game. In May  Woburn had sent C. J. M. Thornhill to Cairo to target the Italian colonies. Department EH were thinking ahead. Even further ahead lay exciting Soviet possibilities: the Caucasus was just a stone’s thrown from British Iraq and the Ukraine only a bit further. Thornhill became Rex Leeper’s emissary, and Leeper felt drawn to the Balkans as a field of political warfare—and excluded by SO—long before he himself left for Cairo in  to become Ambassador to the Greek government. Thornhill became a colonel at GHQ and found a niche in the Intelligence staff. The authority of the commanders-in-chief was vast, and it was possible to imagine Whitehall as a rear HQ. Even the censorship was different. Political censorship of outgoing press telegrams from Cairo, the source of most Balkan fact and rumour, was strict. Once the Italian attack on Greece started and stumbled in October , it was likely that the Germans would try to close the door through which the British could enter the Balkans. Wavell was well aware of the possible campaign in the Balkans. A great believer in ‘the fourth arm’, he wanted Cairo to be the base for Balkan propaganda. He wanted Thornhill’s SO to do the job, but there were the usual difficulties. The Balkan countries, while still neutral, were spoken to by the MOI and subverted by SO who did their own Balkan work (including propaganda) on the spot. George Taylor—in London as Nelson’s chief of staff or en mission in Cairo or Belgrade—was effectively head of special operations in the Balkans, and while his staff worked from Belgrade and

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Athens he did not need Wavell’s approval. SO had plunged into Balkan opposition politics—Britain’s natural assets were melting rapidly but the states were attractively unstable—and SOE alliances were linked to schemes for potential resistance. It was hoped that the Danube could be blocked if Germany attacked Yugoslavia. Romania and Hungary signed the Tripartite Pact in November  and German troops took possession. Bulgaria followed in March. SOE’s plans for Romania failed altogether. When Yugoslavia signed the Pact, German military access or transit rights were refused, and yet there was outrage in Belgrade. The SOE team made a modest contribution to the Yugoslav coup d’état of  March . Yugoslavia was invaded on  April, and the Army crumbled. Thanks to the coup, the Germans could take the open route south down the Morava valley and outflank the Greek positions in Thrace. The entire Balkan peninsula fell into Axis hands. The plan to block the Danube miscarried. The SOE team escaped from Belgrade but were captured by the Italians in Dalmatia. (Their diplomatic cover was respected, and the Italians sent them home.) No one stayed behind, and there were no hidden weapons. This was the benchmark of SOE resourcefulness in . SOE had placed seven wireless transmitting sets—all they could obtain from SIS—with trusted people in Yugoslavia and Greece. GHQ Cairo waited in hope. When no transmissions were detected, it was apparent that SOE’s Balkan preparations had all failed, though one Greek set started transmitting months later. In November  GHQ asked Duff Cooper for a senior figure to take control of all forms of propaganda produced in the Near East. The danger that Duff Cooper might scoop up subversive propaganda with military blessing provoked a response. Dalton sent George Pollock, an SO civilian, to extricate Thornhill (SO) from the military establishment and to take charge of Cairo special operations. Thornhill was a personal friend of Wavell’s, but Pollock obtained a directive from Dalton subordinating Thornhill to himself. Leeper was indignant on Thornhill’s behalf. Before PWE appeared in London, SO had headed off ‘unity of propaganda’ in Cairo much to Wavell’s annoyance. SO’s Balkan work was at this point led by S. W. Bailey, an important Section D veteran who would return to Yugoslavia in  by parachute. Bailey had left Yugoslavia both to supervise the Istanbul office and set up the Balkan propaganda bureau, a black broadcasting operation, in Jerusalem. But Wavell continued to press for a political warfare centre in Cairo which would not be under SO. After SO had fled their offices in Belgrade and Athens, Thornhill started up a Cairo Balkan section, and Woburn sent out two officials to assess SO’s propaganda fieldwork. Bailey’s Balkan propaganda bureau fell, briefly, under SO, who suspended operations until Woburn’s Kenneth Johnstone checked to see what was being done. Black broadcasting from 

Cairo Chiefs of staff to War Office,  Apr. ; Morton’s summary,  Apr., PREM //.

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Jerusalem was still in preparation, but SO were in no sense novices. Under one hat or another they had been in the Balkans for two years or more; they were not admirers of British diplomacy, and they were determined to be more rough and ruthless in future. Already, they had a pet project for setting up the Bulgarian Agrarians as a revolutionary alternative to King Boris. The Bulgarian station was supposed to address a potential resistance movement. This was a model for the sort of work which SO—George Taylor and Bill Bailey—wanted to keep unsupervised. SOE’s political refugees were to be the kernel of future resistance, whatever the Foreign Office thought of them, and the Jerusalem broadcasts would flatter, cajole, and direct their friends into organized activity. Free France was not the model: it would be more political and rooted in the opposition to Balkan appeasement in –. Leeper wanted to transfer all the Balkan work to London, but Dalton allowed Bailey to decide where to keep his Balkan subversives. Thornhill also explained that communications, and a quick response to events, must always depend on GHQ Cairo. GHQ did not like unexpected instructions from London and preferred arrangements which gave them a voice in political plans. The Foreign Office were also determined to squash anything which might resemble the powerful Arab Bureau of the First World War. They did not want an ambitious department of foreign affairs wielding Wavell’s authority, and they had vetoed a single propaganda bureau for the Balkans, Italy, and the Arab world. But once the Germans had overrun the Balkan countries, their suspicion (unwisely) receded. A London meeting decided that all propaganda and SO work done in the region should be anchored in Cairo. Thornhill’s SO office already employed about one hundred people. The working arrangement for propaganda was that SO—Bailey in Jerusalem—should continue to control the staff and transmitters but should give SO, co-ordinating fortissimo in Cairo, facilities to say what they wanted. Wavell disavowed any intention of ‘whittling down’ Dalton’s distant authority, but he tried to insist that Thornhill should centralize all SOE propaganda work and that SO should be grouped with a number of military departments which, under the aegis of military intelligence, dabbled in subversive special effects. He also complained that SO had become involved in ‘activities . . . quite incompatible with service projects’. This dark accusation opened a GHQ attack on SO in Cairo which was not interrupted when Wavell was replaced by General Auchinleck. GHQ Cairo lodged their own trusted officials—spies as SOE later lamented—in Pollock’s ‘Mission’. A file of antiSOE stories was started at GHQ. Oliver Lyttleton was sent out as Minister of State—the War Cabinet’s delegate in the Cairo war machine—and he became Meeting on  May  for MOI, SOE, FO, Colonial Office, and India Office, INF /. Wavell to Dalton,  June , FO /.  Bickham Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular (), ; ‘CD’ to Dalton,  Aug. , FO /.  

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as anxious as Wavell about propaganda authorized (or not) through secret service channels. Dalton’s preference for SO outside the United Kingdom was confirmed once SO was ripped from his hands and became PWE. Bailey saw Thornhill as a threat to his subversives, and warned London that a move was afoot to ‘terminate’ SO interest in propaganda. In Cairo Pollock carried the blame for everything SOE had failed to achieve in the Balkans. He had collected an extraordinary range of military and civilian enemies. Allegations of SOE profligacy and inefficiency became so lurid, that Sir Frank Nelson, ‘CD’ of SOE, went to Cairo to investigate. Dalton was warned that SOE’s political position was ‘extremely grave’. Although Nelson was incensed by the malice of GHQ , he found it politic to remove Pollock, Bailey, and Thornhill from their posts. Both parts of the SOE Cairo Mission were purged in the belief that SOE could seize control of SO propaganda and yet retain the goodwill of GHQ Cairo by changing the staff in SO. Nelson could still employ Dalton’s full ministerial authority. Had he delayed, Leeper might have used Eden and Bracken in Thornhill’s defence on the PWE Ministerial Committee. The disadvantage was that valuable personnel were bundled out of Cairo. Bailey, a key figure, was removed just as resistance was beginning in Yugoslavia. The SOE Mission always remained rather out of place in Cairo. Their modus operandi was rooted in contacts and judgements which were brought out of the Balkans. The Mission’s flavour was youthful, militant, eclectic, disorganized, and, at the top, determined to count for something come what may. Nelson brought in Terence Maxwell—a hastily recruited banker who had served no Baker Street apprenticeship—as a new head of SOE Cairo. Maxwell acquired Thornhill’s propaganda fief, thus frustrating the GHQ attempt to control propaganda, and GHQ retaliated by cutting off the supply of military intelligence which SO had previously enjoyed. This was not a minor matter. It was of considerable future importance that SOE Cairo’s intelligence was poor, so that from October  to September  SOE came near to relying, for information on Yugoslavia, on couriers reaching Istanbul and on one harassed agent, and that when military (signals) intelligence was restored to SOE the whole picture of resistance in Yugoslavia was transformed in favour of the communist Partisans. It was apparent to Sweet-Escott, the liaison officer Nelson left behind, that Maxwell knew little about SOE and nothing about propaganda. In an attempt to please the soldiers a special operations group hitherto occupied with Abyssinia, was incorporated in SOE Cairo, which was then divided into three    

DH/ to AD [Bailey to Taylor],  July , HS /. CD to Minister,  Aug. , FO /. ‘The case of SO in the Middle East’,  Nov. , FO /. Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular, -.

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functional directorates—operations, propaganda, and political subversion. One of Woburn’s inspectors, Ewan Butler, who had been an unhappy German specialist at Woburn, defected to SOE and stayed in Cairo as director of special propaganda. SOE saved the Cairo Mission from GHQ and barred PWE’s path to Cairo, but the cost in concessions, disruption, loss of skilled officers and loss of intelligence made their success too costly. On his return to London, Thornhill told PWE that fifteen months of hard work had been sabotaged. Leeper was so displeased that he refused to send out staff to ‘what is probably a dud show’. PWE did not even ask what Cairo was doing about Balkan propaganda until December. When Leeper came to Cairo in  he became the most implacable of SOE’s enemies. In the period of confusion between April and December  the pace of events in occupied Yugoslavia was furious. The new Usta˘sa regime in Zagreb began to slaughter the Serbs of ‘Independent Croatia’, and the Serbian districts responded with immediate rebellion; Montenegro rose against the Italians and then western Serbia against the Germans; communists and the remnants of the Army began to fight for the leadership of the resistance. Yugoslavia, at least, was ablaze. Churchillian visions of British-fed rebellion seemed suddenly less fanciful. There had been a full year to prepare for these opportunities. But Cairo would not have been in a much worse position to take them had SOE been set up after the loss of Crete. The Jerusalem broadcasts were potentially important, but they were not BBC transmissions and their purposes were not known outside SOE. Jebb and Lockhart negotiated a PWE/SOE working arrangement in autumn . SOE promised to broadcast whatever PWE wanted from places overseas where SOE had facilities, and PWE promised not to start overseas missions of their own. The offer to help PWE meant no more than that. SOE were determined to develop their own very subversive broadcasts. The PWE agreement not to expand abroad seemed to Lockhart a sensible, even necessary, concession to Dalton in autumn , but his Balkan region were unhappy about it, and in Cairo Oliver Lyttleton, as Minister of State, repeated Wavell’s plea for a unified political warfare authority. Bracken was sceptical. Churchill, irritated by the disputes in London, did not want to see Cairo as a competitive fountain of propaganda, and he refused Lyttleton’s request for a senior Director of Propaganda. But Walter Monckton went to join Lyttleton for a time, and Bracken asked him to linger in Cairo (on the way back from Moscow) to make ‘the Brass Hats publicity-minded’. Monckton spent six months wrestling with GHQ and trying to improve their communiqués about the desert war. When he turned to SOE he did his usual job of mediation. SOE Cairo received summarized PWE directives. The PWE Balkan region  

Brooks to Leeper,  Aug. , FO /. Bracken to Monckton,  Oct. , INF /.

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believed that SOE simply did as they pleased, but political distrust was liveliest in the Foreign Office. Maxwell was not a success at SOE Cairo, but the political imaginations at work were those of the directors of SOE in Baker Street: Hambro, Taylor, and Glenconner. Lord Glenconner was Maxwell’s equivalent in London, until he replaced him in Cairo, and he was always more political. SOE’s ambition for the Cairo Mission was not confined to the Balkans. The battle against Mussolini, for instance, might start with SOE recruitment of Italian antifascists in the POW camps but those recruits might then establish a political personality in Cairo broadcasts, and with a fair wind the story might end with revolution in Rome. SOE could even imagine resistance in occupied Russia. If Russia collapsed and Turkey was overrun, the political canvas would become simply enormous. The Great Game had never been so big. At the very least, the British position in the Middle East would need the support of a new resistant crust of anti-fascist (and anti-Soviet) Armenians, Kurds, and Georgians. SOE set to work recruiting and training groups of them to join their Bulgarians, Serbs, and Greeks in Jerusalem. Maxwell visited London in January . He was summoned to see Orme Sargent and Lockhart in the Foreign Office. He managed to satisfy Lockhart that PWE directives were welcome, but he did not convince Sargent that all was well. Sargent asked for a guarantee that Cairo would not start broadcasting in forbidden languages, and Maxwell had to admit that SOE would do as instructed by the commanders-in-chief. Eden then told Dalton that he was surprised to learn that SOE Cairo were doing any propaganda work, and demanded that everyone in Cairo—including GHQ and SIS—should forget about Armenians and Kurds. This intervention, and Sargent’s trick question, made SOE collectively see red. In Cairo the SOE directorate of special propaganda did battlefield work in Italian and German. There was no question of Cairo propaganda being superfluous. Nevertheless, Sargent was right to be concerned about Moscow and Ankara, whatever the assurances from Cairo that their Armenians and Kurds were trained secretly. The worst problem about SOE Cairo, however, concerned Greece and Yugoslavia. SOE liked to discuss subversion in Bulgaria because their right to try was unchallenged, but subversion in occupied allied states implied a collision course with London governments. Once a sceptical mind seized on this point it was easy to infer what SOE secrecy was about. When news of guerrilla fighting in Yugoslavia had reached London, George Taylor went to Woburn to impress upon the propagandists their duty to help SOE. Glenconner supplied PWE with useful morsels of information. But PWE were suspicious. When SOE asked for better liaison, PWE feared a trap. Lockhart declined to supply a digest of British broadcasts and SOE were asked not to expand their Balkan 

Eden to Dalton,  Feb. , HS /.

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transmissions from Palestine. It was accepted that SOE retained a right to disseminate propaganda in the field but not that this permission covered the Jerusalem transmissions. When Dalton was suddenly removed from SOE, the Baker Street staff worked hard to convince Lord Selborne that SOE’s Balkan projects did not make sense without Jerusalem. PWE could listen to the SOE broadcasts. Ralph Murray, the Balkan regional director, dismissed SOE’s talk of ‘operational purposes’ as ‘demonstrable bluff ’ meant to prevent PWE from correcting ‘what, in all conscience, we must consider to be bad and ineffective propaganda’. The Jerusalem propaganda bureau was run by five British officers and a large number of émigrés. It was installed in the Palestine Broadcasting Service building in a special wing under SOE security. The Serbo-Croat, Greek, and Romanian output was supervised by Archibald Lyall. SOE, unwisely, did not explain their activities in detail to PWE. But they grasped one nettle very firmly. Jebb told Sargent that SOE wanted ‘to promote revolution’ in the Balkans, and Glenconner confessed that SOE propaganda must appeal to ‘those elements . . . in each country addressed who can be relied upon to help us, and must be able, if necessary, to differ from the policy of HMG’. This applied, at the time, more clearly to Greece than to Yugoslavia. PWE did not so much disagree as disbelieve. They saw no clear purpose in the Jerusalem broadcasts. Lockhart’s first impulse, in the postDalton era, was to get them shut down. Murray counselled against this. Jerusalem had grown: there was a staff of  and reception was often better than for Woburn stations. He did not wish to throw away facilities and audiences even though he thought the Hungarian programmes were ‘feeble and illinformed’ and he guessed that the Yugoslav broadcasts were chiefly ‘a sop’ to SOE’s political favourites. Most curious of all was the station called the Free Voice of Greece, which implied a location in the Soviet Union without saying so, made statements on behalf of the ‘working class of Greece’, went in for ‘occasional—apparently pointless—mudslinging’, and was indirectly hostile to the Greek government. Monckton had to ask SOE to close the station down temporarily. Inside SOE it seemed that their problem with other departments derived from ideological trepidation. Jebb warned his new minister that ‘our job is, somehow or other, to allay the suspicion of the older generation’. But the worst fears in the Foreign Office—‘ZP’ in SOE signals—were realized in . Sargent’s suspicion of how the younger generation might wish to play the Great Game was correct. Murray to Peter Scarlett (DG’s Personal Assistant),  Apr. , FO /. Jebb to Sargent,  Mar. , HS /; Glenconner, ‘SOE: Middle East and Balkans’,  Apr. , FO /.  R. Murray to Lockhart,  Feb. , FO /. The Yugoslav staff in Jerusalem were paid by the Yugoslav government.  PWE monitoring report, – Jan. , FO /.  CEO to SO,  Apr. , HS /.  

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Bracken asked Selborne to hand over the Cairo propaganda directorate to PWE. But SOE had not surrendered the idea that they should lead in political warfare. Taylor, Glenconner, and the Balkan staff had being running fieldwork for two years on the assumption that subversion and political mud-slinging went together. Sir Charles Hambro argued that the black and white sides of PWE ‘should be divorced but co-ordinated’ and that black ‘for operational purposes should be grafted onto SOE’. Taylor and Glenconner wanted to stand and fight, and to send Selborne to the Prime Minister equipped with the resignations of all the SOE directors. Selborne was as ambitious for SOE as Dalton, but he was more thoughtful and courteous. He offered to consider any arrangements in Cairo which did not require complete abandonment of SOE’s charter right to do propaganda, and argued, using the Bulgarian case, that SOE did not ‘come by these stations in some haphazard sense’. Eden, though willing to sign letters, did not really want to study the problem. Lockhart had to warn him that the Americans would soon not only discover this pile of British ‘dirty linen’ but take it as a model so that ‘a PWE–SOE situation’ would be reproduced ‘among the Americans’. Selborne let his officials negotiate a new settlement. Leeper received his old SOE associates at Woburn, confidential telegrams were passed around, and a ‘concordat’ was negotiated. Sargent remained suspicious, but a deal was done by September. PWE could have overseas missions on safe territory; control of the Cairo facilities would pass to PWE, but SOE would retain the right to fulfil their operational goals. PWE selected Paul Vellacott as director of political warfare in Cairo. He was an administrative figure: Master of Peterhouse, formerly Headmaster of Harrow, and recently Inspector-General of the Home Guard. After a courtesy call on SOE, Hambro advised Cairo that Vellacott was friendly and cooperative. In London Vellacott was conciliatory, but he arrived in Cairo—on the eve of El Alamein—as a political bailiff to take possession of a rogue outfit imagined to be employing anything up to a thousand staff. He was egged on by Rucker, the Minister of State’s diplomatic adviser. Vellacott now insisted that every single broadcasting team should fall directly under his control. In London the SOE Balkan desk were horrified: ‘if we lose this battle, policy will be in the hands of PWE as to which groups will be supported and in which manner’. SOE Cairo fought stubbornly. Lord Glenconner had taken command in Cairo some three months before Vellacott arrived, and was trying to lick the SOE Mission into such good shape that no one would want to change it. The SOE relationship with GHQ had improved, and SOE did not want their plans rechecked and their work delayed. Bailey was back in Cairo, prepar Hambro to Bowes Lyon,  Mar. , FO /. Internally, SOE still believed that PWE control of the Woburn freedom stations was illogical.  Selborne to Eden,  July , HS /; Lockhart to Eden,  July ; Lockhart to Sargent,  Aug. , FO /.  D/HV to CD [Pearson to Hambro],  Nov. , HS /.

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ing to be dropped to General Mihailovi´c, and in Jerusalem a ‘Chetnik’ station was in preparation. Vellacott was counter-attacked as a troublemaker who did not understand, for example, that the attack on Italian morale—a topical subject—required SOE/Army co-operation. Vellacott had no experience of PWE or the Balkans, but Ralph Murray soon arrived as his political adviser. Glenconner presented SOE propaganda as a going concern and offered PWE a seat on the board. But Vellacott stuck to his brief. He forced SOE into his own co-ordinating committee. Murray made his way into the Intelligence community and secured a sort of informal Balkan bureau working on PWE tasks and willing to employ PWE personnel. He also made friendly contact with SOE junior staff, who seemed to welcome a new broom, and he was at Vellacott’s side during an inspection of the Jerusalem bureau. Glenconner retreated inch by inch, defending the line that SOE’s ‘operational propaganda’ meant continuous broadcasting not episodic requests to PWE. Glenconner and his three senior officials—Brigadier Keble, Colonel Tamplin, and Ewan Butler—knew that their political authority was shrinking. After a struggle lasting five months, PWE Cairo secured direct control of the Jerusalem stations. Butler was deposed as director of propaganda and, as SOE had foreseen, PWE tried not to re-employ SOE’s Balkan clients. In Cairo SOE could attend Vellacott’s planning committee where Murray was ‘head of propaganda’. When Leeper came to Cairo, as Ambassador to the Greek government, he joined the committee for the Greek items. The Cairo arrangements now resembled London’s. The enormous energies consumed in getting to this point made everyone rather embarrassed. Glenconner, who was in  poised to become a great figure, lost his diminished position at the end of . The outcome in Cairo was a logical extension of creating PWE in London. But the delays explain a lot. SOE’s success in getting hold of Woburn in  made SOE more political than necessary. This was not sustained in London, but SOE clung to a special status in Cairo. SO was politically embroiled in the Balkans before the Axis occupation began; SO, not SO, made the propaganda and witnessed a revolution. Balkan resistance ignited more quickly than in western Europe. The Cairo Mission thought they understood more clearly where they were going, and they expected to be radical. This created a controversial emphasis—in the Foreign Office and PWE—on uncovering exactly what SOE had been doing. There was no single story, but it was tempting to attribute natural difficulties to mistakes made by one ambitious but lonely outpost of SOE. The handling of Mihailovi´c and the approach to Tito, and British choices in Greece, owe a good deal to the attempt by some to do ‘subversion’ while others did political warfare. The SOE insistence that policy and opportunities were at stake in these agency turf wars was correct, though the contest in Cairo was not a simple departmental translation of competing ideas about the Balkans. The ideas and agencies will be considered further in Part V.

 Émigrés and Experts B E F O R E the war continental Europeans had some reason to consider the British well-meaning but supercilious and semi-detached. Scandinavia was told no alliance was available, Spain was tossed to the wolves, and aspirant clients in the Balkans were advised to trade with Germany. Even the French alliance was less than a partnership. The people doing propaganda work in  regretted all this. German victories seemed to demand a new British European strategy; it was unformed in 1940 but surely inevitable. Thousands of well-connected foreigners and a clutch of governments were soon to hand. The resistance audience might believe in Britain out of spiritual necessity, but these highly educated émigrés needed to hear propaganda trumpets before they altered their scepticism about British intentions. They could take rough treatment and hard bargaining, but what they feared was politeness masking indifference. The Dutch were the first to arrive. The Foreign Office viewed this government with some distaste. By  June the Dutch asked the MOI for ‘free time’ in the BBC Dutch programme. The MOI accepted Gerbrandy, the Dutch minister responsible for broadcasting, and Dr Pelt, head of the Dutch press service, as trustworthy. They were both more warlike than the majority of a dispirited Dutch Cabinet. The Swinton Committee, the highest organ of British state security, had doubts about the Dutch, but Duff Cooper made his decision and ‘Radio Orange’ began. No conditions were attached or promises extracted: there was no political contract. Kirkpatrick agreed to Dutch ‘free time’ although he hoped, in vain, that it would not be a precedent. The new Dutch team were given fifteen minutes a day. The BBC Dutch sub-editor complained of their neutral posture ‘in perfect continuity with the Dutch government’s pre-invasion policy’. There was some criticism in Holland that Radio Orange should have a softer line than the BBC. It was discovered that de Geer, the Dutch Prime Minister, edited the Dutch scripts himself to remove material which might be too offensive to the Germans. Some of the Dutch, including Queen Wilhelmina, were preparing a Cabinet reconstruction, and Gerbrandy may have been helped in taking over as Prime Minister in August  by British confidence in him. Queen Wilhelmina’s speech opening Radio Orange committed the government to resistance and

 W. R. Elston to A. E. Barker (Overseas News Editor),  Sept. : P. M. H. Bell, ‘The British and the Dutch Government’, Governments Conference, .

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ultimate victory. Cabinet changes in September provided her with more forceful advisers. Free French air time was also extracted from the BBC by the MOI who made reference to Churchill’s agreement to discourage a BBC appeal to the Foreign Office. France was a preoccupation for Duff Cooper. General de Gaulle had his immediate goodwill. After the Armistice, de Gaulle twice secured War Cabinet encouragement to broadcast to France, but MOI support was almost as useful. The MOI liked Free France because they did not wish an anti-French mood to get established on the home front. Duff Cooper, Harold Nicolson, and Oliver Harvey were passionate Francophiles who were ashamed that the BEF had not been much larger. The idea that Marshal Pétain and his ministers represented France was appalling—an invitation to Francophobia. But unless de Gaulle represented something important, what could be said for the French? The BBC in  wanted to find, train, and employ their own broadcasting teams. But if foreigners were a necessity, the MOI were not. A difference of emphasis existed at different levels in the BBC hierarchy. At the summit Powell and Ogilvie promised active co-operation. But the Overseas Service had two upper layers of its own: Tallents, the Controller, with Clark, his Assistant, under whom there was an Overseas News Editor, A. E. Barker, and a Director of the European Service, J. S. A. Salt. They treated the MOI as a professional threat. Lower again in the hierarchy came the real thing: the French and German Regions with a senior editor and a service organizer each; the geographical regions (North, South, and South-East) with three managers and section editors for every language; Central News led by Noel Newsome; and the European Intelligence department. These people looked for help wherever it could be found. The BBC Overseas Service wanted the freedom to make their own French service. A few instructions from the Foreign Office were welcome, and a few introductions from the MOI, but nothing more. Clark, the Assistant Controller (Overseas), found that his existing French staff wanted to go home and he had to recruit afresh. He decided that no broadcaster should be present at the BBC’s French policy committee since the committee was infected by an MOI representative. Later Russell Page, the French Service Organizer, asked if he could go to meetings in Malet Street to ensure the gradual education of people not yet ‘very broadcast-minded’. Since he was an administrator he secured grudging permission. But the broadcasters and the MOI specialists were kept apart. A mingling of expertise and authority might familiarize the Ministry with broadcasting. Corporate self-defence meant assuming the MOI  Ibid.; Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, iii, The War of Words (), –; Policy Committee,  June , INF /.  R. Page to Salt,  Nov. , BBC E/.

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would pull every string unless stopped. Eventually, of course, the new European Service (with News re-attached) was removed from BBC control. But for a year the production of integrated state/BBC propaganda met tactical obstacles. This was known, inside the BBC, as preserving ‘some shreds of broadcasting independence’ and, externally, as the distinction between what belonged to Caesar—‘policy’—and what the BBC must determine: ‘principles . . . to be translated into broadcasting practice’. But political direction and editorial control cannot be divorced. They inform each other. Harvey and his deputy, Nigel Law, were left to learn this for themselves. The allocation of roles between linked departments is not an exact science but it need not be byzantine. Good work required a grasp of what was done elsewhere. But the BBC Overseas Service wished neither to use the MOI to improve their own broadcasts nor to educate Malet Street in good ‘broadcasting practice’. Harvey’s French division did not challenge, or even understand, these demarcation rules very quickly. A division of labour accepted with a novice’s good faith became a problem. The immediate issue in foreign broadcasting was how far to enter domestic arguments. The national governments which set up in London arrived with pasts, political traditions and sometimes with strategies adopted in the age of appeasement. They all carried some burden of failure or imperfection. General Sikorski was above such criticism but he inherited the controversial Polish constitution and, among his colleagues, some of Pil/sudski’s heirs. The Belgian government reached London—via Vichy—as late as  October  after some difficulty in choosing whether to come to Britain or return to occupied Belgium. Some Belgians, especially the socialists in contact with Dalton and Attlee, opposed this government, complaining that the ministers were still neutral-minded. Lord Halifax accepted that the Cabinet should change, but Churchill ruled out a forced reconstruction. The Belgians had gold, ships, and the Congo, all of which the British wished to borrow. ‘Radio Belgique’ was controlled by the BBC and the editor in charge, Victor de Laveleye, although a former Belgian minister, was regarded as loyal to British interests and policy. Camille Gutt, the Belgian finance minister, was important as he negotiated about his gold. He forwarded a lot of suggestions for Belgian leaflets to Dalton’s SO and was irritated when he obtained no reply. SO were in fact pretending they had not been identified. Feeling generous, the Prime Minister tried to establish a rule that the Belgians and the other governments should on the whole determine the propaganda to their own countries. Duff Cooper explained that the problem was how to be ‘in a position’ to know that Belgian propaganda was acceptable. Otherwise he ignored the suggestion. Two days later they both saw General  

J. B. Clark’s minute,  Nov. , BBC E/; and  Nov. , BBC E//. Duff Cooper to PM,  Feb. , PREM //.

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Sikorski, who complained that the Poles did not have the freedom to say what they wanted. Churchill supported Sikorski. He still wanted to be far-sighted and to help London-based governments maintain vestiges of authority and dignity. Duff Cooper received a warning note from the PM: I doubt very much if you are right in supposing that the Allied Governments here are entirely content with the propaganda issued from the BBC. . . . Many complaints reach me . . . After all, they must know more about their own countries than we do, and it is in our interest to give them the best possible chance of keeping alive under increasingly difficult circumstances.

The officials in Malet Street and Woburn took little notice. Harvey’s Low Countries specialist claimed that Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian foreign minister, was content and that Gutt’s leaflets were rather poor. Harvey admitted that the BBC were too suspicious of Allied ministers, but he left it at that. Noel Newsome spoke for the emerging BBC European service. He resisted more authority for Belgians and Poles with patriotic indignation, and he appealed for a study of the ‘whole requirements of [British] radio leadership’. Kirkpatrick attributed the complaints to an unhelpful comparison of privileges granted to different governments. The next to complain to the Prime Minister was Gutt who said, plausibly enough, that he was baffled by ‘several departments who are jealous of each other’s authority’. Churchill asked for action (‘that day’) and obtained a reply from Dalton, a week later, inviting Gutt to go through the proper channels. The Belgians finally exposed the basis of the Ministry’s unwillingness to accommodate them. Spaak saw Duff Cooper and asked to take over the BBC’s Radio Belgique. On being refused, Spaak asked at least to be allowed to pay the salaries of the Belgian staff. Harvey explained to the Foreign Office what was wrong with this. Victor de Laveleye, the editor acting under BBC control, was using texts supplied by Belgians whom the government had refused to admit to its ranks; these texts were uncompromising stuff which would not be heard if de Laveleye came under Spaak’s authority: The Belgian government is the most defeatist of the allied governments. . . . Though they are paying lip-service to the allied cause here, in reality their sympathies lie in Belgium with King Leopold. Though the latter may not have played so base a role as public opinion here believes, he was responsible for the excessive neutrality of the Belgian government before the war, he is personally anti-democratic in sympathy and would prefer to have something approaching a totalitarian regime to be established round his court in Belgium. . . . Belgian ministers even refuse on the wireless to stigmatise de Man who is co-operating with the PM to Duff Cooper,  Feb. , INF /. Newsome’s memorandum ‘British Broadcasts and Allied Governments’, undated, BBC E//; Kirkpatrick to Duff Cooper,  Feb. , INF /.  Notes of conversation between Belgian ministers and Churchill,  Mar. , and Dalton to PM,  Mar. , PREM //.  

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Germans in Belgium or the Flemish separatists who are trying to organise a legion to fight against us. . . . It would be fatal, in our opinion, to allow Radio Belgique to fall into their hands. . . . We have not forgotten the Prime Minister’s directive . . . but he would be the last, we feel sure, to wish to apply it à tout et à travers to a defeatist ally. The case of Norway, which pays its own broadcasters, is quite different; the Norwegians are stout and democratic.

This was dangerously frank. Reactions in the Foreign Office were hostile. Harvey’s diatribe was shown to Cadogan to prove what Malet Street was really like. Roger Makins, head of the Central department since Kirkpatrick’s transfer, expressed astonishment at the ‘prejudice and downright lying’ in the letter: It is we and not they who settle the policy to be pursued in regard to the Allied Governments . . . We disagree in toto [about] the character and policy of the Belgian Government . . . Having said this, it is a little difficult to know what to recommend. The Ministry of Information, in conducting their policy on a purely ideological basis, have got themselves into a hopeless tangle. . . . They are prepared to give control to a government whom they consider to be ‘Left’ and to refuse facilities to a government whom they consider to be ‘Right’, although the basis of their estimate is prejudiced and bears no relation to the constitutional position or political affiliations of the governments concerned.

Did Mr Makins really know better, and escape more tangles, than Mr Harvey? Had the matter been so simple, Monckton would have received a rocket from Cadogan. The Foreign Office had to use sparingly the right to speak ex cathedra, and Eden might not support the Central department. What Strang ventured in reply was that it was unreasonable to claim the Prime Minister’s directive on Belgium did not apply to Belgium, and he stated tartly that he was well aware of Harvey’s ‘personal views’. Strang had seen a letter from Leeper in Woburn begging the Foreign Office to ensure the MOI paid attention to what the black propagandists were doing. For Cadogan’s benefit Strang outlined his experiences. He understood that Leeper wanted him to take sides: The two propaganda agencies (and their Ministers) carry on a running fight which seems to interest them almost as much as the propaganda they do. We find it easier to work with ‘black’ propaganda (Mr. Dalton and Mr. Leeper) than with the ‘white’ propaganda of the Ministry of Information, though the section dealing with neutral countries (Mr. Leigh Ashton) is more ready to collaborate with us than is the section dealing with occupied countries (Mr. Harvey) which is a law unto itself and pays little heed to what the FO may say.

Harvey and his division plainly did prefer the Left and made judgements on the basis of resistant soundness. But these judgements had to be made. When PWE took over the MOI’s Belgian brief—using the same specialist—the    

Harvey to Strang,  Apr. , FO /. Minute by R. M. Makins,  May , FO /. Strang to Harvey,  May , FO /. Strang’s minute,  May , FO /.

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judgements were less harsh, and the emphasis was on educating an admittedly weak government into a better and more useful frame of mind. Eventually, they were even given some free time. But the Belgians were a problem, even if the propaganda was not. SOE were later tied in knots by internal Belgian politics. The propagandists usually wanted to reshape exiled governments. But even when PWE relearnt the impertinence of the MOI, the diplomats remained more placid and patient. The Czechoslovak National Committee under Eduard Bene˘s was not a recognized government until . They had no free time, although relations with the BBC were quite good. The Poles were in the opposite position. ‘Radio Polskie’ was a weekly free period which started in April , but daily free time was resisted by Newsome, Kirkpatrick, and Michael Winch, the BBC Polish editor. Their opposition grew stronger after June  when the Poles were accused of ‘defeatism’, which meant disbelief in the Red Army. Winch had violent arguments with Polish officials. At first he persuaded Kirkpatrick that it was all a struggle to remain ‘master in his own house’ and to throw off ‘control’ by Stanisl/aw Stro´nski, the Polish Minister of Information. Stro´nski was a right-winger (‘National Democrat’). Winch’s battles with those he considered reactionary defeatists got the better of his temperament: ‘Mr. Winch ran to the desk . . . with a changed face, his fists clutched and making wild gestures in front of my eyes.’ He was moved to PWE as the Polish intelligence officer. Gregory Macdonald, the new Polish editor, had fewer problems. But he was a Scot who worked with Moray MacLaren, another Scot, who was PWE regional director for Poland. They did not see the BBC, as did Newsome, as first and last the Voice of Britain. ‘Radio Polskie’ was granted fifteen minutes of free time a day. Macdonald reported that it was competent and responsible. The Poles accepted policy censorship and, in very difficult circumstances, showed good discipline. The Polish broadcasts that made trouble would come from Woburn. The Norwegians were ‘stout’, as Harvey said, but their unique position in the BBC was something which Harvey and Kirkpatrick would have cancelled if they could. The BBC official history suggests that Norwegian broadcasts were conducted so harmoniously that the Norwegian government, with their own officials acting within the BBC, politely declined free time, and this is contrasted with the Greek section, who were always feuding with the Greek government. The comparison is misleading. Norwegian state broadcasters merely declined a part when they had almost the whole. PWE were annoyed about both the Greek and Norwegian sections and Douglas Ritchie— Newsome’s assistant—thought that the Norwegian broadcasts (and the Polish,    

J. W. Lawrence to Salt,  May ; Winch to Kirkpatrick,  Sept. , BBC E//. Kisielowski to Stro´nski,  Dec. , BBC E//. Macdonald to A.C.(Eur.S), spring , BBC E//. Briggs, War of Words, , –.

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though not the Greek) were virtually lost to the BBC. Ritchie came to see ‘free time’ as a way of confining some inevitable special pleading to a strictly limited and well-labelled official programme. It left the rest of the output free for pure Radio London themes. This is why the Norwegians refused it. It had little to do with good relations. Kirkpatrick disliked the senior Norwegian broadcasting official—a ‘very obstinate and difficult individual’ who enjoyed too much influence with Trygve Lie, the foreign minister. PWE shared his opinion. They were even more annoyed by Newsome’s defence of the enemies of the Greek government ensconced in the BBC Greek section. The Norwegian government brought with them officials from the Norwegian Broadcasting Service. Toralv Øksnevad became de facto editor of the BBC Norwegian Service after displacing a British editor. The Norwegians had simply taken over when the European Service was in its infancy and then hung on stubbornly. The advantage was that Norwegian broadcasts were done by established professionals. The disadvantage was that when Kirkpatrick or Newsome tried to exercise authority, there was diplomatic trouble. Though it pleased the Foreign Office to support the Norwegians, the propagandists had a case. In March  Barman argued that though almost all Norwegians were anti-German many were also anti-British. This was a British problem and required a solution. But it was obstructed: ‘every talk and every news item put out by the BBC which goes through the Norwegian announcers is in effect censored by officials appointed by the Norwegian Government’. The attempt to distinguish between British and Norwegian time in Norwegian transmissions was abandoned as hopeless. Trygve Lie realized he had Foreign Office support and he pressed his claims so hard that Leeper accused the Norwegians of denying the British the right to speak to Norway. In return Leeper was stubborn about PWE’s pamphlets, tried to keep secret his black ‘freedom station’, and threw a low punch when telling Sargent it would be ‘a cardinal error’ if London propaganda gave the impression that the British were committed to the ‘re-establishment of the present Norwegian Government’ in Oslo. It was the kind of point that in other cases kept decisions in British hands. The pre-war government had adopted a policy of stiff neutrality, which failed when Norway was invaded in April . After leaving Norway in June the Labour government expected blame and was anxious about the ‘bourgeois’ leadership of the civilian resistance to Quisling. The ministers needed the BBC. They took few risks and at the end of  broadcasts seemed too narD. E. Ritchie, ‘Radio London and Free Time’,  May , BBC E/. Kirkpatrick to Bracken,  Nov. , BBC E/.  A detailed Norwegian account is given in H. F. Dahl, Dette er London: NRK i Krig ‒ (),  ff. The NRK team were also adept at fending off the Norwegian government.  Barman to L. Collier (British Ambassador),  Mar. , FO /.  Leeper to Sargent,  June , FO /.  

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rowly Norwegian. There was also evidence that the reports of civil resistance were too unreliable to deserve their prominence in the bulletins. Kirkpatrick blamed the Norwegian state broadcasters and repeated his war cry: Our evidence is that all the occupied territories thirst for hard news bulletins. These we are trying to provide but we are always being stymied by the Allied Governments who wish us to use our transmitters to fry their own particular kettle of fish, much to the annoyance of listeners at the other end.

When PWE absorbed SO, Tom Barman, whose family was Norwegian, came into his inheritance as PWE’s Scandinavian regional director and obtained a mess of pottage. When Øksnevad made a trip to New York Barman warned that if he re-established himself in the BBC ‘there was no prospect whatever of exercising any control over any Norwegian broadcast’. Even Trygve Lie admitted Øksnevad was a ‘difficult person’. (But so was Lie: Lockhart warned Eden and Bracken about his attempts to set British departments at odds with one another.) Øksnevad was a good scriptwriter and speaker, but he was stubborn. Barman complained that he wanted guidance from no one: ‘not from the British Government and most certainly not from the Norwegian Government’. Øksnevad was clearly formidable and survived even a contest with his own Prime Minister. When Barman was promoted, his successor, Brinley Thomas, had no better luck. The BBC editor explained his use of extreme caution: The instructions which I received from C.Eur.S. [Kirkpatrick] were that last Saturday’s scripts [on transport sabotage] should be shown to Øksnevad and if his reaction was against them, he should be told that we are not intending to force the scripts on him. . . . C.Eur.S. added . . . that if Øksnevad’s reaction was favourable there was no need to tell him this, but on no account must we run the risk of a protest from the Norwegian Government to Mr Eden. Øksnevad did object . . . [and] reacts most unfavourably to the whole question of a transport campaign.

More substantial reasons for tolerating the anomalous BBC Norwegian Service are given in Chapter . Newsome argued in March  that the European Service was ‘rapidly ceasing to exist’ as Allied governments attempted the ‘determined infiltration’ of the BBC language services and were, in some cases, supported by PWE directors. There were too many people who seemed not to want British Kirkpatrick’s minute,  Dec. , FO /. Barman to Lockhart,  Sept. , FO /.  Barman to Lockhart,  Dec. , FO /; Barman to Lockhart,  June , FO /.  H. D. Winther to Brinley Thomas,  Sept. , BBC Written Archives, box marked ‘French Service—sabotage’.  Newsome to Kirkpatrick,  Mar. , Policy File, Newsome Papers.  

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propaganda. Kirkpatrick resisted ‘free time’ for Allied governments until the battle was completely lost. In  he was still trying to hammer home the lesson that if state officials, British or foreign, were imposed on his staff by daily force majeure, Radio London would be timid, boring, and regionally selfserving, whereas his journalists, given their head, would be interesting and sound in touch with their audiences. This was not the same defensive posture as the BBC hierarchy adopted in –. It was a point about how to implement state control not how to avoid it. Nevertheless, PWE regional directors had occasional reason to complain that Kirkpatrick was too tolerant of foreign staff who opposed their own governments. Foreign influence in Radio London was not confined to the London governments, and propaganda control was not a simple matter of authority. In his memoirs Newsome records that his ‘two touchstones’ for judging the fitness of people to produce broadcasts to Europe were soundness on the USSR and acceptance that victory and peace depended on the overthrow and reform of ‘all the Fascist States: Italy, Japan, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece, Spain and Portugal’. Newsome did not relish the awkward reality of alliance with something like the anciens régimes of Poland, Yugoslavia, and Greece. This, of course, was the other reason he had for shielding his broadcasting staff from experts in PWE and exiled politicians. Events had taken an unexpected turn. When the Greeks defied Mussolini, the heirs of the dictator Metaxas became an allied government; then Yugoslav officers overthrew Prince Paul’s government. Some rather unlikely people had ended up on the anti-fascist side. Were the regimes known to have changed their spots, were the spots misunderstood, or were they problematic pseudoallies against whom justified charges were silenced at the mere say-so of the Foreign Office? The BBC Greeks did not like the new arrivals, and were not willing to grant the King of Greece favourable publicity. PWE conceded that the unpopularity of the government made it prudent to advertise the King’s qualities with restraint, but the scruples of the BBC Greeks became too marked. Kirkpatrick fought his usual battle against BBC free time for the government. But he was unable to save his first Greek editor. Exchanges between Ralph Murray, the PWE regional director for the Balkans, and Kirkpatrick were rather strained before D. E. Noel-Paton became editor in March . Even the new editor was no champion of the Greek government. There never was any BBC attempt to popularize King George. The line followed was a carefully patrolled compromise between the Balkan Region and the BBC staff. Newsome tried his best to avoid becoming committed to what he considered the wrong cause. In  and  he resisted the suggestion that the communist-led ELAS guerrillas were knifing their rivals in the back. He reminded PWE that the BBC 

‘Haunting Spectre’ MS, vol. ii, , Newsome Papers.

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must look to its reputation: ELAS must have their successes acknowledged if they were to be identified for the purpose of criticism. This served to block criticism for a time. SOE and the Foreign Office were at odds, and the intelligence was controversial. The extent and real identity of active resistance in Greece was unclear in , but lines of communication important to the Afrika Korps were believed to go through the country. Once the Partisans and Chetniks of Yugoslavia were known to be deadly rivals, one could deduce a parallel if more murky contest in Greece. But when more was learnt about Greek resistance, the desert war was over. There was little to lure a sceptic into difficult commitments. For ELAS resistance would have to be its own reward. Newsome claimed that Britain, as one ally among three, had no authority to ponder the meaning of its duty to support ELAS. But ELAS made political mistakes in full view of British observers. When ELAS broke agreements designed both to unify Greek resistance under Cairo authority and to rescue other groups from insignificance, the question arose of how, if at all, to employ or discipline a growing and popular force whose communist leadership would not even pretend to be trustworthy. The Cairo authorities took a long time to decide how much they disliked ELAS. They never resolved the question of how to oppose them until the battle for Athens at the end of . The BBC argued that it was wrong to go too far in criticizing ELAS and so prevent Greek reconciliation. Reconciliation was Cairo’s Greek policy, but not on the terms ELAS proposed. Eventually, the BBC Greek section was instructed to make propaganda of which they disapproved and to ‘swallow their suspicions’. But Rex Leeper still complained from Cairo that the BBC gave ELAS too much favourable attention, and the SOE main mission in Greece objected that BBC broadcasts seemed likely to strengthen ELAS ambition and so prevent reconciliation on British terms. This was a serious charge, though it reflected less lack of PWE control than hesitation. It was now PWE who did not see a way to popularize the King in the way that Sargent and Leeper wanted, and they thought it would be counter-productive to attempt it. There were few radio sets in rural Greece and ELAS were anxious to confiscate all they could find. Formal instructions to criticize ELAS or, at other points, to ignore everything they did, were, on the whole, obeyed. It was understood that the BBC Greeks were pro-ELAS, but this did not attract much attention, beyond PWE and SOE, until a commentary on the Parliamentary debate on Greece in December  after which Lockhart was hauled before the War Cabinet. BBC broadcasts in Greek tended, despite E. Barker to DDG,  May , FO /. See Nicholas Hammond, Venture into Greece: With the Guerrillas ‒ (), , : ‘ELAS took complete control of the dissemination of news in Pendalofos and outside it. All radio sets had to be surrendered on penalty of death, and an ELAS loudspeaker in the market square gave its own garbled version of events.’  

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strong pressure, to reflect what Newsome would have called established news values and a Radio London tone. They were not designed, a few grudging exceptions apart, to help Cairo stop an ELAS seizure of power. Rex Leeper was even convinced that the contrary was true, and he should have known. If Kirkpatrick and Newsome prevented the BBC being used to weaken ELAS, it was because PWE wanted to escape, or at very least postpone, an open dispute with a communist resistance movement. This motive already applied to Yugoslavia. The Greek case offers a contrast, in the same ideological context, to the trend in Serbo-Croat broadcasts explored in Part V. The slackness with which the Belgians and Dutch were handled, the hesitations about the Greeks, the anxiety about the Poles, and, above all, the aimless disputes between departments, indicate that no one had really decided what to do with the London governments. They were given facilities because they were there, and there was an initial idea that they were a real asset for London broadcasting. But the governments were not reconstructed, or not much, even when they proved disappointing. Above all, they were not asked to be part of any European, or quasi-European structure. The post-war survival of the London governments was not given any high political meaning, and it became a matter on which propaganda should not pronounce too much, an issue to be decided ad hoc. There was no manifesto or ambitious treaty for them to sign. The Atlantic Charter was about everywhere, and so improbable, not about somewhere and therefore interesting. It might be said that the British Commonwealth was still seen in the context of the empire—India and Africa—not as the natural associate of an alliance of maritime states in Europe, but this would not be so true of the MOI and PWE, where hopes for Anglo-French leadership in post-war Europe were vivid and strong. The biggest themes, however, need ministerial trumpets. The BBC needed capable staff who accepted directives conscientiously. Obedience was not always enough. There had to be some idea generating constructive work. Newsome was the propagandist of the hour when optimism and anti-fascist brio were most relevant, that is, when victory was very distant territory. Inevitably, the collective sense of propaganda direction faltered when victory came closer. Churchill and Eden were wrong to suppose that some strategy would occur to them once they understood the lie of the land better. Newsome often detected an influential obscurantism emanating from the Foreign Office, where special dispensations were handed out to opponents of the true cause. The chaotic conservatism of the Office was an attempt to maintain order without a grand plan. Newsome’s real difficulty was not just that his sort of anti-fascism was not always appropriate, but rather that the grandees above him did not reciprocate his concern with doctrine. There was no theory of special dispensations, no guidance for wartime radicals on how to interpret pre-war circumstances: Pil/sudski’s Poland, Prince Paul’s Yugoslavia,

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Metaxas’s Greece, or even the Third Republic. Newsome had Kirkpatrick at his elbow and PWE upstairs, but there were few attempts to educate and complicate his enthusiasms. This was not mere omission. It was the collective reticence of ministers and mandarins who were almost reconciled to some radical new Europe but refused to choose, except ad hoc, between confirming Newsome’s direction and altering his licence.

 Propaganda and Dogmatics I T is tempting to divide the wartime propagandists into Patriots and Intriguers: the first wanting news of exemplary patriotism—with British resistance as the lead story—and propaganda being an invitation to join in; the latter seeing a tangle of interests and ideology which Britain must manipulate, in which case political warfare should construct clever promises. Newsome was a Patriot studying the agency reports and Leeper an Intriguer picking through intelligence material. The problem with Intrigue was the tendency to allow propaganda to be determined by its own audience. The British were trying to work from the outside on the defeated, and Berlin possessed the apples of discord. For the propaganda of exemplary patriotism, on the other hand, there was in  an elevating complication. This was the call for renewal, reform, or revolution, widely felt that year. Churchill’s Britain offered to be different. If there was a radical promise, was it plausible? If there was imperial revival, was there also a plan for Europe? What were the British, or anyone else, to feel revolutionary about? The modernizing, post-liberal core of Nazi thought was emphasized by realists wanting to oppose Nazism with a wholesome alternative. The discussion began as soon as Department EH was put together. Britain went to war with an offer to German conservatives. When that failed, the British felt the lack of an overarching scheme. Churchill, though he made ruminative remarks about ‘Europe’, wanted no hostages to fortune. Although a superb spokesman in a tight corner, he did not concede that an Alternative must be found. There was some disappointment among new admirers when Churchill accepted the leadership of the Conservative party after Chamberlain fell ill. There is a severe Tory understanding of Churchill as the man who compromised Conservatism. Perhaps he did. He was a Whig who understood his predicament: there were no allies to the right, and no other great power shared Britain’s social conservatism. Nevertheless, he declined to read the world’s horoscope or to let the ‘guilty men’ agitation get out of hand. Duff Cooper wanted a British message to the world. He obtained a Cabinet committee on war aims, and it took papers from great names. Churchill was a sceptic surrounded by believers in a formal alternative to the New Order. The propagandists wanted to preach. But their great text never appeared. (The ‘Atlantic Charter’ came only in August  and, though made famous, did not create excitement in Malet Street.) The lure of ‘war aims’ was as great for the Tories as for anyone else and all agreed that the poor needed a reward for privation and danger: ‘If the Twelve Apostles had contented themselves

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with repeating the Creed without the gloriosus praedicare, the Christian Religion would have been still-born’, Desmond Morton warned the Foreign Office. Walter Monckton and Oliver Harvey thought new war aims were appropriate and good for morale: they should clarify the case for national pride. Wickham Steed and Harold Nicolson—two journalist-intellectuals— believed the Nazis had ‘revolutionary war aims’ and they wanted Britain to do better by offering a ‘good revolution’. Halifax and Duff Cooper took this for a new fact of public life. In July  Cooper intended to get a practical scheme of reform within a few weeks. While the Cabinet committee sat, the project was not disputed. But the most defensive position was the easiest to state. Lord Cranborne’s proposal was unsuitably humble: The furthest . . . that we can with honesty go is to point to the steady, indeed striking improvement in social conditions in the past fifty years, and pledge ourselves with increased resolution on the same lines, keeping before us the twin aims of improving conditions and safeguarding the liberties of the British people.

Externally, European union was an obvious and lofty theme. But this ‘Europe’ was the past—the whole  gallery—not a London alliance which Britain could assemble in wartime prototype. Even Leo Amery’s ‘united Europe’ was just a huge new space cleared by Hitler for which poor Britain would be even more helplessly responsible than in . Cranborne conceded that Duff Cooper was right to wish ‘the nations of Europe in the same relationship to each other as the states of the American Union’. This was crudely utopian and unhelpful. He admitted that Russia, Italy, and Spain would have none of it: an American-Anglo-French alliance would have to set new rules through economic weight. Cranborne’s point about Russia stated the obvious without drawing the crucial regional inference and his doubts about Italy and Spain were unimaginative, and the rules America would wish were not AngloFrench. But even livelier minds, under pressure, did not fasten on fertile questions. There seemed to be no candidate strategy whose hour had come. The moment was not seized to propose a consolidation of historic British and French interests around the North Sea and the Mediterranean in the form of a maritime alliance. The idea of Anglo-French union came, went, and vanished. Harvey, encountering Dalton at Woburn, also called for a ‘united Europe’. But he did not neglect his ‘other theme’: the ‘necessity of doing something now to prove that we weren’t just fighting for  but that we were going to have Morton to R. A. Butler,  May , CAB /. Wickham Steed to Duff Cooper,  July , INF /. Wickham Steed, formerly editor of The Times, acted as an adviser to the MOI; he was a veteran of the  Department of Enemy Propaganda.  Memorandum by Cranborne,  Aug. , INF /; J. Barnes and D. Nicholson (eds.), The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries ‒ (),  ( July ).  

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far-reaching social reforms here’. Officially, the gap between ‘’ and ‘reforms’ had to be masked. In practice the propagandists chose for themselves. Cranborne defended – and Harvey wanted to reject it. The difference did not reflect party colours. A guidance paper which Dalton wrote in December —a forlorn attempt to impose himself on PWE—might have been Cranborne’s: ‘social justice, more easily approached in war than in peace, will be maintained here, and even improved upon, after the defeat of the Germans’. The propagandists, natural or official, produced a claim about changing social relations. Their consensus was egalitarian, and Oliver Harvey was part of it: That old fool Ld. Davidson (S.B[aldwin]’s henchman) criticised the Priestley broadcast at Duty Room Committee today, because he had attacked certain middle class families for not taking in refugees, and D. said he was playing into the arms of Communists. This was too much for me. I told him I quite disagreed. I heard on all sides that these broadcasts were the best propaganda we had. It was only healthy that people who behaved badly should be shown up, and it was the people’s war etc. The old boy got quite stuffy but I had the majority with me. Walter Monckton who presides told me afterwards how pleased he was.

Without doubt, Harvey spoke for England. Davidson had been a chairman of the Conservative party and was powerful in Reith’s time. But a new consensus was forming and Davidson was not part of it. In early July  the MOI Policy Committee believed that Goebbels was poised to deliver a major challenge: ‘a revolutionary doctrine to which there was no proper answer but another doctrine’. In the Catholic section of the Religions division, Richard Hope recommended ‘the defence of Christianity and of existing good things in Europe’ as a much better long-term bet than ‘the democratic counter-revolution against Nazis and Fascists’. Catholic opinion in Europe and Latin America would view the latter as a doubtful enterprise likely to revive bolshevik problems in southern Europe and leave Lithuania in atheist hands. Lord Perth, the chief diplomatic adviser to the MOI and an eminent Roman Catholic, gave Hope’s paper his support. But their position was weakening. Monckton, the Deputy Director-General, and Radcliffe, then Controller of press and censorship, were determined to halt this sort of thing in its tracks. Monckton identified a ‘new revolutionary spirit . . . in every belligerent country’ with which British propaganda must be attuned. He foresaw resistance politics: ‘revolutionary movements’ would arise in occupied Europe with ideals from which Britain must not be dissociated ‘in advance’. Radcliffe added that ‘militant socialism’ was the religion of millions, implying that, Harvey diary,  Nov. . Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton (), . The suggestion that such thinking had a cool response from Tory Ministers of Information is a misconception.  Harvey diary,  Sept. .  Policy Committee,  July , INF /.  ‘Catholic Opinion’ by the Hon. R. Hope,  July , INF /.  

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somehow, this disposed of Christian conservatism. The director of the Religions division was a Protestant for progress who refused to see Christianity identified with the ‘status quo’. He cast his vote for ‘a new order’ as against ‘prewar institutions’. The director of the American division said that British support for revolutionary socialism in Europe was essential since ‘our only allies in the USA would be unable to distinguish between nationalist and socialist movements and would certainly favour both’. Lord Perth resigned and was replaced by Sir Maurice Peterson. One week convinced Peterson that ‘some basic policy is necessary’.  All this pointed to leftish formulations in British propaganda. Opinions at Woburn were similar. Dalton and several of his officials— Gladwyn Jebb, Hugh Gaitskell, Richard Crossman, Ralph Murray—were explicitly progressive, although Rex Leeper and Tom Barman were not and did not want Britain to do political warfare with a right hand tied behind her back. The radical ascendancy came much too easily. It was easy to abjure the status quo, but a vision of what this meant was not. ‘I’m not expressing myself well’, lamented Monckton writing to Sir Stafford Cripps in Moscow about the ‘future’. Cripps was still the leader of the Labour Left. But he too felt the blockage: ‘It is indeed a revolutionary war and we are on the side of the past— at the moment. We talk some of us about the old order changing but in our hearts we are clinging to it as the one solid thing we can visualise.’ This was shrewd. Cripps shared the British sense of doctrinal inadequacy because he assumed the revolution must be social and painful not international and appealing. In  politicians tried to catch the tide of change. Excited commentators proclaimed that France had been overthrown by virtuoso propaganda and ‘a strategy of ideas’. Hence the call for a flashy manifesto. But to be persuasive radical self-criticism had to go further back than appeasement. The country had been foolish, but it was not easy—except in respect of rearmament—to say when and how. There was some idea of the National Government after  as a regime of stultified trepidation. The pamphlet Guilty Men contained undeveloped accusations without much explanatory bite. The failures sensed in  felt deeper. Something passive had grown up in reaction to the wild patriotism and the unprofitable victory of the Great War. It was as if a convalescent scepticism had damaged the appetite for success. An anecdote must serve. At the beginning of the war, firearms in private hands were called in by the police. Ten months later Gubbins was trying to prepare a British resistance force to fight Nazi occupation. He asked for the weapons but found that they had been dumped irretrievably. As even Sir Orme Sargent, a magnate among   

Policy Committee,  July , INF /; Peterson to Duff Cooper,  July , INF /. Monckton to Cripps,  Sept. ; Cripps to Monckton,  Dec. , box , Monckton Papers. Wickham Steed’s ‘Policy for Propaganda’,  July , INF /.

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mandarins, prayed under simliar provocation—‘God deliver us from the mentality of –!’ But he shuddered at what might follow. Baldwinian good order was not credible as a retort to the Nazi challenge. Alternative ideology had its moment. The Left did supply the idea that the war-machine must be classless. (But old patronage was strong: Mountbatten and Alexander rose to the top.) Communists could dazzle themselves and others with their extremes of pragmatism and utopianism. Yet they too were disinclined to dwell on middle-order strategy, and refused to learn from the experience of Soviet power. They too were stuck in . The European Left had real passion but lacked expertise and worldly invention. The war disguised this. Churchill and the Tory mavericks found that the socialists had little to teach them about patriotic collectivism. Socialists could put forward propaganda claims—about the German masses or later about Yugoslavs and Greeks. But there was no common view. Richard Crossman, Kim Philby, Harold Nicolson, and George Orwell were all socialist intellectuals of different sorts recruited to do propaganda work—in SO, SO, the MOI, and the BBC. They were carriers of a presentiment. The French Radical, Pierre Cot, called the will to adopt this presentiment ‘le progressisme’. For him it implied communist leadership. Something similar could be felt even in Britain although there was no plausible communist party to latch onto. ‘But where was I to go?’ asked Kim Philby. If his answer—a onesided contribution to Anglo-Soviet understanding—was eccentrically literal, his instinct—to seek remedies in Europe for British inadequacy—was more common. British political culture, including the labour movement, had been strongly formed before . This provided insulation against fascism without supplying an answer to it that sounded modern. What mattered by  was how PWE would cope with the revived anti-fascism of the Resistance particularly in France and Yugoslavia. The remedy for national degeneracy (or bourgeois weakness) was to burn away the sins of the past in a democratic purgatory. In Britain this meant a middle-class promise to be more egalitarian. British rhetoric, lacking a manifesto, was modest. But the egalitarian promise was sincere. MOI officials and BBC editors might be puzzled but they were not cynical. For Radcliffe and Newsome, this was a point of pride. Bracken was more ironic, but the people’s war rhetoric did not offend him. The Nazi propaganda offensive was launched on  July . The German Economics Minister, Walther Funk, announced a ‘New Order’ in Europe. (Funk had been in the Propaganda Ministry before his promotion.) This created consternation in Malet Street. Who could deny that a single economic Minuted on R. H. Hoare to Sargent,  Apr. , FO /. ‘The politics of the Baldwin–Chamberlain era [was] more than the politics of folly. The folly was evil’: Kim Philby, My Secret War (), p. xviii.  

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bloc imposed by competent enforcers might have attractions for a tired continent? Of course, the attraction would weaken if the New Order degenerated into crude pillage, and in due course it did. But in  there were serious interim anxieties. European economic integration under Berlin control was more radical than any reply London was ready to give. An MOI advisory group was already excited. Wickham Steed was all aquiver with presentiments of McLuhan: ‘Hitler’s revolutionary suppression of many European sovereignties by force has struck many minds as a logical and necessary historic process of unification in an age when the very meaning of space and time has been altered by the swiftness of means of communication.’ Halifax, after consulting Bevin, told Duff Cooper that ‘talk about Nationalism, Liberty and Independence’ was ‘almost Gladstonian in relation to the whirling pace at which thought is moving’. Halifax and Nicolson showed Keynes, the British intellectual best known in Germany, a list of German propaganda promises and begged him to broadcast an answer to Funk. Reluctantly, he agreed. His claim that ‘three-quarters of the passages quoted . . . would be excellent if the name of Great Britain were substituted for Germany’ was not particularly shocking; the problem was that ‘no one I have yet seen has the foggiest idea’ of what could be said. Keynes himself could not sense how to deploy his own radicalism; the problem of war aims was much bigger than a local difficulty in the propaganda. In the absence of clear, well-stated British ambitions, a path to American solutions would open up. Victory took Keynes to Washington with a begging bowl. Oliver Harvey was close to Eden, who had a record as a League of Nations man and considered himself modern. Harvey wanted Eden to acquire broader ministerial experience and then to succeed Churchill. When Eden became Foreign Secretary again, Harvey thought his old boss lost his creative spark. (Orme Sargent warned Lockhart against taking Eden’s promises about Whitehall reform seriously.) Though Harvey begged Eden to ‘put himself at the head of the Priestley movement’, Eden did not see how to do it. The ‘Priestley movement’ meant the post-Dunkirk mood of hard work and sacrifice and the conviction that a shift to the Left had been signalled in J. B. Priestley’s BBC ‘Postscripts’. Priestley responded to the acclaim which followed his broadcasts with a ‘ Committee’, which Noel Newsome supported and which included Ritchie Calder, from the Daily Herald, who went to PWE in  and became Director of Plans. When Harvey saw Eden in May, the Foreign Secretary complained he had no one to talk to: ‘none of the  Wickham Steed to Duff Cooper,  July  (memorandum enclosed); Halifax to Duff Cooper,  July , INF /.  J. M. Keynes to H. Nicolson,  Nov. , INF /.  Harvey diary,  Jan. ; Lockhart diary,  May .  The  Committee has been called ‘a perfect snapshot of the new progressive Establishment arising from the waves’: Paul Addison, The Road to  (), .

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departments had any ideas of their own—all had to come from him’. He found Cadogan ‘unhelpful’ and Vansittart useless. Yet he would not attempt a solution. Harvey told him that Halifax had ‘devitalised’ the Foreign Office; he should give pensions to the ‘old and tired’, make changes quickly, and ‘not tolerate obstruction’. Harvey was a radical democrat in the News Chronicle mould. He was a bit of an Ancient Mariner, stopping one in three to impart big ideas and dark tales. He thought Roosevelt was the world’s leading statesman; but judged Halifax a ‘disaster’ as Foreign Secretary and, as a man, ‘a selfish old hypocrite’. British diplomacy was in unsafe hands: I’m worried about F.O. policy—it seems to me altogether on the wrong lines. After being ahead of public opinion right up to the war, it is now behind public opinion and wrong. It would damp everything down—it is like a piece of Chamberlain Govt. still going on. And what is worse the disease has afflicted the staff itself and even the young ones. They frighten one to listen to. It is like one’s grandmother speaking.

Harvey tried to absorb socialist understanding: There is no doubt that the working classes . . . suffering far more than the richer classes in this war—are far sounder and healthier in their instincts and convictions about foreign affairs. They know who are our enemies and I only pray they won’t let themselves be bamboozled by the FO.

This was a front populaire evaluation. The ‘working classes’ preserved traditional virtues while the elites were going to pieces. Harvey was still thinking in French after his Paris posting. There was no vernacular edge to his radicalism. He wanted the war to be a ‘democratic crusade’ in the literal sense: Lesson of this war for [the] plain man was that no country could be allowed to have anything but a parliamentary and representative system, and [the] British army would have to see to it that a free constitution[?] was maintained and freedom of press, trial, meeting etc. To tolerate totalitarianism in Spain, say, after the war would be beginning of a great rot. Fascism was a unity, as Hitler realized: one state could no more be allowed to have a non-representative form of Government than a man be allowed to have bad drains in his house.

Harvey’s idea of propaganda as a grand gesture of democratic defiance bore the stamp of his courageous excitability. His diary, often written up at night during the air raids, is devoid of notes of pessimism or even depression. His confidence readily became an argument for his views: ‘the Vichy regime now sees we are winning and having failed by its abasement to get anything out of Germany is anxious to clock in on the British victory and save itself.’ His outlook was purely political. He did not worry about Gibraltar or the remainder  

 Harvey diary,  May . Ibid.  Oct. ,  Jan. , and  Nov. .  Ibid.  Nov. . Harvey to Peterson,  Jan. , INF /.

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of the French fleet. He was not even unduly interested in Russia. He was radical in the sense that he knew Britain was not yet giving Europe leadership, but not so worldly as to ask how much of Europe could or should be led. Like Harvey, Francis Williams, who came to the MOI from the Daily Herald to be the senior press adviser, wanted ‘to create the feeling that all attempts to block the onward sweep of Democracy by Dictatorship are doomed to failure’. This was the old doctrine of Progress. Though still serviceable, it was deeply satisfying only if one thought the finger of Providence still pointed at Britain. Harvey buttonholed the International Secretary of the Labour Party and told him that ‘British Socialism’ should be made ‘broadly what British Liberalism was in Europe in the nineteenth century’. He needed a word with Cripps or Mosley. The MOI radicals were not traditionally left-wing. They were determined patriots who felt that without an ideological optimism courage would be incommunicable and solidarity with friends on the continent would not find expression. Monckton had stated in February  that he was ‘a rotten politician and no Conservative’. But he acquired political ambitions and might have taken a major role in  had Cripps forced a reconstruction of the government. He professed to being a ‘follower’ of Sir Stafford, and when discussing war aims drafts with him admitted that ‘you and I would like to go a great deal further’. His conversations with Maisky, like Nicolson’s, touched on the end of the old order and prompted the claim from the Russian Ambassador that Eden ‘knew before the war that the capitalist system is finished’. Nevertheless, Monckton joined Churchill’s caretaker government in  and he did become a Conservative. Cyril Radcliffe spent a good deal of the war protecting the press from creeping censorship. He was assisted by a close and friendly working relationship with his minister. Radcliffe was efficient and unimpressed by Whitehall, and he won Bracken’s confidence. His contribution was made through his increasing clarity about what propaganda and news control should not be and should not attempt. He wanted a manifesto in , but as Director-General in  he escaped from the question of propaganda promises. Indeed, he accepted Bracken’s intention to close the MOI debate by giving the Ministry a lower profile than its publicity. In  he answered his younger self: You cannot hand out faith to people as a doctor writes a prescription for a patient. Nor do men experience this inspiration of faith because to receive it is a sound measure of national well-being. The spirit bloweth where it listeth and no one can predict when or with what force it will blow again in Western Europe.

 F. Williams to K. Clark,  Apr. , INF /. Harvey diary,  Jan. . Monckton to Reith,  Feb. , INF /; Monckton to Cripps,  Feb.  and Monckton to Cripps,  Jan. , box , Monckton Papers.  Lord Radcliffe, Not in Feather Beds (), –.  

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In  the propagandists tried to predict but the spirit did not blow. Arnold Toynbee suggested Britain should appear both ‘conservative and revolutionary’ by making promises which ‘flow from results which are already being achieved’. What was being achieved was patriotic stability. Since the British had not begun a ‘good revolution’, they could not describe one. Lord Halifax went to Washington as Ambassador. He wanted something programmatic in his first speech. Churchill, who had narrowly avoided placing himself in a Cabinet minority of one on war aims, now advised him that the ‘agitation here has died down’ and sank Halifax’s first draft with one sarcastic salvo: Do you contemplate the abolition of private property, especially the forms of rent and interest unless related to some form of service to the State? If so, this will carry very far, unless of course you count managing one’s estate and hunting foxes as such a service. . . . I do not understand how the whole world can be compelled to join together to bring the world back to health.

In Fleet Street an attack on industrial incompetence was made by the Daily Mirror and Sunday Pictorial. Their case was that behind the Government’s boasts of a new ‘war machine’ huge pools of old mismanagement lay quite undisturbed. This line of attack irritated Churchill. Both Beaverbrook and Bevin assured Churchill that the complaints were largely demagogic. No one, until Cripps in , wanted to hitch their doubts about industrial performance to lurid accusations in the popular press. What the reformers understood as ‘war aims’ did not relate to industrial weakness—then little understood—although failures in production were part of what Cripps called ‘the Dotard’s muddle’. Churchill thought war aims talk was empty and obstructed it with a clear conscience. Not until Beveridge slipped his plan into the headlines was there anything like a British manifesto. In  there was no Cabinet pronouncement, and in January  Churchill stopped the Cabinet discussion by refusing to make any grand statement. According to Duff Cooper, Attlee was the real obstacle. Perhaps Attlee disliked Tories rummaging through his rhetoric. A more interesting objection to revolution by White Paper came from the BBC’s most enthusiastic propagandist, the European News Editor. Newsome’s attitude to any ‘blueprint of the Brave New World’ was dismissive: What is needed, and needed urgently, is . . . a very simple war aim, confined to the fact that the one fundamental desire which is common to every human being, but entirely absent from the Nazi system, [is] . . . the liberty of the citizen to ‘get his rights’. . . . With most of Draft of War Aims by A. Toynbee,  Aug. , INF /. Churchill to Halifax,  Feb. , PREM //. Cripps to Monckton,  Oct. , box , Monckton Papers. For the press see PREM //–; for a post-war indictment, of industrial policy see Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War ().  Executive Board (MOI),  Feb. , INF /.   

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Europe sick of politics and politicians, and in many cases weary of trying to make democracy work in circumstances which do not favour it, it is futile to base our propaganda upon the promise of what we may consider the benefits of our particular system of government.

This view was both patriotic and Soviet-aware. It stemmed from a longer history than Cranborne’s last fifty years: The demand for justice, for fair play, is fundamental in the human being of all races and ages. It has inspired most of Man’s progress and the majority of his revolutions. . . . [including] the fight to recover and consolidate the common law after the advent of the Norman dictators.

He thought ‘the simple people’ of the world more anxious to get a fair hearing in a civil action against their neighbours than to send representatives to parliament. Liberty was constructed pragmatically. It had to be taught and re-understood: The Nazis and Fascists . . . set to work to make the people despise their constitutional rights and their protection under the law. . . . These people have to be educated from the beginning, taught to understand what is meant by liberty . . . . [Others] will quickly understand what we mean. . . . This is, above all, the rallying cry which we are most competent to get across because we understand it; it is part of our mental make-up and spiritual background. We just can’t foozle it.

Newsome was, by almost any standard, left-wing in his sympathies and understanding. He was ferociously Russophile, but he was unembarrassed about conservatism in British propaganda. He was a West Country radical untroubled by the fear of being on the side of the past. Halifax’s nervousness about the irrelevance of ‘Gladstonian Liberalism’ would have provoked his indignation. Since the Nazis wanted to devalue ‘constitutional liberties and legal rights’, the most convincing response was to defend them. This was not a rejection of revolution in Europe, it was the intuition that where the antifascist revolution was not needed, it could not be defined. Nine weeks after his paper on English liberty Newsome pushed his thesis (‘History as Our Ally’ or ‘nostalgic historiography’) even further: I do urge most strongly . . . that we avoid helping Hitler to discount our greatest asset (and his heaviest liability) by hastening to prove that we are a nation which has broken with its past and is relying solely on a hurried rebirth to provide the dynamics of victory in a changed world.

The instinctive certainty of Newsome’s propaganda leadership was useful. Not all his editors were admirers, but most were glad to have his buoyant directives. There was nothing Reithian about Newsome. His tastes were English vernacular—pints of bitter, football matches, and shooting. He was a  

‘British War Aims: The Alternative to the Nazi New Order’,  Feb. , BBC E/. ‘A Plan and Basis for Propaganda’,  May , BBC E/.

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bon viveur who worked hard. His blend of national confidence and radical sympathy was exactly right at the worst moment in the war. (The future Overseas/World Service, and even the domestic BBC, when Newsome’s German editor became Director-General, owed a good deal to the wartime European Service.) Newsome and his assistant, Douglas Ritchie, had more personal experience of the Empire—Malaya and South Africa respectively— than of Europe. They were hired as news editors not as regional specialists: unpretentious press men to run a central news desk and impose a British gloss on the language services. Newsome was not intellectually dominant. His worst directives are merely fire and brimstone. But at his best he was a good motivator. It was difficult to raise post-war issues without asking what had gone wrong with the Germans. But it was not the point of departure. In – Campbell Stuart had decided that some left-wing voices—subversive but German-friendly—were quite acceptable. Richard Crossman encouraged the BBC and the left-wing ‘blacks’ to maintain, in effect, that there was nothing much wrong with Germany that a free election and a natural socialist majority could not put right. It was a New Statesman variation on Chamberlain’s initial theme. Ewan Butler, who worked in a small group doing black propaganda aimed at the German Army, remembered the Woburn Left with contempt: The psychologists in ‘the Country’, as Woburn was generally called, insisted that Great Britain had ‘,, allies’ in Germany. [A slogan coined by Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman.] These were the ‘German workers’ who were, it seemed, heartily sick of Hitler and all his works, and awaited only the necessary stimulus from Bedfordshire to overthrow their master.

German Socialists were rather fond of the ‘Brave New World’ that Crossman wanted to promise and Monckton to devise and Newsome thought unEnglish. Such material sounded pro-German to Vansittart. There was still a clandestine communist resistance in Germany, but it was dwindling—almost at the end of a long and hopeless battle against the Gestapo. It is likely that Department EH contacts with Willi Münzenberg in Paris persuaded Woburn both that they knew about this opposition and to overrate its persistence. Moscow had betrayed these heroic Germans, but that did not create an opportunity for London. Appeals to the other Germany continued faute de mieux after the fall of France. Barman, one of Leeper’s clever journalists, considered EH was trying to persuade the German worker that his socialism was a ‘sham’ and that the English worker had ‘the more real socialism’. He thought this must fail because it was absurd: the Nazi state gave Ewan Butler, Amateur Agent (), . For Paul Willert’s contact with Münzenberg see Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals (), , .  

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the working man most of his idea of socialism. Barman preferred to assert ‘the middle class aspect of British civilisation’ instead of fictions about the German proletariat. He also thought his colleagues underrated working-class disaffection in France and Britain. But he found little support. Ralph Murray was scandalized that democracy should not be acknowledged a labour movement virtue. There was a ‘nucleus of a revolutionary movement’ among German skilled workers, and ‘to ignore this element would be a crucial dereliction of duty’. Murray moved on from German affairs and became an important figure in extending British support to the Yugoslav Partisans. Barman ended the war in the British Embassy in Moscow—exile for a political warrior—grumbling about the BBC. Crossman had scandalized Frederick Voigt, the most distinguished German specialist at Woburn. Voigt knew how susceptible liberal England had been to German apologetics offered with a radical or an anti-French dressing. He understood the socialist tendency at Woburn as an attempt to pickle old errors in impossible dreams. He knew Europe faced the German problem not just the Nazis, and believed the British had to accept this before they could make persuasive propaganda. Crossman eventually provoked Vansittart, Dalton’s most senior adviser for SOE, into a series of anti-German diatribes on the BBC, published as The Black Record (). Vansittart pushed his own scripts past the BBC staff. Once he had begun Duff Cooper would not let Ogilvie stop the series. Vansittart had certainly looked into the abyss of German nationalism for too long. He bore the burdens of a prophet and his mind was undoubtedly inflamed. In July  he told Halifax ‘we must never again for an instant forget . . . that  out of  Germans are bad, and violently dangerous, whenever a man or a movement arises to make them so’. Vansittart was haunted by the fear that people ignorant of Germany would fall for comfortable but facile distinctions between Nazis and nationalists and underestimate the task of re-education needed. At the time Britain was expected to shoulder prime responsibility for a defeated Germany. Crossman’s friends in Fleet Street counter-attacked. Vansittart was accused of wild abuse and racial nonsense. Vansittart and Voigt were bitter and desperate in their polemic. Some of their arguments were reckless and weak, and even Bracken considered Vansittart rather wild-eyed. But the assault was less on the German ‘race’ than on liberal complacency about the German problem. By the mid-point of the war few observers seriously believed that the poison in German political culture affected the Nazis alone, even though, in framing propaganda in German, there was permission for ‘a liberal policy’. Voigt  T. G. Barman, ‘Note on the Socialist Aspects of German Propaganda’,  Jan. , and R. Murray to R. J. H. Shaw,  Jan. FO /.  Vansittart minute,  July , FO /.  Micheal Balfour, Propaganda in War (), .

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could not bear Crossman’s authority, but he went down fighting. He sent a hostile report on Crossman’s propaganda to Monckton. The MOI considered that Voigt, though over-excited, made a good case: Sir Robert Vansittart . . . disapproves of the line now being taken which, he feels, will result in the Germans fighting on to the last because if they win they have the world, and if they lose they will be asked to collaborate with the victors. In other words, we are now putting out the Laski, Noel-Baker type of broadcast, whereas I think you prefer the line, which incidentally seemed to be taken by the Prime Minister yesterday, that we are fighting the German nation—not merely the Nazis.

This preference was expressed, mildly, in all languages except German. But the German language was widely understood in Eastern Europe, and unsubtle appeals to the German proletariat could disgust those who met the proletarians in uniform. By  it was neither right-wing nor racial to claim that the Germans must be saved from themselves. Newsome was often pained by the assumption of the BBC German Region that theirs was the really important European audience. Resistance made all the nations seem more vivid, real, and precious. Newsome gave part of his own solution to the German problem in a BBC commentary on the Vansittart debate in . Accepting Kingsley Martin’s claim that Europe could not ‘seal up’ German industrial potential, he considered confiscations and executions all the more necessary: I do not mind how drastic this process is. ‘Nazi’ to my way of thinking includes German capitalists who have financed and supported the Hitler gang. They all need liquidating. . . . Europe will run with Nazi blood if the German war machine is broken. But it is a job for professional people, trained to take a responsible attitude. 

This was intended to be reassuring to the wider European audience. Newsome believed what he said, but not because he had been told anything certain. He was compensating for official uncertainty. Voigt supported Newsome’s ideas on propaganda, although politically the two had little in common: Our propaganda should, above all, be English in character. It should be the voice of England. What impresses Germans, and, indeed, most continentals, is not the abstractions we may propound or any arguments we may use, but England—her power, her poise, her old institutions (much more so than her new ones), her everyday life. . . . It is something like an outrage that one of the greatest epics in the history of mankind, the defence of London, has not been presented again and again to German listeners whereas a strike in Austria, the German Revolution of , the Abyssinian campaign, have been elaborately ‘featured’.   

Monckton to Duff Cooper,  May , INF /. ‘Reconstruction and Vansittartism’, News Story,  July , Newsome Papers. Voigt’s memorandum, enclosed with Voigt to Monckton,  Apr. , INF /.

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Voigt argued that the Germans liked social equality but had no sense of democracy and he warned the British, good democrats notoriously fond of class distinctions, not to address their enemies by pretending to be what they were not. For the moment all that could be done was to compel the German listener to hear British self-confidence. At a later stage natural conservatives might respond and become anti-Nazi. Most Germans sensed that Nazi social organization, and the new Europe, were inevitable and progressive; but, if Britain fought well, they might suspect that the antithesis thrust at them— between liberalism and organization—was false. Since the Germans knew perfectly well they were supporting Hitler, Voigt refused to be evasive about it. Propaganda must not flinch from being anti-German as well as anti-Nazi. Newsome thought on parallel lines: The insularity of Britain is clearly a German phobia—a phobia in fact among all our continental enemies. It is the main foundation of hope among all our friends, who not merely have a profound faith that the Channel will keep the Panzers out, but are ready to believe that somehow our insular character enables us to withstand events from which we are not spared by geography and which have proved fatal to continental states. This to some extent is true, of course, and we should do our utmost to exploit our foe’s instinctive, traditional and irrational fear of our insularity, and our friends’ instinctive, traditional and irrational faith in it.

In  this sort of attitude—which did reflect one instinct about resistance— diluted the programmatic enthusiasm of the previous year. No one settled these arguments. In August  Rex Leeper tried to assure himself that ‘Brendan [Bracken] will . . . only accept Crossman [in PWE] if we stop most of his socialistic stuff on the BBC and that we must do. Crossman has now got to be controlled as he never was by the MOI.’ But Crossman was difficult to discipline. He had good debating points: it was manifestly a waste of time to broadcast pure abuse. After losing Dalton’s patronage he still derived support from Lockhart’s professional conviction that Germany would, sooner rather than later, resume her place in the balance of power; but Kirkpatrick—a Germanist himself—sided with Crossman’s critics. In  the debate fizzled out. Distrust of virtually all German political groups became standard Foreign Office doctrine. The British did not, in the end, say much—to non-Germans—about Nazism and not as much as might be expected about Nazi Germany. The ideological forms of the contest were still emerging in . Perhaps the war came slightly too early to start as a great propaganda contest. The Nazis had not fully addressed the European future before the war began. Some of the British believed Nazism would be more of an ideological challenge than it became. In   

Newsome’s ‘Plan and Basis. . . .’, see above, n.. Leeper to Bruce Lockhart,  Aug. , FO /. Garnett to Lockhart,  Dec. , FO /.

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a paper calling Hitler the ‘true successor of the Habsburgs’, R. W. SetonWatson warned of a possible New Course: It is . . . highly characteristic of Hitler that he realised for himself the crudity of Feder’s economics, relegated Rosenberg’s mythological theories to the background and even sidetracked his friend Streicher. . . . There are indications that behind the Führer today stand other and subtler and more plausible theorists, who are capable of transforming the political programmes of former days in the crucible of Nazi ambitions.

In the longer term, he might have been right. But when he wrote, Heydrich had already received his instructions for the slaughter of Jews, Gypsies, and Russians, and the killing of Serbs in Croatia had already begun. Hitler was far from ready to give up crudity or to pass the torch to Speer and his kind. It was too late for a New Course to be influential during the short war he intended. He had reached the point at which political calculation stops. Voigt disappeared into Fleet Street and achieved prominence as a journalist hostile to Stalin. Crossman lasted much longer and became Director of Political Warfare (Enemy and Satellites)—DPW(E&S)—but he was under constant scrutiny. Newsome thought Crossman cynical and ‘an entirely malevolent influence’. He believed the German specialists weakened British propaganda by cynical tricks and insincerity. Crossman transferred to AFHQ in  to teach Woburn methods to Americans—it was ‘psychological warfare’ in their manuals. Newsome did believe in ‘good Germans’. He was indignant when the BBC Home Service seemed to sneer at the officer-conspirators after the failure of the assassination plot in July ; but he was more interested in other Europeans provided they were resistant. Newsome believed in some combination of the values of East and West, and PWE allowed a point of view they could not call illegitimate. But Newsome was evidently interested when his French Editor, Darsie Gillie, challenged his theory: The great task of building the peace is going to be how to create a world in which something on Communist lines and something on Capitalist lines can live together and co-operate. . . . We are moving with such a tremendous speed into a future of which nearly all the elements are incalculable, that a programme of ‘projection of all the Allies in a political, social and ideological sense’ is a programme which is surely utopian. The United States is, I should think, relatively the most stable of the Allied nations—therefore the easiest to project. The future of Britain . . . is extremely difficult to project . . . Of contemporary Russia, there are in the whole world only a few score non-Russians who are both able and qualified to speak.

Gillie saw no Allied convergence and did not wish to use upbeat language to cloud imminent contests in Europe. He needed, but did not have, a discourse to permit the statement of differences.   

R. W. Seton-Watson, ‘Policy and Propaganda’, sent to Lockhart on  May , FO /. Newsome to Kirkpatrick,  Jan.  (‘Not Sent’), Policy File, Newsome Papers. D. R. Gillie to Newsome,  Feb. , Policy File, Newsome Papers.

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Resisting Europe wanted fascism and its origins explained. What had produced the fascist moment of opportunity? Before  capitalist power and privilege did not take the whole blame: Europe had been attacked from two sides; Communism had found no answer to the storm it helped unleash. But by  the explanations were confined to the other side of the coin: the decay of bourgeois culture as big business looked for obstacles to the advance of the working man. This was fairly common ground. The promise to remove what were understood to be the preconditions of fascism was popular. Political collaboration and economic power were patently locked together. The case was strong, but it was also dangerously elastic and ideological. When French socialists discussed nationalization on its economic merits, the communists rebuked them for sullying the prospect of épuration with economic argument: confiscation should be a simple anti-fascist duty. The Tories with easy access to the Prime Minister on European affairs— Eden, Beaverbrook, Selborne, Cranborne, and Bracken—were conscious of fighting Germany in alliance with socialists, communists, and New Dealers. For the privilege of destroying Hitler they would have paid a greater price than they did. But their difficulty, even weakness, at the bargaining table— Stalin’s, Tito’s, or Beveridge’s—was not, primarily, that the commitment to victory came at a price, it was the genuine doubt about how to reformulate essentials. The distinction between what they paid for victory and what they wanted to purchase with it was fuzzy. The price was also the prize. They too wanted a strong Russia ‘in’ Europe, a France stripped of poisoned special interests, and the best affordable means of securing a healthy and contented workforce at home. These were not the costs but the fruits of victory—security against Germany and stability—and would only register as an uncomfortable ‘price’ if matters got out of hand. Selborne was an old ally of the Prime Minister. He thought the pessimism of the pre-war decades had been wanton and self-validating. He was an imperialist, a Churchman and, in , a representative of the cement industry. He shared the Resistance disgust with the knaves and weaklings who had frozen with indecision at the approach of the Nazi wolf. He thought that courage was the political virtue which Democracy tended to lack, and he admired Churchill, Bracken, and Beaverbrook for possessing it. He wanted the recovery of self-confidence by the nations, industrial planning, and a certain British commitment to Europe. But he doubted the willingness of the Conservatives to oppose property confiscation in Britain or the ability of resistance movements to find a safe political footing. In spring  he had ‘no clear picture’ but suspected that ‘a set of new dictators’ might appear after an interlude of post-war chaos. Selborne accepted that the contest with Nazism proved the case for what the French Resistance knew as the Republic pure et dure. But he 

Selborne to ‘Anthony’ [Eden?],  Apr. , box , Selborne Papers.

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also doubted the governing competence of the resistance movements without a stabilizing contribution from Britain or, in France, from de Gaulle. But neither he nor anyone else could construct policy from such intuitions without a blueprint, without headline promises on denazification and reconstruction. Britain needed a community for giving and receiving security: something which could start from a London group of émigrés—the French, Belgians, Dutch, and Norwegians, perhaps the Yugoslavs and Greeks, and certainly any willing Free Italians—accepting common obligations in return for clear British promises about Germany. Failing this, ‘Europe’ would have no meaning unless, indeed, it was seized as a slogan and a project by the very interests which were expected, during the war, to be charged with collaboration. Churchill’s opposition to radical blueprints lapsed only on the domestic front with Beveridge’s Report and its publication in November/December . There was a nervous moment before the Report came out, but it was decided to go for a big propaganda effect. Once the MOI had the Report, they set to work with Bracken’s blessing. After the headlines, there was another crisis of official nerves, and the Government tried to interrupt the fanfare. It was too late. The MOI and Fleet Street had hailed a second Magna Carta. Goebbels was left grinding his teeth in disbelief that Plutocracy had a social programme. Beveridge hoped to see the entire working class relieved of several chronic anxieties. The promotion and defence of his Report absorbed the head of steam behind ‘planning’. Selborne thought that its reception was a case of mass hysteria, and its propaganda value ‘comic’. However rational, this assessment was myopic. The popular fear was that the dream of security would evaporate in a post-war slump. The Report resonated against this uncertainty which made it more dramatic. But its potency was untapped except in British polling booths. ‘Beveridge’ might have been used to obtain working-class consent to painful industrial reconstruction if there had been no American Loan in . Signed by several governments, it would, like collective denazification, have served a British economic alliance in Europe even better. Newsome claimed resistance would restore political health because it was essentially a refusal to see Nazi Germany as permanent. Britain had been first, but there would be others: ‘this war is bound to be followed by a long era in which the ideas of progress and liberty will be more effective and more potent for the good than ever before’. The delayed recoil from fascism refreshed liberty as a value. While there was little resistance elsewhere, he recommended a British propaganda of old values and insular strength; but when resistance developed, an autonomous anti-fascism was seen as its core, and he did not need a British message. Resistance radicalism—socialism—meant popular  

Selborne to ‘Anthony’,  Apr. , box , Selborne Papers. ‘A Plan and Basis for Propaganda’, BBC E/.

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

justice for societies with nasty elites. Britain did not quite need it, but others did. Newsome wanted respect between America, Russia, and Britain. His ‘Man in the Street’ told Europe that the Soviet people were ‘inspired to make . . . necessary sacrifices by faith in their own new social and economic methods’ and that British discussions about the Beveridge Plan were attempts to find an equal inspiration. This skewed into a brittle, pan-Allied optimism a message that could have been specific to the British Commonwealth and its European associates. But there was no treaty to carry Newsome in that direction. The advocates of ‘war aims’ in – needed the gift of prophecy. Without it, they did not ask what Russia or America would demand when and if they became allies or what could be put in place while Britain was still alone and free. They did not quite foresee the problems and pressures that might have made the debate more concrete and vivid. The shock of near defeat did not bring illumination, and the progressives reached more easily for an all-purpose internationalism than they visualized any redefinition of British power. The British were uncertain about war (or peace) aims because their general ideals were not planted in specific ambitions. The next step was always invisible. Officials and advisers were determined to say something, but they were, in spirit, soldiers of the last victory, which had come to nothing. The impulse to be visionary glowed for a few months then faded. The  discussion contained too much ideology and too little strategy. It was almost buried when PWE appeared. It is easy to laugh at Toynbee, Keynes, Wickham Steed, and Harold Nicolson trying to dream up Britain’s ‘good revolution’ or at Cripps in Moscow straining for insight. But if we laugh it is because failures of imagination, which they felt as such, we feel as elemental, that is, as part of a natural post-imperial order in which British grand designs are neither seen nor heard. They knew better. They understood that Europe needed leadership from London, and that getting back to  was implausible and unattractive; that the British–Russian–American triangle—if it formed—would fix the world’s fate; but that a Britain that stood for nothing would be swept aside. Political vision was not impossibly difficult. Anyone could have a go: Funk, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Beveridge, Monnet. All it took was a taste for intelligent simplification, unusual ambition or desperation. But Churchill could not know in  what would happen to the New Deal in America or whether Soviet Communism would survive the war or what post-fascist Europe might be like. He refused to foreclose options with untimely slogans and pretty promises. He heard nothing he had not heard before, and he was busy. 

[N. F. Newsome], The ‘Man in the Street’ Talks to Europe (),  ( Feb. ).

 The Soviet Ally When I first met [Churchill] in 1919 he was even more violently anti-Soviet than today he is pro. He accused everyone who spoke against intervention of ‘shaking hands with murder’ . . . He saw himself riding into Moscow on a white charger. Now apparently he wants to ride in on a red one. Extraordinary the attraction Russia has for this man. Lockhart diary, 16 May 1939. A whole host of things have happened and will happen [here in Moscow] that I and most others will regard with horror . . . I dislike the whole atmosphere —but if Stalin were to ask me tomorrow for advice (which he won’t do!) what should I say about it? Cripps to Monckton,  September .

B R I TA I N ’ S position in June  was dreadful. But the magic of the new alliance was equal to it. Like Trafalgar, the war in Russia ended the threat of invasion. A prophetic enthusiasm discerned unparalleled military resistance even while the Red Army was collapsing. But true Russian resilience soon followed as a dazzling bonus. A new British perspective on Russia was established before the German Blitzkrieg petered out in the autumn rain. The achievement was not, of course, the disaster for Soviet arms which the press saluted in August and September, it was the subsequent ability of the Soviet peoples to rebuild an army and a war industry under terrifying pressure. This transformed the war and reversed the trend of events since . It confirmed the pre-war claim that the Soviet alliance must be embraced and the Pascalian wager on Russia in British popular opinion. Political disbelief or antipathy fell away and a vigorous Slavophile sentiment entered the British psyche. To whom or what did one attribute the unheralded strength and fighting capacity of the Russians? The sceptical military analysts—and the Poles—had almost been right. The Red Army, horribly misdeployed, began the war with a string of blunders and enormous defeats. But the Army was bigger than expected and some of its weapons better. For two summers Soviet forces recoiled in defeat until the advantages of population and space were severely depleted. But Soviet staff work improved, the new tanks were superb, and Anglo-American deliveries were timely. Above all, there was a Russian sacrifice of lives and effort which left Britain awe-struck. 

Box , Monckton Papers.

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On the evening of  June  Churchill spoke on the BBC. He intended to dispel doubts: ‘I have to make the declaration, but can you doubt what our policy will be? . . . Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. . . . It follows therefore that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people.’ His chief concern was to teach the world how to understand the new ‘communist’ alliance. He began with a stunning insult—a testimony to his mature political grasp—which would never be repeated: ‘the Nazi régime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism . . . No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it.’ But sympathies not previously available to the USSR—‘the past, with its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies, flashes away’—should now focus on the Russia of ‘ten thousand villages’ where mothers and wives were praying (‘ah, yes, there are times when all pray’) for their menfolk. Besides, Hitler’s intentions were unchanged: ‘his invasion of Russia is no more than a prelude to an attempted invasion of the British Isles’ which was itself a preparation for ‘the final act, without which all his conquests would be in vain—namely, the subjugation of the Western Hemisphere to his will and to his system’. The conclusion was plain: ‘the Russian danger is our danger’. Churchill spoke from a position of advantage and moral authority which would not last. The speech was broadcast in Russian. But the BBC did not start a Russian service —beyond fifteen minutes a week in ‒. Stalin’s errors were not widely understood. Evidence of Soviet military failure was matched, then eclipsed, by Soviet survival. The credit stood to three accounts: the Russian people, Communism, and Stalin, or to two of them minimizing the claims of the third. If the British had not quite mastered the art of modern war, it seemed fully understood in the USSR. This subversive thought was deepened by gratitude, and the Ministry of Information monitored the growing force of enthusiasm for Russia. The MOI were warned of the impending German attack on Russia. They explained it as a sign of German frustration and warned that Germany would make valuable conquests. Duff Cooper, at Churchill’s request, reminded Ambassador Maisky that the Internationale was not a national anthem. Desmond Morton, the PM’s advisor on political warfare, asked the MOI whether the newspapers were causing concern, but was told not to worry. Nevertheless, there was an anxious discussion in the MOI about communism in Russia and Britain. Radcliffe was asked to consider whether, if Russia were defeated, Britain would be accused by the ‘Left Wing’ world-wide of a ‘secret desire to see Communism crushed’. The charge might be deflected in advance by a ‘picture of Anglo-Soviet co-operation’ and conspicuous attempts to



Winston Churchill, The Second World War,  vols. (–), iii. –.

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inhibit anti-communist distaste while the new alliance lasted.  Harold Nicolson thought his officials in the Duty Room—the hub of the Ministry— were not coping well. This prompted one of those meetings in Orme Sargent’s room at the Foreign Office where large matters were examined. One was quickly decided: the BBC were told to treat Russian military communiqués with less reserve. The War Office advised that they were accurate—on land at least. The BBC were invited to give them in full summaries and not to offer juxtaposed German counter-claims. Lord Davidson was one of four MOI Controllers. He and his immediate subordinate Ralph Parker, director of the Home division, insisted that the Soviet ally presented an alarming difficulty. But then Bracken became Minister and Davidson’s career suddenly ended. Davidson had been Baldwin’s party chairman, and Bracken bore grudges. Desmond Morton, however, was Bracken’s close ally, and he was just as anxious. Morton conceded that British propaganda must sound pro-Russian, but he wanted to curtail the inevitable profit for ‘Marxism’. Monckton, preparing for a trip to Moscow, advised Bracken against ‘destructive’ criticism of Soviet ideology and said that pointed emphasis of democratic tradition was protection enough, and Radcliffe, soon his successor as Director-General, refused to allow anxiety about communism to justify employing the MOI as some sort of filter for socialist ideas. The MOI figures moving up into controllerships—Sylvester Gates (Home), Francis Williams (Press), and Kenneth Grubb (Overseas)—were not inclined to react to a Soviet or communist problem before it took shape. This left Ralph Parker with no support except Morton in Downing Street. He wanted something said quickly: six months of drift would leave the situation ‘beyond control’. Parker admitted one could no longer dismiss the Soviet Union as ‘a cranky political machine based upon illogic and phantasy’; its political theory had an unprecedented opportunity because it had, he said, foreseen the Nazi onslaught and was prepared. (What Theory really said to Stalin is still uncertain, but they had the T- and we did not.) British values—law, free speech, and home life—could be restated in critical counterpoint to communism, but the difficulty lay in reminding the public that ‘as Hitler has his Gestapo so Stalin has his Ogpu’ without feeling able to tell them about it ex cathedra. Malet Street organized a series of events and exhibitions on Russia. MOI regional offices were soon trying to outrun communist attempts to use AngloSoviet committees as vehicles of second front agitation. Beyond such precautionary measures lay discouraging obstacles. One of Parker’s officials objected that it would simply be wrong ‘to criticise the Russian achievement’ when the Russians, as already seemed possible, had just ‘saved the civilised world which   

Prof. Harlow (Empire division) to DDG,  July , INF /. R. H. Parker to Davidson and Scorgie,  July , INF /. Parker, ‘Policy Towards Communism’,  Aug. , INF /.

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Communism was popularly supposed to be out to destroy’. Such a retreat from received wisdom—‘popularly supposed’, ‘Russian achievement’—wrought by strong emotion either in tolerated discourse or real conviction was the new problem. Churchill’s own minute complaining about ‘the British tendency to forget the dangers of Communism’ had no apparent impact. Bracken’s department had opted for neutrality. Bracken gave as little sign of being worried as did Beaverbrook. But Bracken rarely did more than scrawl ‘BB’ on what he read, and Churchill saw him almost every day. Radcliffe decided not to publish an MOI booklet on Russia. Lockhart ruled against Morton’s wish to throw some mud at the Third International. Radcliffe was advised not to appoint an expert on the Comintern and not to doubt that it was communist. There might be a sharp political contest if Moscow ever lapsed into revolutionary defeatism, and there might be scope for an anti-communism of ‘intelligent opportunism’. Even so, British objections must be to the ‘method’ of communism not to its ideals. Above all, no ‘grand strategy’ was worth having while the voice of events was so exceedingly loud. Radcliffe agreed that Morton’s suggestion would ‘lead to disaster’. An anti-communist orthodoxy would interfere with political debate in Britain. This had to be sacrosanct since definitive war aims had not been declared in . In any case, the advice Bracken took was plausible. Radcliffe and his advisers believed that communism would not be a problem unless military failure discredited British institutions. Morton wanted the MOI to defend liberty against fashionable confidence in the benevolent state, but his concern was communism at home not in Europe. He remained unhappy: ‘it is up to someone to try and educate the people of England so that they understand firstly the complete absence of communism in the USSR and secondly, that Russian victories have not been won because the country is communist, which it isn’t.’ These debating points obscured the problem. The MOI disliked their own ‘Anglo-Russian weeks’, but no one seemed concerned about Stalin’s growing popularity. The claim that the Russians were magnificent patriots led by a great man could not really suppress the question of communism. British public admiration for Stalin did more than add glamour to a doctrine, it supercharged Stalin’s prestige, and, through the BBC, did so throughout Europe. Certainly, it was hard to know how little of the credit for Russia’s survival was in fact his. Stalin had driven the country into a hole from which victory was no escape. But his power, his reputation, and his flair for shrewd damage were unimpaired. Lockhart should have worried more about the reputation.  Maxwell’s memorandum,  Sept. , INF /; Churchill to Bracken,  Aug. : P. M. H. Bell, John Bull and the Bear (), .  Gates to DG,  Dec. ; DG to Gates,  Jan. , INF /.  Morton to Parker,  Jan. , INF /.

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Fleet Street would have responded to a plain request from Bracken not to whitewash Stalin, but the request would have leaked and been contested. Editors assumed that raison d’état coincided with the tide of sentiment. The opportunities for placing unpleasant truths firmly in the public mind were allowed to pass. On the other hand, some official pro-Soviet publicity in Britain was needed for domestic tranquillity and the safety of the alliance and to establish that residual anti-communism did not imply a lack of allied commitment. Pro-Soviet processions, displays, and dedicated production targets could dilute the suspicion that British alliance with Russia was at bottom cynical. But they did not offer a description of the Soviet Ally. Churchill and Bracken had long hoped to sup with the devil and they were worldly enough to acknowledge a price. But Churchill did not know how close the AngloSoviet alliance would have to be. The proposal to say something about ‘Stalin’s OGPU’, before it became unmentionable, was soon replaced by the opposite idea. The clearest expression of the public mood was a well-mannered resolve to set aside the prejudice against ‘Reds’. Patrick Ryan, Kirkpatrick’s counterpart in the BBC Home Service, considered that the nation was more curious about the USSR than at any time since Lenin, and that people suspected they had been misled. This suspicion was fed by jubilant revisionism. To have met it with dry doctrine would have been disturbing and painful. Even satisfying popular curiosity was difficult: ‘our own experts seem to know very little about how wheels really go round in Russia, and . . . we could not afford to upset the Kremlin, as we certainly should if we gave any publicity, with official or semi-official blessing, to critical comments on Russian affairs’. Silence on the Soviet record quickly became binding. Soon it was Russophile sentiment in Britain which the BBC could not afford to upset. Bracken’s officials might have worked out a ‘doctrine’ about Russia. Once they did not, the case for offering an official description of the USSR melted away. The MOI, having decided not to educate the sympathy for Russia, could only echo it. The best opportunity to expound a useful but reserved position on Russia was already gone. In – there was no authorized version of Stalin as a deluded cynic, although there was a softening in references to Russia just in case Hitler forced her to fight. In June  a new objectivity could not be achieved overnight and there remained an ideological fence around the subject. Before  ‘Bolshevism’ had been as satisfying as a bogey as it was pretentious as a threat; afterwards the idea of needing Russia and somehow approving had been mixed up and not just in socialist circles. For The Times E. H. Carr wrote foreign policy leaders and helped sustain the joke that the journal had become the London edition of Pravda. Carr, a former diplomat who had been at the MOI, was a man with a mission, but he could judge what 

A. P. Ryan to DG (MOI),  Sept. , INF /.

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was welcome and timely. The new consensual position was best signalled from outside Whitehall. Lockhart, as much as anyone, wanted departments to accept a certain amount of pro-Soviet re-education. But reasoned consent to Soviet influence in post-war Europe was not the only form of realism. Keeping some balance in public opinion might have been an advantage for diplomacy. PWE did not receive much advice from above. Lockhart was, of course, equipped to advise himself. It is possible he was chosen to lead PWE for that reason. His formative political experience had been in Russia; his introduction to British politics had followed his arrival in Whitehall in  as the first eyewitness of Bolshevism. He had encouraged ministers to ignore Churchill and be pragmatic about the Revolution and had urged his case with such violence that he had been ‘labelled as hot-headed and partisan’. This had damaged his prospects. His sudden promotion, at the moment of ‘Barbarossa’, felt less a career triumph than a piece of Establishment pragmatism belatedly falling into place. The Cabinet were not as curious about Russia as when he had counselled against intervention. No ‘Russia Committee’ was formed either for concerned politicians—Beaverbrook, Selborne, Cranborne, Dalton, Bevin, and later Cripps—or by officials with useful experience. Too much work and responsibility remained with Eden, who was seriously overburdened, except when Churchill intervened with his billets-doux to Stalin. (A Russia Committee, combining political, intelligence, and propaganda duties, did not appear until April . The suggestion then came from Christopher Warner—see below—and was, surely, a comment on his wartime experience as head of the Northern department. His view that the Cold War should be articulated as a propaganda contest, and so be the better contained, presumably owed something to his earlier spell as Leeper’s deputy at Woburn.) The absence of a doctrine on Russia was not quickly recognized in PWE but it was felt. The mechanism for propagating views within Whitehall worked in fits and starts. Middle-rank officials were not told what to think of the Soviet Union except by their newspapers. Soviet expertise was not drawn together. Internally, PWE did have an authoritative mechanism: the ‘confidential annexe’ to the central directive. Once a knotty problem created difficulties, the explanatory ‘annexe’ could help officials to get their bearings. But ambitious documents on the USSR issued ex cathedra for all departments were not produced. The BBC offered hints and their audience was left to over-interpret a trend. In western Europe the British response to Russia was intelligible: French and Danish resisters in Europe considered themselves to be following  Carr left the MOI in March ; he had written editorials for The Times in  but joined the paper in Jan. . He was impatient with people who wanted a Soviet ally but not a Soviet peace: see Bell, John Bull and the Bear, .  K. Young (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, ii, ‒ (),  ( Nov. ).

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a clear British lead as they put aside the overt anti-communism of –. But where the gap in political culture was wider and the implications more difficult, the BBC pseudo-message was not appropriate. The Poles and the Yugoslavs were not at all sure what they were being told. Newsome thought he understood. Even at the Daily Telegraph Newsome had been an idiosyncratic Russophile. He saw the Russians as a backward people dragged into the present by a post-revolutionary, modernizing empire. If Stalin was a dictator, so was the Viceroy of India, but Stalin was more like Cromwell. Newsome convinced himself that the USSR was shaking off its Marxist inheritance. He worked out, at least he acquired, an eccentric account of Soviet politics as moving steadily, from , back towards traditional or Western values. He did not like cynicism about the  Constitution and thought that sympathy for Zinoviev was incredibly confused. A Nazi-orchestrated coalition of extreme Left and stupid Right had made an enormous fuss about the Purges. The end of Trotsky’s communism favoured the capitalist democracies, and it was only in Germany’s interest to overlook this. Newsome admired Stalin’s regime, and even the Terror, because it had strengthened Russia and tamed the Revolution. When others hesitated, he found it a pleasant duty, as ‘The Man in the Street’, to assure listeners that Britain and the Soviet Union were, constitutionally, moving towards the ‘same goal’ and were destined to ‘meet on common ground’, and to boast that British and Soviet views about the coming settlement were so ‘fundamentally identical’ that all contrary assertions were ‘pernicious nonsense’. He also suggested that ‘the final liquidation of the forces of the political reaction, and economic nationalism and imperialism’, even if it caused a few ‘disturbances’, would be assisted by a Britain happy to see the new European democracies adopt ‘what they have learnt to admire and respect in the Soviet system’. That this might not be true was tolerably clear, but that it might be true was too devoutly to be wished to be disallowed. The prospect of Britain and Russia in mutually beneficial association would solve so many problems that the subject could not be treated with less than consistent respect. (From the perspective of  the main features of the Cold War were all undesirable: a British Commonwealth perceived as inadequate, military overstretch, and NATO.) PWE were willing to argue that Anglo-Soviet co-operation was at least probable by rehearsing arguments of self-interest in its favour, but they were unable to speak frankly about self-interest ‘without mentioning obvious points of differences’ about which ‘we are repeatedly urged not to speculate’. Newsome understood so well the benefit fascism derived from anti-communism that he ceased to understand it except as folly—a nearly-willing submission to the hypnosis of Goebbels. In  

[Newsome], The ‘Man in the Street’ Talks to Europe (), , , , , and . Duncan Wilson to Neame,  Feb. , FO /.

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 this was a strength; by  it was not. Newsome’s USSR was acceptable for a time, but deprived him of a full sense of the European tragedy. What the BBC said about Russia would be studied in Moscow to judge British intentions. Lockhart knew this and knew Russia. He had known a Soviet gaol from the inside, and understood that Stalin controlled a tyranny of unimaginable cruelty. He viewed Stalin as a tyrant-revolutionary who was a dangerous ally and dangerous to patronize, who was lethal and likely to be as remorselessly cynical about allies as about foreign comrades. Nevertheless, Lockhart knew that the pre-war isolation of the Soviet Union had been a grave mistake of imperial policy. He thought that there could be no secure Russian alliance without taking the Revolution as irreversible and conceding, even twenty years too late, Russia’s right to a leading position in Europe. Despite disliking Bolshevism intensely he suspected that some formidable force was still at work in Soviet society. He thought Bolshevik cynicism and malice would, again, be an acute problem if, at the highest level, the Russians were mishandled. He did not believe that publicity could undo bad diplomacy. Lockhart defined his initial anxiety in a commentary on Stalin’s Red Army Day speech. The Russians read into our hesitations and inconsistencies the most sinister intentions. Suspicious by nature and by upbringing, they have developed during the last twenty-five years a strong distrust of all foreigners and, particularly, of Europeans. This distrust reached its apogee at the time of Munich, declined slightly after the visits of Lord Beaverbrook and the Foreign Secretary, and recently has regained its former strength . . . Facing approximately % of the German armed forces and containing % of Japan’s total strength, [the USSR] is now awaiting the formidable and perhaps decisive campaign. Yet . . . she is allowed no real share in the inner councils of the grand Anglo-American alliance . . . There is no professional diplomat so sensitive as the Russian; no Russian so sensitive as the Bolshevik leader who nurses in his heart the accumulated slights and humiliations of the last quarter of a century . . . [One Soviet conclusion] is that Britain has an interest in bleeding Russia white, and the fulsome praise lavished by our press on the heroic Red Army merely strengthens him in this belief. Another conclusion is that Britain still has up her diplomatic sleeve the card of a compromise peace with the German generals and that this card will be played whenever there is any risk of Russia spreading westwards.

Lockhart spent the weekends at Cherkley, Beaverbrook’s house in Surrey, before and after Beaverbrook’s February resignation. He helped Beaverbrook to his view that a military crisis in Russia required a political crisis in London. Although the USSR faced outright defeat in , Stalin’s leadership was ambitious. In spring  he intended to retake the eastern Ukraine. When disaster struck at Kharkov and Kerch, his response was not to threaten the West, but to intensify anti-German propaganda to fever pitch, to exaggerate  Lockhart, ‘Stalin’s Address [  Feb.] to the Red Army’,  Mar. , D/, Beaverbrook papers, also printed in Young (ed.), Lockhart Diaries, ii. -.

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the collapse at Rostov in July—a shock even greater than the surrender of Tobruk—and to start drastic Army reforms. There was no alternative to the British alliance even when long summer daylight made the Arctic convoys so costly they were stopped. Resentment was, of course, a different matter. It was exceptionally difficult to get inside the Soviet machine. Opportunities could slip by very quickly. In autumn  SOE in Istanbul were in touch with one ‘Nikolieff ’, a General Staff officer answerable directly to Stalin. There seemed to be a good prospect of joint work in Yugoslavia, but Nikolieff seems to have backed off in the face of Anglo-Yugoslav confusion. In Moscow SOE’s representative with the NKVD passed on an invitation to send a Balkan team to Jerusalem to work with SOE. But the invitation was withdrawn when Soviet diplomats flatly refused to discuss Yugoslavia. Sargent, the foreign office mandarin who watched every step that SOE took, acted as if the NKVD were subordinate to Molotov. But perhaps Molotov and Vyshinsky said no because they could not say yes. In March  Sargent told SOE that since the NKVD obviously wanted to get their men to Jerusalem the Soviet foreign ministry must first promise to be helpful. SOE were annoyed, and the Balkan specialists were alert to the risks. Their man in Moscow warned that his NKVD contacts were ‘extremely perturbed’ at the delays and were stressing the urgency of their Jerusalem mission ‘from every point of view, including any further inter-relationship’. SOE wanted to respond. The NKVD were excited about co-operation and needed help, but British diplomats let the opportunity pass. The consequences in Yugoslavia were considerable. Lockhart wanted a policy of graceful and unforced concessions designed to lighten the morbid suspicion of the Soviet leadership and permit intelligent partnership. Stalin’s territorial claims were to be conceded as Soviet ‘security interests’. But equality of sacrifice was beyond reach, and Beaverbrook’s second-front rumblings exacerbated a difficult situation by parading the belief that opportunities to help Russia were being thrown away. There were rumours about Russo-German contacts in Stockholm, but PWE guessed this was Russian ‘black’ playing games. Lockhart knew that a long-term difficulty remained even if the wartime alliance held. Puzzling about Stalin, he came to the crux of the matter: ‘We have, in fact, no propaganda policy towards Russia because we have no foreign policy towards that country. And we have no foreign policy towards Russia because we have no foreign policy for Europe.’ Without some idea of European goals, negotiation with the USSR could not make sense, and without negotiation there would be confrontation. Lockhart wanted the USSR inside the concert of nations. The requisite concessions were the borders of the USSR as of June , but these were  Sargent to Jebb,  Mar. ; ‘Sam’ [SOE, Moscow] to ADW,  Apr. , HS /: ‘Sam’ to AD(O) [Taylor],  Mar. , HS /.  ‘Stalin’s Address’: Young (ed.), Lockhart Diaries, ii. .

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disreputable. They included a large slice of Poland; the Finnish territories seized in the Winter War; the republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and the Bessarabian portion of Romania. When Eden, at the end of , first put similar Russian demands to his Cabinet colleagues—with a recommendation to accept—Churchill had been reluctant and Attlee was hostile. Only Beaverbrook was entirely in favour: the territory Stalin wanted was, for the British Empire, an attractively cheap price for Soviet friendship. A difficult War Cabinet discussion had led only to talk of resignations and an alarming threat by Beaverbrook to take on the moralists in public debate. The convention was established that in this trade the British were buying and the Russians selling. Beaverbrook’s unqualified insistence on everything for Russia left him unsuited for any position except that of Prime Minister during a military emergency on the Eastern Front. In March  the press were asked never to speculate about Anglo-American discussions on the Soviet borders. Lockhart might have participated in the major Anglo-Russian encounters. In May  a full Anglo-Soviet treaty was in prospect. Before Molotov arrived in London Lockhart was asked to attend the ministerial meetings to interpret his moods and reactions. He assured Sargent that Molotov would not be coming to London unless Stalin had decided to sign something. But the Russians objected to Lockhart’s presence and, curiously, were allowed their way. Molotov arrived with a draft treaty requiring the British to accept, in public, both the  borders and some new and undefined Soviet rights in Finland and Romania. The British side resented the additional Soviet demands—fortunately for Finland—but to the  borders they objected merely that the Polish guarantee of  and American public opinion made it impolitic to legitimize changes before the final peace conference. This was, presumably, what Molotov wished to establish. Eden discarded the War Cabinet’s doubts; he did not attempt to rescue a single Baltic state or Polish province. Lockhart, of course, approved. He rather believed in the gloss which Oliver Harvey put on the Russian treaty question—that ‘understanding’ was menaced by ‘reactionaries’, particularly in the Labour movement where anti-communist currents ran deep. The charge that Labour’s anti-communism was greater than that of the Tories, and that both inspired irrational opposition to Soviet expansion or a second front, was promoted by Beaverbrook, though Harvey saw it as the measure of Eden’s importance: ‘P.M. anti-Russian, Cabinet contemptible, Labour leaders, Bevin, Attlee, Morrison violently anti-Soviet.’ Molotov left for Washington and then returned to London. His terms for the Anglo-Russian treaty were still Elisabeth Barker, Churchill and Eden at War (), . Young (ed.), Lockhart Diaries, ii. , – ( and  May ). He could discuss ‘almost anything’ with personnel at the Soviet Embassy: Lockhart, My Europe (), .  John Harvey (ed.), The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (), , ,  ( Oct.,  Nov., and  Dec. ).  

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pitched too high and he was demanding an Allied statement about the second front. But Lockhart was right: Molotov had come to sign something. The ambitious draft (the ‘old treaty’, as it was called) was dropped and an anodyne twenty-year alliance signed instead. Eden thought this a tremendous success. He did not have to face the War Cabinet having conceded the  frontiers, and he had a treaty. But the deft footwork was Churchill’s. What had been conceded was a broad British hint, what had been refused was formal Allied approval. This combination served a complex political purpose. Churchill had slipped a pro-Soviet position past a sceptical Cabinet, which was a tactical gain for him; but, even better, he had adopted America’s strategy—the refusal to negotiate about Eastern Europe—while allowing the foreign policy community to suppose, for a few months, that they had started out in the opposite direction. Churchill was nervous. Bracken had not even been told that Molotov was coming. This is very surprising, and Bracken felt humiliated by Churchill’s secrecy. An accurate version of the negotiations reached the press through a Reuters telegram from Washington and leaks from the embassies. Reuters were told to kill the story, and the censorship of outgoing telegrams silenced the American journalists who received the leaks. The Chief Censor complained that he could have thrown a blanket over the whole event if Foreign Office secrecy had not prevented him from warning his censors in time. Lockhart was caught up in the self-congratulation of those who had been ‘for’ the old treaty yet pleased with the new version. Eden told him that much of the Office had been recalcitrant and ‘pro-Balt’ and only Sargent had been ‘grand’. Lockhart’s advocacy of Russia’s claims was bruited about as particularly valuable. Brooks, his deputy, held forth at a dinner in July: Dallas dined last night with Mountbatten. Maisky was there, and Dallas spoke to him about the treaty; said both English and Russians could thank me much for that. Maisky replied: ‘I know, but tell Mr Lockhart that the second front is more important than the treaty.’

Churchill knew that the achievement had been to sink the old treaty without a crisis. He told Roosevelt that the American Ambassador had played a crucial role: ‘We received invaluable help from Winant . . . He made the Russians understand, as no one else could do, how injurious to good relations between us three, must have been the American reaction to the old treaty.’ This ‘we’ was Anglo-American. Those on the British side who expected to strike a lasting bargain with Russia were skilfully obstructed by this intervention. The Anglo-Soviet communiqué published on  June  was one of the worst political blunders of the war: ‘Full understanding was reached with   

Bracken to Churchill,  June , INF /. Young (ed.), Lockhart Diaries, ii. ,  ( June and  July ). Churchill to Roosevelt,  May : Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill, vii. .

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regard to the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in .’ It was entirely untrue, and it handed Stalin a rod with which the British could be beaten; it was not even likely that the enemy could be deceived. A secret aidemémoire which rehearsed British doubts concluded ‘we can therefore give no promise’. But even this unpromised second front made sense only as a Norwegian possibility; nothing was possible in France. Eden had been disconcerted when shown the Russo-American draft about ‘full understanding’, but his anxiety was not lively enough to have the phrase struck out. Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, the new British Ambassador in Moscow, was soon signalling in alarm that the Russian press had announced the second front as an imminent certainty. PWE knew that reputation was being sacrificed for some level of deception and feared there would be a high price to pay. At the end of  there was a new front in Tunisia. In August Churchill had been completely explicit with Stalin: ‘the wisest course is to use “Sledgehammer” [the French plan] as a blind for “Torch”, and to proclaim “Torch” when it begins as the second front . . . [which] is what we ourselves mean to do.’ But Maisky insisted that Torch should not be called the second front, and Lockhart conceded the point. This was unfortunate, but there was one good reason to hesitate. There were, at first, no German soldiers in French North Africa. The fighting against Vichy forces might have been over in a week. PWE chose not to risk ridicule. ‘Torch’ was not, on the day Allied soldiers came ashore in Algiers, an occasion to boast the second front pledge redeemed. The scale of Germany’s reaction in Tunisia was impossible to predict. The great size and duration of the battle for Tunis was not expected: the contest lasted six months and led to the capture of , Axis prisoners. German air transport squadrons were transferred to the Mediterranean just before , German soldiers were cut off at Stalingrad (November– January). The campaign in Tunisia was the first second front. Stalin and Hitler had burnt all their bridges. Hitler dared not attempt to solve his future problems in the West by trusting in the East—there was no other point in an armistice—a regime he had cheated and nearly destroyed. Even if Hitler surrendered all his gains in Russia, he could not safely repeat the risk he took in  and withdraw his main armed strength from the East. He needed repeated victories. To stop fighting in the East was to abandon not only the hope of German victory but any prospect of security. Hitler dared not stop until the Soviet Union was beaten. From Stalin’s point of view, undesirable changes might be triggered in the capitalist world by an armistice which left the Germans on Soviet territory. But Lockhart long retained a suspicion that the Russians might at some point choose to ‘rest upon their oars’.   

Churchill, The Second World War, iv. . Aide-mémoire for Stalin,  Aug. : Gilbert, Churchill, vii. . Young (ed.), Lockhart Diaries, ii.  ( Sept. ).

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Certainly, it was not by Stalin’s choice that the Russians did most of the fighting: it was his greatest failure of policy. Russian territorial demands were difficult to oppose and Western opposition might sour the alliance. The Russian Empire was still a recent and familiar object of understanding; it was almost attractive to think of Stalin as a Tsar. But if the Anglo-Americans did not try to negotiate about difficulties there could be no preparation for peace. Diplomacy based on postponement was an investment in a painful future confrontation. The real imponderable was not what the borders should be, it was the relationship, as understood in Moscow, between the Soviet Union and the rest of Europe. After Beaverbrook’s moment passed, Lockhart thought hard about this. What he and Orme Sargent proposed was a British policy free of the American refusal to negotiate, for they came to understand that Churchill had quietly embraced that refusal. After Stalingrad PWE had a new stick for beating the enemy. British pride in Russian achievements was part of the rhetoric of indissoluble alliance. PWE directives were stamped with a redoubled faith in propaganda. But Goebbels openly addressed the fear of what would happen if Germany lost. As the British raised their new propaganda baton, Goebbels told the German nation that Stalingrad was not a defeat but a catastrophe. Only the German Army stood between ‘Europe’ and the Red terror. Henceforth German propaganda made constant implicit reference to defeat. However dangerous as a strategy, it was a powerful theme. PWE called this the ‘Bolshevik Bogey’. Goebbels’s policy made most sense inside Germany. The ‘Bogey’ was also a goad for Hungarians, Romanians, and Finns. But there was no attempt to tap new resources by handing genuine power—in Oslo and Brussels, conceivably in Warsaw, but above all in Paris—to local fascists. PWE were struck by the ‘feverish exaltation’ with which the Nazis announced the Stalingrad defeat—‘using the dirge to smother with emotion any awareness of the real military situation’. Hitler and Goebbels were ‘propagandists of genius, professionals who delight in propaganda as an art’; they understood what could be done: ‘unlike British statesmen, they do not curb the extravagancies of their propagandists; they encourage and intensify the propaganda plans of their subordinates until, in their hands, propaganda becomes not the Cinderella of the services, but the inspirer of policy’. This compliment was a warning that the Nazis were still dangerous. At the same time, Lockhart was asking what the prospect of victory would do to Stalin: Until a month ago the Russians and probably most of us assumed that although Russian resistance might well be the winning factor in the war, Russia herself would be so crippled  Annexe I, ‘The method in the Madness of the German Propaganda Ministry’, Central Directive,  Feb. , FO /.

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that she would be comparatively innocuous at the end of the war and would need our help in her own reconstruction. This fear, amounting almost to a certainty in the minds of the Russians, was the sole cause of Russia’s suspicions . . . [But] the recent victories had at any rate created a situation in which it would be possible for Russia to win this war by herself. Already [Ambassador] Bogomolov was telling his Czechs, Poles and Co. that Russia was no longer so interested in a second front. What then?

What would London say when the Russians went forward? The next central directive—they were often drafted by Newsome—demanded an offensive against the ‘anti-Bolshevist myth’ and insisted that propaganda must prevent anti-Bolshevik thinking. Yet British apologetics on the Soviet theme would be half-hearted and ‘transparent to our listeners as a defensive line’. The answer chosen for the problem was atrocity propaganda. In June  Bracken had presided over a press conference at which the London Poles published their intelligence on several extermination camps. In December the full Polish statement about Auschwitz went far beyond anyone’s propaganda needs. PWE believed that the killing of the Polish intelligentsia and the Polish Jews was ‘nearing completion’ and knew that the extermination of ethnic Poles in selected areas of the ‘General Government’ had begun. Nazi goals were now wholly evident. The retort to the ‘Bolshevik Bogey’ was to define Nazism as ‘the worst form of terrorism in all history’, and the Gestapo as ‘the most ruthless of all secret police’. The comprehensive evil of the Nazi dream was to be found not just in racial obsession but in paganism and in the Nazi contempt for trade unions, family life, and the emancipation of women. Without direct reference to Russia, it was to be implied that anything said against the Bolsheviks could be said of the Nazis with redoubled force. The German ‘Red Bogey’ theme would not be admitted to refer in any rational way to Marxist doctrine: ‘it is not ideological, it is pure ju-ju; it is an assault on emotion and prejudice’ conjuring with images of mass execution, labour camps, the OGPU and Siberia. The remedy was so to fill minds with Nazi horror as to leave no room for the dread of other oppressions. The decision not to be ‘defensive’ about the USSR, to sustain an offensive ‘campaign’ come what may, appears in almost every directive of the period. This PWE riposte to Goebbels confirmed, under pressure, the decisions made in . Nevertheless, no positive case was made for optimism. British evasiveness was not instructive. The decision to swamp anti-communism with other fears secured something to say, but there could be no reassuring account of Soviet intentions because there was no official judgement of them. The suggestion that there was a myth to be exploded may have nurtured pro-Soviet expectations among European resisters. Nazi propaganda featured the more    

Young (ed.), Lockhart Diaries, ii. – (/ Feb. ). Central Directive,  Feb. , FO /. Annexe III, ‘The German Terror in Poland’, Central Directive,  Jan. , FO /. Annexe I, ‘The Anti-Bolshevist Campaign’,  Feb. , FO /.

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uncritical Western statements about the Soviet Union. Listeners to both sides might think they could hear a British compromesso storico with communism even though the PWE directives did not provide one. The disinclination to approve of Stalin’s regime in  matched the decision not to disapprove in , but the emphasis had shifted. The PWE suggestion that the Russians would resent ‘British apologetics for the Russian system’ was as much a tribute to Moscow’s pretensions as a polite excuse. The decision to be noncommittal without seeming so expressed a sort of internal truce, but the directive would be difficult to interpret when events spoke against it. Any proposal to challenge the CPSU to change its spots, or to insist that the Russians deal gently—in eastern Europe—with suspicions produced by their own behaviour, would have encountered, in , a chorus of objectors. PWE did not want unacceptable risks. But exactly what was unacceptable to Moscow? The presumption against referring to unpleasant Soviet realities— no matter how embedded in reaffirmations of Allied purpose—became the instinctive etiquette for the alliance. There was no response to the Soviet problem except to block out by sheer volume the idea that alliance with Stalin gave any sort of licence for the relativizing cynicism in which the Nazis wrapped the troubled German conscience. False bonhomie about ‘Uncle Joe’—genuine warmth about Russia masking political reserve—had settled into place as a contribution to consensus. It was—for the moment—a great convenience and boon to propaganda. It helped suggest that ‘Unconditional Surrender’ was truly intended. There was some discomfort in PWE and SOE about the Nazi claim that Britain had written off the Continent. But during the Katyn crisis Newsome told his editors to be confident: German propaganda had an uphill task because the majority of the occupied peoples had ‘a great respect for the Red Army untempered by any really deep-rooted fears and suspicions’—he congratulated the Dutch for having ‘overcome their prejudices’. His reference to the ‘Red Army’ was inappropriate. In any case, the Axis satellite nations and collaborators among more resistant peoples were the real German target audience not the Dutch, Danes, and Czechs. But Newsome expressed a special British sang-froid about the Soviet place in Europe: a Churchillian pose which borrowed left-wing clothes because they fitted. It was hope but not quite faith, and the expression of trust would become a mask. At the beginning of  Lockhart still believed ‘concessions’ were the key to a lasting Russian alliance; by August what he feared most was British weakness and procrastination. He began to see the post-war shipwreck of the wartime alliance as probable. He wanted to ‘bargain stiffly and hardily’, to raise all the worst problems and so achieve a true if painful understanding of goals  

‘The Political Warfare Offensive’,  Feb. , FO /. Memorandum by D.Eur.B.,  Apr. , FO /.

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and limits. Nothing else could secure an agreement for liberated Europe: ‘it is better to face up to these unpleasant problems and fail than drift into disaster’. The response of Sargent and Lockhart to the Katyn crisis—examined later—was to demand an early exploration of the dangerous issues—Poland not least—at the highest level. On the British side, they were the sponsors of the Tehran Conference of November . But they were fighting an inhibition which only faultless statesmanship in  could have removed. When they discovered what happened at Tehran, they were appalled by its banality, by the fecklessness of Churchill and Roosevelt shuffling away from issues after a display of raising them. Not until  were the disadvantages clear. During the Warsaw Rising the propagandists experienced their inhibitions in a new way: some with shame, all with mixed feelings. The crucial claim that there was, beyond military comradeship, an Anglo-Soviet relationship of great importance for Europe was left to those who most wanted to say it. It concealed both the absence of agreements and the absence of initiatives. In October  a War Office official warned PWE that a researcher Newsome used for military news was circulating nonsense about the scale of German losses on the Stalingrad front. Newsome had to stop circulating his assistant’s material, but it is not clear what he was told about the source. By  Lockhart felt that a serious mistake had been made in handling Soviet war news, but he blamed diplomats and politicians. The idolization of Russia had tempted Western leaders to postpone grasping painful nettles until—they told themselves—the end was in sight. Lockhart rejected ex officio some heated accusations from Tom Barman—then in the Moscow Embassy—that BBC war news often amounted to Soviet propaganda, but he admitted—to his diary as the war ended—that ‘British propaganda, the British people and, I think one must say, the British government have done everything to encourage the Russians to believe that they have won the war single-handed’ and that an ‘almost hysterical adulation of the Russian military effort’ had settled into the BBC output. What else were journalists likely to do without strong guidance? Lockhart made a mental resolution, in May , to cut out ‘the ultra-sloppy nonsense some of my chaps write, talk and think about Russia’ and observed in April  that one should not ‘lend a wishful ear to those sentimental proRussians who assure us, with more confidence than knowledge, that we have nothing to fear because Russia has ceased to be Communist’. But this came late in the day. Since he had always known that the Bolsheviks interpreted ‘bourgeois flattery’ as ‘a certain sign of weakness’, his failure to educate the BBC on the point, when it was most needed, is striking. It was the omission of a man Memorandum,  Aug. : Young (ed.), Lockhart Diaries, ii. . Aylmer Vallance to Brooks,  Oct. , FO /. German battle losses were said to be ‘four times as heavy’ as at Verdun. Rothstein, the TASS correspondent, was thought to be the source.   Young (ed.), Lockhart Diaries, ii.  ( Apr. ). Ibid. , –.  

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wearied by two decades of anti-communist dogma, and provoked by pre-war indifference to the balance-of-power implications of anti-Soviet postures. He was so used to explicit antipathy to Russia being at the core of British statesmanship that, in , he took a remarkable change in tone, and large territorial concessions, to be the groundwork of a fundamental shift. Thereafter his suspicions were too dark to guide his work. A sense of military inferiority underpinned British moral disarmament about the Soviet Union. In – the inferiority was real. The Army was disturbingly unsuccessful. British weakness was, however, more obvious than the facts justified. The naval war—the crucial British exertion—was veiled from public attention. It was as important as the defence of Moscow and Stalingrad. But the Navy could not imprint itself on the popular imagination as in the past. Fast-moving, incident-crammed land battles filled the bulletins, and the biggest stories came from Russia. As the Russian stock rose investors made a profit. Stalin’s reputation for wisdom and unerring competence was inflated on the scale of the sacrifice made to rectify his errors. This happened without too much official premeditation. A cautionary message about the USSR might have been laid down like a political foundation in . It was less appealing the more it was delayed. But even a gilded and softened account of wartime Russia could provide a framework for educating the public. Honesty might have combined with advantage in reporting the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet war effort, in specifying expectations for Poland, and in wondering aloud whether a Leninist party could accommodate liberal allies. But by  honesty seemed excluded and Nicolson, inside the BBC, admitted that ‘silence’ about the Soviet ‘legend’ was better than being ‘edged by tact and discretion into something as untruthful as the legend itself ’. Without the exchange of pledges—an ambitious treaty— propaganda had no strong material to absorb the dangers of the Anglo-Soviet alliance. Churchill could not be more frank in public unless he was ready to meet Soviet ambition promptly and seriously and to strike a bargain with Stalin. His reluctance to try was never declared; it was not even explained to PWE. His choice was not, of course, without worldly justifications. The prospects of a different USSR lay behind the great diplomatic problems. There was an obvious starting point for a closer alliance: an insistence on the open repudiation of the ‘imperialist war’ theory of . The notion that Stalin could not compromise about communist doctrine was assumed too strongly; the view that doctrine did not matter was surely wrong. Hitler’s suspension of antipathy in – was an ill-omened model. But Britain had no experience of being close to the USSR. Most observers, including Churchill, believed that inside wartime Russia the Terror was much diminished. But Lockhart did not believe, and PWE did not argue, that there had been a 

Nicolson to Maconachie,  June : Bell, John Bull and the Bear, –.

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sea-change in the system. Nevertheless, PWE and the MOI left Stalin’s reputation to Fleet Street. The alternative was, of course, wildly unorthodox: to make a case against old bolshevism, and then to send Cripps and Lockhart to Moscow to demand a New Russia. But without a political map of some sort, the hunger for explanation and discussion could not be met, except by proSoviet publicists. It might be argued that the deepest and most covered of intentions was to mollycoddle Stalin, to maximize the Soviet war effort, and to postpone all difficulties until, after the war, Russia hit a barrier of AngloAmerican disapproval. If so, PWE were certainly not witting accomplices. But it is what Lockhart came to suspect. Official reticence about Russia seemed fastidiously correct. The state was reluctant to teach with authority. Making doctrine could damage the feeling that it should not need to be made. But the pressure to choose could not simply be shrugged off; even postponements signified something. Events impose political choices even about knowledge. Hence the common opinion that Russia was on the mend. A few Roman Catholics continued to rail against communism, but their fewness and stridency underlined the withdrawal of consensual authority. The fair wind of common sense veered leftwards. Faced with the risk of serious controversy inside Britain, propagandists were more typical of Whitehall, and less ambitious, than they imagined. In  some alert citizens, or very British cynics, warned that the ‘information’ in ‘Ministry of Information’ would mean ‘propaganda’. It was true, but less than they thought.

 The Summons to Resist B E F O R E there was even the chalk on the walls, resistance was the secret work of armies and governments. Most of this was espionage: heaven’s gift to SIS; for SOE it was merely promising. In September  the Czechs saw the first arrests of resisters trying to stockpile arms. The Polish Underground stemmed directly from the battle fought around Warsaw at the same time. In the forests of south-western Poland Major Dobrzanski led a unit of partisancavalry through a winter of skirmishes until his death in May . One of his officers reached London to plead for agents and radio sets to be sent by plane and parachute. SOE did not have illusions about the power of armed resistance but they sensed a great propensity for it. Except in manifesto mode, they tried to err on the side of caution. After early demonstrations in Prague, Czech clandestine organizations were almost extinguished in /. The lesson was learnt. Even when it was thought, wrongly, that France, Norway, or the Balkans might somehow erupt, it was, literally, the last thing London wanted. The first episodes of overt resistance—strikes in Amsterdam and the French coalfields, sabotage on Polish railways—were isolated events, but they might have been alarmingly premature signs of insurrection. Overt activity was readily interpreted as over-excitement: dangerous, wasteful, and premature. This is why certain forms of collaboration, where the authorities were perhaps tacitly antiGerman, were judged both acceptable and useful. The positive case for collaboration was clear for Denmark; a case was made for General Elia˘s in Prague; it was argued for Marshal Pétain in France and even for General Nedi´c in Serbia. Exiled governments used stories of resistance to supplement their prestige in London, but the prospect of provoking extensive bloodshed was abhorrent. They were all relieved that SOE did not ask them to be inflammatory. Few nations had prepared for occupation, and defeat robbed them of the power to react. Violent resistance was tremendously difficult. It could not be an instant response; it might never be genuinely important. Except when organized by the Polish Army or Comintern specialists, resistance was short of expertise. Resisters started on the margins of significance and often stayed there. The idea that an indignant people with arms could somehow fight fascism more successfully or more stubbornly than trained soldiers was not a British doctrine. The idea coloured popular discussion, but left little trace in Whitehall. Armed resistance before the Wehrmacht stumbled at the end of  was slight, except in Yugoslavia where the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia

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had almost no choice. Nevertheless, even before June  it was clear that there were militants who expected British help, needed money, and listened to London radio. There was, indeed, a false dawn in the war. The beginning of  was a surprisingly hopeful moment. The powerful impression made by the Battle of Britain was reinforced by Wavell’s capture of Tobruk and Benghazi. In Belgium there was a vogue for painting ‘RAF’ on walls and hoardings. Musing on this, the BBC Belgian editor first thought of the sign ‘V’. He made a broadcast on  January  which casually recommended this ‘V’ sign, and the response provided the first evidence that prescriptive propaganda from London was welcome. Newsome and his assistant, Douglas Ritchie, seized on this and asked for an epidemic of chalked ‘V’s all over Europe. Ritchie was already convinced that the BBC could tell their audience how to begin resistance. Throughout the spring of  a BBC-driven V campaign spread the sign of anti-Nazi impudence. The BBC was explicit: to write a ‘V’ in public was to sign one’s name on the invisible muster roll of the army of liberation. Ritchie produced a paper ‘Broadcasting as a New Weapon of War’. He could not discover whether anyone outside the BBC was interested: the MOI and SOE were still contending for his rattle. Ritchie made sensational predictions for agitation-by-radio, but, unlike more senior draftsmen, he was on to something feasible and immediate. He was a plain, russet-coated captain with the enemy in view. Ritchie took as his text Churchill’s promise in his French broadcast in October : ‘Presently you will be able to weight the arm that strikes for you’. The nations had lain down and must get up. Hitler has used the bad men—the misfits, the fanatics, and the lunatics—as the Fifth Column against the great mass of sane and sober but rather lethargic people of Europe and has obtained the mastery. . . . It now remains for us . . . to show the people of Europe that they must deserve our victory and that they must help us achieve it, and to tell them what to do. All this has, of course, the most far-reaching political as well as military implications. It is not only a means of winning a total war but it is, in the creation of European solidarity, an essential means of securing a total peace.

This idea of European solidarity was evidently London’s mission. Ritchie was aware of his citizenship in a continent which had stumbled. The ‘great mass’ had betrayed themselves. They must not fail again if democratic forms were to survive. Unless the failures of – were to be taken as conclusive, resistance was a duty. He thought that the lapse of concentration could be redressed by a deeper soundness of instinct, but he believed that people needed an invitation to set about regaining liberty. Trial by battle has a moral dimension. Though victory is a poor adjudication, the willingness to fight remains a test of sincerity. There was a troubling 

‘Broadcasting as a New Weapon of War’,  May , Policy File, Newsome Papers.

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idea in  that the democracies had lost because the masses were cynical and dispirited. Ritchie wanted to dispel this suspicion by making the BBC’s audience feel part of a secret army which rejected German dominion by reacting on a European scale. His hypothesis was that propaganda could work up this audience to such a pitch that, at the given word, ‘the BBC will cause riots and destruction in every city in Europe’. This might sound lurid, but it seemed possible. It was more modest than the armies of insurrection stipulated by the military planners who admitted that the British Army would ‘never’ assemble a very large Continental field force and wanted ‘subversive action’ to compensate for the ‘lack of normal military formations’. Few propagandists plunged as far into prophecy as the Joint Planning Staff: ‘secret armies can never operate until bombing has first created suitable conditions’. Ritchie just wanted to be the recruiting sergeant. Ritchie’s advocacy of some sort of campaign preceded the ‘V’ symbol. It began after a discussion with a Czech diplomat about the general problem of restraining resistant feeling throughout Europe. (The Nazis threatened a bloodbath if there was trouble on the streets. Machine-guns were visible on Prague rooftops.) Ritchie’s first proposal was for an Allied Council to decide policy and a single radio voice to issue orders and make speeches. Kirkpatrick tried to be encouraging but Ritchie thought he had been ignored. He had started the agitation for European resistance before the MOI could discuss anything practical with SOE. Ritchie sensed how to advocate resistance through examples. He was not detached from the fertile problem of what to say next. At the end of May the BBC created a V Committee to help him. On  June Ritchie began to speak as ‘Colonel Britton’ on the BBC Englishlanguage European service and continued to broadcast under this name for almost a year. He had nothing more behind him than Kirkpatrick’s permission: the V campaign was less a plan than spontaneous combustion. The idea of ‘Colonel Britton’ speaking to his troops had popped up in the wrong place. Ritchie’s V campaign was not one of Leeper’s black propaganda ‘Research Units’. The BBC ‘whites’ were launching sabotage propaganda before the subversive ‘blacks’ had found their feet. There were, however, critics even inside the BBC. Ritchie broadcast in English and invited the regions to trail in his wake in translation. Even Oliver Harvey had to struggle to override BBC regional susceptibilities. On May Day  fraternal socialist greetings were broadcast in all languages—with texts from Bevin, Attlee, Dalton, Alexander, and Citrine—in the teeth of BBC and Foreign Office objections. Ritchie did not have Harvey’s authority. Even MOI officials, looking  Forward Operations Planning Staff,  June , JP (); Joint Planning Staff report on SOE,  Aug. , JP(): D. Stafford, Britain and European Resistance (), –, .  Harvey forced it through ‘thanks to Duff who refused to be lobbied. . . . To judge of the obstruction one might have thought we were preaching Communism—this England!’: Harvey diary,  May .

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into the V campaign in July, chose to feel irritated at yet another point of rivalry. The departmental fronde was at its worst. Lockhart, trying to be judicious and needing allies, accepted a Foreign Office opinion that Colonel Britton sometimes lacked a ‘sense of responsibility’. This was timorous beyond the call of duty. When PWE appeared it inherited a BBC vehicle for aggressive propaganda which was already disliked. Fighting talk must, sooner or later, have precise implications. The campaign’s language, though not yet the injunctions, suggested that resistance meant sabotage of military targets and industrial capacity. But Britton did not say, nor did Ritchie know, how this should be done. The broadcasts were arthritic with reservations, cautions, and appeals against overt violence. In any case, the model talks and recommended materials were often ignored by regional editors. Yet such was the craving for militant talk that Colonel Britton made an impact. No one denied it. After the invasion of Russia the Newsome–Ritchie V Committee were, of course, unable to respond to Moscow’s desperate calls for sabotage and insurrection. The V Committee promised to confine recommended resistance to ‘small ways short of actual sabotage’. When Eden asked Bracken to stop the ‘excellent’ V campaign going beyond harmless agitation, his request was superfluous. The Foreign Office did not want the BBC even to imply a future campaign of sabotage. The BBC V Committee, on the other hand, wanted a military tone, a hint of violence, even while avoiding precise instructions. Ritchie got his campaign off the ground and he announced the V Army on  July. But in September Colonel Britton was placed under a PWE V Committee. The BBC team was superseded and the ‘Colonel’ settled down to a winter of sober reporting. Popular opinion was not thought ready for violence. No one had a better plan than ‘V’, but PWE wanted to react out of knowledge not to declaim in the dark. Newsome and Ritchie, like resisters everywhere, thought that Europe needed the myth that it was already resisting in order to nerve itself to begin. PWE and SOE were not yet ready to agree. The British voice had to be kept in reserve. The bureaucratic tangle was part of the reason, but the delay also expressed complex views about France to be explored in Part II. PWE did not expect a rapid approach to physical resistance. It was not only in Vichy France that ‘a slow and cumulative case for Resistance activity had to be made’ in –. Whether this required silence about the violent destination is another matter. It is useful to enter a plea before making a case. Perhaps Woburn was still too much of a German propaganda department. Before ‘V’ was thought of, Leeper was fingering Joshua’s trumpet: Lockhart to Strang,  July , FO /. V Committee minutes,  July , FO /; Eden to Bracken,  July : Charles Cruickshank, The Fourth Arm: Psychological Warfare ‒ (), .  H. R. Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France (), .  

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Propaganda [is] only the instrument, though certainly the chief instrument, for what is known as Political Warfare. Total Warfare, as waged by Hitler, has changed the character of this war, as compared with the last. It means that Hitler’s main target is not the armed forces of his enemies but the civilian populations and that victory will depend on his ability to break the morale of these populations before we can break Italian and German morale.

This was professional obsession. Despite the reference to the ‘changed’ character of this war, it was  seen through the spectacles of . Leeper missed the point that Newsome and Ritchie felt strongly—that British propaganda’s first role was to remake the morale of friends. Leeper’s idea of a race between two corrosive propaganda machines was melodramatic. He knew, better than anyone, about the unequal battle, fought and lost between  and , to create confidence that the Nazis could be stopped. But that was over, even though it was understandable that Leeper, like Hitler, should see the Blitz as a logical part of it. There was a new contest. Leeper wanted to win in Germany, but his passion for political warfare grew from hunger into greed. At Woburn he chaired every regional committee, doling out his spoonfuls of secret intelligence. He was determined to pull all the strings and he was jealous even of his own staff. His French regional director, Denis Brogan, resigned in March  pointing out that both the BBC and MOI were better informed and more professional because they were not hindered by a chief who kept the intelligence and the tasty political problems to himself. Had the regional experts been questioned carefully, PWE might have found it difficult to take so negative a view of the V campaign. In early September Brooks, as the military man on the PWE committee, was warned that some resistance strategy was needed. The first task had been to get occupied Europe to ‘feel’ the right way, but already ‘in practically every occupied country’ this stage had been passed: ‘the Regional Heads sense that their propaganda should now be moving to the stage of doing, or at least a precise preparation for doing’. The regional directors did not air such opinions when discussing the V campaign as such. It was not yet obvious that a reputation for belligerence was high ground to be seized when it was unoccupied, and that one day it would command respect. PWE did not grasp that whoever acted first—Anglophile or not— might lead the rest. In  SOE needed to find more resistance deriving from a British-led recruitment in . When Newsome complained that radio leadership must remain British he perhaps sounded chauvinistic but the instinct was right. Fortune can bestow a natural authority upon a nation at a given moment. But the weaker the power the briefer the moment. The opportunity did not linger. Britain could not be a great power in Europe without   

Leeper to Cadogan,  Nov. , FO /. Denis Brogan to Leeper,  Mar. , FO /. Barry to Brooks,  Sept. , FO /.

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offering leadership in resistance and a European ambition for friends to adopt. In  both these things seemed quite likely, but by  June  neither had happened. Woburn wanted to reinforce conspiracy with publicity and not vice versa. Covert should precede overt. SOE should assemble ‘secret armies’; others should assess opinion; the appropriate national authorities should make appeals. But this inverted what was both natural and expected. Resisters accepted that London had the right to set war aims and appeal, directly, for armed assistance. They were less ready to admit tight British control of their organization and tactics. The term ‘secret army’ needs a gloss. It was the anti-Nazi successor to the ‘fifth column’. The theory was that a substantial force could prepare and train itself for battle while avoiding all forms, or almost all forms of overt action. It was what Norway’s Milorg was; it was what several early French resistance movements intended; it expresses the strategy of Rowecki in Poland and Mihailovi´c in Yugoslavia. It meant waiting. It allowed resistance leaders to be economical or ineffectual, to be inconspicuous for a season or to procrastinate endlessly. It had the support of SIS, who lost no opportunity to repeat that terrorism hindered intelligence gathering; and it had the support of SOE. But in the end it conflicted with the experience of leaders who saw their movements grow by flexing muscles and who accepted the risks of combining security with activity. The V Army was meant to start something by detecting and provoking signs of life. The resistance movements shared the same need. SOE’s idea of resistance in – was a secret army whose high command was in London and subordinate to Allied supreme command, waiting for the reopening of the European front. This secret army should allocate sabotage work to small, watertight units distinct from the main body of recruits. SOE would modify the ‘secret army’ concept in practice, but not in London before the field was explored. In  the V campaign lacked the support of its natural patron. Almost everything turned out to be an exception to the secret army rule. But this came later. The Free French in London were told that they must adopt in France SOE security procedures. But the most important resistance movements had already constructed themselves ad hoc by the time de Gaulle’s representative did his rounds with the SOE directive. The leader of Combat objected: It was . . . total misunderstanding on the part of the English as well as the French in London of what the Resistance was. They wanted to employ the secret service techniques needed for work in enemy territory. But it was not the same for us, French working in France. . . . Our resistance was a new, original, diverse phenomenon which we invented step by step . . . This rigorous segregation of military activities was impossible. We had to wait until spring  for the special services [BCRA and SOE] to understand this and try to reconnect what they had told us to separate. 

H. Frenay, L’Énigme Jean Moulin (), –.

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SOE and the resistance groups had to learn from each other. SOE were not contemptuous of the V campaign. Sir Charles Hambro, the SOE director most concerned with PWE, wanted to have advance notice of anything Colonel Britton might say about sabotage. But SOE were not ready for an open and open-ended call for sabotage—even if opinion had reached the point where the demand for sabotage was logical. PWE wanted to discourage the shooting of German soldiers in France for several reasons, including the fear of taking, or making de Gaulle take, responsibility for German reprisals. Not until March  was it argued that French willingness to take risks was being underestimated. SOE confirmed a disinclination among PWE regions to frame propaganda on a European basis. The course of resistance in Norway shows how the V campaign of – could be unwelcome. Norway was uniquely exposed to British military force; the British withdrawal from northern Norway in June  would not have happened without the French catastrophe. SOE had trained its first Norwegians by September and the ‘Shetland Bus’ was running agents into the fjords by December. It was always possible to dispatch gunboats from Scapa Flow to seize a fishing village. Getting ashore was much easier than in France, and Norway was until summer  thought likely to be the first country liberated. But the population was small, and the most determined anti-fascists became visible in the course of the civilian opposition to Quisling. Armed resistance groups were exceptionally vulnerable. SOE prepared for invasion in some haste by creating and arming their own circuits, and in autumn  warned Milorg, the Norwegian Army’s clandestine militia, to expect invasion by April . Active resistance before an invasion seemed wasteful and pointless. The fear of premature action was in the Norwegian case entirely pragmatic. The regime in Norway had already become dangerous—with ten death sentences in Bergen in February . When British and Norwegian raiders descended on the Lofoten islands in March the patriots of Svolvær declared themselves. There was great enthusiasm:  German prisoners, twelve of Quisling’s men, and a chief of police ended up in British custody. The ships put to sea again with  recruits and were bidden farewell by a crowd of hundreds at the quayside singing the national anthem. Arrests and reprisals followed. Some blamed the British raid for the Gestapo drive which led to the state of emergency in Oslo in September, though Reichskommissar Terboven said he was responding to opposition to Quisling and to espionage. But the Germans had been shown the risk: there was an influx of counter-espionage officials, and most of Milorg’s district groups were uncovered. The first verHambro to D. Bowes Lyon (PWE),  Oct. , FO / (folder marked ‘’). S. E. Mangeot to Bowes Lyon,  Mar. , FO /.  Sverre Kjeldstadli, Hjemmestyrkene (Oslo, ),  n. . Gubbins told Kjeldstadli this advice had been sincere.  

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sion of Milorg was very insecure: it was a centralized organization of all the obvious people. But it was destroyed by informers not by its own or SOE’s activity. Churchill thought that further raids, especially if they triggered a popular response, would persuade the Germans to reinforce Norway. Milorg, in any case, claimed that it was too early to start arming the resistance. Milorg had a relationship with the Norwegian government only from summer . SOE had rushed ahead to build their own clandestine striking force. Norwegian official opinion was divided between those who worked regularly with SOE— important but junior figures who shared SOE’s urgency—and the government, who did not entirely trust Milorg but had no intention of being more militant. The government did not welcome independent SOE activity or sabotage or even, for the moment, stockpiling arms. A V campaign in Norwegian was arguably unnecessary and would probably provoke Milorg. In London PWE were also trying to avoid trouble and keep a secret: a black ‘freedom station’ had not been cleared with the Norwegians. The civil resistance in Norway was popular and impressive. It was reasonable to wonder if the bravest spirits would not go too far, identify themselves and disappear. In the thinly populated regions that seemed candidates for an invasion— Trøndelag, Nordland, and Troms—it was impossible to replace resisters lost through political activity. London had good reasons for wanting to lower the temperature of the civil confrontation with Quisling. Even in  the Norwegian government rejected what they called ‘an undefined scorchedearth policy in respect of valuable industrial establishments in Norway’. There was a real risk, at least until everyone consented, that British sabotage propaganda would seem callous and anti-Norwegian. Some good Norwegians distinguished between ‘our struggle’ against Quisling and the battle of the great powers to which they expected to make no overt contribution before an invasion. SOE dared not tackle the government-in-exile head on—the Foreign Office might jump in—but they needed results. Eventually, SOE tried to stop PWE asking the Allied Governments formal questions about sabotage and the V campaign. There was puzzlement when PWE, knowing the risks, did exactly that. The secret army strategy, by definition, could not produce results until too late to help SOE in London. As the Russian front continued to hold in , the idea of a British offensive in Europe revived. There was a PWE duty to create ‘feints and diversions’ to assist the fighting services. Military opportunity, as understood in PWE, was  Olav Riste, London-regjeringa: Norge i Krigsalliansen ‒, i, ‒: Prøvetid (Oslo, ), –, .  Major-General W. Hansteen to Mountbatten,  Apr. : Riste, London-regjeringa, i. .  ‘Our admission that there was not yet anything we could do got us black looks in high places’; Bickham Sweet-Escott, Baker Street Irregular (), .  ‘Strategy of Political Warfare’,  Oct. , FO /.

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what Brooks said it was. Brooks predicted that support for Russia would not be limited to supplies and propaganda but would mean ‘such diversions in the West as will substantially affect the military issue’. He expected a ‘major revolt’ wherever the British seized a ‘bridgehead’ and emphasized that the problem would be preventing premature action and ‘disciplining’ what did develop. The first true Combined Operations raid took place at Vaagsø in December . Combined Operations had been meant, like SOE, to stir up Europe. Again, the landings were greeted with enthusiasm by local Norwegians and followed by Germans reprisals. The Norwegian government had not been consulted—for security reasons—and demanded that in future great care be taken to avoid civilian reprisals. From February  there was an Anglo-Norwegian committee in London, but Milorg was told not to co-operate with British raids but to wait for the ‘bridgehead’. If the British intended to invade Norway seriously in  the Norwegians proposed forgetting about interim sabotage. But SOE continued importing arms and they used men also recruited by Milorg. There were more disasters—the most famous at the village of Televaag which the Germans later destroyed. In June  the Norwegians sent an agent to Milorg to help them deal with SOE. He was met with the observation that had he not arrived Milorg would have seriously considered giving up. PWE supported the government: the purpose of the Norwegian RU was to oppose ‘overenthusiasm’ and explain the ‘go-slow’ policy. The communists proposed a more violent resistance policy in October , although they were rather isolated. Trygve Lie, the foreign minister complained to the Soviet Ambassador about them and about the Norwegian Service of Radio Moscow. The Government did not worry too much until autumn  when Milorg reported that the communists were partly in control of their Oslo district and had infiltrated another. This was a shadow of parallel problems throughout Europe. When Ritchie Calder joined PWE he became the chairman of the V Committee and tried to revive the V campaign. He told the regional directors not to abandon a campaign with ‘so much goodwill’ and to stop vetoing BBC suggestions without putting up an alternative. He obtained support from Terence Harman, the Low Countries regional director, who warmly supported ‘the work done by Ritchie, Newsome & co.’ as ‘the first shot and the only shot that has been made at strategic co-ordination’. Harman thought that ‘all countries . . . need a positive and unequivocal lead given them from here’: the Belgian government were hostile to ‘such a lead’ and the Dutch government, though not so bad, were very cautious and limited. Ralph Murray, the Balkan ‘Plan for spring and summer ’, undated (Feb?), FO /. Kjeldstadli, Hjemmestyrkene, ; Black propaganda report, – Sept. , FO /.  Riste, London-regjeringa, ii. –. Ritchie Calder to RDs,  Nov. , FO /.  Harman to Ritchie Calder,  Nov. , FO /; Harman’s minute on Dalton’s Propaganda Paper,  Jan. , FO /.   

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regional director, was less sympathetic. The Balkan sections of the BBC had largely ignored or rewritten the Colonel Britton scripts, partly because Balkan resistance was considered unique and partly because ‘radio leadership’ of the Yugoslav resistance had been granted to the Yugoslav government which should stand as ‘the symbol of Yugoslav resistance . . . in a position of authority over that resistance’. Murray thought the Colonel Britton idea should be phased out, and he considered the Greeks too self-centred to be other than bored or insulted by tales of resistance elsewhere in Europe. Douglas Ritchie clung to the goal of a continental programme and resisted insipid expertise: Surely Greece is not so parish-minded that it is impossible to tell them anything about the rest of Europe?. . . It is good for Greeks to be made conscious of the existence of other countries, to realize that these countries must, and do, play their part in resisting the Axis. . . . We know, of course, that there is violent resistance in Greece and also quite a lot of acceptance of the situation by people who could usefully go in for Western forms of resistance. . . . Surely reports of passive resistance would not cause such despondency as the absence of such reports, and they should lead to a little less violence and a little more general, disciplined resistance, which you would agree would be good.

But Ritchie Calder conceded that the V campaign must be regionalized. Nevertheless, Douglas Ritchie had taken his case a long way. His V Army was taken seriously. He had conducted a campaign against named collaborators throughout Europe and rejected Woburn’s claim that only black propaganda should make threats against specific villains. Once again, he raised the possibility of instruction in sabotage being given over the BBC by SOE’s experts. PWE, under new pressure from SOE, were moving towards the idea of a ‘general staff ’ to conduct V operations. On  February  Ritchie met senior representatives of PWE, SOE, and MEW. SOE now admitted that their secret army strategy would not be disturbed by operational propaganda provided that ‘when you call on one people to take action you should tell other people to wait’ and withdrew the objection that the V campaign made the life of SOE agents more difficult. SOE now accepted that, with a secure position on some V campaign general staff, they had nothing to fear from stronger propaganda. The idea that Woburn should monopolize operational propaganda had, of course, never existed in Baker Street. Ritchie Calder still insisted on consulting Allied governments, but the obstacles seemed to be getting smaller. On  March PWE started to move into Bush House. The regional directors came up from Woburn eager to exploit their new proximity to the microphone. Several were still unconverted. At the first meeting of the Propaganda Policy Committee Leeper made enough trouble for a decision about ‘V’ to be deferred Murray to Ritchie Calder,  Dec. , FO /. Ritchie to Murray,  Feb. , FO /.  H. Sporborg’s remarks at Joint Sub-Committee on Operational Propaganda,  Feb. , BBC R/. Sporborg was a senior figure in SOE.  

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until Brooks had consulted the Chiefs of Staff about strategic requirements during the expected spring or summer German offensive in Russia. The V Committee now became an SOE-supported ‘joint sub-committee on operational propaganda’. But its request that the BBC should begin instruction ‘in subversive activity including sabotage’—was watered down to ‘instructions in undetectable sabotage’. Whatever Leeper had expected, the COS approved the new line. But Brooks said that an enhanced V campaign was ‘all a matter of timing’. Lockhart suddenly paraded his doubts. He did not treat broadcasting about sabotage, even with COS blessing, as a commitment. He was more agitated about ‘second front’ politics than immediately concerned about resistance. Britain’s reputation might slump if the BBC called for European sabotage before a second front. There would not be much response to ‘V’ ‘until Great Britain herself was playing a more active role’. Alternatively, resentment about the absence of the second front would not be confined to Russia if the BBC caused bloodshed in the great cities. Of course, this sort of bitterness— you can’t help Russia, why should Europe help you?—did reflect a cast of mind. British radio leadership was deferred again. If Lockhart’s thinking came from Bene˘s, the Czech president had killed two birds with one stone. Lockhart was desperate for a second front. He knew that sabotage had been postponed in Norway because Norway was a candidate. Newsome broadcast his own answer: I have been told that on account of our series of reverses in the Pacific and the disappointments in Libya and over the German battleships, we are losing our friends in Europe . . . I don’t believe it. I believe there are few people in Europe outside Germany who believe that ill success is a crime, that those in trouble deserve to forfeit loyalty.

Lockhart was necessarily more sceptical. He and Leeper agreed that sabotage propaganda, in conjunction with military operations, could win the full support of Allied governments provided that they were not antagonized in advance by unilateral calls for action. Colonel Britton was given permission to prepare his audience for new instructions but to do no more. Two weeks later Lockhart offered an explicit hostage to fortune: ‘The impression we wish to create is that the spring is not going to witness a repetition of the German– Russian duel; this time it will be a three-cornered fight for which we have been preparing the part we will play.’ He did not kill ‘V’, but he made it conditional on new British operations. On  April the Propaganda Policy Committee seemed to take a firm decision ‘to go forward with the campaign’, but two weeks later PWE were asking  Propaganda Policy Committee,  Mar. ; report of Joint Sub-Committee on Operational Propaganda,  Mar. ; memo to Chiefs of Staff,  Mar. , FO /.  Propaganda Policy Committee,  Mar. , FO /.  [Newsome], The ‘Man in the Street’ Talks to Europe (), – ( Mar. ).  Instruction to Regional Heads,  Apr. , FO /.

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for the ‘sanction’ of Eden for ‘a considerable acceleration’ of operational propaganda and, after another fortnight, Brooks made yet another enquiry of the COS. They were waiting for the final word about Norway. On  June Lockhart read out a clear explanation from the COS that ‘general sabotage’ and ‘sabotage connected with operations’ were different things, and the former need not await the latter; but on  June he still lumped together ‘secret armies, sabotage, go slow’ as something one switched on to accompany a second front. Lockhart and Leeper kept fending off a campaign SOE believed to be imminent. Despite Kirkpatrick’s dissenting voice, Douglas Ritchie was told to announce the suspension of his weekly talks. The reason given was that Colonel Britton’s audience would evaporate in frustration if the active campaign was postponed any more. The regional directors who disliked Ritchie’s wish to give specific instructions and complained that Newsome’s talks were ‘more bloody’ than anything in ‘V’, considered Colonel Britton a nuisance. The temptation to wait on events was considerable. There was a genuine belief that dangerous propaganda needed the authority of the Allied governments. The decision on ‘V’ would probably have gone the other way if the governments had been keen on it. SOE did not help their case for sabotage propaganda by refusing to hand over the Cairo organization. Lockhart was in no hurry to restore to SOE a daily voice in London broadcasting. From November  there were few insuperable objections in principle to a European V campaign. But Lockhart did not find sufficient reason to settle the matter or to support Kirkpatrick. Jebb was ‘extremely concerned’ at the failure to launch the new phase of ‘V’ in April and stated that the Services, especially the Air Ministry, wanted to know why ‘the much discussed extension of the Col. Britton talks’ had not begun. A month later Kirkpatrick reported that Hambro, Menzies (‘C’), and the Czechoslovak government all regretted the discontinuation of the campaign. There was, of course, no trouble from the Foreign Office, but the nub of Lockhart’s hesitation was his privileged grasp of Britain’s military stance and his political instinct that to launch a serious V campaign, and then not to invade Europe, was to invite disgrace and turn all eyes to the East. Ritchie was indignant. The fate of ‘V’ demonstrated what he most disliked. He thought the ‘desires of émigré governments’ and PWE’s theories about ‘the supposed needs and prejudices of our various listeners’ were producing inconsistency but not propaganda; Europeans did not listen to the BBC for the good of their skins or their amour propre. On the contrary, they wanted the truth and the British point of view. No country had ever possessed the ‘golden opportunity’ that Britain had of addressing the vast majority of the   

Propaganda Policy Committee,  and  Apr.,  May,  and  June , FO /. Note of a meeting of T. Barman, T. Harman, and N. Sutton,  Apr. , FO /. Jebb to Lockhart,  Apr. , FO /.

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European population—‘either because they listen to London directly or obtain [news] from friends or from the underground press’—and yet the opportunity was running to seed: There are [‘regional editors’] who became more concerned with . . . what they think our listeners want to hear than they are with what we want to say . . . perhaps fearful that listeners will become angry or bored and switch off. [But] . . . if our listeners are not hearing what we want them to hear, it is not worthwhile broadcasting to them . . . . In any case our broadcasting has today in wartime a compelling interest for Europe . . . the people who are opposed to Nazism (the great majority) must listen to us, directly or indirectly.

Barman, the Scandinavian regional director, was impressed. PWE officials often conceded that Ritchie made a good case, but they soon forgot again. There were other campaigns. In June Lockhart asked David Garnett, his agricultural specialist, to advise farmers on how to withhold their produce from German hands. There were Sunday morning slots in the schedules known generically as ‘Dawn Peasants’. But the scripts were not much used— or they were tailored by country specialists so extensively that they became garbled or ridiculous. Kirkpatrick warned Garnett that regional directors were hostile to ‘central’ scripts: ‘the central authority, myself included, only insists that definite scripts will be used in cases of first-class importance and urgency—and then only after a struggle, usually involving unpleasantness with the RDs’. One garbled reworking of Garnett’s material was a request to shepherds not to shear their sheep and so keep them warmer in winter. The successor to ‘V’—the Transport Campaign in September—carried the curse of its ancestor. It lacked broadcasting material and strong support. SOE attended yet another PWE ‘operational’ committee. A talk on transport sabotage was commissioned from the Air Ministry—to persuade resisters they were doing the same sort of job as the RAF. It was then decided that Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, should be the ‘author’ of this talk. Sinclair did not speak himself since the message was broadcast in every language except English. (MI distrusted British railwaymen: regional directors were warned that no English news bulletin should refer to the talk nor should the text be given to the British press.) Sinclair’s text explained that the Axis transport system was going to be attacked; his only appeal was to prepare for complementary action. The transport campaign was meant to start as pure publicity and to reveal ways and means only in its final phase ‘when all parties agree it should be launched’. Many ‘transport’ scripts fell victim to editorial discretion. The new campaign was as liable to disintegrate as ‘V’. ‘Britain’s Right to Speak’,  May , FO /. Kirkpatrick to Garnett,  June , FO /. R. Calder to RDs,  Sept. , FO /.  Directional Committee on Operational Propaganda minutes,  Sept. , ‘French Sabotage’ box, BBC Written Archive.   

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The hesitation about ‘V’ was not purely bureaucratic. Sabotage implied an attack on industrial collaboration, but there was little confidence, and astonishingly little discussion, about fighting on that front. PWE were confident only about the broad injunction to try undetectable sabotage. They possessed no estimate of the damage to production thought possible, and gave no indication of what the Allies expected. Before  the resistance achievement in industrial sabotage was slight, perhaps negligible. Too few industrial managers and trade unionists tried to limit economic exploitation, and short-term considerations spoke strongly the other way. To keep production and jobs inhouse firms had to deliver on time; otherwise the profits and wages, even the machinery, would go elsewhere. A huge raft of life-goes-on justifications had to be conceded for most employments and businesses. PWE did not expect to continue finding reasons for postponing their own belligerence. Before the central directive was up and running in September , the regional directors were still marking out territory. Regional differentiation was rather too healthy. The regions were protective; they helped to get demands postponed which could have been made earlier on general grounds. PWE wanted to see mature resistant opinion before making demands on it. General problems, like industrial collaboration, occupied less attention than politics and mood-making.

 Propaganda and Political Warfare We could not hope to pile up sufficient men and munitions to outmatch the Germans. This was a war of science, a war that would be won with new weapons. Winston Churchill,  Sept. .

P U B L I C I T Y offers access to the initiative in political affairs. It stakes a claim. Persuasive or not, it represents and pre-empts. Whatever the immediate success of publicists with their audience, what they do compels the powerful to be attentive. The opportunity to be explanatory comes and goes and does not linger. As events move, there develops a public need to hear and the pressure to make statements. In every war this pressure becomes at times acute. Silence might block the pressure to know, for example, about the war at sea, but silence could also be exasperating or sinister or weak. As news managers, propagandists had a measure of real responsibility. There was often no higher knowledge of what was happening than a mere editor could come by. But this was more a problem for PWE than for the audience. The hunger for information and orientation during a war is intense. In the fog of war Bush House needed a Prophet Royal more than the ‘objectives’ for which they pestered the Chiefs of Staff. When what came down from above was not guidance but puzzlement and hesitation, regional directors and news editors had to interpret the mood of London as much as the meaning of events. Such indeterminacy offers journalists their professional freedom; it is also the existential pressure which demands that true political obedience is active not passive. Journalism is defined less by its honesty in the face of fact than by its allegiance in the face of ignorance. The normal autonomy of broadcasters consists in the combination of professional judgement and active obedience. News management during the war was not exactly political warfare; the useful consistencies that editors cultivated were values not precise goals. But it was a sort of propaganda, perhaps the kind the British could do best because it was professional: the daily challenge was to keep up appearances not to preach absolutes. Pre-war appeasement had been damaged by a sustained propaganda barrage, and the decision to continue the war in June , particularly if there was less patriotic certainty than Churchill sensed, could have become bitterly divisive without the long-term, anti-fascist preparation of –. It was the 

John Colville, The Fringes of Power (), .

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antecedent influences that counted and became more effective in the war years. Bracken, Selborne, Nicolson, Harvey, Leeper, Kirkpatrick, Warner, and even Newsome had been marginal but usefully placed Churchillians in , and they all came to wartime work with a good record on Hitler. Many of their colleagues—Lockhart (Evening Standard), Ritchie Calder (Daily Herald), Crossman (New Statesman), Murray (BBC), Sefton Delmer (Daily Express), Darsie Gillie (Manchester Guardian), and Harrison (Reuters)—shared the same commitment though they were even more remote from power than the Tory mavericks and dissenting diplomats. There was no dramatic purge of appeasers in the Foreign Office, but as the foreign policy community expanded, the recruitment networks which counted had been formed in opposition to Chamberlain. During the war Noel Newsome was against lies and for propaganda. He thought that the brilliant Crossman was unprincipled, cynical, and a bad propagandist—in fact the worst influence in Bush House. But Lockhart chose to give talent its chance; though Crossman was hard to discipline he was convincing. Crossman enjoyed years of dialectical success as he forced more earnest colleagues to admit that they must only say what would be rewarding. But Newsome had the more authentic concern for doctrine. He was delighted that providence had called him to exorcise the moral cynicism which fed fascism and to teach a resumption of confidence in liberty. He wanted his European Service to sing with optimism about man and freedom. He did not doubt he had something to say. Newsome’s chief problem and Crossman’s advantage was a certain distrust of propaganda. This distrust was subtle and not at all conspicuous. Mere distaste was easily put aside because there was a war to win; but there remained a deep scepticism. This operated not as an overt disapproval of propaganda as lies and distortion—quite the contrary—but rather a covert disbelief in propaganda as truth. The two things are simple to distinguish but endlessly confounded. The first is ethical, the second cultural. ‘Propaganda’ started, in English history, as Jesuitical argument against the Reformation; time loosened the word from its Romish origins, but the ethical connotations of mental reservation lingered. ‘Propaganda’ was later the cry raised against Jacobin or socialist political criticism. The immediate, ethical objection was to ‘propaganda’ as sophistry on stilts: dangerous argument concealing dishonesty or impropriety of purpose; but underlying this was the cultural objection to systematic claims as such. These two objections to ‘propaganda’ combined to produce a British judgement which was both instinctive and considered. They had their ‘truth’; we had Berkeley, Burke, and a free press. The Protestant conscience and the modern British intellect hoped to divide mankind into those who thought for themselves and those who believed propaganda. Crossman and Orwell saw the difficulty of doing so in the real world, but they both clung to the possibility.

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The British instinct was that most ideas tend to corrupt but dogmas corrupt absolutely. To distinguish fair argument from ‘propaganda’ was essential for democracy; the alert citizen could be taught to be good at it. This was a perfectly genuine part of national self-respect in Baldwin’s time. It explains the acute sensitivity about the whole idea of state propaganda before  and the sequence of hesitations afterwards. (In  Baldwin had delivered his famous attack on the propaganda power of Beaverbrook and Rothermere: ‘power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’.) The cultural suspicion of ‘propaganda’ senses failure, or worse, in the very act of organized advocacy. There is, of course, a neutral sense of ‘propaganda’: the concerted advocacy of a case, especially if unfamiliar. MOI and PWE officials tried to use the word in this sense, but their use of the term was happier when hinting at political alchemy. Resisting an opponent’s propaganda is essential, but scepticism about making one’s own is not. Every society has a need to proclaim truths, to publish useful instruction and to work up the collective capacity to change its ways. This is propaganda, and it may be wholesome unless no truth can ever diminish the scepticism that resists it. The exclusively pejorative use of the term is a rhetorical convention and may echo a lingering anti-clerical reflex. It does not supply a clear distinction between kinds of public argument. The consistent advocacy of goals and values is indispensable in war. To fear great resources applied to corrupting good sense, or to hate sheer noise, is entirely sane; but fastidious indifference to, or tacit disbelief in, the orchestration of any sincere message about values was a problem for PWE. The problem was more easily attributed to oversight higher up than detected as a cultural reflex. Almost no one formally opposed wartime propaganda, but there was a distinct reluctance to take it seriously as a project the more it concerned fundamentals and was meant honestly. Propaganda as lies, or as a certain oiliness with the truth, could be understood and discussed rationally. But honest propaganda, the sort for which Newsome pleaded, was too pious for agnostics. It was left to those who liked that sort of thing. Fashionable platitudes could get in the way of winning the war. If propaganda meant simply the rubbish one threw at the enemy when short of weapons, few would bother to deny its utility; but value-propaganda could not win such easy pragmatic approval. It was allowed—earnestness was not prohibited—but its application to practical problems was hesitant. Long-term sincerities and short-term political warfare were not expected to be reinforcing. The disjuncture was not ruthlessly contrived, as it might have been with Americans or Russians, it was assumed. A trick could be understood and assessed pragmatically, a statement of faith could not. One believed  K. Middlemas and J. Barnes, Baldwin (), . The speech was given during a critical byelection campaign, and Baldwin’s candidate was Duff Cooper.

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in, or employed, discrete political projects and one disbelieved in, or withdrew from, preached values and grand goals. It was less deliberate than instinctive, and it operated long before it mattered. This discontinuity in the valuation of ideas and their applications could be abrupt and extreme. Consider France. In – almost everyone wished that more had been built on the informal alliance with France. Nevertheless, even the real wartime alliance remained under-defined until, suddenly, France faced defeat. The War Cabinet then snatched at the idea of political union. This spasm of strong policy, however hasty, expressed a structural need, but there was relief once the idea’s moment passed. As a pragmatic expedient the offer was a disaster: it actually sank Reynaud’s Cabinet. But then a moment of British indignation launched Charles de Gaulle. This turned into a revolutionary project, which might have been pragmatically suppressed had the Foreign Office collected their wits more quickly. But having bumped into the de Gaulle project, the British stuck with it for want of any better idea. It turned out to be a good idea, but that it was an idea not a ‘reality’ caused unwarranted consternation. Newsome and Crossman, with many others in Bush House, wrote papers which explained the possibilities of propaganda and called for more serious attention from above. Their advocacy had a history, and the original was composed by a resistance specialist before their time. T. E. Lawrence was a superb publicist. In his memoirs, he claimed to have understood political warfare quite suddenly in . In the deep desert, with the tribes of Arabia on his mind and confined to his tent by fever, he had a moment of shocking modernist insight: Our ‘propaganda’ . . . was the pathic, almost the ethical in war. . . . It was more subtle than tactics, and better worth doing, because it dealt with uncontrollables, with subjects incapable of direct command. . . . We had to arrange their minds [Arab minds] in order of battle just as carefully and as formally as other officers would arrange their bodies. . . . We must also arrange the minds of the enemy, so far as we could reach them; then those other minds of the nation supporting us behind the firing line, since more than half the battle passed there in the back; then the minds of the enemy nation waiting the verdict; and of the neutrals looking in; circle beyond circle . . . The printing press, and each newly-discovered method of communication favoured the intellectual over the physical . . . We kindergarten soldiers were beginning our art of war in the atmosphere of the twentieth century, receiving our weapons without prejudice. . . . We had seldom to concern ourselves with what other men did, but always with what they thought. Battles in Arabia were a mistake.

This was indeed futuristic, and the clever conclusion was delightfully concise even if not entirely true. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom was well known and sounded relevant in . Had Lawrence lived, Churchill would have wanted him at the top of SOE, but Lawrence might have preferred Bush House to Baker Street. 

T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom ( edn.), –.

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The claim that faster communication favours the ‘intellectual’ in modern war is now familiar, but it is a complex claim. Lawrence was suggesting that modern mobility, signals, and political ideas might interact with posttraditional societies to change the nature of warfare. The idea which Lawrence presents in extreme form—-that politics and applied psychology could replace battle rather than fuse with its preparation and consequences—is not, even today, the ultimate military axiom. But after the ‘Cold War’ it would be churlish to deny Lawrence’s prescience. Battles in Vietnam were a mistake. That war was lost, and the larger Cold War won, ‘in the back’—in the realm of ‘uncontrollables’. But modern communications and audiences do nothing of themselves. The ‘intellectual’ may mean anything from Prussian staff college and British boffins to the faith that moves crosses and crescents. A powerful message is no less problematic than it ever was. Words may be the lightest of light cavalry, exploiting and magnifying military victories with an expanding torrent of fears and assumptions. This idea of a great civil–military earthquake—the  model—is how success in political warfare was envisaged in . The incessant talk of enemy morale and the ‘home front’ testifies to this paradigm. Within a year one great power, France, collapsed in circumstances which seemed to confirm the prediction. That the other principals hung on until victory or destruction was a surprise. Still, there was more to political warfare than the rise and fall of morale. There was classical intrigue: the timeless combination of rhetoric, bribes, conspiracy, and threats which changes the course of wars by pre-empting battles or obtaining contests which might have been lost by default. Important decisions made by the masters of cities—Tunis (), Rome (), Paris ()—might be influenced by the special effects that political warfare could deliver. As the war rolled around Europe and the Mediterranean, a sequence of little-known characters might, for a few hours or a few days, hold an astonishing power in their hands. The intention at Woburn, under Leeper, was to identify these people, study them, and help them to the right decision. This would be done by devising a political weapon for a specific problem. There was in theory no limit to the potential value of this sort of weapons research. At one point Lockhart thought his job should be to keep Russia in the war, at another to acquire the French Fleet. But the big chances were likely to be rare and the smaller needed very good intelligence about what was imminent. Before PWE was started the intelligence input, especially to the MOI, was insufficient. In the  scheme of things, propaganda was done politely as ‘Information’, and political warfare possibilities were studied at Woburn. The two should not have been separated, but the conceptual distinction says something about the British war effort. There was a determination to overcome the limitations of raw power with special contributions from the Intellect, and the ethos was scientific. This prompted a sense that propaganda must not cloud the minds or mist the vision of the experts who studied how

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to steal victories and make ‘battles in Arabia’ unnecessary. Black propaganda was not meant seriously; it was not true propaganda or earnest ideology. This meant one was allowed to handle it scientifically. Serious ideology obscured the truth about power and was best treated with detachment. Woburn wanted a scientific search for political opportunities. Some of the  Woburn team—Leeper, Lockhart, Crossman, Brogan, and Barman—had sceptical minds and were intellectually capable of conducting the search ‘without prejudice’ as Lawrence had stipulated. When Bracken, a kindred spirit, created PWE it was the Woburn staff who moved in, not the believers and crusaders in Malet Street. Whether this scientific, or cynical, detachment from Newsome’s ideology was actually helpful is another matter. The fretful alternation of leading assumptions about France examined in Part II suggests it was not. In the support for the Yugoslav Partisans cynicism, ingenuousness, and honesty were whisked together in a bewildering flurry of pragmatic bravura. If the BBC failed to lift the Earth it may be that they missed a place to stand on. By  Lawrence’s fast communications included the technology and studio production skills that were the BBC’s true métier. There was in – a justified confidence that the BBC had a growing audience. The French, Belgians, Dutch, and Danes could and did listen to the BBC in hundreds of thousands then millions. In Yugoslavia and Greece wireless sets were rare but they were already centres of local attention when SOE arrived; in Poland, where their possession was illegal, they were hidden, but the few that could listen reprinted ‘News from London’ in clandestine newspapers. The thirst for news drew the audiences. What they expected to hear was the official voice of Britain. The early resistance needed inspiration from London. The big problem was despair, and Britain’s good fortune was talismanic. It was essential that London should say something fierce and acceptable. Silence was unthinkable, and would have been intolerable. Words did not move occupied Europe to early action, but Churchill’s words in  were needed. They were translated, rebroadcast, and widely heard. Europe knew that the British had heard something special: ‘it is no exaggeration to say that until early  our friends [in Serbia] always smiled when they mentioned the Prime Minister’. It was just as true in Poland and, without the time limit, in France and Denmark. Churchill’s words remained as symbols after the encouragement in them had mingled with other events. Propaganda is not a measured supply of moral electricity to engines that are understood, it is an attempt to channel the endless search for motivation and justification. The social energy it summons ignites unpredictably; important reactions slip out of the time-frame desired or jump past the chosen target. Work on opinion is done in the dark: what will matter and what may be 

J. Rootham, Miss Fire (), .

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changed is uncertain. The work is circumscribed by skill and opportunity but by time above all. These limitations were not much discussed in the MOI or PWE. The déformation professionelle of propagandists is to exploit a mystique and claim knowledge and influence when all is still conjecture, and then plead force majeure as events take shape. Churchill, though he was not unsympathetic, was not considered to appreciate the possible yield. But who did? Lockhart himself was very uncertain about the movements of opinion really available. The educated conjecture was that if propaganda had ever moved mountains it could do so again. But it was all too easy to start out with the brave idea of using words to compensate for armed insufficiency and then to stop speaking at the first complication or test of wills. The theoretical point about time deserves some historical illustration. The right time for British war aims was –. It was also the right time for harsh official truths about Russia and for dramatic statements about post-war alliances in Europe and about quitting India. It was when Britain was closest to defeat that her enemies and potential allies had least hold over her policy. This was the optimum moment for binding new goals and information to public opinion. The passage of time, filled with repetitions, was needed to make the tie strong. Britain went into coalition warfare without the strengthening and support of big commitments and firm judgements. What could have been said about Russia before June  became unsayable in . What could have been said and done in India became insufficient after the fall of Singapore. What was almost said to France as a passionate prophecy in  was mostly lost in pragmatic tinkering in –. The point lends itself to counter-factual illustration. Poland’s position would have been much stronger in , if what happened at Katyn, or more extensively in the labour camps much further east, had been so fully alleged in London before June  that the arrest of the NKVD bosses—Beria and Merkulov—must have been an inevitable item number one of Anglo-Soviet negotiations in July. That is what Cripps might have demanded when he first strode into the Kremlin as an ally. The Soviet black record had to be turned on itself and used as the fuel of an Anglo-Soviet new course. This was the ideal context for supporting Russia’s role in Europe and solving the ‘Katyn’ problem before Germany discovered it. It must be admitted that this hypothesis does not reflect the minds and moods of the time. The Soviet problem was not studied hard enough and early enough. If Chamberlain was one reason, the delayed formation of PWE was another. But the more general reason is that it was the Comintern which had laid down the assumptions about how to oppose Hitler. Rhetoric in one period shapes decision-making in the next. Reith’s MOI was anti-Soviet, but only as the reflection of a reckless war strategy: it did not try to shape a robust and informed public opinion prepared for what might come later. After June , the British approached the idea of a Soviet alliance as a truth to be accepted

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(again) not as a problem to be solved. What is started late is often an echo of what could have been. The problems of occupied Yugoslavia—entirely unimagined in —show this pattern in lurid Balkan colours. The imperatives of the Anglo-Soviet alliance were understood, but they were not understood imperatively until the inconveniences came bouncing down like boulders in an avalanche. It would be harsh indeed to blame British ministers for not having a solution to the Yugoslav problem in April , and even the professionals could not see the Partisan revolution as it started. But the fact remains that there was nothing in the stock of British ideas or policy which helped. A great power which was itself taken by surprise by the implications and emotions of the Soviet alliance failed to contribute to the handling of the communist problem and, faced with some embarrasment, felt the urge to retreat. This was not what political warfare was supposed to be.

PART II

France: Reinventing an Ally

 First Thoughts T H E offer of Anglo-French political union was meant as a grand gesture for holding on to France as an ally. This political isotope had a half-life of one week. As France fell into German hands in June , Charles de Gaulle, the new French under-secretary for War, came to London and won Churchill’s attention. He was persuaded by Vansittart and several eminent Frenchmen to press for political union. The War Cabinet consented and de Gaulle took the plan to Bordeaux. Reynaud resigned when the French Cabinet rejected the offer and Marshal Pétain formed a new ministry. It was evident that Pétain would ask for an armistice. De Gaulle persuaded British officials that he might soon be arrested and that only in London could he support continued resistance. Pétain admitted defeat in a remarkable radio statement on  June. He offered France ‘the gift of my person’. The capitulation seemed total. An armistice would leave industrial France in German hands and might, in time, deliver French colonies and warships to German control. De Gaulle asked to broadcast immediately, but was put off until Churchill had announced that Britain would in no circumstances imitate France. Next day, on  June, de Gaulle found his way to Broadcasting House. He insisted that ‘the cause of France is not lost’ and he appealed to French officers and men on British soil to contact him, promising that ‘the flames of French resistance must not and shall not die’. The broadcast was not recorded, but the text was reread four times and quoted in the bulletins. De Gaulle’s permission to broadcast stemmed from British shock at the response to the offer of union. Permission for this first broadcast was given by the War Cabinet. Then there were doubts. Cadogan complained that Churchill was making French policy in the hall of No.  Downing Street assisted by ‘every crank in the world’. He tried to restore a Foreign Office grip on matters by asking Duff Cooper to reject the next de Gaulle script. Duff Cooper told his officials that the original appeal could not be repeated because Bordeaux might yet stiffen. In fact Kirkpatrick helped de Gaulle to broadcast again, though using different words and not claiming any role for himself. The French community in London was divided. Duff Cooper broadcast in French on  June saying that France had lost a great battle but would rise  Philippe Pétain, Discours aux Français  juin ‒ août , ed. Jean-Claude Barbas (), .  Charles de Gaulle, Discours et Messages—Pendant al Guerre, Juin –Janvier  (), .  D. Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan (), – ( June ); Policy Committee,  June , INF /.

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again. The MOI prepared a poster in French which repeated the idea. The text was shown to de Gaulle, who produced the famous final version. This poster was put up widely in London; with the broadcasts, it implied firm British support. There were two grey eminences who disapproved: Jean Monnet, Chairman of the Anglo-French Economic Co-ordinating Committee, and Roger Cambon, the Minister at the French Embassy, argued that a de Gaulle opposition was the wrong way to influence events. But the Armistice undermined their case. When it was signed on  June, de Gaulle was allowed to go further: ‘All free Frenchmen should continue the fight wherever they are . . . I invite all French people who wish to remain free to listen to me and to follow me.’ On  June Pétain answered the London case: I would not be worthy of remaining as your leader if I had accepted shedding French blood to prolong the dreams of some Frenchmen badly instructed in the nature of the contest. I have placed neither my person nor my hope beyond the soil of France . . . You have suffered . . . Your life will be hard. It is not I who will trick you with deceiving arguments. I hate the lies which have brought you so much misfortune.

This call for realism was tremendously powerful. The British understood why, but in their own ears Pétain sounded maudlin and suspect. On  June de Gaulle announced that he was forming a French National Committee. The Foreign Office first announced recognition then cancelled the statement while the Ministry made attempts (‘only partially effective’) to persuade the press to leave the matter alone. Duff Cooper tried to secure a better-known French politician. He flew to Rabat in search of Georges Mandel, but the authorities were suspicious and blocked him. On  June de Gaulle was allowed to say that he had been recognized by the British as ‘leader of all free Frenchmen wherever they may be’. Access to the BBC had undoubtedly helped him to this point. De Gaulle’s immediate appeal was for Frenchmen to work or fight with the British. The radio appeals of  and  June were otherwise not very political. On  June he called for an ‘ideal’ and a ‘hope’, but implied that there were other rallying-figures. Even after declaring himself a leader on  June, he seemed no more than the leader in London. His broadcasting technique was excellent and solidarity with Britain was his message. It was a commitment made in the teeth of French sentiment and directed against the legal French government. It was cast in bronze after the naval bombardment of the French fleet at Oran. De Gaulle explained on  July that the Armistice had put French warships ‘at the discretion’ of the enemy, and that they were better destroyed since there was no doubt that the enemy intended to take them. The first hint    

De Gaulle, Discours et Messages, . Pétain, Discours aux Français, –. Policy Committee,  June , INF /. E. L. Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, i (), .

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that his person had acquired the gift of sovereignty came on  August: his goal was to ensure that France ‘may be present at the victory’. The de Gaulle expedient had an immediate value as an attempt to attract French personnel, especially technicians, to Britain, but it was also based on a simple, instinctive determination not to let France go without a struggle. De Gaulle broadcast despite the suspicion that whatever he said would push Pétain the wrong way. Tempers were set high enough for acts of faith and intangible investments. Nevertheless, the rejection of the offer of union killed a powerful idea. Union itself was perhaps unconvincingly lurid and desperate. But thereafter France was not offered any other headline commitment beyond restored independence. London did not promise the French nation—over Pétain’s head—any military, economic, or imperial alliance nor a future as a restored parliamentary democracy. There was no alliance in whose name resistance should begin, and which might be made permanent on liberation. It was often supposed—in BBC commentary and in France—that there would be some form of Anglo-French post-war association, but this weak inference could not have the energy and imaginative reach of a formal British offer made in . The French parliament assembled in Vichy on the morrow of Britain’s horrific naval action. Within days Laval had obtained for Pétain full authority to rewrite the constitution. The Marshal then proclaimed himself head of state and the Republic simply evaporated. Pétain had for some time been the tool of a right-wing faction. The French political establishment knew what they were getting when they resigned in his favour. De Gaulle had known him quite well and understood that, at , the old soldier was approaching his dotage. Pétain was still lucid but he could no longer concentrate for long and he had become weak-willed. The war seemed lost. Extensive and unqualified despair was short-lived, but not its cost. It stamped the new regime with a deep resentment against the original advocates of war against Germany and, by extension, with contempt for ideas about resistance. Marshal Pétain’s authority was confirmed by a large majority of the two chambers of the National Assembly. Few wanted to deny his paternal reproach that the war had been a mistake. Pétain preached repentance about an easygoing past and promised discipline. A rancorous coalition of veterans and opponents of the Third Republic took power and designed a ‘national revolution’. The underlying theme was that France should look for a lesser role and avoid further humiliation by offering goodwill, and the tatters of her eminent position, to the dominant power. The leading lights in Vichy—-Pierre Laval and Admiral François Darlan—took the optimistic view that Germany needed an ally and must pay a price. Pétain announced that France was now released from the snares of international 

De Gaulle, Discours et Messages, , , , .

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capitalism and international socialism. Jacobin democracy had lost its argument with History: France would rediscover her religious and national traditions. There was every chance of constructing a consensus around a social Catholicism which had a genuine appeal in France. Hitler did not want an obligation to support French fascism or revive French power. Nevertheless, the candidate fascist leaders—Doriot, Déat, and Deloncle—hoped that the need for allies would overcome German prejudice. Although hobbled by rivalry, the right-wing radical parties had a substantial membership. Pétain stood in their way. For the ‘collaborationists’—the collaborators from conviction—Pétain won approval for the wrong reason. For many Frenchmen the war was basically a military miscalculation. The Marshal, they hoped, could say ‘no’ to Germany because he had said ‘no’ to the war. His Great War record promised talismanic power against the further humiliation. His prestige both blighted the prospects of resistance and muddied the waters of principled collaboration. Pétain left to his colleagues the public altercation with London. He was rumoured to favour a gentleman’s agreement to differ about the Armistice. The first British reaction to the Armistice was to state clearly that the new government was breaking treaty obligations. The first British leaflets attacked the Armistice: ‘Frenchmen: Are you in favour of handing all your country’s resources to the enemy? . . . Are you prepared to agree to gather harvests for the Germans, to dig coal for the Germans, and manufacture arms for the Germans?’ The dismay and indignation provoked in London by the Armistice was short-lived but very important. Just before the attack on the French fleet the French government sent two emissaries to London to request less hostile propaganda. They were not allowed beyond Lisbon, but they did get a hearing. Pierre Bressy had been Georges Bonnet’s chef de cabinet at the Quai d’Orsay and Jacques Chastenet, managing director of Le Soir, was another Bonnet aide. They were veterans of French appeasement in search of sympathy. The MEW intelligence officer, David Eccles, was a Tory who understood them. He even shared their first premiss: ‘we cannot play with the dregs of French Democracy’. But Eccles introduced his interlocutors to the severity of the judgements now made in London. He doubted the Pétain government could ever ‘pluck up enough courage’ to revive ‘the traditions of your ancestors’: [Bressy] thought they could and would but only if we gave them a chance and did not sabotage their efforts by refusing to have anything to do with them and by showing interest in the Front Populaire leaders who would all be shot in due course. He complained also of Mr Duff Cooper’s visit to M. Mandel [in Morocco] who was a crook surrounded by crooks. ‘Well’, I said, ‘I’m told that’s true of all your politicians.’   

Pétain, Discours aux Français,  ( July ). n.d. [June ], FO /. D. Eccles to R. Makins,  July , and memorandum, FO /.

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There was no inclination to trust the new France: ‘the Marshal and his friends are too old, or too crooked, to clean up France or anything else’. The Foreign Office was cynical about Vichy’s protestations of neutrality. The British Ambassador left Bordeaux on the news of the Armistice. No one proposed attempting good formal relations with Pétain’s France. Sustained hostility was a different matter. Roger Cambon, who resigned his diplomatic post to remain in London as a private citizen, explained that France was ‘ill’ and should not be rebuked. The two French commanding officers in the Near East made the same point, advising the British to ‘realise the extent of the break in morale and . . . treat it by psychotherapy not by upbraiding’. Cambon thought the French would cure themselves after some experience of German occupation. Frenchmen around the world offered similar advice. The War Cabinet had expressed one view of Vichy by ordering the destruction of the French fleet on  July. But this was an awesome and disorientating decision. In due course it would exhaust British hostility and make it difficult to sustain public indignation at Vichy’s Anglophobia. Nevertheless, when the Central department suggested that a formal diplomatic link would help Pétain’s ‘resistance’ to match Franco’s, Cadogan, the Permanent UnderSecretary, reminded his specialists that Britain wanted an ‘alternative government’ to Vichy. Churchill reinforced this: ‘we are encouraging and aiding a revolt by de Gaulle . . . [and] by our continued survival, making the Pétain government look increasingly base and shameful’. This seemed clear enough, but it did not produce a sustained public condemnation. In August a new French department was formed in the Foreign Office. Tempers cooled. Officials did not exclude the possibility that Pétain might defend French neutrality. They were not optimistic, but they reverted to open-mindedness. The Vichy reaction to the Oran bombardment was mild, and the diplomatic attempt to stop the British moaning about the Armistice was soon resumed. This made the Foreign Office propaganda-conscious. The French were in shock and the national mentality was suggestible. Political leadership might fall to whoever won the attention of a bewildered people. The Communist party took great risks to scramble back on the political stage. Fascists and right-wing ultras advocated a parti unique. When this was refused—it was not the conservatism Pétain’s advisers wanted—the radical Right became almost as vituperative about Vichy as the communists. But Pétain’s prestige was so inflated by State and Church it seemed to embody a resolution of the long Franco-German quarrel. London was told that Pétain had become a ‘sacred symbol’, that the term ‘democratic’ offended a nation G. E. Millard’s minute,  July , FO /. William Strang’s minute,  June , FO /; Harrard (Beirut) to FO,  Aug. , FO /.  Makins’s minute,  July ; Cadogan’s minute,  July ; Churchill to Halifax,  Aug. , FO /.  

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‘fed up and disillusioned about party politics’, and that the British would do better to boast of their King than of their Parliament. Championing the dead republic might deepen Britain’s unpopularity. The Vichy press did not circulate in the German-occupied France, but Pétain’s broadcasts reached a huge audience. They did something, briefly, to cauterize wounds to national pride. The French were not fed a diet of pure despair. French fascism needed an extended moment of moral defencelessness and political vacuum to assemble the sort of constituency captured by German Nazism. The British decided to tread with some care in the debate about the battle lost in May and June. British explanations of the failure were liable to feel insulting. The obvious expedient was for much of what had to be said from London to be written and spoken by Frenchmen. In the heat of the Armistice debate, William Strang the Assistant Secretary supervising French affairs, had defined ‘collaboration’—the expression used in France—aggressively: it was ‘helping Germany to keep France defeated and under blackmail’. But the case against controversy was made by Alexis Léger, the former head of the French diplomatic service who was briefly in London. (Like Monnet, he was en route for Washington.) Léger and Cambon said that any British agitation should wait for Anglophobia to die down. The Pétain regime really did control the unoccupied zone and the colonies, and French enthusiasm for the Marshal was a fact. The Foreign Office were soon willing to mask British contempt for Vichy. It seemed sensible to end the unprofitable controversy about the Armistice and to restrict London propaganda to the claim that the position of France would improve when British military resistance was successful. British and French interests could reconverge. There was no need to be dogmatic about Pétain’s room for manoeuvre. Vichy appeared to be popular. A way had to be found to address maréchaliste opinion. René Pleven, a civil service high-flyer who had left Monnet’s staff to join de Gaulle, was sent to the rallied territories in French Africa. He reported that support for de Gaulle’s stand rested on the hope that the Marshal secretly approved. Pleven recommended strongly against ‘personal attacks’ on Pétain or on any of his ministers and generals. The more rapidly the empire was polarized, the fewer colonies the Free French would collect. In Malet Street Oliver Harvey was creating a French division. He listened carefully to Pierre Comert, press director at the Quai d’Orsay until his antiappeasing stance provoked his removal. Comert—the French Rex Leeper, though further to the left—predicted that despite everything French opinion A. Yencken (Madrid) to W. Mack,  Aug. , FO /. Memorandum by W. Strang,  June , FO /. Vansittart’s minute on Léger,  June , FO /.  W. Mack’s minute,  Aug. , FO /. Pleven would be Prime Minister twice in the th Republic.   

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would remain ‘predominantly sympathetic’ to Britain, and that the bombardment at Oran tied Britain to an anti-Vichy course: We ought . . . to say that the arrival of Pétain and Weygand, neither of whom had any parliamentary mandate, in power, was a coup d’état by the Right and nothing else. France was now the subject of a military dictatorship itself the tool of Germany and Italy. This argument was bound to be effective with the French Left and we ought not to shrink from using it.

This complemented Harvey’s inclination to defend republican tradition against cynicism in France. But Comert’s premiss was difficult to trust. Nor was the factional status of individuals clear. General Weygand, for instance, had been the French commander-in-chief. After Dunkirk he was blamed in London as a defeatist looking for excuses. But in September he was appointed Delegate-General in North Africa, where he might have the power to defect to Britain. Once in Algiers he was reassessed. A group of young Frenchmen at the French Information Bureau made contact with Harold Nicolson, the French-speaking Parliamentary Secretary at the MOI. They warned that unless Pétain was denounced from the start he would become legitimate: ‘it will then be too late to preach disobedience’. Nicolson accepted this. The MOI sent to the BBC a Havas correspondent, Pierre Maillaud, who became famous as ‘Pierre Bourdan’ in the Trois Amis programme, and Bourdan’s first talk was explicit and anti-Pétain. But there was so much hostile French reaction that Noel Newsome agreed to stop personal attacks on the Marshal. In August there was a Parliamentary Question: would Duff Cooper explain to the French that they were being betrayed and would he champion the principles of  against the révolution nationale offered by Vichy? Harvey suggested the answer ‘yes’ on both counts, with the qualification that no attempt was made to deny Pétain’s government ‘such day to day authority as it possesses’. The Foreign Office, however, did not want the matter stated so conclusively. The BBC needed new French voices. The professionals from Radio Paris had gone home after the Armistice, and a replacement team had to be found. The most important figure was ‘Jacques Duchesne’, the nom de guerre of Michel Saint Denis, who became the organizer of the BBC French Programme on  July. Saint Denis—henceforth Duchesne—was a well-known theatre director, who had served as a liaison officer with the BEF. Under his direction a daily programme—Les Français Parlent aux Français—rapidly acquired an enviable reputation for good broadcasting. French News and French Talks came under BBC Britons—Darsie Gillie and Ian Black. Once the French Service was functioning, Russell Page, the French Service   

Comert’s opinion reported in Charles Peake to R. Makins,  July , FO /. André Gillios, Histoire secrète des Françaisà Londres (), . Note by W. Mack,  Aug. , FO /.

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Organizer, chaired a daily conference of Gillie, Black, the intelligence officer, and Raymond Mortimer from the MOI. (Mortimer, previously literary editor of the New Statesman, was a daily visitor to Broadcasting House in –.) Most of the Duchesne team used pseudonyms, and these are employed below: ‘Jean Marin’ for Yves Morvan; ‘Pierre Bourdan’ for Pierre Maillaud; ‘Borel’ for Jacques Brunius. The radio personae bore some relation to their actual selves. The formula for reaching a touchy and sophisticated audience was prudence enlivened by wit and pace. The message was bathed in humour to disarm resentment. The programme Les Français Parlent aux Français took its name after a few weeks under the dangerous title Ici la France. It became the centrepiece of the BBC’s output in French. Duchesne allowed speakers and scriptwriters to combine their opinions. The Vichy regime was discussed in terms that varied from anxious sympathy to rooted opposition. The conclusion was always that the French must judge Pétain’s deeds not his words. The staff became adept at presenting different opinions as part of a continuum of understanding shared by patriots of good will. The BBC kept a closer control over bulletins through Darsie Gillie, the French News Editor. The programme makers were held loosely together by Russell Page, the French Service Organizer, who was an enlightened patron: ‘the French here are called “Free French” to some purpose . . . Whatever directives are issued must be put into practice by Frenchmen and by intelligent Frenchmen, and they will not do anything without thrashing out every detail first.’ But with whom? The BBC French were in fact not Free French. They did not come under de Gaulle’s authority and they did not want to. An unaffiliated French staff tried to create a rapport with an equally unaffiliated French audience. Russell Page had to remind his superiors that the BBC should not be making policy. Duchesne’s programme was improvised rapidly before the MOI was competent to offer supervision. The BBC’s contribution was the house doctrine that the best propaganda should not look like propaganda. A half-truth perhaps, but its hour had come. On  August  Duchesne spoke in response to a Pétain radio address. He confessed that he could not hear the Marshal’s voice ‘without feelings of respect and without being naturally moved’. But he complained about the growing antisemitism of the French press and the ‘perfectly unjustified’ criticism of Britain. Three days later he offered criticism of the Vichy programme of social reform: the Third Republic had been a regime of social mobility; talent would be squandered in the Nazi utopia of an entirely stable social order. Duchesne kept a safe liberal distance from Vichy, but tried to stay in contact with an audience not so careful. On  August Paul Baudouin, the Vichy Foreign Minister—at this stage London’s bête noire—spoke on Vichy radio against Churchill’s ‘destructive fatalism’ in prolonging the war and accused 

Russell Page to Salt,  Nov. , BBC E//.

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him of condemning Europe to starve. The BBC response began with an apology to the audience for ‘inevitable’ divergences of view between London radio and its listeners, and offered as common ground the belief that Pétain would not lie. This was dangerous. The most potent of the Marshal’s themes was that he had swept away a regime of mendacity. Lies had destroyed the old France and threatened the new: that France must fight Germany was a lie, that she could win was another. The prospect of further resistance was the ‘lie’ against which Pétain flung his full authority. Harvey’s French division expanded to cover other enemy-occupied territories, and Nigel Law became his deputy and head of the French section. The MOI French Advisory Committee included representatives from other departments, and was known as the ‘Law Committee’ although Harvey or Maurice Peterson often took the chair. Hal Mack, the head of the Foreign Office French department, sent a specialist as did a reluctant BBC, SO, and the Spears ‘mission’, a quasi-embassy to the Free French. The Law Committee was a consultative gathering of middle-rank officials: broadcasting authority remained with the MOI, and Harvey knew Churchill favoured a clear anti-Vichy line. The BBC could not tamper with de Gaulle’s own scripts which, when submitted on time, were read at the Ministry of Information then submitted to the Foreign Office. In addition, the Free French were granted a daily five minutes of broadcasting time on BBC wavelengths. This ‘free time’ became a programme Honneur et Patrie which consisted principally of Maurice Schumann’s talks as the spokesman of Free France. Shortly afterwards, a third series of talks was begun—again at MOI initiative. News bulletins were reasonably BBC, but editorial influence in the rest of the output came variously from a semi-independent French team learning on the job, de Gaulle’s Free French, and the Ministry of Information. Harvey’s French section at the MOI did not like the tactical suspension of anti-pétainism even to get at a wide audience. But the BBC did the broadcasting and the FO French department supported subtlety. The BBC French Service were informed by their superiors that regular visits to Malet Street would be ‘definitely against the interests of broadcasting’. The MOI French specialists—Law, Mortimer, Jack Sandford, and Major Hamilton—became familiar with the London French, but they were not as close to the BBC as to the radical journalists they sponsored to produce France, a French daily newspaper. France was edited by Pierre Comert. It became the home of de Gaulle’s left-wing critics, but it was not the organ of their criticism. Despite their contacts MOI officials usually protected Free France. However, the critics or ‘dissidents’ were valued because they shared with the MOI officials the sense that France had lost any democratic guiding light. Some expected the Foreign  J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac (ed.), Les Voix de la Liberté (), i. , –, ; P. Baudouin, Private  Diaries (), –. Page to Salt,  Nov. , BBC E//.

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Office or the BBC to obstruct a ‘democratic’ response to Vichy; others feared de Gaulle. The BBC French intelligence officer was a regular participant at meetings in Cambon’s home, where criticism of de Gaulle was prepared for transmission to the Foreign Office. Severity about Pétain’s new regime ceased to be the anchor of policy. De Gaulle’s remarks about Vichy were not forced into the BBC mould. Though instructed to be careful about named individuals, he achieved a tone of studied contempt for the new political establishment. Mordant reproof of the Vichy government was just as marked in the Ministry’s Labour Talks as in Schumann’s Honneur et Patrie programme. The Free French said the Armistice was treachery; the MOI added that a British victory meant democracy and free trade unions. Together, they supplied a stiffening context to milder remarks in the rest of the Radio London output. The BBC French often sat on the fence. Duchesne hesitated where de Gaulle plunged ahead with acid remarks about Pétain’s ‘managers’ and his ‘dismal justifications’. The main evening broadcasts—Les Français Parlent aux Français—accepted Pétain as a useful, even appropriate, figure for France but one who might make mistakes and in whose name mistakes would be made. The BBC morning Labour Talks were free of these genuflections. They relaunched the radical fable that France had not been defeated but undone by treason. Pétainist renewal was bogus since it was part of the treason. There was even a call for active opposition. André Labarthe, an MOI favourite in the early days, called upon railwaymen to oppose the ‘abject regime’ that was in preparation by means of ‘national resistance’ and ‘sabotage’. Lightness of touch was not much valued at the MOI. They wanted to add to the morning talks, advocating workplace resistance, an evening series on social progress in Britain. Internally, the BBC Director of European Broadcasts admitted a ‘lack of comprehensive policy’ in the French output. Differences were simply unresolved. Harvey’s officials thought active resistance was urgent while the diplomats and broadcasters complained that their sarcasms about capitulation were too simple-minded. The Labour Talks evolved in this context. The Ministry decided that the organized, or once-organized, working class could accept a stronger tone than Page, Gillie, and Duchesne were willing to employ. Henri Hauck, the Free French counsellor for social affairs, obtained Attlee’s support for a frankly left-wing programme. Hauck had resigned as labour attaché at the French Embassy to join de Gaulle, and was used by the MOI as adviser, scriptwriter, and speaker for the Labour Talks. These were broadcast early each morning to catch workers before they left home. There was never much sign of an audience.   

Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, i.  ( Aug. ). Ibid. i. ,  ( and  Aug. ). Salt to Tallents,  Nov. , BBC E//.

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The Ministry believed that French Anglophobia was diminishing. One source, who had left Marseille at the end of September, stated that unoccupied France had been overwhelmingly anti-British in the summer, but that in midAugust ‘public opinion . . . changed entirely and so suddenly that I scarcely understood the reasons for this change of mind’. What began in mid-August was the battle of Britain. Effective British resistance was on display. The weight of the doubt that the British could still fight was turned against itself. Britain was reinstalled as an acknowledged great power. This made her propaganda, and Free French statements, important and interesting. In early September  a report arrived via Barcelona: ‘The de Gaulle movement, as it is called, is gaining ground in all classes of society and in spite of the official campaign inspired by Germany. In the town [Perpignan] one sees numerous inscriptions of ‘Vive de Gaulle’. People in all ranks of society feel rancour against the deputies and politicians and one hears on all sides people saying ‘if only the General does not take up with the parliamentarians’.

There was, of course, no organized de Gaulle movement in France. There was just a response to London broadcasts. In October Vichy prohibited listening to the BBC in public places. The German Propaganda Department, with headquarters in Paris and offices throughout occupied France, listened carefully. They asked for better radio jamming before the audience for Radio London was consolidated. By April  it seemed too late: ‘all politically-interested Frenchmen either listen to the French broadcasts of the English radio or ask their neighbours about it on a daily basis. The English radio has improved the presentation of its French broadcasts and has produced a political entertainment programme whose couplets one can often hear sung in the streets.’ By the end of  Britain had a French propaganda vehicle of quality which was more interesting than anything that could be produced in Paris. There were four or five million wireless receivers in France. Vichy radio monitors thought there was a BBC daily audience of , in early  (a low estimate) which had grown tenfold by the end of . France devoured Nazi photojournalism, but in the diffusion of the spoken word the BBC established an ascendancy which lasted throughout the war. Hugo Staub to Nigel Law (MOI),  Oct. , FO /. F. Paton (Consul-General, Barcelona) to Halifax (GFO),  Sept. , FO /.  Propaganda-Abteilung Frankreich, Tätigkeitsbericht,  Feb. , and Lagebericht, nd week April , RW/ (MA).  J. Lacouture, De Gaulle: Le Rebelle (), .  

 The First Gaullism D E G A U L L E had a strong personality, but he was touchy and his manner often stiff and arrogant. He made unnecessary mistakes of tact. On casual inspection he could seem just another authoritarian exploiting the fashion for uniforms. His political eclecticism contained royalist strands. The republican motto Maurice Schumann used to begin his first broadcast for Free France was discontinued. De Gaulle wanted to indicate to Catholic France that he was not in Jacobin fetters. Honneur et Patrie became the title of the Free French ‘free time’ on the BBC. Schumann spoke almost daily for the next four years. The BBC French were unimpressed by Schumann, but the MOI general instruction to ‘advance the aims of General de Gaulle’ put him beyond their reach. De Gaulle was not bursting with ideas. It was unusual for him to comment on Schumann’s talks—except when he was insufficiently severe with Pétain—and he rarely proposed material in advance. De Gaulle was joined by a number of royalist officers, but he was not captured by them. France seemed to need symbols that were broader, or at least older, than those which had lost their gloss. Patriotic depth might be acquired by invoking a Christian past which no one could expunge from French history. The Cross of Lorraine became the Free French symbol in August. The naval chaplain announced on the BBC that Admiral Muselier recognized Catholicism as the religion of the French majority, and that the navy would accept religious services ‘according to the old customs’. Vichy had the support of some ‘authentic and illustrious Christians’, the chaplain admitted, but the Armistice exposed most of the country to the ‘hitlerite neo-pagan propaganda’ which even the Vatican was obliged to denounce. Duchesne was more conventional. He recommended secular reform—a ‘purge of political customs’—provided it could be separated from the cult of ‘national penitence’. By  August Schumann was clear enough about political fault-lines to announce that ‘the Republic is not dead: it only appears to be so’. The Republic might not unite the nation but it still prohibited a royal solution. Many of de Gaulle’s first recruits were soldiers and sailors. The civilian side of Free France was slender but included a few top-flight civil servants and some writers. Several distinguished figures who chose exile, even in England, declined to join the movement. Alexis Léger and Jean Monnet left for the USA, where they fanned suspicion of the London experiment. The one Wellington (MOI) to Tallents (BBC),  July , BBC E/. J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac (ed.), Les Voix de la Liberté (), i.  ( Sept. ), and i.  ( Aug.  ). Maurice Schumann, Honneur et Patrie (),  (Schumann’s BBC talks).  

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eminent politician to offer his services was Pierre Cot, a Popular Front minister with a defensible record on rearmament. But he already carried the fellowtravelling reputation he would perfect in recanting his criticism of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, and de Gaulle turned him down. De Gaulle preferred to be free of politicians. But other Frenchmen did not. However unfashionable, vigilant left-liberals eager to explain French events were well-represented in the French community in London. They were alert for signs that the Free French were attuned to the clericals in Vichy; they were distrustful of soldiers and twitchy about Maurrassians and cagoulards. If Free France did share with Vichy an initial authoritarian impulse, the signs disappeared quickly. ‘Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité’ secured another favourable mention in October, and Cassin, the Free French lawyer, returned to the microphone to attack the Vichy decree merging all the old rival veterans’ associations into one. Since Cassin was a Jew his prominence in Free France was also a signal. Speaking in the Free French Honneur et Patrie period, Cassin’s points were liberal: the old associations had been voluntary and the old officials were elected; the new ones were nominated (‘according to Fuehrerprinzip’); the five most prominent members were specialists in civil war —right-wing ultras and cagoulards. As Vichy moved against the syndicalist confederations, Henri Hauck made complimentary remarks about the British Trades Union Congress. In November Cassin argued that Free France was democratic because it proposed to account for its actions before the nation and to submit itself to a post-war electorate, whereas Vichy had no such intention. Schumann’s talks rarely contained much political inflection. The political drift of Honneur et Patrie was set by the occasional speakers. Catholic language supplied, as it did to the Vichy reformers, a way of saying that politics had been dirty and needed a remedy. The speakers who used it made a broader criticism of French public life than was implied by the leftwing cry against munichois plotting. Thus spoke Joseph Hackin addressing de Gaulle as much as his audience: It is the duty of Free France to guarantee, after the tyranny and excess of the totalitarian powers, the liberation of the French spirit and the elaboration of a doctrine of government . . . Such an effort of reconstruction demands, on the part of those grouped around the chief mainspring of the liberation movement, a complete disinterestedness. And our supporters ought not to become clients but rather apostles anxious above all to avoid the formation of ‘clans’, of côteries, of organised factions.

Hackin’s early death (at sea) was a serious loss to the Free French. De Gaulle found the summons to high-flown purpose irresistible: Pierre Cot (–); Air Force Minister, ; Stalin Peace Prize, . Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, i. , ,  ( and  Oct.,  Nov. ). René Samuel Cassin (–), professor of international law; Free French Commissioner for Justice –.  Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, i.  ( Dec. ).  

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Undoubtedly those who fight on, who suffer and pray, have the right and duty of delivering judgement on the causes of France’s temporary disaster. Undoubtedly, they intend to indicate by their union, by their renunciation, by their spiritual elan and their religious faith, the political, social and moral paths by which their Country will rediscover its good fortune and its grandeur. But the Free French forbid themselves any sort of usurpation. It is not they who are tearing up rights and liberties on the pretext of carrying out a supposed national revolution.

The Free French wanted first to establish that they were simple patriots and that the cranks and usurpers were at Vichy, but they reserved their position on everything. About Vichy de Gaulle managed to be consistent. His style was slightly cramped by Foreign Office censorship, but he put together the case he wanted. He questioned Pétain’s right to blame others for the military disaster since his influence on pre-war strategy had been great. He threw an open insult: it was ‘senility or great treason’ to suppose that the war was lost or that France could retain anything of value under Hitler. Though Pétain had not been named, this was personal abuse of the kind officially prohibited. In August de Gaulle described the leading figures in Vichy as criminals attempting to distract attention from themselves by finding others—party politicians—guilty of parallel crimes; then he called them fools who believed that the presence of ‘one very old marshal and some old defeated generals would ameliorate the wrath of the conqueror’. These claims and jibes were the staple of Free French pronouncements. De Gaulle was taken aback by the press criticism which followed the failure of the Dakar expedition (– September), and he soon learnt how British official opinion filtered into Free French affairs. De Gaulle declared the scope of his rebellion on his first journey outside Britain. On  October he issued a ‘Brazzaville Manifesto’—on French territory—denouncing Vichy as unconstitutional and setting up an Empire Defence Council. No one in London had been consulted. There were complaints that he had ‘played the potentate’ in Africa, and the Foreign Office took comfort from a pledge from the General that he had ‘no personal ambition’ and was realistic about what must happen if General Weygand declared for Britain from his stronghold in Algiers. De Gaulle’s modesty was hypothetical. He expected Weygand to remain inert. The BBC French Service remained supportive. They reported the defence of de Gaulle by the Prime Minister and by the Daily Telegraph against criticism of the Dakar expedition. But there was no further allocation of free time beyond the ten minutes a day already granted and de Gaulle was refused a free period in the Home Service. He became concerned that the   

De Gaulle, Discours et Messages (), – ( Jan. ). Ibid. , –, . Minutes by W. H. Mack and W. Strang,  Dec. , FO /.

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newspaper France took its inspiration from the Ministry of Information rather than his HQ at Carlton Gardens. When Pétain sacked Laval as his first minister in December, de Gaulle, despite the excitement on the British side, was deliciously unmuzzled: It appears that at the court of the Vichy sultan a palace revolution has overthrown the grand vizier and that Vichy has asked Hitler’s permission for the investiture of a successor. But these kinds of changes are only of interest to the court of Vichy, its chamberlains and valets, its spies and eunuchs. . . . We shall one day see what it costs to have assisted in the enslavement of France.

William Strang, the Assistant Under-Secretary, in approving another de Gaulle text, minuted that Pétain’s strengthening stance ‘could hardly have been without its effect on de Gaulle’s mind and public attitude’. This odd remark says something about Strang’s hopes—and Churchill’s—after the dismissal of Laval and Flandin’s appointment as Foreign Minister. Whatever he imagined, there was no modification of the Free French ‘public attitude’. On  February  the General handed in another essay in sarcasm. Oliver Harvey recognized that the contemptuous treatment of Darlan and Flandin—not named but clearly identified—broke the guidelines, and he passed the script on to the Foreign Office. This was the moment for critics of the General’s strong line to come forward. In Eden’s absence, Orme Sargent asked the Free French to cancel the broadcast, but when Sir Louis Spears, the ‘ambassador’ to the Free French, reported that de Gaulle was distressed Sargent yielded and the broadcast was made—ninety minutes late but textually intact: It seems that under the regime of infallibility, collaboration and national revolution, they have just altered, for the eighth time in seven months, the composition of what it is convenient to call the government of Vichy. This eighth variation grew from the tumult of a quarrel between three politicians . . . One of the three [Flandin] retired since he could not—he said—collaborate with the enemy at the moment with honour and dignity . . . The second [Laval] has also refused to figure in the new team because he would not be the premier and so would not be able to collaborate with the enemy as much as he had hoped to do. The third [Darlan] came out on top. I should not be surprised if all this proved to be the best solution available in the enemy’s interests, since the change seems the most likely to disguise behind equivocation the infamy of collaboration.

These strictures now seem beyond dispute. De Gaulle used his rhetorical skill to stay, almost, within the directive and convey what he meant. But he needed steady support. The BBC was a meeting place for several kinds of Frenchmen. Schumann was de Gaulle’s spokesman but Georges Boris was the Free Frenchman who  

De Gaulle, Discours et Messages,  ( Dec. ). Strang’s minute,  Dec. , FO /.

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Script,  Feb. , FO /.

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paid most attention to the rest of Radio Londres. Boris spoke often and kept himself informed of the workings of the BBC. Some of the staff considered him strained and sectarian in his disapproval of those who would not join the Free French. There was a difference in rhetoric between ‘de gaullists’ and ‘dissidents’. Maurice Schumann spoke with a heavy eloquence that Jean Oberlé (of the BBC’s Trois Amis) felt to be ultimately monotonous. The BBC speakers in Duchesne’s team spurned everything overblown and declamatory. They were dry, light, and modern in tone. The BBC preferred deftness: its battle of slogans with Radio Paris was a contest of wits; otherwise, as Oberlé said, all was meant to be ‘sincerity’ and ‘simplicity’. De Gaulle lacked the requisite transparency. Raymond Aron felt disquiet at de Gaulle’s ‘theatrical manner’, which did not really suit the role which remained for France to play in the war, and was exasperated by the ‘little gaullist milieu’. The heavy talk of duty and sacrifice, whatever it meant, sounded like a concession to Pétain. The ‘Spears Mission’ was the diplomatic link with Free France. Spears was a veteran of Anglo-French military liaison. He rejoiced that the Free French, at least, could express his own feelings about Vichy. Spears believed that only Free French successes could give the impression of an unbroken AngloFrench alliance. His officials kept watch on Carlton Gardens even when Spears himself was away with de Gaulle. They were troubled by the factionalism which blew up in Carlton Gardens, and they also detected anxieties about British policy in October. The MOI wanted both to educate Free France and to work with other Frenchmen. The Mission wanted to intervene in the quarrel of Free French factions and said that polite British indifference would be taken as a sign of under-commitment. But propaganda coaching from MOI was not approved. Spears was advised that there was ‘no hope of a division of powers between the MOI and General de Gaulle’ and that a dispute between the two would discredit both Free France and London propaganda. Spears wanted almost the whole propaganda effort to be made through the Free French: Any purely British propaganda is not only a waste of time but is positively dangerous. We cannot hope to instil love and affection of ourselves. Our achievements . . . provide the only propaganda which is of the least use to us. Whatever propaganda we put forward should aim at strengthening the hand of de Gaulle, since the French will only trust and follow Frenchmen.

Spears conceded that de Gaulle made mistakes, but it was only ‘our own faith’—and a campaign to get prominent Frenchmen to come over to join Jean Oberlé, Jean Oberlé Vous Parle (), . A. Gillois, Historic Secrète des Français à Londres (), . Aron (–), philospher and sociologist, was beginning a long involvement in journalism which continued post-war with Combat and Figaro. He became Sartre’s political opponent and a defender of NATO.  W. H. Codrington minute,  Oct. , CAB /.  Cowell to Somerville Smith,  Dec. , FO /. 

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him—which could push this ‘very great man’ into prominence. This meant discarding short-term advantages and not blowing hot and cold about the General. Spears was an eloquent but not an effective advocate. Eden, Duff Cooper, and Dalton agreed that the Free French must undertake ‘no subversive propaganda or operation’ without consulting HMG and must not print their own leaflets for distribution in France. The senior diplomats—Cadogan, Vansittart, Strang, and Mack—took an instrumental view of the Free French. De Gaulle’s request to take over the newspaper France was difficult to reject, because all he really wanted was an official Free French newspaper. The refusal to accept either course disclosed reservations in Malet Street about the political calibre of the Free French: a ‘gaullist’ publication could no more be subject to pre-publication censorship than Fleet Street. De Gaulle’s critics were linked to British officialdom, and this played a large part in his political education. Although Pierre Cot had been sent away, André Labarthe, a former member of Cot’s entourage, took a briefly important place in Free France with the fanciful title of director of armaments. Labarthe was described by Oliver Harvey as ‘a mixture of scientist, engineer, intellectual and Left-wing politician’. For a time, he promised to become de Gaulle’s Lindemann. He was even more confident than Cot that Stalin had done the right thing in August . If, as sometimes suggested, he was a source for Soviet intelligence, it was a rather open sort of espionage. Labarthe was, in any case, the first of de Gaulle’s Honoured Intellectuals. He was ambitious and started a campaign to get control of the fledgling Free French secret service. He complained that, because of his Popular Front past, he was blocked by the ultra-right conspirators—cagoulards—in Colonel Passy’s deuxième bureau. He was well liked, even admired, by the British propaganda officials, but he was not thought very truthful. For a year or so Labarthe continued to impress de Gaulle and to enjoy influence in both British and French circles. Harold Nicolson believed that the ‘passionate and brilliant’ Labarthe ‘represents France far better than de Gaulle’. To French journalists Labarthe spoke as one who had seen through the General and his entourage. He was proprietor of the successful monthly journal La France Libre, which had been launched with MOI support, de Gaulle’s blessing, and an article by Vansittart. With this journal Labarthe established a position as a leading light of émigré London. The editor, Raymond Aron, confessed that Labarthe turned him against de Gaulle to an extent he later regretted. The star contributor to La France Libre was an ex-Austrian Army Polish communist—Szymanczyk     

Spears, Memorandum on Policy towards the Free French Movement, Dec. , CAB /. Committee on Foreigh Resistance,  Jan. , FO /. Harvey diary,  Mar. . Nicolson, N. (ed.), Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters ‒ (),  ( Dec. ). R. Aron, Mémoires (), –; Gillois, Histoire Secrète, .

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(‘Staro’)—who had worked with Willi Münzenberg in Germany before . ‘Staro’ wrote the military commentaries which made the journal’s reputation. A more consistent anti-gaullist was Comert, the editor of the MOIsubsidized France. Comert and some of his journalists sensed fascism in de Gaulle although in print there was no quarrel between the newspaper and the movement. Their distaste was another reason the General lobbied to control France. But the MOI was ready to defend Pierre Comert from reactionaries in Free France. Duff Cooper warned Churchill that Carlton Gardens wanted to dismiss the existing staff of France and change the character of the paper. He argued that a clumsy Free French publication would provide the enemy with propaganda material and he offered the current MOI political profile of de Gaulle: He wishes to appeal to all forces in France which are in favour of reaction and Catholicism . . . When I asked him to specify his complaint against France he fell back on vague generalisations, saying that it represented the old France of the s which he never wanted to see again, that it contained reports on the present French press and mentioned what was being performed in the theatres of Paris. His only specific grievance was that his own name had been mentioned in the same column with that of one of the Rothschilds as people whom the Vichy Government had deprived of citizenship.

Nevertheless, some of de Gaulle’s advisers were respected in Malet Street. Jean Massip, the director of Free French publicity, threatened to resign if de Gaulle went too far in his bid to appropriate a sober journal of record. Suddenly, Gaston Palewski—in charge of the Free French service politique— declared the newspaper much improved. All he wanted was a promise to include more Free French material. De Gaulle told Dalton he had found Eden over-conciliatory. Faced with Duff Cooper, he took one step backwards. Comert’s circle was the home of the ‘dissidents’, but Labarthe aimed higher. He intrigued to capture first de Gaulle then his movement. He succeeded in dividing the Free French—and confusing the British—by encouraging Vice-Admiral Muselier to offer himself as a rival leader. Labarthe then resigned and became the most active and inventive of de Gaulle’s London critics. Emile Muselier—the ‘Red Admiral’—had some useful ships and he found in the Admiralty a warmth missing from the Army response to Free French soldiers. Egged on by his naval intelligence officer, who knew that Passy employed some very right-wing agents, Muselier joined the critics, and he became the instrument of Labarthe’s campaign to establish a leading position inside the movement. ‘Passy’, that is André Dewavrin, was a young officer of conservative family. De Gaulle met him, trusted him, and told him to start an intelligence service. This became the BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignments et d’Action), a Free French SIS and SOE combined, and was  

Colonel Passy, Souvenirs (), i. . Duff Cooper to PM,  Feb. , PREM //.

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supervised by its rival British parents. Passy was a novice very much in the hands of SIS. Muselier and Labarthe used the rumour that de Gaulle was a disciple of Charles Maurres and Passy something worse as a lever in a British anti-fascist environment. The long whispering campaign against Passy was damaging. Some journalists hung on to the story so long that Eden had to face a delegation of MPs led by J. J. Astor in . (He explained that ‘Passy’, as a youth, had been secretary to Eugéne Deloncle—a cagoulard and later a collaborationist—but that he was an excellent intelligence officer of ‘no particular political tendencies’.) Well before this, Labarthe’s influence, even outside the movement, had diminished as he ‘talked himself out of importance’. Curiously, another veteran of Pierre Cot’s ministerial cabinet appeared in London in , and succeeded exactly where Labarthe had failed. Jean Moulin, later de Gaulle’s chief representative in France, avoided his old comrade; and his association with Labarthe remained unknown for a time. His authority in resistance matters would be unrivalled. De Gaulle liked to be provocative. He and Fontaine, his director of civil affairs, gave a dinner for the journalists—Labarthe, Aron, Gombault (a veteran socialist journalist) and the BBC French. There was a discussion of how to prevent the Paris press from becoming as corrupt as it had been. Fontaine stopped the conversation: ‘We’re wasting time. Either Hitler wins and France is finished, or we win and General de Gaulle will supervise the press and radio.’ The media men were displeased. They were aghast when de Gaulle was unable to resist an unvarnished ‘absolutely’. When Passy criticized Pétain’s reforms as untimely and inappropriate, he did not exclude a révolution nationale after liberation. From early  this was a left-wing platitude, but before then it was considered right-wing and objectionable. The left-wing dissidents were ungenerous in hearing nothing in the talk of reform except illiberal relapse. They were not disposed to identify an anti-fascism of the Right. De Gaulle left England in March  on a grand tour of Africa and the Near East from which he did not return until September. The trip was a disaster. British officials insisted on British co-responsibility for French colonies acquired for Free France by British intervention. Thus provoked, de Gaulle became quixotic and started to defend the French Empire against the heirs of Wolfe and Clive. His foul temper lowered the British estimate of his personality and judgement. Even Spears despaired of de Gaulle’s good sense and turned hostile. (Spears ploughed a lonely furrow: the declared enemy of the Foreign Office and also the Hammer of the French in the Levant.) Carlton Gardens became a little more congenial when Maurice Dejean, who had been in Reynaud’s cabinet, arrived from Morocco. Dejean replaced Palewski as Minutes of meeting in Jan. , FO /. Attributed to ‘a great English journalist’: Passy, Souvenirs, i. .  Gillois, Histoire Secrète, . ‘Fontaine’ was also a pseudonym. Antoine—his real name—held Carlton Gardens against Muselier when de Gaulle went off to Africa.  

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director of the service politique and became a British favourite. Carlton Gardens remained, however, a house divided. De Gaulle’s critics now hoped that they could win British support for a purge. Fontaine and the Colonels Augenot and Dassonville represented the loyal Right and Admiral Muselier and Dejean the Anglophile Left. The critics exploited their contacts. Desmond Morton and Oliver Harvey believed that Passy’s organization was populated with suspect characters and in need of change. Labarthe’s agitation against Passy encouraged British departments to use the Free French without conceding control. SIS refused to be tied to ‘gaullists’—a term used freely by people otherwise insistent that it ought to have no meaning. They wanted Passy’s agents to clear everything with British controllers, which was unrealistic in French terms however sensible, useful, and correct in British eyes. De Gaulle’s original concept of union was non-political: a stillness of factions in which sincere people could purge their confusion. His first motive for being difficult was that he could not renew French patriotism if he was submerged in a council of old hands. The royalist d’Estienne d’Orves, as a Free French agent in a French gaol, told a fellow prisoner that de Gaulle had promised him to be ‘a soldier and nothing more’. The General wished to lead not a coalition but all patriots. It was a wiser and surely sadder de Gaulle who, two years later, confessed to Harold Macmillan ‘I am not a soldier’. The purists in Carlton Gardens, known to the British as ‘de Gaullists’, insisted that Free France was the only legitimate vehicle for Frenchmen assisting Britain. Anti-gaullists found this unacceptable; they disliked the self-promotion and legal fictions of Free France. They were more modest about France, and they considered Free French HQ to be a seed-bed of exotic ambitions. Dejean, inside the movement, conceded that the dissidents had a point. At this point what the Foreign Office and SO wanted was less trouble. They had lost the thread of de Gaulle’s ‘rebellion’. The gaullist logic that made enemies of all who were not enlisted friends was disconcerting; but so, conversely, were the scruples and complaints of the dissidents. Pierre Bourdan, one of the BBC’s Trois Amis, explains the differences between the ‘two unfortunate types of sectarianism’: One of a party political kind, perhaps the less serious . . . wanted to exclude from the cause of resistance all conservative tendencies and identify resistance with the parties of the Left; another, almost its opposite, treating London Gaullism as a party of power, welcomed everything, good or bad, which rallied to it openly and without reserve, but rejected unpityingly all, patriotic or not, who acted through other channels or who showed any  Passy, Souvenirs, ii. . SIS work was ‘bedevilled’ by lack of a clear division of responsibility between two of its own sections: F. H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War,  vols. (–), i. 277.  Noguères, Histoire de la Résistance en France,  vols (–), i. . He was shot soon afterwards.  Harold Macmillan, War Diaries: Politics and War in the Mediterranean, January –May  (),  ( Sept. ).

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independence whatever . . . For holders of this faith, there was neither Right nor Left, nor any personal political convictions, true or false, but only the ‘pure’ or the ‘impure’, the true ‘gaullist’ or the ‘traitor’.

Purist gaullism began as an appeal to the serious Right. Vichy’s constituency had to be divided. Since the Left was already divided, de Gaulle’s task was to fragment the Right. If this was difficult, it became no easier after June . The mark of his limited success in  was de Gaulle’s dependence on the Left after , but the bid had to be made. The call for a reconstructed polity could not be conceded to Vichy. The division of opinion among the London French was between the leftliberal intelligentsia which expected to shape French policy and those who wanted the forms of political life to be broken before the Republic was remade. The former accused de Gaulle of discouraging equals. De Gaulle had been granted political latitude on an experimental basis. The British were always relieved to hear that new figures with political or administrative experience— Palewski, Dejean, or Diethelm—had arrived to run Free France on sound lines. De Gaulle’s personal ascendancy over his early supporters seemed unhealthy. Like others, he believed the Third Republic had gone wrong. Any other view seemed incomprehensible. The dossier on de Gaulle’s politics was slender. Few knew that he had disliked ‘non-intervention’ in Spain. De Gaulle was certainly difficult to identify. But even in the early days there were Free Frenchmen of the Left: Hauck, Tixier, Cassin, Lapie, Hakin, Muselier, and Georges Boris. (Formerly chef de cabinet to Léon Blum, Boris became the most active Free French propaganda official.) They were a useful link to the sceptics. De Gaulle viewed distrust as part of the general debilitation of judgement he was fighting. He was not a military simpleton who believed that France had been overthrown by communist subversion. He was coldly rational about the fall of France. While Vichy pointed the finger at moral decay, the General attributed the defeat to the intellectual failure of the General Staff. Despite a youthful sympathy with royalism, and a mature belief that Great Men made History, de Gaulle’s equipment for political leadership was an ironic distance from standard political alignments. He was a nationalist, but otherwise took shape as a Trimmer, a military philosophe confident that he had learnt more from books and observation than others had derived from long and enervating apprenticeships in the cabals of the age. 

Pierre Bourdan [Maillaud], Carnets des jours d’attente (), .

 The Case for the Left T H E cry that France had been betrayed from within was the last sound from the French Left before it was silenced. When Churchill first spoke on the BBC French Service, even he suggested that la cinquième colonne ranked among the causes of the defeat. This ‘fifth column’ was not a neutral expression. It meant the pre-war core of capitalist conspiracy fuelling appeasement and acting for the ‘two hundred families’. Pétain had been accused of plotting the overthrow of French democracy when he was Ambassador in Spain. The charge was considered proven when he abolished the Republic. (The communists added that the socialist deputies who voted for Pétain in July had been in the plot all along.) Henri Hauck was one of the first socialists to join Free France. In November he submitted a script which went to the Foreign Office: I have already stated that in the struggle against the Germans and their accomplices, the French haute bourgeoisie, it has always been the French people which has saved France. There is a tradition of despair, of cowardice and of treason to be found in our ruling classes.

The accusation had a Jacobin and socialist pedigree. It prepared listeners for the invitation to remain ‘faithful to the democratic and revolutionary traditions of your ancestors’. The Woburn ‘blacks’ were already working up ‘Radio Travail’ to cater for this taste. But white propaganda bore some relation to foreign policy. The BBC asked the Foreign Office: ‘Are we to address other countries as though we were a revolutionary country ourselves, and if we do, will the countries we so address give us credit for anything but hypocrisy?’ They could not understand how the MOI had passed the script. The Foreign Office refused to see the haute bourgeoisie as the scapegoat for national collapse. William Strang capped a series of hostile minutes on Hauck’s script with a round rebuttal: This broadcast is pretty poor stuff and pretty bad history. The people of France are as a whole responsible for the fall of France, and the workers were as defeatist and pacifist and ca’canny as anybody else. Who among their leaders stood up strongly for resistance?

Their leaders did have charges to answer. But Léon Jouhaux, the veteran leader of the Confédération Générale du Travil (CGT), and Léon Blum, his    

J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac (ed.), Les Voix de la Liberté (), i.  ( Oct. ). BBC text,  Nov. , FO /. H. R. Cummings to Randall,  Nov. , FO /. Strang’s minute,  Nov. , FO /.

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socialist party equivalent, had not been pacifists or simple defeatists like Bonnet and Pétain. Harvey and Sandford had been in Paris until June. They understood the divisions between pacifistes and bellicistes in the socialist Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) and in the CGT, but they did not blame the troops for the generals. The socialist and communist trade union blocs—the CGT and the CGTU (Unitaire)—shared an abusive rivalry and a theoretical commitment to revolutionary socialism. Both tendencies had been caught up in the wave of syndicalist direct action which had followed the elections of . They were forced together in the Popular Front period, when the communists made gains at the expense of the socialists, but the CGT split again in  when communist activity was made illegal. There was no doubt about the anti-fascist feelings of the mass of syndicalists, but the socialists had been weakened by the ‘pacifism’ that made non-intervention in Spain possible—one of the pacifist CGT leaders, René Belin, later joined the Vichy government—while the communists flourished until they were crippled by the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Both the CGT and the Catholic syndicalist confederation temporized after Pétain took power. Only the Vichy decision to dissolve the confederations in October saved the CGT from difficult choices. The local syndicats remained in being, but Vichy’s ‘Charter of Labour’ was delayed, and the chance of getting emasculation by consent slipped away. In  the Left was leaderless, but much of the rank and file—of whatever party or confederation—retained a pride in their past. Resistance began in this milieu as individuals began sifting through their contacts for signs of activity. The MOI specialists assumed that the working-class Left was likely to resist and would try to believe in the Anglo-Americans. Strang’s point about ‘their leaders’ passed over the MOI claim that the ‘militants’—a communist expression then passing into wider use—remained sound. The December MOI directive to the BBC explained that resistance could not be based on ‘prominent’ men: mass non-co-operation would flourish only when workers sensed a ‘framework of social solidarity’ guarding their anonymity. The MOI believed, reasonably, that French workers had never been given the anti-fascist lead they wanted, and that they were easily cured of Anglophobia. A socialist initiative would ensure a non-communist pre-eminence in resistance. This was far-sighted. Syndicalist officials sceptical about resistance compromised more than themselves. They lost control of events: the CGT went underground and re-emerged at the end of the war firmly in the grip of the communists. The MOI had some allies. Spears considered that unless the Free French put down roots in the ‘industrial masses’ they would fail. Resistance in modern times could not subsist on ‘outraged patriotism’, it required ‘opposition to foreigners imposing a hated political doctrine’. But the Germans were using 

Spears, ‘Policy towards the Free French Movement’, Dec. , CAB /.

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socialist propaganda. Harvey and Sandford wanted a detailed response in the idiom of French syndicalism. The twenty-one communist deputies who resigned from their party in  and the thirty-six socialists who voted against Pétain’s pleins pouvoirs in July  were a sign of something even if they did not count as ‘leaders’ for William Strang. Blum and Jouhaux were placed under a form of detention though they received visitors. In December  a Parisian group of syndicalists, disturbed by Pétain’s prestige, produced the clandestine journal Libération to warn against collaboration either with Vichy or the military government in Paris. Libération was pro-British. Its sponsors felt the anti-German case was done so well by the BBC they could focus on collaboration. This was what the MOI predicted and wanted to support. The preservation of a France aligned with Britain required an attack on the new regime. The FO French department did not, at this point, agree at all. The officials examining Hauck’s  November script were amazed that the MOI had ignored their advice not ‘to belabour in public the Government of Marshal Pétain’. The time might come for an appeal to revolutionary feelings ‘but that time is certainly not yet’. Strang warned his French department not to antagonize Harvey. It was not quite certain that he would accept an instruction. Duff Cooper could fight if cornered. Cabinet ministers might learn how supple the treatment of Vichy had become. Strang lunched with Harvey to give him some coaching. Three months later Nigel Law received from Hauck a text about the Paris Commune of . He decided, for once, to please the diplomats and stopped it. Hauck complained to Attlee identifying the BBC as the underlying obstacle. Attlee was fraternally indignant, and Duff Cooper was delighted to hear of it. He told Attlee that the Foreign Office were ‘always reproaching us for Leftist tendencies’. He promised that Law would not yield again. The thinking at Woburn was mixed. Paul Willert, who had been in France in –, produced a self-critical paper which shared the MOI perspective. He admitted that ‘our propaganda’—Foreign Office choices reflected in SO leaflets—had not taken sides in French politics on the theory that Britain, at least for a while, could only ‘wait for the signs of a national revival’. But this might be wrong: Britain’s natural allies—‘petits patrons, peasants and workers’ who regarded Germany as their hereditary enemy and for whom Perfide Albion was ‘a meaningless abstraction’—were just beginning ‘to recover from the shock of defeat and betrayal’ and were still ‘unorganised and anonymous’, whereas ‘our enemies are a well-organised minority whose leaders are wellknown to us’. A stronger lead from London would offer the natural allies a   

R. L. Speaight,  Nov. , FO /. Duff Cooper to Attlee,  Mar. , CAB /. P. Willert, ‘The Situation in France’,  Oct. , FO /.

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helping hand out of disorientation. De Gaulle’s broadcasts, in any case, ‘violated’ the inactivist version of British policy. But it was time to control Free France carefully. Willert advised against ‘opportunistic alliances with reactionary elements, however tempting’, and requested ‘a consistent policy’ based on a strenuous effort ‘to establish contact with Socialist and Syndicalist cadres, in some cases with communists’. There was a submerged national consensus— ‘essentially republican, vaguely socialist, and radical’. British propaganda should not reflect the post-republican alternative which Vichy, Radio Paris, and the Roman Catholic hierarchy were trying to entrench even if the Third Republic was ‘certainly finished’ and ordinary Frenchmen might not have escaped entirely ‘the corruption of the last ten years’. Harvey was thinking on the same lines. On the Third Republic he was even less severe. Harvey would not blame a good piece of machinery ‘when the trouble was the chauffeur’. There was even a flash of political steel: ‘We should not . . . throw stones at the Third Republic . . . Where should we ourselves have been last June without Mr. Churchill?’ The MOI wanted no concession to the collapse of democratic conviction in France: democracy was altogether superior to tyranny save where it degenerated into a private spoils system. By the end of  the MOI enemy territories division had sorted themselves out: they wanted to resist the tide of revisionist opinion. By January Harvey had a list of the well-disposed: It is the French Socialists who have sent us a message of solidarity. Our own resistance and our propaganda may claim to have now brought round the majority of French opinion, but those who recovered first were the Bretons, the peasants and the workers. They were closely followed by the teachers and their class, and now the upper strata of the bourgeoisie are being won over.

This was rash but not absolutely groundless. ‘Brought round’ meant won back from despair and persuaded by the British claim that the war was just beginning. Harvey thought Vichy was wedded to the claim that a decadent West had been defeated. Vichy would be the victim of any propaganda which created a different view, and it was silly to pretend otherwise. Mack, the head of the French department, continued to regret certain ‘expressions of opinion’ and ‘implications as to France’s future’ made in various broadcasts, while conceding the MOI was entitled to take a view about industrial workers. He used his departmental authority on nomenclature. Though Pétain’s ministers could never be called the ‘French Government’, he asked that the expression ‘the Vichy Government’ should be dropped. Mack also provided a list of Vichy politicians not to be attacked explicitly. The MOI Harvey diary,  Dec. ; Harvey to Peterson,  Jan. , INF /. Harvey to Peterson,  Jan. , INF /.  Committee on Foreign (Allied) Resistance, rd meeting,  Jan. , FO /. Law agreed to phase it out gradually. 

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knew that the diplomats were attempting some sort of dialogue with Vichy spokesmen: We are gradually becoming conscious of an increasing number of criticisms that our line of propaganda is too democratic . . . I do not think it is too far-fetched to suppose that though Vichy wanted to be liberated from Germany and therefore desires our victory, yet they are determined to establish an anti-democratic regime there permanently and are consequently embarrassed by our propaganda . . . In any contacts our informants may have with Vichy officials they will always be told our propaganda is bad because it is too democratic. Even the BBC has become infected with this view, with the exception of the Intelligence Section of the BBC which, depending as it does on fan mail from France, gets a different view of what the French like.

The MOI issued instructions for a ‘psychological offensive’. Non-democratic systems of government (‘including by implication the Communist system’) were to be branded as ‘despotic’; democracy provided ‘the possibility of rehabilitation’ even for those who had mishandled its freedoms; and every despotism had its despot: one who was perhaps ‘kept in the dark about the true situation’. The message for the French was that their problems had arisen from the ‘frustration’ of democracy not from its practice. The MOI derived no assistance from Woburn. When Strang objected to the ‘definite left-wing flavour’ of London propaganda, he knew that ‘Mr Dalton’s propaganda is less “left-wing” than Mr Cooper’s.’ Harvey, Law, Sandford, and their French journalists made ‘difficulties’ for the Foreign Office. Nigel Law’s French policy committee was attended by Darsie Gillie from the BBC, Denis Brogan, the politics don who was Leeper’s regional director for France, and Robert Speaight from the FO French department. On  March this gathering of specialists met with Peterson and Harvey to discuss an MOI paper from Jack Sandford proposing a new theme of ‘vigorous and progressive democracy’ developed ‘without regard to the susceptibilities of Vichy’ and with no concessions to the advocates of ‘attenuated or “French” despotism’. The visitors accepted the challenge. Gillie, Brogan, and Speaight argued that this emphasis would alienate ‘the younger officers in North Africa’ trying to make the way smooth for Weygand, and, more generally, would increase the difficulty of persuading the French that de Gaulle had not ‘gone over to the Left’. Law warned his guests that the BBC liked to play the Foreign Office against the MOI and should be kept in their place. These points were ironic. The Foreign Office wanted to be played against the MOI, and the MOI wanted to move de Gaulle to the Left and had their own views on North Law to Strang,  Jan. , FO /. ‘Fan mail’ from Vichy via Spain. MOI Weekly Instructions,  Jan.  and  Dec. , FO /.  W. Strang, ‘French Propaganda from London’,  Jan. , FO /.  MOI French Section, Report on propaganda policy,  Mar. , FO /.  R. Speaight’s minute,  Mar. , FO /. Speaight suggested, provocatively, that the MOI had put up a fair case for ‘a % Socialist programme of a Second International brand’.  

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Africa. Sandford had received disquieting information about Robert Murphy, the American consul in Algiers. (Murphy was said to be complaining of the ‘enormous harm’ done by the BBC treatment of ‘Weygand, Pétain and the whole situation’: the BBC had provoked ‘bitter feeling’ against the ‘nonmilitary crowd who got away [to London] and who are pretending to act as Frenchmen’, and reinforced the belief, most unwelcome in French North Africa, that ‘the labour people’ would dictate Britain’s future’.) Sandford warned that Murphy was unsuitable as the manager of the Anglo-American intelligence pipeline which fed ideas to Woburn. Sandford wanted to revise all BBC broadcasting on the pattern of his Labour Talks. The Foreign Office case for a modus vivendi was crumbling. On  March they had to concede permission for BBC answers to Admiral Darlan’s threatening statements. In departmental terms, however, the MOI was still outgunned. Strang wanted something done about the MOI. Leeper and Vansittart offered to tame Harvey and Law by constructing an interdepartmental ‘plan’ for France on which the Foreign Office would have the last word. The ‘Morton Committee’ proposed a new committee on French propaganda chaired by R. A. Butler, the politician least hostile to Vichy. Butler, the last of Chamberlain’s coterie still at his old post, said he would chair the committee only if he were allowed to avoid ‘democratic’ and ‘urban’ politics and to consider France as a bruised soul deserving ‘tact and circumspection’. Duff Cooper, despite pleas from Eden and Dalton, refused to consider this muzzling committee. Russell Page, the BBC French Service Organizer, confessed to the Ministry that Britain needed ‘very badly’ an additional programme free of the constraints which the BBC, attempting to be a surrogate French Home Service, imposed on itself. Page had allowed the Duchesne team to keep the ethos of their programme as un-English as possible. The BBC thought this was the right mask for British propaganda. Jacques Duchesne’s authority at the BBC stemmed from his acknowledged ability as a producer and his vital role as conciliator of the political tempers of his team. The BBC French included both gaullists and non-gaullists (the majority), but the Free French resented that Duchesne was not their man. This difficulty was never resolved. It was quite distinct from the question of taking up anti-Vichy positions. If Duchesne was insufficiently gaullist, he was also too gentle with the maréchaliste opinion to please the Left. Duchesne’s mission to reconcile honest opinions would have been impossible subject to Free French discipline. When he, Bourdan, and Oberlé spoke as ‘the three friends’ they expressed a range of views which kept Private letter to Sandford,  Feb. , FO /. D. Morton, ‘French Propaganda’,  Mar.  and R. A. Butler’s minutes,  and  Mar. , FO /.  Page to Wellington,  Apr. , BBC E//. He suggested a short-wave station in New York.  

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one lesson in view: that the Armistice had been a mistake for which the price had yet to be paid. Arguably, this was insufficient. Les Trois Amis were very popular, but critics wondered if Duchesne could teach an audience as well as he could hold it. Darsie Gillie accused Law and Sandford of disliking Les Français Parlent aux Français because the programme attempted ‘a synthesis of French opinion and feeling outside their control’. This begged the question of what the ‘synthesis’ was for. The MOI were already a little agitated, or excited, by a conjecture that communism was reviving. After the Armistice the PCF, although they raged against British imperialism, were polite about the German occupier. There was no point in responding. After May  British anti-communism dried up. Churchill waited patiently for Moscow to change sides. It was not difficult to be sceptical about the Nazi–Soviet Pact. If the French communists were, in truth, helplessly obedient, their tune could change again. The MOI knew the PCF were making a rival appeal to the audience they wanted. An early report from Paris stated that the wall slogan ‘Vive Thorez!’— in honour of the communist leader—was not scrubbed from walls as quickly or invariably as ‘Vive de Gaulle!’ and that the Germans seemed to be permitting or even encouraging communist activity. The PCF’s attempts to legalize l’Humanité were probably not known in London, but revolutionary cynicism was expected and understood. In Paris the German military government negotiated with PCF delegates, and even released them from gaol after the French police tried to interfere. But in August the Germans concluded that Vichy had more to offer than the communists. What the British feared most was the renunciation of patriotism. It was surely with relief that the MOI heard the new communist slogan Ni dominion britannique, ni protectorate allemande. The BBC did not comment. Reports confirmed that the Germans were ‘doing deals’ with the communists, but the bigger picture was of Communist resurgence as PCF activists flouted the French decrees of / prohibiting Party activity. In January the MOI forbade direct attacks on the communists or the Soviet government although it allowed occasional unforced references to the RussoGerman Pact. The communists made an unqualified attack on Vichy. Although the highest leadership remained clandestine, regional officials were told to resume open organization and agitation. After some hesitation, due to uncertain German intentions, the French police—even in the occupied zone—mounted the first wave of arrests of communists. In Bordeaux, Charles Tillon, later national leader of the armed communist resistance, rejected his instructions, but in Paris Fernand Grenier, later the party’s London agent,   

Gillie to Kirkpatrick,  May , FO /. Intelligence reports, Francis Paton to Halifax,  Oct. , FO /. MOI Intelligence Reports,  Oct. and  Oct. , FO /.

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obeyed orders and was soon in prison with hundreds of others. The possibility of an ‘anti-German turn’ in PCF propaganda was mentioned in the MOI Intelligence Report of  October. Anti-Nazi leaflets were produced by dissident provincial communists. When the policy of ‘collaboration’ was declared openly in October, the PCF (like the BBC) held their fire. Pétain was one thing but explicit criticism of Germany another. Then came Molotov’s November visit to Berlin. Incredibly, Stalin demanded Finland, Bulgaria, and a military base on the Bosporus. In December Russo-German relations were obviously deteriorating. On  December, l’Humanité printed a ‘Letter to Communist militants’ signed ‘Thorez–Duclos’. (Maurice Thorez was in Moscow but pretended to be in France until ; Jacques Duclos, his deputy, received radio messages from Moscow.) This open letter mentioned the ‘liberty and independence of France’ and boasted that the PCF was the only party which expressed popular sentiment against collaboration. It claimed that in other countries there were patriots ready to join revolutionary workers in a struggle against national oppression. This was militant but opaque. On a strict reading it merely threatened that communists would find support for the demand for German rule to be less exacting. The key term ‘national liberation’ was not yet employed. However, a further ‘Thorez–Duclos’ statement in March  characterized Hitler’s New Order as ‘scandalous enslavement’ for France, but balanced this with a warning that de Gaulle and de Larminat (in Africa) would ensure ‘the loss of our country’s freedom in the event of a British victory’. The party’s anti-fascist investment was largely untapped. Party publications were rarely impolite about Nazi ideology. But enough was said to indicate, to the very faithful, that the party wanted to lead resentment at the occupation. The communist party had gone underground before the occupation began. In due course communist security compelled the admiration of SOE. When they joined the Resistance they were well ahead of the rest in clandestine skills. It was a long time before the party press had any serious clandestine rival in the occupied zone. Their sympathisers retained more than a foothold in the syndicats; and their strong-arm groups, the Organisations Speciales (OS), although used at first simply to discourage gendarmes from interfering with the distribution of party literature, were by June  a lightly armed force. The PCF supported the trial of the politicians ‘responsible’ for the War, for which they offered prosecution witnesses. But in other respects, the communist attack on the Vichy reform programme set a standard which the MOI wanted the socialists to set. Charles Maurras, once the mentor of the patriotic Right but now a collaborationist, said the Gaullists were communists. Perhaps he was embarrassed by the rumour that Free France was full of people  There was a ‘distinct anti-German inflection’ in l’Humanité from  Oct.: S. Courtois, La PCF  dans la Guerre (), . Ibid. –.

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nurtured on his journal Action Française. But the most incorrigible antiGermans were, in truth, yesterday’s anti-fascists (‘communists’) who were trying to regroup behind the most unexpected mask for the Left—de Gaulle. The situation reports of the Paris Propaganda-Abteilung amplify this view: ‘an investigation of the Parisian working classes revealed that in greater part they favoured de Gaulle, this being principally true of the previously communist workers’. Only the BBC had a large patriotic audience, which spanned the entire French Left. At this stage the existence of a clandestine PCF was better known to the police than to erstwhile PCF voters. Very few communists would have seen any sort of clandestine publication in . The communist belief that great opportunities beckoned was correct. But Moscow’s hopes for a partnership with Germany postponed the moment the party could recover their support. The Ministry wanted to strike first and secure for an Anglophile anti-fascism those ‘liable to fall under Communist influence’. Outside Malet Street only Spears had a similar sense that time would run out for those failing to make the right commitments. Jack Sandford’s intelligence reports became commentaries on the error of trying to keep anti-Pétainism and socialism off the air: [The PCF] rise since the disintegration at the outbreak of war is one of the most striking phenomena of the Pétain regime and is certainly due in great part to the propitious atmosphere created by this regime. Vichy and its more influential supporters . . . are now seriously pre-occupied with a Communist menace which some of them feigned to fear formerly. The more Communists are arrested, the more active the Party seems to become . . . It represents the only co-ordinated force of resistance to oppression.

This was unduly flattering. (The term ‘oppression’ was even the approved Comintern expression: it referred obliquely to Germany without judging German intentions.) The ‘co-ordinated force’ had picked itself off the floor and was improving its propaganda. The PCF was alive and trying to kick. But in even deeper obscurity groups were forming which wanted explicit resistance to occupation. They were prepared to sample Vichy ‘oppression’ before condemning it. Criticism of Vichy gave the communists something familiar to say, but it was not an easy road to mass approval; it resembled the previous fight against oppression in –. Desmond Morton, a Catholic conservative, distrusted the radical assumptions made at the MOI: ‘the further Left you go in politics, the more you lose your sense of humour’. Malet Street did have a rather puritan ethos. But the plea that Britain must not leave the French Left lost and isolated was convincing. Morton shared the Foreign Office idea that Britain must not champion  against Pétain, and he grumbled that ‘many of our own front populaire fail   

Allgemeines Stimmungsbild, – Apr., RW/ (MA). French Section (MOI) Weekly Instructions,  Jan. , FO /. Weekly Instructions,  Apr. , FO /.

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to realise that this is quite different from the French front populaire’. There was the rub. The Foreign Office was all too aware that France lacked the stability of the Sceptred Isle. The Popular Front had exemplified the French disease. It was understood as a double fracture in national solidarity: workingclass triumphalism in May  provoking the answering venom of the French patronat. But distaste for the Popular Front now implied consent to the Vichy account of the Third Republic. Its incorporation in British propaganda, under the colour of moderation, was a concession which the MOI refused to make. For Morton front populaire stood for communist influence. But across a very broad Left—only the MOI grasped this—the old Republic was condemned not by the existence of a radical Popular Front in  but by the Front’s failure to deliver. In June Ian Black, the new BBC French Talks Organizer, adopted a variant of the MOI position. He wanted powerful progressive propaganda: We are not appealing sufficiently to the French workers. Our dilemma here is that we are still terrified by the Communist Party. Mr Hauck told me . . . that he was certain that England did not wish to see a Communist France and that consequently he was anxious to build up solidarity amongst the trade unions and their leaders of ‘liberal’ persuasion, which would be a counter blast to the strength of the Communists at the present moment. This attempt to group what we Anglo-Saxons call the ‘decent’ and ‘respectable’ labour leaders is in my opinion doomed to failure . . . It is our own confusion which shows through the whole of our propaganda effort.

Denis Brogan of SO erected an equally sophisticated political hurdle when reasoning that because ‘the Communist influence’ was ‘one of our great obstacles’ one was obliged to show that revolutionary defeatism would not lead to the overthrow of capitalism. These views were incorrect for the reason that Brogan gave as a caution: ‘If we cannot count on a revival of patriotism in France we are largely wasting our time’. Brogan and Black clouded the issue. The propaganda requirement was more simple. The way to prevent Vichy putting down roots into good French soil was to threaten it. In – this could be done authoritatively only from London. The most useful theme the MOI could offer French resistance was the warning that Vichy would not survive the Nazi defeat. If ‘respectable’ labour leaders kept clear of resistance, did they know what London wanted? This, not their inadequacy as radicals, was the problem. London did not yet know the mentality of the Resistance. The question was not what to promise the workers but who would recruit their sons and daughters. Any figure who committed himself to opposition might refresh his reputation. Even Léon Blum won back public respect. Syndicalists speaking in favour of Morton to Mack,  May , FO /. Ian Black (French Talks) to Page,  June , and Brogan’s memorandum,  May , BBC E /.  

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Britain, wherever they had stood in the spectrum, were invaluable. That there was a standard of hard-edged syndicalism against which they would be found wanting was an illusion. As Morton suspected, there was a room for a lighter touch. The socialisms of the French Left produced heat and little light; SFIO dogmatism, in particular, was a costly form of party self-defence which failed to prevent splits, failed to block the communists, but did damage France. Resistant syndicalists would not be of the wrong kind, they would be too few. The demand for a new way to unlock working-class energy was a search for the Philosopher’s Stone. The bottleneck in active resistance was not motivation but the difficulty which motivated people had in finding each other. As Newsome believed, with the audience that mattered the ideological advantage lay with Britain. A German report from south-western France reported that the communists were suffering from ‘inner uncertainty’ and thinking for themselves: ‘Communist elements believe in a Russian intervention in Britain’s favour and, since they have so far been disappointed in hopes of this kind, they even advance strong criticisms of Russian policy, whose goals are unintelligible to them’. The British were too diffident. The doctrinal question was not as important as it seemed. The MOI proposed to revive democratic sentiment where it was least damaged. On  June  the PCF was reconciled to Albion. This undid both the damage to left-wing morale and made the non-communist Left less special. Some early resistance movements had a clearer political definition than the later recruitment, but resistance was less crudely political than the MOI predicted. There was a debate about ‘internal fascism’, but the communists took care to make their contribution in strictly patriotic terms. It was in practice not theory that socialist leaders were found wanting. They were too slow. The SFIO never achieved the status in the Resistance that vigour and assurance in  could have secured. A few resistant socialists, loyal to the Blum tradition, organized two zonal Comités d’Action Socialiste in , but they decided to help existing resistance movements not to compete with them. Nevertheless, the MOI guess about the socialist militant and his supply of friends and contacts was correct. SFIO militants did not have the sheer vigour of the communists, but SFIO members were the indispensable element in many resistance movements.  

For a similar verdict see Tony Judt, Marxism and the French Left (), , . Allgemeines Stimmungsbild, – May , RW/ (MA).

 Second Thoughts on Vichy I N winter / the shape of the war remained completely open. Germany might have wanted French support for a campaign against British positions in the Mediterranean, or, opposing German demands, Pétain might have fled to Algiers. Pétain did not believe French North Africa could be held against the Germans. Perhaps he was right. French North Africa was, in a sense, a useful buffer between Tripoli and Gibraltar. But the small signs suggested that Vichy was preparing for a German victory. This was certainly true of Pierre Laval, the chief minister. Joining the war against Britain would have broken up the Vichy coalition. It would have meant a bitter struggle within the armed forces and the colonies. It was an unlikely outcome, but it was just possible. Until Hitler’s strategy became clear, the factions in Vichy and the conditions under which Weygand might declare for Britain seemed very important. If Pétain were driven into the arms of collaborationists by the lash of émigré abuse, he might tolerate a German grand design in French Africa. Fortunately, Wavell’s success against the Italians drew German attention to the other end of the Mediterranean. This left French North Africa as a backwater. But the Mediterranean contest might have been quite different. In September the Navy took de Gaulle and Free French troops to Dakar to acquire French West Africa. But Dakar remained loyal to Pétain. The ships were fired on and driven away. There was grumbling in the Foreign Office that the sponsors of the Free French had taken a propaganda trick too seriously. Perhaps there could be no ‘alternative regime’ to Vichy. Halifax warned the Cabinet that France’s power of resistance ‘did not necessarily’ reside with de Gaulle. Quite suddenly there seemed to be no useful goal beyond minimizing Franco-German collaboration, and the view that this was urgent may have had SIS support. There were also damaging Whitehall anecdotes—some no doubt true—about Free French security leaks, and the first of many calls to ‘reorganise Carlton Gardens’, that is, the Free French HQ. Vansittart took the Dakar ‘fiasco’ seriously and wanted, as a remedy, to dispatch de Gaulle and his followers to Egypt to fight and win some reputation: ‘We had pushed him halfway up the hill, but he has now slid back to the bottom, and at the bottom he will stay if he is brought back here as a commander not only defeated but WP(),  Sept. , FO /. Christopher Andrew, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (), ; Mack’s minute,  Oct. , FO /.  

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lacking in judgment and ill-served by his Intelligence Department.’ The propagandists, on the other hand, were not dismayed by the failure of the Free French to steal colonies. Their problem was not how de Gaulle was rated by colonials in Dakar and Damascus, it was how to re-establish a bond with the French people. In late October Professor Louis Rougier, a Vichy emissary of some sort, reached London to plead for a non-aggression pact about colonies. He may have tried to deceive both sides for their own good. Pétain, later, thought he was a British agent. Rougier was seen by Churchill, Halifax, and Strang because he promised to be a channel to General Weygand in Algiers. He was told that no arrangement between London and Vichy could preclude the defection of further colonies to de Gaulle. Rougier later claimed that he was promised that the BBC would not make personal attacks on Pétain. It is likely that Halifax and Strang made their readiness to continue a restriction of criticism already in force sound like a promise to be more considerate. This is not excluded by establishing that Rougier’s aide-mémoire on his London talks was, as published later, a doctored text. On  November a French department official admitted that ‘we are still trying to reach some sort of accommodation with the better elements of the Pétain regime’. He was complaining that the MOI were not being helpful. Hitler and Pétain met at Montoire on  October. Laval had arranged everything and Pétain scarcely knew what was happening. The official position was that constitutional obstacles prevented a war with Britain, but the talk was of military collaboration. Hitler received new pledges of goodwill. The whole episode displeased most Frenchmen and damaged Vichy. Pétain made a broadcast on  October in favour of ‘the way of collaboration’. Anxiously, Halifax telegraphed de Gaulle: ‘we shall avoid any public condemnation of Vichy government on the assumption that their betrayal was minimal’. Britain did not exploit Pétain’s sudden vulnerability although de Gaulle, at least, was allowed to make a fierce response. Churchill wanted Weygand to defect, if possible with Pétain’s permission, but he warned the Cabinet on  November not to become ‘obsessed’ with the idea that Vichy must not be provoked further. The Foreign Office were pleased to hear that Pétain, in conversation with Goering on  November, had ruled out German and French troops fighting together. (They did not know that Vichy had tried to get permission and equipment for counter-attacks against the African territories which had declared for de Vansittart’s minute,  Sept. , FO /. See Robert Frank in J.-P. Azéma and F. Bédarida (ed.), Le Régime Vichy et les Français (), –, . The deception has long been evident, but the episode is now better understood.  R. Speaight’s minute,  Nov. , FO /.  Pétain, Discours aux Français (), ; F. Kersaudy, Churchill and de Gaulle (), .  R. T. Thomas, Britain and Vichy: The Dilemma of Anglo-French Relations ‒ (), , .  

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Gaulle.) Six months later Pétain made an interesting complaint about Radio London: ‘subtle, insidious propaganda’ had aimed at dividing the French Empire; ‘suspended for a moment, the appeals for dissidence are taken up again in a tone each day more arrogant’. Vichy may have supposed that Rougier had obtained a few useful courtesies which had not lasted. De Gaulle was aware of Rougier’s attempt to soften British propaganda, and the staff at Carlton Gardens were anxious. One BBC discussion of ‘collaboration’ is worth examining in detail. There was a studio discussion by the Trois Amis at the end of October in the aftermath of Hitler’s meeting with Pétain. Each speaker took a distinct position: Duchesne as a Pétainist with doubts; Oberlé as a simple anti-German; and Bourdan as the man who saw through Vichy. Bourdan argued that the regime intended a ‘complicity’ in Nazi crimes. Duchesne accepted that there was a group in power whose political instincts (older than Vichy) blinded the whole government to the significance of British resistance and the permanent interests of France; Darlan—the Anglophobe Navy commander whose promises Churchill had not trusted before Oran—was identified as more dangerous than Laval or Baudouin. The Trois Amis all agreed that collaboration could not win France a better negotiating position or favoured treatment in the new Europe. An attempt to express respect for Pétain was slapped down. The government should not look for inspiration in Mein Kampf. This was as strong as anything the BBC had produced. Churchill allowed Halifax to investigate some very limited colonial accommodation with Vichy and Halifax was prepared to ‘play down de Gaulle’. It is unlikely that Churchill agreed to this, but he was rarely willing to forswear the pursuit of ingenious advantages. Dalton, despite his opinions, would not commit himself. On  November he gathered his officials at Woburn to discuss France. Gladwyn Jebb put the Malet Street case for a focus on the industrial working class. But the discussion of class was a perambulation round the political obstacle. Leeper knew what was meant. He put the FO objection in strong form: ‘Left revolution’ would conflict with ‘the declared intention of HMG to arrive at a modus vivendi with the Pétain government’. He preferred a revolt ‘led by someone of position’. This implied Weygand in Algiers rather than de Gaulle in London, but it was a peculiar modus vivendi. Dalton was defensive: he said he meant not revolution but sabotage. After this Leeper knew that his Minister would not make difficulties. Pétain, Discours aux Français, – ( Apr. ); emphasis added. J.- L. Crémieux-Brilhac (ed.), Les Voix de la Liberté (), i. – ( Oct. ).  D. Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan (),  ( Nov.); see also M. Gilbert, Winston Churchill, vi. .  ‘Policy on France’,  Nov. , FO /. Harvey later recorded that his wish to ‘increase contact with Left Wing and CGT opinion in France’ had been opposed by ‘the Political Warfare people’: J. Harvey (ed.), War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (),  ( Apr. ).  

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What was ‘declared’ was not as clear as Leeper claimed. Leeper’s ‘modus vivendi’ is found in a telegram Churchill sent to de Gaulle on  November asking him to return from Africa: ‘Laval and revengeful Darlan are trying to force a declaration of war against us and rejoice in provoking minor naval incidents. We have hopes of Weygand in Africa, and no one must underestimate what would follow if he rallied. We are trying to arrive at some modus vivendi with Vichy which will minimise the risk of incidents and will enable favourable forces in France to develop.’ Britain did not have the reserves to rush around Africa defending de Gaulle’s colonial gains from counter-strokes. Vichy commanders might or might not keep U-boats out of French African ports on the Atlantic. The Admiralty lacked the ships for a tight blockade of the French Mediterranean coast. Making a bribe of a necessity, Britain might trade food concessions for anti-Axis vigilance in Algiers and Casablanca. Sam Hoare, the Ambassador in Madrid, was asked to explore the possibility. Baudouin told Hoare that France wanted a colonial modus vivendi. He suggested the British might wish to ‘discourage the political organisation of de Gaulle, and only support his military organisation’. Churchill contemplated a very provisional, partial truce in Africa and the Near East. But he insisted that it would only work if British threats were sustained and there was no hint of a ‘nice, soft, cosy, forgiving England’. SIS too had important business in Vichy France. Perhaps ‘C’ too considered that an apparent cooling in the AngloGaullist relationship would be helpful. It was distasteful that Vichy had deliberately pinned the word ‘collaboration’ to itself when Hitler and Pétain met at Montoire. But a more extensive Franco-German entente was formulated by Otto Abetz, the German Ambassador to France, and Fernand de Brinon, Vichy’s delegate in Paris. Berlin was sceptical about sincere collaboration and Laval’s rivals were reluctant to embrace it, but in Paris a genuine alliance seemed possible. On  December the BBC were told to keep the Laval/Abetz/de Brinon trio ‘under constant fire’ while leaving scope for a more intense attack on Laval. At Foreign Office request the BBC fell quiet about Laval’s rivals: General Weygand (‘silence for the present’), Admiral Darlan (‘avoid all criticism and indeed lay off completely’) and Baudouin (‘lay off ’). A week later Pétain did exactly what London hoped. He dismissed Laval as his first minister after a complex Vichy intrigue which included figures in contact with SIS and the Free French agent Pierre Fourcaud. Halifax and Leeper had obviously known something in advance. But Laval fell because Pétain’s entourage feared, rightly, that he was threatening the ambiguity they needed in France. There was Churchill, The Second World War,  vols. (–), ii. . P. Baudouin, Private Diaries (), ; Thomas, Britain and Vichy, .  Directive for the BBC,  Dec. , BBC E//.  See Michèle Cointet, Le Conseil National de Vichy (), . H. Navarre offers an account of Anglo-French contacts: Les Services de Renseignements ‒ (), –. Fourcaud (–) had a past in intelligence and the Cagoule.  

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no marked change in British propaganda, but there was hopeful curiosity about the new Darlan–Flandin–Huntziger triumvirate. The BBC directive now distinguished between personal attacks on Pétain and descriptions of the Marshal as the ‘unwitting instrument’ of collaborating politicians. But speculation about Pétain’s role was discouraged. The SO idea of political warfare was to encourage conspiracy against the collaborationist hard core at Vichy. The quasi-autonomy of French North Africa should not be prejudiced before the opposition was ready to act. Ideological flavours merely got in the way. Rex Leeper had been calling propaganda the handmaiden of power politics for years. He wanted subtlety. There were some anti-Germans in Vichy, and perhaps they were the ‘Vichy’ with whom Leeper wanted a new relationship. But his modus vivendi was an exploration not a done deal. What he seized on as the ‘declared intention of HMG’ was at the outer edge of what the War Cabinet might accept. Desmond Morton’s reflections on Rougier provide a more convincing version of what was intended: I am convinced that the majority of Vichy gangsters would gladly sacrifice one kidney if they could thereby destroy de Gaulle. In this I would include Weygand himself. I thus ask myself if it is not desirable to reach a secret agreement with Vichy not to attack Gaulliste Africa. If so, what is the solatium we offer to Vichy in exchange? In view of the plans already made it could hardly be an undertaking not to assist de Gaulle to acquire additional Vichy colonies . . . Let the Vichy worms do some more wriggling. They are fishing in troubled waters with themselves as bait.

For Morton a suggestion of modus vivendi, defined or not, was merely the pennyweight which might swing the balance in Vichy against colonial retaliation. Halifax prepared a Cabinet paper on Rougier and his messages. Then he was invited to become Ambassador in Washington, that is, to resign. The private office sent the paper to the MOI on the day Anthony Eden became Foreign Secretary. Harvey tore into it as ‘the pure doctrine of Vichy’, and dismissed Rougier’s version of what the BBC were saying: ‘we do not harp on the defeat . . . and we have laid off speculation about Weygand’s intentions. We make no use of communists.’ The MOI sent a rebuke to the Foreign Office for taking such criticisms seriously. Churchill let the discussion take its course. Though he was watching for opportunities in Vichy, he wanted Anglo-French friction both as a goad and as a smoke-screen if the goad worked. He was opposed to any serious concessions. The Free French gave warnings of a Vichy–German military pact to unleash an attack on Gibraltar. But it did not happen. At the start of February, the Free  

Morton to Mack,  Dec. , FO /. Harvey to Peterson,  Jan. , INF /. But Labarthe was a transparent fellow-traveller.

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French predicted that Vichy was about to hand over to the Germans the naval base of Toulon and a foothold in North Africa. Leeper then announced a ‘critical situation of the first magnitude’ and revealed his assumptions about a modus vivendi. He proposed to ‘strengthen Pétain’s hand in resisting the Germans’. He thought Pétain was enough of a free agent to let Weygand know when the time had come to disobey instructions. Leeper had entered the hall of mirrors. Strang found it ‘curious’ that ‘our propaganda’ should reach this point. He was as much sceptical as surpised. Dalton complained to the Prime Minister that de Gaulle had been ‘flat-footed’ in his pronouncements and ‘too abusive of Vichy and the Marshal’. Churchill told the Foreign Office that ‘an end should be put to the cold-shouldering of General de Gaulle and the Free French movement, who are the only people who have done anything for us’. But he told Beneš that France would be back in the war by the end of March. Perhaps de Gaulle was to be Britain’s friend in Weygand’s Algiers. The contest inside Vichy, taken seriously, would marginalize de Gaulle. Unless he was ‘flat-footed’ he would be misunderstood. The strain of choosing between Pétain and de Gaulle produced in France a common and persistent pseudo-solution: the idea that de Gaulle was Pétain’s London agent, and that what the two men said about each other was a disguise. On this view de Gaulle was a useful but junior figure. It was Pétain who aroused the stronger expectations: he was the clear head that could play both sides against the other or the resister who understood that France must wait. In either version de Gaulle was a chess piece, Pétain the player. The theory of Pétain’s double jeu was attractive for people who wished the Free French well yet refused to provoke the Germans to enter unoccupied France. De Gaulle considered the rumour of a ‘secret accord’ between the Marshal and himself as a comfortable myth which allowed the believer to refrain from choosing. Even Vichy officials could believe that the intentions of Pétain and de Gaulle would become complementary if the German military position weakened. Hard words could then be retracted: Pétain’s armistice would have saved French North Africa and Gibraltar. This prospect was very difficult to exclude as a possibility and immensely attractive for most people. The danger of the ‘double game’ theory was that people who liked the idea of an anti-German move did not trouble to prioritize their loyalties. They did not prepare what they should do if the right moment came without a lead from the Marshal. For some, the double jeu was a humiliation to be cast off once the British took the offensive, for others it offered a line of retreat if the Russians ever reached Berlin. With a dash of ambiguity holders of these views could speak to each other, and obtain introductions, as if they were of the same  Leeper to Mack (FO),  Feb. ; Strang’s minute,  Feb. ; Dalton to PM,  Feb. , FO /.  Churchill to Foreign Office,  Feb. , CAB /; Colonel Passy, Souvenirs (), i. .  Henri Frenay, La Nuit finira: Mémoires de Résistance ‒ (), .

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opinion. The difference between being far-sighted and very confused could be a narrow one. Pierre Pucheu could be Vichy’s Minister of the Interior in  and yet present himself to de Gaulle in Algiers in  with amazing selfconfidence. Even his enemies were taken aback by the composure and apparent good faith with which he faced his subsequent trial and execution. Belief in the double jeu rarely worked to the advantage of the believer. Working against it were the logic of civil war, genuine defeatism in Vichy, and the unyielding German demand for collaboration without rewards as the answer to an obvious trick. Pierre Fourcaud, one of the first Free French agents to get into France, made contact with several friendly figures at Vichy, including members of secret services predisposed to various sorts of jeux. They sent him back to London with a suggestion that abusive propaganda should continue but only as the mask of a working relationship between an undefined patriotic core at Vichy and Carlton Gardens. De Gaulle reproached his agent: Pétain was foxy; he would welcome the rumour of a secret alliance, and draw advantage from it, unless every feeler was met by a flinty insistence that the Armistice meant nothing but capitulation. But SIS could not be expected to keep away from Vichy. Pétain’s prestige was not deflated by the winter revival of Britain’s fortunes because it enhanced the impression that France retained some cards. But the Paris Propaganda-Abteilung warned that Vichy did not command the respect reserved for Pétain. The rumour of France joining the war against Britain had given communists and ‘Anglophiles’ an ‘easier game’ since most of Pétain’s support was against such a war. An Abwehr report mentioned that not everyone who respected Pétain approved of the Armistice and many were disturbed by German propaganda support for him. By February the opinion survey was gloomy: One must not in any way disguise the fact that the majority of the population continue to believe in an eventual British victory and their attitude and behaviour reflect this. The result is that receptivity to enemy propaganda—England (English radio!), de Gaulle and the Communists—is greater than it was some months ago.

Another report in March confirmed this picture of French sympathies: Since December  . . . anti-German opinion has grown much worse. The Français moyens are today all against any collaboration with Germany and adopt the attitude: Be patient and do whatever one has to do under the terms of the Armistice, but nothing more . . . The population has recovered faith in France’s future and  per cent of it hopes for an Anglo-American victory.

Passy, Souvenirs, i. –. Allgemeines Stimmungsbild, – Nov. , RW/ (MA); Stimmungsbericht aus Paris,  Dec. , RW/; Allgemeines Stimmungsbild, – Feb. , RW/. 

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This report accepted that British claims about American industrial resources were now taken seriously and detected a belief among Pétainists that the French fleet would one day be used against Germany. The double game was a folk belief. The pressure on de Gaulle not to be ‘flat-footed’ did not last very long. On  March  Admiral Darlan made a rash broadcast threatening to defy the British by convoying French supply ships across the Atlantic. He was trying to exploit Vichy’s partial immunity from the British blockade to make a favourable impression on Berlin. This pushed British suspicion of Vichy back to a high level. The Foreign Office could not withhold permission for a reply and for trenchant criticism. The Chiefs of Staff decided that French North Africa should be drawn in to the war ‘as soon as possible’. But Dejean, having come from Morocco to join Free France, warned that generals Weygand and Noguès would not stir on Britain’s behalf. The window of strategic opportunity was in any case shut by Rommel with his first Libyan offensive in April. No sort of conspiratorial progress was made in French North Africa. Leeper’s hopes were dashed. He admitted that Weygand was ‘a broken reed’ and that American ‘infiltration’ of French North Africa had produced a ‘lot of wishful thinking’ and nothing of great value. Weygand’s moment had passed. He was dismissed in November and ended up in a German prison. The idea that a maréchaliste colonial-military establishment in Tunis, Algiers, and Rabat might be cajoled into disobedience subsided for a time. The best time for British propaganda to have struck both at Pétain and Vichy with lasting effect was in the autumn and winter of /. The RAF and Wavell’s troops in Egypt created a resurgence of confidence in Britain’s prospects, while the Franco-German negotiations and the emphasis on ‘collaboration’ were recent and disquieting. The war news was consistently good until March. Thereafter the British position, and so the persuasiveness of Anglo-gaullism, crumbled again. It does not follow that a case made against Vichy in the winter would have melted in spring. Value-judgements are easier to make than to set aside. They resist erosion. The tide was not taken at its flood. Pétain’s authority was not disputed. Some of Rommel’s supplies were shipped through Marseille. The MOI had to ask the press to keep quiet: to admit the Navy could not stop it would reveal too much. When the bubble of British success burst, Pétain looked wiser than the Yugoslavs and Greeks. After the fall of Athens the German propaganda office in Paris reported that the prestige of BBC news had been dented: ‘the politicalpropagandistic effect of British radio no longer clearly outweighs German explanatory efforts . . . the position resembles that of July last year’. German    

‘Zur Lage in unbesetzten Frankreich’, Mar. , RW/ (MA). Morton, ‘French Propaganda’,  Mar. , FO /. Leeper to Strang,  June , FO /. Lagebericht der Propaganda-Abteilung Frankreich, – Apr. , RW/ (MA).

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jamming of BBC medium-wave broadcasts to France, which had been ineffective, became stronger in April in the occupied zone. Jamming made listening unpleasant, and left listeners impatient for facts and unreceptive to mere argument. Pétain’s position was stronger than ever: ‘For  out of  Frenchmen the Marshal represents France and is beyond criticism. Even in working class circles he is considered as entirely decent and as the nation’s guide by all kinds of political opponent.’ But the argument in London was not over. The MOI French section hit a wall of opposition just as the trend in Vichy strengthened their case. There was another ‘row’ on  April when Peterson censured BBC officials—Salt, Newsome, and Page—for ignoring MOI directives. When the Ministry tried to construct a May Day programme, Duchesne offered his resignation to the BBC. Law hoped in vain that the offer would be accepted. The threat of resignation was effective. In the Foreign Office Strang was aghast at the ‘levity’ of Law’s suggestion that Duchesne and his ‘gang’ could be replaced. He thought that the programme Les Français Parlent aux Français was ‘one of the best in the history of broadcasting’. Sandford’s claim that BBC broadcasts, except de Gaulle’s, were heard in France as British, was held up as ‘a deliberately misleading theory’ designed to torpedo the choice to be as French as possible. Sandford confused ‘is’ with ‘ought’. But he was wrong because French listeners thought that Radio Londres was gaullist, though this impression was not at all intended. Strang still felt able to accuse the MOI of not striving to prevent the Vichy government from ‘sliding down the slippery slope of collaboration’. But if French resistance was to the slide not the slitherer, it was still interior to the Vichy regime. Strang could not impose this interpretation, and he could not demonstrate that milder propaganda would inhibit collaboration. Sandford made the wounding charge that ‘certain Vichy elements’ had been pleased by the ‘softened tone of our broadcasts in recent months’. This had probably been true. But the diplomats felt provoked and became combative. Ivone Kirkpatrick defended Duchesne. He now operated inside the BBC as Duff Cooper’s ‘Adviser’, and he was too ambitious to be a post box for Harvey’s division. He accused Sandford of ‘stupidity or dishonesty’, and argued that the BBC had hammered Darlan (‘hip and thigh’) for the last six weeks. This was an incomplete answer to MOI complaints about ‘recent months’. Vansittart, who considered himself England’s senior Francophile, claimed that most Frenchmen in London doubted that Harvey or Sandford understood France, and he urged their removal. The French department      

Allgemeines Stimmungsbild, – May, RW/ (MA). Minute by S. Tallents,  Apr. , BBC E//. Strang’s minute,  May , FO /. Claude Bourdet, L’Aventure incertaine (), . Strang’s minute,  May , FO /. French Intelligence Report No. , FO /.

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member of the Law committee, claimed that the MOI French section were obsessed with ‘the line of straight, blunt invective’. The MOI could do no other. They believed that ‘the vigorous tone of the de Gaulle propaganda’— but not the rest of the London output—had ‘stirred many people deeply’. The critics no longer offered arguments about policy. The BBC’s new reputation for good French broadcasting was the rampart behind which they dug in. Sandford’s complaints were mild precursors of those that came from Spears in Cairo. Spears lamented that Free France was going nowhere since Britain was ‘for ever condoning, negotiating, being polite to its most deadly opponents’. This was too rhetorical to be appreciated in the Foreign Office. Spears believed that Vichy was becoming troublesome because its domestic position was secure. By refusing to strike hard, London had not unsettled them. Spears was amazed by the complacency of GHQ Cairo about French territory. The French in Syria and Somaliland had believed, in , they should have to submit to Cairo. But General Wavell refused to take these prizes merely to promote Free France. His local advisers invented their own modus vivendi. This nonchalance accompanied the softening of Anglo-Vichy relations in late . When the Germans arrived in Tripoli there was even less interest in Vichy colonies. They had kept quiet since refusing to rally to de Gaulle. But then came the reward. German aircraft were detected in Syria. Spears’s hot and indignant dispatch made a strong case. Someone had blundered: ‘the faith of the French in Pétain and Weygand has been enhanced by the respect we have displayed towards them’. After indignant instructions from London, Cairo reluctantly mounted an invasion with Free French support. Political indifference in  to a likely ralliement of the French Levant was paid for by the , Allied and , Vichy French casualties sustained a year later. On reaching Beirut and Damascus British commanders did not conceal their coolness about their Free French allies, and Vichy officers were returned to France bearing this tale. On  May Darlan went to Germany to negotiate with Hitler. Pétain gave the visit his blessing in a curious radio address about the habit of criticism: ‘there is no longer any justification for a disturbed but ill-informed public opinion to calculate our chances, to measure our risks, to judge our actions’. Darlan’s initiatives at last demolished the reluctance to provoke Vichy by criticizing Pétain. Whatever Kirkpatrick meant by ‘hip and thigh’, there had been a ban on personal attacks on Darlan, and Eden had to remove it. The BBC’s Les Français Parlent aux Français conducted a nightly ‘trial’ of various members of the Vichy government and found them guilty of industrial col Kirkpatrick’s minute,  May ; French Intelligence Report ,  May; Vansittart’s minute,  May; Speaight’s minute,  May , FO /.  French Intelligence Report No. , FO /.  Memorandum on Propaganda to the French,  May , FO /.  Pétain, Discours aux Français,  ( May ).

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laboration, putting Syria and Morocco at the disposal of Germany, using American food aid for German not French benefit, and firing on Frenchmen at Dakar. The renewed prospect of some sort of Franco-German alliance moved the Free French to beg for more BBC free time to call for anti-Vichy demonstrations. The ghost of the modus vivendi was now laid to rest. The MOI told the BBC to argue that Frenchmen ‘cannot support both Pétain and de Gaulle’, advised that ‘Pétain should be attacked through his manifest inability to control the situation’; the time had come to ‘incite the French to show that they will no longer tolerate the policy of their Government’. Vichy resentment at London propaganda revived. Darlan denounced the ‘unceasing moral aggression’ from a ‘dissident radio’ and claimed that ‘British imperialism’ needed war in order to destroy Europe. Crete had just been lost. It was a difficult time to intimidate Vichy commanders. British and Free French troops in Syria encountered stiff resistance before capturing Damascus. ‘Why does the Marshall remain silent?’ asked one BBC speaker, implying that he would not express full support for Darlan. When Pétain broadcast in favour of Darlan and the fighting in Syria, Duchesne announced that it was no longer possible to listen to him ‘sans malaise’. There was now Foreign Office praise for a Free French BBC script which ‘thoroughly damns Pétain and does not even give him the credit for having turned out Laval as a gesture of resistance to Germany’; it was ‘an admirable denunciation of Vichy and all its works’. The Foreign Office member of the Joint Intelligence Committee recanted his error of ‘many months’ in believing ‘there might be a change of heart at Vichy’. The MOI had won one side of the argument. But the departmental ill-will lingered. Strang objected to the expression ‘universal suffrage’ in a draft about republican institutions; there was a ‘stormy atmosphere’ as Law refused Foreign Office advice to boast that Britain was a better democracy (than the Third Republic) for having only three parties. Law and Darsie Gillie, the BBC French editor, were a ‘violent irritant upon each other’ and ‘quite unable to co-operate even over the most trivial matters’. The clever chaps had been wrong but decided to think no better of all the damn fools who had been right. Churchill said he wanted British propaganda to be aggressive but did little to make it so. Morton, better informed than anybody and speaking for Downing Street, gave no support at all. Morton’s disapproval of Harvey’s  Maurice Dejean’s ‘Note pour la section Française de la BBC’,  May , FO /. Speaight minuted that Dejean was ‘preaching to the converted’. He meant recently converted.  MOI directive to the BBC,  May , FO /. A PID ‘Analysis of British Propaganda to France’ on  June said speakers had ‘given up the deferential attitude to Pétain himself ’.  Darlan’s broadcast on  May , FO /.  Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, i.  ( and  June ).  H. Hankey’s minute,  July ; Cavendish-Bentinck’s,  Aug. , FO /.  Strang’s minute,  May , and Speaight’s minute,  June , FO /; Speaight’s minute,  June , FO /.

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radicals did not indicate illusions about an ascendency of patriots in Vichy. In June the Inspector-General of the Sûreté, Colonel Groussard, came to London. This was not a good moment to sell inner-Vichy intrigue to the British. (He was already an SIS source and was sent home with an invitation to stay in contact. Darlan learnt where he had been and put him in prison.) Morton’s comments on Groussard reveal how little Vichy had ever put on offer: I have always considered that if Vichy felt any sympathy for us at all it would be quite easy for them, in spite of the grip of Wiesbaden [the seat of the Armistice Commission], to engineer certain devices in our favour. These might have been relatively unimportant . . . but they would have had a great effect in promoting a better relationship with us. When Col. G. came to see me I put this point to him. He never claimed that Vichy had already done anything of this sort. On the contrary, he was visibly confused.

Churchill did think something could be wrung out of Vichy. At the end of  he was toying with the idea of secretly threatening Pétain with a post-war trial as a war criminal. He was, in the end, tried by the French themselves and then gaoled on Île d’Yeu. British restraint about Petain had a steering effect on French resistance movements before they found their voice. The usual larval stage for resistance movements was a clandestine newspaper. In the Vichy zone clandestine publications presented themselves as patriotic watchdogs sharing the political consensus. Before autumn  opposition to Pétain was rare. Liberté, for instance, started as a Catholic argument against clericalism. These left-wing Christian democrats were, individually, more critical of Vichy than their journal suggested, but not until October did the journal declare that Pétain deserved political opposition. The publications produced by the Mouvement de Libération Nationale (MLN)—started by Henri Frenay as a secret military structure—printed respectful pleas for the Marshal not to accept dishonourable advice. In time the movements understood their very limited appeal to the higher bureaucracy and patronat. But it was difficult, at the start, to renounce the chance of discreet support in high places. Most illegal publications printed speeches by Churchill and de Gaulle whatever their own thoughts on Vichy. When London changed its policy, their tone stiffened. In the Vichy zone a new movement, Libération, started a shift to the left. In June its journal, Libération, was the first non-communist publication in the Vichy zone to express complete opposition to Pétain and the révolution nationale. All the clandestine journals grew more critical, and most became hostile. Following Churchill’s support for Russia, they called the anti-bolshevik crusade a fraud. Resistance opinion took its political line from London. It could   

Morton to Speaight,  Aug. , FO /. Morton to Strang,  Dec. , FO /. H. R. Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France (), , –.

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be less tolerant of Pétain and more tolerant of Stalin if that was what London proposed. In Lyon the police special branch had been providing the clandestine Verités with material about the more dangerous collaborators in Vichy. When the shift against Pétain was detected in Verités, Frenay was asked if he had become a ‘gaullist’. Contact between the deuxième bureau and the MLN was then broken off. When Frenay’s left-wing colleagues had persuaded him to allow the explicit rejection of the Pétain cult, his consent drew a collective ‘sigh of relief ’ from the MLN regional and departmental chiefs, even if it was reflected only gradually in the pages of the MLN’s Verités. This point could have been reached much earlier. Radio Londres did not force the pace until summer , and this delayed matters. The BBC’s unwillingness to tackle Pétain was so well tuned to the broader French mood it underpinned resistance indecision. The first episode of radio agitation was not premeditated. On Armistice Day  the BBC suggested that Parisians should congregate on the ChampsÉlysées. A student demonstration against the arrest of Paul Langevin, the eminent left-wing scientist, was already in preparation. Further publicity was obtained when Radio Paris criticized the BBC and warned that all demonstrations were prohibited. As a result there was a large demonstration. There were scuffles and a few shots. The BBC reported the demonstration and carried the false rumour that eleven people had been killed. Laval corrected the report and made a sour reference to British broadcasts by émigrés. The Germans closed the University of Paris for five weeks. De Gaulle was not so lucky. He called for the streets of France to be deserted for one hour on New Year’s Day. The results were difficult to notice. Unspecific calls to demonstrate were not easy to follow. But the pro-Allied demonstrations in Marseille after the Belgrade coup d’état in March  suggest that mood was even more important. De Gaulle’s nationwide appeals started as failures which, nevertheless, introduced his audience to the idea. The Germans used the term Gaullisten for people inclined to follow up BBC suggestions. They observed the radio stimulation of very minor patriotic incidents with an anxiety which justified Douglas Ritchie’s V campaign. They recorded several weak responses to infrequent BBC prompts. After British defeats in Greece and Africa they noticed a diminution of activity and ‘gaullist’ confidence. MOI admitted that the French response to public acts of collaboration was sluggish and muted. For the Feast of Saint Joan ( May ) de Gaulle had again called for demonstrations. There were different Bourdet, L’Aventure incertaine, ; Frenay, La Nuit finira, –, , . H. Noguères et al., Histoire de la Résistance en France,  vols. (–), i. , , ; A. Ouzoulias, Les Fils de la nuit (), –.  

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accounts of the response: the most optimistic claimed a crowd of one hundred thousand in Paris with Christian hymns and communist songs. The MOI were already asking for sabotage. They proposed an ‘active resistance’ which went beyond slogan-writing and other ‘platonic demonstrations’. Henri Hauck was allowed to enliven the Labour Talks with an invocation of ‘the spirit of Blanqui’ and the ‘great traditions of street fighting and the barricades’. Demonstrations in the streets of the unoccupied zone were suggested, and a directive was issued on  May. Nothing was detected in the BBC output in the next two weeks. Nigel Law telephoned the BBC in protest. Gillie, the French Editor, was inflexible: He [Gillie] refused to explain and merely expressed his regret that I was so ignorant as not to realise that the BBC could not make requests to the French people. He then flung the telephone down in a rage. I then rang up Mr Newsome whose manners contrasted agreeably with the Hitlerian outbursts of his subordinate. His view however was similar . . . The BBC, being anonymous, could make no requests . . . [and] could not be responsible for producing a clash between the French people and their Government.

It was unhelpful to ignore instructions because their immediate form was open to objection. The Free French could have made the appeal. Newsome and Ritchie were already arguing that the BBC’s ‘Colonel Britton’—scarcely better than anonymous—ought to summon demonstrations as commander of the V Army. However, the BBC French disapproved of the V campaign. Gillie was against an appeal that would be ignored. The BBC French Service Organizer put to Vansittart, in question form, ideas which were unwelcome when they came as answers from the MOI: did we want () Vichy to fall or () even to function, or () to provoke the total occupation of France, or () disorder or bloodshed? The French department felt that the answer to , , and  might be yes, but Vansittart was, quite rightly, perplexed and passed the questionnaire to Eden, who did not give a useful reply. The MOI was informed that ‘armed revolt’ against Vichy, leading to a German occupation of the southern zone, would come about in good time— some way off. Morton called a meeting to consider open political opposition in France. It was twelve months since de Gaulle’s first appeal. BBC calls to demonstrate, it was agreed, would fall flat ‘in the absence of a widespread organisation of “cells” of supporters in the various French towns, which is at  MOI Intelligence Reports,  June and  July, FO / and . Noguères, Histoire de la Résistance, i. , suggests ‘many thousands’. The Propaganda-Abteilung reported ‘several thousand’ in central Paris though de Gaulle’s appeal to parade in the streets was ‘as good as ignored’: Lagebericht, – May , RW/ (MA).  MOI Weekly Instructions,  May , FO /; PID Analysis of BBC Propaganda to France,  May to  June , FO /.  Law to Mack (FO),  June , FO /.  Russell Page to Vansittart,  June ; Vansittart to Eden,  June ; and FO to Law,  June , FO /.

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present non-existent’. The missing element was not authority in London but organization in France. The MOI believed such cells, though still unconnected, already existed and were trying to latch on to BBC suggestions. The others were less confident. Overt agitation now seemed the right way to deter Vichy from deeper collaboration. Woburn produced a new black station ‘Radio France’ (F). The Free French were introduced to the leading figures of SOE. Rémy and Fourcaud, the first Free French agents, had discovered resistance groups in Paris, Lyon, Montpellier, and Toulouse. Passy’s intelligence service, hitherto a client of SIS, set up a service d’action in the hope of arming them. But the attempt to sedate the MOI continued until the departmental convulsions preceding PWE. Nigel Law had too many critics to inherit the PWE French region, whose first regional director was Colonel Nigel Sutton, Leeper’s new French specialist. Some MOI staff transferred to PWE, but not from the French section. Something about the image, voice, and bearing of the Marshal had touched the French deeply, and Vichy seized their chance. It was right for the BBC to back off slightly in July , but failing to renew the attack after the Hitler–Pétain meeting at Montoire was disadvantageous. It indicated consent to the distinction between Pétain and his government which flourished in France. British propaganda had allowed that Pétain was honest and might restrain his worst ministers. The BBC were not playing to their strength. London represented even higher French hopes than those placed in Pétain. Once Radio London said that Vichy was a conspiracy to help the enemy, the claim would become powerful. The initial British attack on the Pétain regime petered out even before the Dakar expedition. Events and moods then changed more quickly than motives. By September  Radio Londres was aimed at the French middle ground. Debate took place on terms more comfortable for Pétain than was necessary. The accusation that Pétain was binding France to the Axis war against Britain—the most potent charge—was put on one side. The British made this accusation at Oran, but then left it to de Gaulle. To be convincing is less important than to be understood. The big questions of economic and colonial collaboration reached a national audience chiefly through London and they needed a sharper formulation. The revived attack on Vichy in April and May came only just in time to help the non-communist resistance escape serious embarrassment later in . The BBC French section felt a lack of guidance. The MOI could provide it only if they could act inside the BBC. Since BBC high officials opposed  

Morton to Leeper,  June , FO /. P. Laborie, L’Opinion française sous Vichy (), –.

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cohabitation, the problem remained and quarrels became institutional. The MOI had realized too late that editorial control, and constant contact with programme makers, was the principal tool for directing propaganda. The BBC were not trying to launch a vanguard resistance and they took care not to get ahead of their audience. Claude Bourdet, a leader in the resistance movement Combat, is severe: the BBC, especially in the earlier phase of the war, provided ‘psychic compensation permitting one to remain passive with a good conscience’. London radio was impossible to ignore. The BBC had wonderful advantages and offered discussion which was simply prohibited in France. Admittedly, it had been difficult, at first, to imagine that British criticism could make Pétain a controversial figure. But by May  the attempt could be postponed no longer. Though propaganda struck hardest at Darlan all the important figures at Vichy were admitted to be blameworthy. The idea that Vichy could alter course was henceforth an unhealthy error. Churchill, as before, did not move with the pack. He continued to believe that Vichy was a reed in the breeze and that events could reverse the direction of its abasement. Pétain was the obstacle to popular understanding that no French opposition to Germany would ever come from Vichy. There were no British illusions about him, as distinct from his entourage, yet he was granted a period of relative immunity. The cult of Pétain flourished while the BBC did not challenge it, despite the recovery of British fortunes in autumn . The Marshal would have enjoyed his hour of adulation, whatever the London voices said. But doubts had to be planted—most of all in ambitious minds. A good deal would depend on exactly how Pétain’s authority crumbled. This is true whether Pétain’s real support was still rock-solid in  or whether, as some claim, it was as overstated then as it would be long after the war when, for various reasons, saying so would seem attractively severe. Resistance, one hoped, would jump off more than one platform. But it was easier to see the difficulty of asking the middle ground to abandon Pétain than to foresee the danger of political opposition becoming identified with Jacobin nostalgia. The alternative to pragmatic hesitation was an investment in opposition. The first requirement was for a protective arm around the shoulders of the despised and rejected. This would have happened automatically if the MOI had obtained its war aims manifesto, although it is unlikely that a propaganda carrot was exactly what the socialists needed. The programme for which so many specialists argued was essentially a noisy doctrine to clear the air. Political problems can be much easier to solve with the help of a few settled opinions. Harvey’s officials wanted to restore the self-respect of socialists and so balance the sharper potential of the communists. The opposition to Vichy Bourdet, L’Aventure incertaine, . J. F. Sweets calls ‘widespread popular support’ for Pétain’s government ‘among the most persistent and least justifiable myths’ of the period: Choices in Vichy France (), .  

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would inherit France. If the only opposition was Jacobin, then resistance would be smaller than it should be but France would again be Jacobin; if the active Jacobins were communists then the resistance would be communist. Politics was inescapable. A slight reluctance to assert Britain’s own parliamentary identity made it more difficult, not less, to dispose of the suggestion that the pre-war errors of people likely to resist were as damaging as the offer to collaborate.

 Resistance and Leadership I N July  an attempt was made to regroup resistance under a broader heading than de Gaulle’s movement. The Foreign Office received a memorandum on propaganda signed by three highly valued Frenchmen: Pierre Comert, the editor of France; Maurice Dejean, their favourite in Free France; and Roger Cambon, the senior critic of de Gaulle. It was a striking alliance. The paper was aimed, in part, against the V campaign. Radio Londres, they said, had become a vital element in ‘our national life’, but no more should be squeezed out of it. It should simply promote a ‘psychological ambience’. Positive advice about resistance should be given in leaflets with a local distribution rather than by radio, and no one should ask for demonstrations in the occupied zone. There was no need for controversy with Vichy since the one good Vichy argument was now on trial in Russia. The old insistence that Vichy had chosen the wrong side should be replaced by the projection of Britain: ‘it seems that our compatriots, in listening to London, desire to hear British opinions rather than those of their countrymen living here’. The signatories did not want Free France to be more prominent or made more influential at the BBC. This was advice the Foreign Office liked: no sticky gaullist fingers on the BBC; a limit on ‘de Gaullist’ publicity; and no Malet Street subversion-by-radio. On  July Duchesne told his listeners that factional attachments must wither away: ‘there is only one party in France, the party of national liberation’. It was not just a figure of speech. The SO French region were floating the idea of a National Liberation Party as a device for associating the Free French with a broader range of opinion than had been attracted to de Gaulle. Dejean liked this idea. He telegraphed for permission to start publicizing the party on the BBC. De Gaulle replied that this might produce two rival symbols of liberation. There was a little Foreign Office indignation that the General could imagine that ‘we are trying to pull a fast one across him’. The BBC had already used the term. Nigel Sutton, the regional director at Woburn, wanted Free France, which he considered ‘preponderatingly military’, to be absorbed and transcended by ‘an abstract political concept which would appeal to all Frenchmen of whatever party, without diminishing the specific appeal of de Gaulle and his movement to existing sympathisers’. Under this umbrella politicians were to renounce party politics, appeals would be made for passive    

Memorandum,  July , FO /. J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac (ed.), Les Voix de la Liberté (), i. . Speaight’s minute,  July , FO /. Sutton to Vansittart,  Aug. , FO /.

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resistance or demonstrations. London needed a larger coalition and expected new names. The PWE French region acknowledged, after replacing the MOI French section, that the earthquake of  had not carried the French nation very far. But Free France seemed to appeal only to sand-blown colonials, a few soldiers, and the most rigidly Teutophobic readers of Action Française. Since de Gaulle did not take the bait, there followed a more forceful attempt to make Free France liberal-democratic and to render the General primus inter pares. During a brief struggle in September British departments gave heavyhanded support to de Gaulle’s critics. The contest began when de Gaulle returned to London to face an accusation from Admiral Muselier that he was a megalomaniac. His behaviour in the Near East did indicate this line of attack. Churchill forced de Gaulle to promise a governing body for Free France and extracted from him a number of apologies, disavowals, and submissions. He would not have survived without them. The way seemed open for the critics to democratize Free France. De Gaulle was invited to be less political, which meant less ambitious, and less in command. The PWE French region were at this point slightly uncomfortable about the soldier-leader expedient. De Gaulle promised to accept a controlling committee, but he did not intend to bend any further to his critics’ wishes. De Gaulle considered surrendering control of his service politique to Labarthe—which might have meant dissident (or even Soviet) control of future liaison with the resistance movements. It is conceivable that Labarthe would have obtained British support for marginalizing Passy. De Gaulle retained his ascendency largely because Muselier and Labarthe miscalculated. The critics overplayed their hand. They tried for a coup when they could have had a success. A French National Committee (CNF) was created to placate Churchill, who now detected the Anglophobe in de Gaulle and had heard accusations about cagoulards and agents des trusts in Carlton Gardens. The Prime Minister ceased to be de Gaulle’s rock of support and learnt all the arguments for shrinking him to a manageable size. One was that British support had been so unconditional that the General, after one or two strokes of good fortune, would be beyond control; another was that if a one-man movement turned out badly, Britain would shoulder a heavy moral burden; if well, there would be no reward from a jealous Gaullist France. Harvey records the changes prescribed: We are anxious to spread our recognition of de Gaulle over the [National] Committee as a whole . . . At the same time we do not wish to give de Gaulle jurisdiction over those Frenchmen outside France who do not wish to be Gaullists. We hope however that the still wider body . . . which de Gaulle now proposes to set up in addition to the Committee—will embrace all the best names . . . who have so far held off.

Churchill ordered a temporary freeze on co-operation with the Free French, and decided that ‘our weight in the immediate future must be thrown more 

John Harvey (ed.), War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (), – ( Sept. ).

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heavily against de Gaulle than I had hoped would be necessary’. When the MOI wanted de Gaulle to help with the French element of a European ‘go slow’ week, the Foreign Office refused permission. Kirkpatrick gave the BBC a muzzling directive on Free France. Its precise terms remain obscure, but the Free French went off the air and lost privileges for a time. De Gaulle, complained Mack, held the stage ‘a little too prominently at present’. The intention was to show de Gaulle what could happen by making him suddenly very much less conspicuous. De Gaulle had just used the BBC to announce his new National Committee. He pledged that a ‘place’ would be kept in the Committee’s ranks for Frenchmen currently detained by the enemy (‘or his collaborators’) who might subsequently come to London. This was a reference to the political leaders then held for trial by Vichy. De Gaulle needed to keep his promise to Churchill but he kept the initiative in his hands. He had done enough to survive. Having made his concessions, he kept his nerve and did not surrender to the malcontents. A year later he passed over an opportunity to bring out Reynaud. The PWE intended to present the Free French as the military side of an incomplete national union; but they also assumed de Gaulle’s period of disfavour would not last long. The readjustments were said (and thought) to be in de Gaulle’s own best interests, though disengagement and reproof were mixed in with the good advice. Some specialists thought that this did not quite make sense. Paniguian, who controlled Woburn black broadcasts in French, claimed to be ‘at a loss’ to understood either de Gaulle’s goal or Britain’s use of him. The military idea of Free France had not been serious enough. The decision to build up and glamorize Free French armed forces had faltered and there were few news stories about them. The available French pilots had not been turned into a Free French air force. In any case, the advice that the Free French should be an ‘exclusively military movement’ was misconceived. It struck de Gaulle as ill-meant, and it was naive: ‘the General who marches victoriously at the head of his troops down the Champs-Élysées will have France at his feet’. De Gaulle should be made tractable by offering him precisely this and exacting in return ‘his full co-operation on minor matters—and everything else is minor’. British perspectives had changed. A more democratic Free France was sought for the sake of émigré unity and Anglo-French cooperation. The antecedent wish, thinking less about de Gaulle than about France, to prevent the identification of the Free French with the democratic ancien régime was forgotten. De Gaulle became more circumspect but not less ambitious. It remained his intention to be an ally not an umbrella, to compel attention rather than adopt Whitehall’s version of his best interests.   

 Minute,  Sept. , PREM //. Mack’s minute,  Oct. , FO /. Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, i. – ( Sept. ). ‘The De Gaulle Movement’, Paniguian to Rae Smith,  Jan. , FO /.

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The PWE French region picked up staff from SO and functions from the MOI, so the staff were more proprietorial about black than about white. The first two ‘research units’ or RUs, which started in November , had been concealed from the Free French. ‘Radio Inconnu’ was meant to raise patriotic steam, sow confusion among collaborators, and make Pétainist bankers (la clique Worms) quake in their boots: it was a vulgar Jacobin-chauvinist production which was abandoned in  on the grounds that it had done its job and might cause embarrassment. ‘Radio Travail’ was syndicalist and more serious but equally anti-Vichy. Both these stations said that the rejection of Vichy and collaboration was the property of no one political tradition. F, ‘Radio Catholique’, was run by one priest who left to be a pilot and then by another who had worked underground in Russia. It reminded the faithful, on a frequency close to Vatican Radio, that Vatican statements provided a comprehensive case for opposition to Nazism. The explicitly Free French F (‘Radio France’ or ‘Radio Gaulle’) started in August  and worked to a directive produced at a weekly Anglo-French meeting chaired by Leeper. It was meant to be a practical resistance station, but never went much beyond establishing itself. Maurice Dejean supplied the staff and was PWE’s consultant for black broadcasting. F offered disillusion with Pétain, arguments against defeatism, and the promise of military instructions in due course. This was all vaguely subversive. But it was evident that Vichy would not be overthrown while it kept one-third of France out of German hands. Political warfare, in Leeper’s mind, had until recently meant making Vichy troublesome to Germany. Open propaganda pressure to make France troublesome to Vichy had been MOI work, though PWE hoped to hand this work over to black. Paniguian’s work with a gaullist Radio France, however, was frozen by the September crisis. He wanted a clear British choice not a diplomatic game of sulks and punishments. Radio France was intended to procure ‘hard work, sacrifices and terrific risks’: the orders had to come from Frenchmen. The broadcasting interdict against Free France was pointless if brief and damaging if not. France had to feel ‘back in the Allied camp’ even if ‘we all agree that , Carlton Gardens and Brazzaville do not give this feeling with sufficient intensity and universality’. Free France could achieve nothing until it emerged from semi-official disgrace. Paniguian asked for an end to ‘all restrictions and reserve in building up de Gaulle’. He did not like Free France as a Londonbased movement. Paniguian read the future fairly well. If North Africa could be detached from Vichy, the Germans would occupy the unoccupied zone and  Radio Propaganda Policy Committee, report of  Aug. and  Aug. , F /. Ellic Howe calls Inconnu ‘F’ and Travail ‘F’: The Black Game (), –; but PWE reports—see ‘French RUs’,  Nov. , INF /—appear to reverse this order.  Paniguian, through private disclosures to Dejean, is said to have evaded occasional instructions not to show ‘F’ material to the Free French: A. Gillois, Histoire Secrète des Français à Londres (), .  ‘Comments on Political Warfare for France’, Paniguian to Sutton, Oct. , FO /.

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the mood of France would strengthen: the Free French could then be shipped to Algiers where their eccentricity would be diluted. This combined Leeper’s plots with Harvey’s values in a package which Spears could approve. Free France was the least unpredictable element in the package. Desmond Morton in a review of PWE plans said that though the ‘national rising against the Germans’ would be ‘an affair for the French to create and control’, intelligence, sabotage, and propaganda was Anglo-French work requiring the ‘closest co-operation’. It was just this closeness that seemed to invite SIS, SOE, and PWE both to knock the Free French into shape and also to keep them afloat. Resistance was a project which still needed a push. But London had been procrastinating. When Jean Moulin reached London, shortly after the September crisis, the push came from France. Moulin had been the youngest prefect in the country; he impressed everyone with his manners and good sense. He saw Morton, among many others, and urged both the British and Free France to pass beyond the idea of resistance and support the real thing, the movements which, he said, already existed: There is a rising tide among thousands of young Frenchmen to take part in the war again. They want someone to tell them that they are already in the Front line in France. This must be combined with some promise of organisation and direction . . . Failing this, my informant [Moulin] fears that all these young men, who might work for an Englishman or more readily for a Frenchman who is visibly continuing resistance, i.e. de Gaulle, will join the Communists.

It was easier to take this from a recent arrival than from an ideologue in Malet Street who set teeth on edge in the Foreign Office. But the message was similar. Moulin brought to London a list of resistance movements. His information seemed exceptional. He had been dismissed by Vichy after the Germans flung him out of his Chartres prefecture; he had then spent six weeks in Paris, four months as organizer of a propaganda group in the Midi, and a period back in Paris consulting fonctionnaires and hommes politiques. He returned to the Vichy zone and saw Henri Frenay in July . After the war Frenay interpreted Moulin’s report to SOE as a garbled or distorted version of the facts about resistance as recently explained by himself. At Lisbon he refused all British offers of employment. He knew that the Free French would be more attentive to a volunteer than to a ‘source’ produced by SIS. Moulin was questioned at length. Sutton considered him ‘the first person I have met or heard of ’ with the right to speak for several resistance movements and the ‘natural authority’ needed for the role. Moulin was a highly political figure. In the Popular Front government Moulin had been Pierre Cot’s chef de cabinet. But to Sutton   

Morton to D. Stephens (Secretary, PWE),  Oct. , FO /. H. Frenay, L’Énigme Jean Moulin (), . N. Sutton, ‘Interview with M. Moulins [sic]’,  Nov. , FO /.

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Moulin confided that his brief experience of London, especially of French circles, convinced him that ‘far too much importance was attached to political questions especially in the party meaning of the word’: French resisters were unlikely to be fastidious. Jean Moulin’s ambition was to bring together de Gaulle, the resistance movements, and sympathetic politicians in a large, national combination. He impressed de Gaulle. His reward was to be sent back to France as de Gaulle’s representative to recruit the movements in the unoccupied zone and to distribute money and instructions. Moulin’s unsolicited demand that Free France should take the lead in resistance work was welcome. He was not, of course, a Carlton Gardens purist. He asked the General to sound more republican. He was, thought Sutton, ‘strongly of the opinion that propaganda for de Gaulle as a symbol of resistance and, still more, strictly Gaulliste propaganda are quite unnecessary’, and his advice was that nothing mattered except the formation of ‘para-military hard cores’ all over France. De Gaulle never took a high view of the military value of resistance inside France. But he saw that Moulin’s resistance movements might help him. What he knew of Moulin’s past raised no difficulty. Moulin’s political apprenticeship had been obtained in the coalition anti-fascism of the Popular Front period. Despite his very ‘dissident’ connections he was completely pragmatic about de Gaulle’s project though he had no more use for a dictatorial de Gaulle than Cambon, Comert, or Labarthe. But he doubted that de Gaulle’s personal opinions were all that important. De Gaulle was simply the link between the British and the French resistance. Moulin’s advice was that de Gaulle was already ‘formidable’ as an achieved symbol and that further emphasis on his role would strike a false note. Since resisters were not concerned about de Gaulle’s politics, there was no point in going beyond minimal republicanism and severe patriotism. What was needed was more action in France and more personalities in London. Moulin was an antidote to fretful speculation. He assumed that London would not deal with the communists who loom large in the background of his account without being explicitly recommended. (They had ‘an extremely serious organisation’ and were ‘the most active’ of the many movements not otherwise mentioned.) Moulin made some mistakes: he told Sutton that the MLN—Frenay’s movement which was soon to become ‘Combat’—had Edouard Herriot as the ‘patron in the background’, and he overstated the mutual awareness of the early movements and, it seems, their visibility to British intelligence. (Even so, the leaders of Liberté were, already, trying to play SOE against SIS.) If resistance movements were already equipped with political affiliations and mentors, detailed political direction from outside was  

C. Bourdet, L’Aventure incertaine (), ; Sutton interview, see above. Interview,  Nov. , FO /.

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doubly inappropriate. The broad political point was that patriotism was being radicalized by the invasion of Russia. Moulin was shrewdly circumspect: there can be no question of aiding a revolutionary movement against the government of Vichy (at least not without previous agreement with London). The only question at stake is the fight against the Germans, and the men of Vichy are to be considered as opponents only insofar (and in such measure) as they help the enemy.

This sounded excellent. British hostility to Vichy was more ripe than he imagined, but such innate discipline was commendable. Moulin did not recommend an approach to the PCF, though he certainly had the contacts. It was certainly not a fence to be rushed. Maurice Thorez had applied from Moscow to join Free France, but de Gaulle turned him down as a deserter from the French Army in . The PCF, in any case, had their own ambitions: the Free French were largely ignored in the party press. Moulin’s silence about his party contacts has raised questions. Frenay makes an admittedly circumstantial case for regarding him as l’homme du parti communiste. But he can also be interpreted as a man of the Left, with a sense of what could be done which was neither that of the PCF nor the talking-shop dissidents. His emphasis on active resistance certainly resembled that of the PCF; it was also timely. Moulin warned that gaullism had lost some ‘bourgeois adherents’ because the anti-bolshevik crusade had an appeal; the Catholic hierarchy’s support for collaboration was effective even though Radio Catholique—the Woburn black production—was ‘extremely well done’. The main point, however, was that the resistance movements felt discouraged by a sense that London—‘HMG through de Gaulle’—appeared to have no interest in them. He insisted that unless London organized the Resistance the job would be done by the communists. When Desmond Morton passed this opinion to PWE, he was moved to add, in curiously defensive counterpoint, that ‘my dislike of the IIIrd International in no way prevents me from encouraging it’. Perhaps Moulin, in the same cause, could say the opposite. The MOI had advocated the search for an organization of ‘cells’ to underpin BBC requests for demonstrations. Moulin revealed that the ‘cells’ existed but denied that passive resistance would satisfy the growing will to resist. There were, he said, tens or even hundreds of thousands of volunteers available to resistance movements which were capable of receiving and distributing British weapons: ‘it would be mad and criminal not to make use of these soldiers’. In short, the resistance movements, now understood as geographically overlapping fraternities with distinct personalities, must be encouraged to have armed resistance as their defining function and should not be considered primarily as propaganda vehicles. The status of Free France was no clearer to PWE after America entered the  

M. R. D. Foot, SOE in France (), . Morton to Stephens,  Oct. , FO /.

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Foot, SOE in France, .

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war. The State Department attached great importance to keeping Admiral Leahy, their maréchaliste ambassador, at Vichy. The US Administration believed nothing was lost by being friendly to Vichy and Roosevelt was open to ‘dissident’ views about de Gaulle. When America became an ally, the Washington prejudice against him, formed in , took on new weight. The British agreed, at the State Department’s request, to keep Passy’s agents out of the area. It was Robert Murphy’s territory. In these parts de Gaulle was ‘a liability instead of an asset’. It was possible that another chance in North Africa would tempt London to demote de Gaulle—this time so that he would not blunt American approaches to the sort of people in Tunis, Algiers, Rabat, and Casablanca who arrested Free French sympathizers. The French specialists were less excited than in early , but Churchill became less sceptical. In late December de Gaulle ordered Muselier to take the Vichy-held French Atlantic islands of St-Pierre-et-Miquelon. Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of State, treated this minor stroke against Vichy as a personal affront and began his long vendetta against the General. The episode would show that Churchill could not be relied upon to oppose Washington. Muselier decided to strike again, and tried to exploit American fury and British impatience. De Gaulle feared the worst, and he composed a farewell statement. But a trial of strength in March showed, again, that Muselier had fewer backers than the Admiralty imagined. It was the admiral not the general who resigned from the National Committee. But there would be no more Anglo-gaullist colonial ventures. The Free French were excluded from Anglo-American co-operation whenever the Americans wished to exclude them. PWE were less hostile than anxious to get a grip on affairs. They wanted the Foreign Office to permit a stronger control of Free French statements. There was more talk of intervening to quell the war of factions inside  Carlton Gardens and of doing something to prevent Frenchmen arriving in London feeling cheated on finding virtual party politics where they had been promised a military movement devoid of partisan or political ties. HMG should ‘be master in its own house’. Though it was conceded that the publicity material passing through British filters did not seem ‘viciously Gaullist’, it was still important to discourage ‘specifically gaullist propaganda’. PWE arranged with SOE for a ‘stranglehold’ on Free French printed material sent into France. Whenever it was time to be disagreeable to the Free French the task fell to Sutton. He remained director of the French region until becoming Director of Political Warfare for occupied countries in . He became unpopular. Passy remembered ‘a tall and skeletal Englishman’ who ‘prided himself on Paniguian to Beck,  Feb. , FO /. Notes by PWE French section on Revision of Agreement with the Free French,  Apr. , FO /; note (Paniguian?) to Beck and Sutton,  Jan. , FO /. 

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understanding Frenchmen, a field in which he accumulated unending errors of judgement with an unbearable self-confidence’. Leslie Beck, Sutton’s deputy, was expert at smoothing ruffled feathers—usually French but once Roosevelt’s—and was understood by the French as Sutton’s rival. Beck dealt with SOE and knew everyone. He was later deemed to have played a ‘very subtle game’ which combined advising the Free French on how to handle the British with discreet support for the French dissidents. Lionel Gielgud became regional director when Sutton was promoted in early , but Beck replaced Gielgud six months later. Both tried to teach the Free French how to deflect criticism, and this earned them grateful friends. In  the French believed that though Sutton wanted an almost ‘American’ opposition to de Gaulle, Beck was winning the contest inside PWE. The French region had a foot in every camp. Paniguian, Beck’s assistant for the Woburn work, collaborated daily with Robert Mengin, a convinced anti-gaullist, on the Courrier de l’Air, a fortnightly newspaper dropped by the RAF, and with the Radio Gaulle team from which André Diethelm, when he replaced Dejean as the relevant National Commissioner, could still request political support. Harold Nicolson’s anxiety about the ‘split between de Gaulle and the intellectuals’ was shared by Paniguian and his collaborators in black propaganda. Labarthe still spoke regularly on the BBC and understood more of Woburn’s work than most Free Frenchmen. In March  Paniguian foresaw that F must mark time until Free France was reconstructed though the station would be needed to explain ‘radical changes’ and ‘transfer existing goodwill’. When the French staff proposed in June  using F to criticize America’s diplomatic relations with Vichy, Paniguian confessed that they were over-zealous: the Americans would never accept criticism of themselves as useful camouflage or anything but ‘AngloGaullist trickery’. SOE reported in September that Passy had asked the clandestine press not to refer to ‘Radio Gaulle’ as the official voice of the movement. Beck was disappointed, but Passy was quite right. Despite these cross-currents, Woburn black propaganda, like BBC white, either supported Free France or made parallel accusations. The French region was reserved but still supportive about Free France. It did not share the schizophrenia of SOE with the F and RF sections. In – the rivalry between SOE’s F Section and the Free French secret service loomed large in French eyes. The contest was painful, and important, and still obscure. Passy’s intelligence service was renamed as the BCRAM (Bureau Central de Reseignments et d’Action Militaire) until, later in , the ‘M’ for militaire was dropped. The natural result of keeping some British initiatives,    

 Colonel Passy, Souvenirs (), i. . Gillios, Histoire secrète, . Unsigned report,  Aug. , Commissariat National de l’Intérieur à Londres, f/a/ (AN). N. Nicolson (ed.), Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters ‒ (),  ( Dec. ). Paniguian to Sutton,  Mar. and  June , FO /.

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such as F Section, completely divorced from the Free French was that the BCRA were challenged to outgrow their patrons—SIS and SOE. F Section employed anti-gaullists and never mastered the temptation to recommend themselves by making discourteous comparisons. When de Gaulle asked to be allowed to absorb F Section into his own organization, Eden insisted he could not yet ‘rely’ on the assumption that the Free French National Committee enjoyed the support of a national majority. Churchill told de Gaulle that the August  agreement had ceased to be a fair bargain: Free France had failed ‘to rally an impressive number of Frenchmen’. They had, in effect, told the Free French to hunt for better credentials and apply again. Too little of the empire had ‘rallied’ and the search for support within France became critical. But PWE did not cease to work on behalf of the Free French. PWE pressure to rectify the lack of military news about the Free French may have helped to induce Auchinleck to pull Leclerc’s brigade out of the reserve and to push it up to the front at Bir Hakeim and into the history books. SOE and PWE believed that there was an important non-gaullist resistance. They expected the Free French to get into trouble by trying to ignore it, but hoped to coax a more intelligent approach from Carlton Gardens. When David Keswick of SOE asked Sutton whether de Gaulle might be ‘re-insuring’ as much with the Left as with the Right, there was no disapproval implied. De Gaulle’s interest in the syndicalists was fanned by anxiety about their dealing directly with the British. After Attlee and Dalton received Cambon and Comert in November , it was known that the Labour party was sensitive to de Gaulle’s treatment of French socialists. The September crisis had revealed that de Gaulle could bend when absolutely necessary. However eccentric, he was not a crackpot. In  British officials started to calm down and reserved their judgement. In the Foreign Office de Gaulle’s grand manner secured some converts. Once the General was seen as genuinely larger than life rather than stiff and sinister half his troubles were over. Charles Peake, a veteran of the MOI in , replaced Spears as the diplomat attached to Free France. In his account of a City luncheon there was more than tolerance for de Gaulle’s strangeness: Lord Nathan, who introduced the General, likened him to St. Joan of Arc . . . The effect of the name upon the General, opposite whom I was sitting, interested me. He stiffened, his head gave a hardly perceptible jerk and he raised his eyes to the cornice at which he gazed for two or three seconds. When he rose to speak, I have little doubt that he was sensible of the Maid’s presence at his elbow.

Cadogan remained unconverted but Eden, Harvey and Peake were admirers.  Eden to de Gaulle,  Jan. : Foot, SOE in France, ; note of conversation,  Jan. : Kersaudy, Churchill and De Gaulle (), .  Sutton to Beck,  Feb. , FO /.  Charles Peake to Mack,  Apr. , FO /.

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PWE were never in the front line against de Gaulle. They grumbled but at no time was their true weight thrown against him. They inherited the MOI commitment to the Free French and had no strong objections to their propaganda. Restating the commitment, with tacit reservations, became as unavoidable as listening to the dissidents but keeping their criticisms off the BBC. The flurry of second thoughts, by not leading anywhere, tended to confirm the engagement to Free France, not to break it.

 Violent Resistance T H E movements Moulin listed had no weapons and no military training. There were a few incidents of resistance sabotage in July . One train was derailed. But the trend in France was set by the other side. Collaborators, trying to impress Berlin, cried up active resistance as a great problem. There was a new wave of arrests of communists after  June, and in July Marx Dormoy, once a popular front minister, was assassinated by fascists. A Bastille Day demonstration in Paris was followed by a German poster announcing the execution of a demonstrator for singing the ‘Marseillaise’. The idea of an alliance with Germany was raised, again, by the war against the Soviet Union. The collaborationists wanted to join up as Frenchmen in French uniforms. This made the Russian war a French issue. An expeditionary force was recruited in the north as the Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchevisme and then baptized by Vichy as the Légion tricolore. Its offices became the target for attack in some of the first episodes of violent resistance. After Stalin’s speech on  July  calling for partisan resistance to make life intolerable for the occupier, the French and German authorities considered themselves under notice of a campaign of terrorism and decided to act. Vichy published legislation creating special courts (or ‘sections’) to handle prosecutions on the basis of new retroactive legislation aimed at communists and anarchists. A month later Pétain complained on French radio of a ‘malaise’ which seemed to affect the nation and of the ‘ill wind’ which he sensed rising in certain parts of France. The strikes in the Nord and Pas de Calais were perhaps as much on his mind as the incidence of sabotage around Paris. His ministers, particularly Pierre Pucheu at the Interior, were already negotiating with the Germans about extra measures of judicial and police repression when the communists found their first German victim. On  August Pierre Georges, a veteran of the Spanish civil war and the leader of the Jeunesse Communiste in Paris, went out to shoot a German officer and found one at the Metro Barbès. Next day the Germans responded with the poster announcing the ‘hostage’ policy: anyone currently held in prison was liable to be selected as a hostage and shot in the event of further attacks. This killing and the judicial murders that followed were very well reported. A contest was intended, and prepared, on both sides. The communists had already called for self-defence against the Pétain, Discours aux Français (),  ( Aug. ). E. Jäckel, Frankreich in Hitlers Europa (), . Every department had its list of hostages. Pucheu tried in vain to ensure that only communists were chosen.  

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terrorism of Vichy and the Gestapo, and pointed to the execution of two demonstrators on  August—after a Jeunesse Communiste demonstration on  August—as evidence of who had wanted the contest to begin. Berlin expected a violent struggle to extirpate communism in Europe. It is equally clear that the PCF leadership wanted blood immediately. It would stake out the party’s claim to lead, and Moscow had spoken. The instruction to start random killing of German officers encountered opposition within the PCF. Party propaganda in July urged the destruction of goods and machinery rather than shooting soldiers. In September L’Humanité did not mention the assassination at the Metro Barbès. Then the party press alleged that the shooting had been a private quarrel among German officers. The PCF militant shared the general distaste for the idea of shooting more or less innocent soldiers in the back. The party needed a way to announce that it was drawing together its members again. Most of the conspicuous sabotage done in occupied France in the next twelve months was done by the communists, and sabotage was what most communists considered correct. An existing armed section was reinforced from the youth and immigrant sections to form an armed resistance force. In early  this became the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP). A member of the FTP military committee later acknowledged the hesitation of party members: ‘the difficulty remained always, always, that of killing soldiers of Hitler’s armies’. The Comintern policy was rebellion and insurrection. Since insurrection was literally impossible, the shootings were a small gesture of loyalty as well as an attempt to change the atmosphere in France. Deliberate provocation was meant to dissolve the existing mutual restraint between civilians and the occupying power. This was the reasoning of Pierre Georges, known until his death in  as ‘Colonel Fabien’, the pioneer among FTP leaders. Rémy, the first Free French agent to make contact with the communist armed resistance, later agreed that the French needed a shock. But the communists were aware of the danger of disapproval. There was a repugnance for killing as advertisement. The communists had no hope of winning a soft success, but they were determined to thrust themselves forward. Most of the clandestine press condemned the new practice. Random attacks on individual Germans never did become an important part of French resistance. But the ethical case against assassination was gradually demoted to a private scruple which lacked binding force. Those who cherished it were sometimes intimidated by what they, generously, took to be the superior commitment (or logic) of the others. Claude Bourdet’s thoughts about the coup de feu de Fabien express common feelings in resistance circles: H. Michel, Paris Résistance (), –. A. Ouzoulias, Les Fils de la nuit (), ; see also S. Courtois, La PCF dans la Guerre (), , and C. Tillon, On chantait rouge (), .  Rémy, Mémoires d’un agent secret de la France Libre (), .  

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On our side, we too found that one could not abstain from an action because of a fear of reprisals against the population, but . . . I think that the great majority of the members of our groupes francs [the FTP, as it were, of the non-communist movements of the south] would have had the greatest personal difficulties, as did many communist militants, in gunning down in the street an unknown individual just because he was wearing a German uniform. We [the leaders] did not have the hard, tough courage shown by Fabien in leading by example . . . The difference between the communists and us was, then, rather in the order of feelings and sensitivity than of moral attitude: after all, there was scarcely much difference, from this last point of view, between an attack on military vehicles in which enemy soldiers would be killed and shooting a single soldier in the street.

This is very diplomatic. Bourdet searches for solidarity in the language of agnostic common sense. A lack of ‘hard courage’ may be doubted. Disapproval of the coup de feu de Fabien diminished once reprisals changed the level of violence in France, but it never disappeared. The German Army authorities in Paris were gloomily aware that trouble was being imposed on them by higher authority. On  August a decree was published on orders from Berlin threatening punishment for any sort of communist activity. The threat to shoot hostages followed a week later. The Gestapo reported that it had been answered by communist leaflets threatening to kill ten Germans for every communist or free Frenchman killed. There were SS policemen plotting to push the Army aside and willing to risk Yugoslav or Polish conditions. Vichy, surrendering all legal principle, tried to avoid the execution of randomly chosen hostages by choosing substitute victims and passing death sentences to match the number stipulated by Berlin. On  August the Paris ‘cour special’—a Vichy institution—sentenced three men to death for communist political activity. This carried the death penalty only under emergency legislation a few days old. A similar sentence in the occupied zone which came under General Falkenhausen in Brussels was immediately followed by the death of two soldiers in Lille and two more elsewhere in the Nord. On  August a disillusioned right-wing extremist, Collette, shot Laval and Déat—the wounds were not fatal—and the communists welcomed this as a ‘gaullist contribution’ to their struggle, which it was not. On  September the communists killed Marcel Gitton, a collaborationist spokesman who had been a member of their politburo until August . There were several more attacks on German soldiers in the next two weeks. Reluctantly, the German commanders began to implement the hostages decree. Falkenhausen had five shot in Lille on  September and Stülpnagel shot ten in Paris. But the link between the act of retaliation and the provocation was not specified. The two German commanders were far from being Nazis and hoped to avoid being committed to similar response in future. But in October German officers were shot in Nantes and Bordeaux. Berlin began 

C. Bourdet, L’Aventure incertaine (), .

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Jäckel, Frankreich,  n. .

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to wonder whether the assassinations were not ordered from London as well, as seemed certain, from Moscow. The Wehrmacht had already sent instructions to all occupied territories that  to  ‘communists’ must die for every German shot. Hitler intervened to ensure compliance. The day after the shooting in Bordeaux fifty entirely innocent hostages were killed; in Nantes twenty-one; and at the internment camp of Chateaubriant—for communists and syndicalists of the CGT—twenty-nine were marched off to execution. The Chateaubriant hostages turned their execution into a patriotic demonstration. Later, the PCF collected eyewitness accounts and asked the poet Louis Aragon to write a description. The story was spread through the clandestine press, and Aragon’s text was read, and frequently quoted, on the BBC. General Stülpnagel protested to Berlin that such executions could not be permanent policy, but his posters threatened fifty more executions if the perpetrators of the shootings in Bordeaux and Nantes were not found. Pétain tried to assert himself. His intention to spare France such scenes had been an early political buttress. On the day of executions he condemned terrorism in a radio speech to which the BBC took strong but careful exception. Two days later Pétain warned the Germans that he would present himself at the demarcation line as ‘sole hostage’ if there were any more executions. The next round of killings was postponed. But the force of the gesture faded quickly. Pucheu arrested more undesirables and Vichy continued to promise that all the executions required by Berlin could take place if French authority to substitute ‘criminals’ for ‘hostages’ were acknowledged. But Stülpnagel was unable to oblige. In November more German soldiers were killed in Paris. In retaliation ninety-five hostages were executed; the ‘Jews of Paris’ were fined a thousand million francs; and five hundred young communists were sent to German concentration camps. (Stülpnagel resigned and was replaced by a cousin of the same name but with less extensive responsibilities.) Heavily publicized executions in France never stopped, but internment and deportation were more important. Deportation became the usual penalty for serious resistance activity, and  per cent of the Resistance deportees never came home. At the end of  there were perhaps , communists under arrest in the occupied zone. This prison population became more heterogeneous and continued to swell. None of this took London by surprise. The British objection to the street shootings was that German retaliation would inflame feeling and trigger local risings. Almost every broadcast on the subject included restraining admonitions. Of course, London refused on principle to view the communist actions as anything but spontaneous patriotic frustration. It was now difficult to write,  The number of executions up to  May  was ; by Oct.  ,: Jäckel, Frankreich, . , resisters were deported during the war, although , ‘politicals’ might be combined with this total: J.-P. Azéma, De Munich à la Libération ‒ (), –, .

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within the guidelines, pieces which did not sound tepid. Jacques Duchesne started a broadcast with the question ‘What should I do as a resister?’ The execution of hostages had not yet begun though the spate of arrests was known. Duchesne provided a weak answer coupled with a warning against ‘movements of sporadic or anarchic revolt doomed to defeat’. The talk was ‘resistant’ because he took the side of those who had been shot for cable-cutting or ‘insults’ to the German Army. Duchesne prophesied that police repression would fail because the Gestapo would recruit disloyal as well as loyal collaborators and so produce an antidote to itself. Resistance, it seemed to follow, should foster a dissident mood within officialdom, subdue Vichy by infiltration and so subvert its potential for repression. On another occasion Schumann warned ‘to rise too soon is to rise in vain’. He replied to the hostage decree of  August by asking for workplace sabotage; the authorities had a ‘terrorist plan’ but the French were now strong enough ‘to reply to this crime, not with a spasm of despair but with a collective effort of confident discipline’. The counsel against risings was a formula covering a variety of fears. Risings of any sort were improbable, though no one in PWE said so. When the Trois Amis dissected Pétain’s ‘ill wind’ speech, Duchesne indicated exactly why London recommended against armed resistance. He warned that Vichy wanted to start a civil war to drown the resistance in a sea of blood. On  September Pierre Bourdan offered a moderate’s disapproval of the communists’ new course: It is impossible today to hope that our compatriots will revolt. . . . The French are not Carbonari. . . . Vichy and Paris are trying so to manage things that in a country which is united against Germany, the Resistance of an entire people takes on the appearance of a series of acts of rebellion . . . That is why they call communists everyone who rejects collaboration . . . They wish to kill the national movement group by group, cell by cell, man by man . . . They know well that the disturbed state of France is not due to the propaganda of Moscow, still less to that of London . . . The disturbance is due to the abject policy pursued by the collaborators at Paris and Vichy . . . And if, among the more conspicuous ‘rebels’ there are people who act on behalf of one party, it is because these people were already organised and so found it easier to go into action first . . . But insurrections whether partial or general would not serve the interests of France. Not partial, because the French nation must act like a people and not as a series of groups; not general because a revolt today would be snuffed out, crushed.

The French were not terrorists, but the terrorists were leading the way; criticism and solidarity; warnings against action and warnings against the divisive labelling of activists: this was typical of the BBC output. The course recommended was without immediate practical implications—except in the Labour Talks. The BBC accused Vichy of provoking disturbances and liked to present  

J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac (ed.), Les Voix de la Liberté (), i.  ( July ).  Ibid.  ( Aug. ). Ibid.  ( Sept. ).

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resistance as an existing national solidarity rather than as a minority venture needing to construct a new national unity around itself. Some listeners detached from any resistance connection may have found this reassuring. The longer-term London view was that street scuffles—however bloody— would not withdraw German soldiers back from Russia but that sabotage of communications and industry could really help. It is likely that many resisters would have tried to respond to guidance on sabotage made from London. Yet the V campaign faltered. Sabotage was praised frequently but its scope was left vague. The first effect of communist resistance was to confirm existing reticence. The long-term concern about ‘revolts’ had become immediate. But there was a new political problem: how to dissociate the BBC from Vichy accusation that the communists, as usual, were inviting disaster. Silence from London would imply assent. When hostages were executed, Bourdan reproached every Frenchman who still used the ‘ignoble and mendacious excuse of “after all, they are only communists”’. When Pétain broadcast an appeal to stop ‘criminal’ attacks on German soldiers, the BBC footwork was better: Monsieur le Maréchal should not insult the population of the occupied zone by asking them to help the police, even though ‘no one imagines for an instant that there need be any discussion of the need to stop these attacks’. But dissuasion should to take place ‘fraternally’ and ‘en français, considering these gestures patriotic but premature’. On  October news of the impending mass executions reached London. The Free French were asked to produce a formal statement quickly, and Schumann conferred with PWE. Next day Schumann warned listeners to renounce ‘individual gestures’ and to stop ‘playing the invader’s game by gunning down a German soldier or colonel or general’ who would only be replaced the next day by another. However legitimate the excuse of self-defence, however gross the provocation, ‘contain your anger and defer the hour of punishment’. Lockhart knew that the street killings were considered by both the Free French and SIS to give the Germans the ‘opportunity’ of destroying their secret organizations, and he supposed that ‘silence on our part adds fuel to the Vichy propaganda that asserts that these assassinations are instigated by us’. But the entirely explicit BBC recommendation not to open fire on the enemy was suddenly blocked. Sikorski lunched with Churchill. He brought up Schumann’s broadcast and accused de Gaulle, or so it was said, of ‘Pétainism’—presumably an obsession with saving French lives. Churchill gulped down the bait. Bracken was asked if it was true that the BBC deprecated the killing of Germans in France. Without any serious discussion J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac (ed.), Les Voix de la Liberté (), i. – ( and  Sept. ). Schumann’s text,  Oct. , FO /. Lockhart to Bracken,  Oct. , FO /.  K. Young (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, ii, ‒ (), ,  Oct. . The story perhaps altered in transmission from Churchill to Lockhart.  

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Churchill obtained a War Cabinet decision that no one should ‘discourage individual acts by French patriots against their German oppressors’. But before the decision took effect de Gaulle spoke on the BBC to reinforce Schumann’s message: The nation needs a watchword, and I shall give it. It comes from the French National Committee which leads the nation in its resistance. Here it is! It is absolutely normal and it is absolutely justified that Germans should be killed by Frenchmen. If the Germans do not wish to find death at our hands they have only to remain in their own country. But war has its tactics. The war of the French ought to be conducted by those who have the charge of it, that is, by myself and the National Committee . . . And for the present, the order I am giving for the occupied territories is not to kill Germans. There is a single but very good reason for this: at the present it is too easy for the enemy to respond by massacring our fighters . . . As soon as we are ready to pass over to the offensive—all of us, inside France and outside—you will get the orders you want.

As ever, this was magisterial. It was deft—‘absolutely normal’, ‘war has its tactics’, ‘the orders you want’—where other speakers fumbled or sounded weak. Only an ultra-loyal minority in the PCF would have doubted that de Gaulle’s appeal was right. But the PCF leadership was aggrieved that this extra obstacle was placed before them. Indeed, the broadcast may have been a mistake. Hitler had assumed that the shooting in Nantes was British-inspired, if communistexecuted. His insistence upon the immediate execution of fifty hostages had been designed to drive the London French into begging the British to desist. When, on the evening of the second day of executions, General de Gaulle came to the microphone to give the desired order, the murder of hostages became a proven policy that evidently worked. De Gaulle’s broadcast was weeks too late. Besides if the Gestapo could identify the ‘fighters’ of the resistance, they did not need an excuse to proceed against them. Frenchmen could be executed for far smaller offences. It was not at all certain that repression would be less vigilant or damaging simply because no one was getting killed. If the value of street killings was uncertain, the hard-headed case against them was merely a secret service rule of thumb. Resistance groups in the occupied zone—violent or not—were already struggling for survival against the German police. Total inactivity might be a defence against police attention, but it could not promote resistance. The immediate question was whether it was possible to curb the campaign of assassination without confirming the Germans in reprisal executions—as the response to any challenge—and without suggesting that one must submit. This dilemma was more important than what caused it. Churchill became annoyed because the BBC response to the executions sent out a signal of the wrong sort. The Russian front seemed to be collapsing.  

Quoted in Lockhart to Bracken: see above, n. . Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, i.  ( Oct. ).

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Jäckel, Frankreich, .

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Beaverbrook went to Moscow to explain the  plan—bombing, blockade, propaganda, and the prospect of British landings to ‘raise widespread revolts’ once Germany’s ‘morale and unity’ were weakened, until the Nazi system ‘breaks up as the Kaiser’s system broke up last time’. Churchill needed these slender hopes to seem better than derisory. Already, he wished he had sent more RAF squadrons to Murmansk. He simply could not tell French patriots to stop shooting. Two days after de Gaulle spoke, Churchill contemplated the German Army spread out over ‘vast subjugated and rebellious areas’. He argued that the ‘continuance of the murders and reprisals, slaughter of hostages etc. which is now going on in so many countries’ must extinguish German hopes of a collaborator’s New Order in Europe. Stalin had been told that tension in occupied Europe was a sign of a maturing strategy. Churchill could not prohibit evidence of it. The executions in France, Norway and Yugoslavia were attempts to nip in the bud the sort of armed resistance which seemed the prerequisite for the return of the British Army to continental Europe. Whatever the intelligence community preferred, the BBC could not be allowed to inhibit the cycle of violence. The propagandists were disconcerted. Churchill seemed offended by the rules on which they had hitherto agreed. It was plainly difficult to keep the policy if warnings were forbidden. Morton tried and failed to persuade the Prime Minister that he was in error. Only Bracken’s intervention saved de Gaulle from a reprimand. The propagandists accepted the ban on explicit criticism of violent resistance, but they did not change their views. When de Gaulle spoke on  October there was no further message of restraint. He asked for a nationwide demonstration of respect for the executed hostages— five minutes of silent attention at  p.m. on  October—which appears to have evoked a better response than any previous radio appeal. It was natural to flinch from more reprisals, but the argument against resistance killing had always been presented as a technical objection. Even Oliver Harvey believed that resisters who shot Germans would only ‘expose themselves to reprisals’ and make it easy ‘to “liquidate” Gaullists by making them hostages’. If this was based on evidence, it was the success of repression in Czechoslovakia. But like the theory that martyrs strengthen a cause, it was not entirely empirical. There were, surely, underlying objections. The project suggested by the assassinations seemed too ambitious; its course could not be calculated, and the human cost seemed higher than the marginal benefit; and it would be divisive.  Anglo-American-Russian Conference, General Directive,  Sept. : Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill (), vi. .  Churchill to Lyttleton,  Oct. : Gilbert, Winston Churchill, vi. .  H. Noguères et al., Histoire de la Resistance en France,  vols. (–), ii. . But Passy was not impressed.  John Harvey (ed.), War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (),  ( Oct. ).

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Some of the hostages were executed in reprisal for acts of sabotage. Without communist sabotage work, in advance of most other movements, the killings would have seemed even more questionable. Reprisals made the communists conspicuous, but they owed more to good internal security, to the prestige of Russia, and, above all, to a justified confidence among anti-fascists that their resistance would be very serious. Organizational sinew made them attractive. If most victims had not been communists, perhaps the resistance reaction might have been resentful—as it became in Serbia. But the party’s stoical attitude to their own casualties wiped away the blemish of –. Within rival resistance movements anti-communism quickly became difficult to voice. By  it was a sin against the future. Charles Tillon, the leader of the FTP, argues that de Gaulle’s October broadcast had to be ignored because the Resistance had to do anything that would ‘break the terror’ inspired by Nazi occupation techniques. Tillon was right. Sooner or later resisters came to view their losses as unavoidable: potent as an outrage, weak as a deterrent. But the German Army was not the most ‘popular’ target nor a target that could then be hit seriously. German soldiers did not go in fear of their lives. Resisters had to accept the risk of repression and learn to survive the attention of the German and Vichy police. A handful of FTP organizers tried to force the pace, but in  there was not a great deal of violent resistance to show for it. Most resistance movements of the occupied zone wanted either to oppose collaboration or to be conspiracies whose task was to remain unknown and unguessed at until the Allies landed. None escaped the attention of the police and the Gestapo. The publicist’s relish with which imminent executions were announced, the theatrical courts martial of , and the yellow and red posters listing the victims, were intimidating when experienced as a sort of peacetime totalitarianism. But the Resistance did, in a sense, re-enter the war and become hardened. The real terror of Nazi rule was the fear that the war could not be won. What resisters would accept was conditioned by the news of the Red Army and the RAF. Collective intimidation was blunted by the prospect of the day of judgement. After Churchill’s intervention PWE left the French themselves to judge the value of armed action: ‘we do not either encourage or discourage’. But armed action remained unpopular in London—as Eden established when he enquired of the governments-in-exile. In May  there was an SOE/PWE discussion of the prospects of a levée en masse in France but the prospect was too remote for useful planning. Maurice Buckmaster, the head of F Section, postponed the issue of violent agitation by asking PWE not to transmit instructions on sabotage lest the Germans gain some sort of warning of what   

Tillon, On chantait rouge, . He adds, correctly, that the new tactics shifted British opinion. PWE Sub-directive for the BBC, – Jan. , FO /. Eden to Allied ambassadors,  Nov. , FO /.

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the saboteurs intended. Buckmaster had a point, but he did not explain why the rudiments of sabotage could not be taught openly. PWE regarded the decision to push RAF bombing beyond the French ports, which had been targets since June , as their own achievement. SOE agreed that Squadron , which ferried SOE’s agents and containers to France, might occasionally drop a bomb on factories working for Germany which were too small to be RAF targets. PWE were confident that pro-Allied opinion was reconciled to RAF bombing raids and officials complained that ‘at varying high levels’ there were too many people ‘still hampered by entirely unwarranted fears and misgivings about probable reactions in France’. War Cabinet permission for the bombing of factories in occupied France was intended chiefly as a warning. Churchill and Cherwell wondered if a British threat to bomb French cities might revive Vichy’s ability to resist German pressure, although the Foreign Office was always reluctant to contemplate extensive bombing in France. In the first major inland bombing raid, the Renault engine factory in Paris was attacked with the precision then at the command of the RAF. Six hundred and twenty-three people died in the bombing. (The damage to the works might have been more long-lasting had the owner not been desperate to restore full production lest vital machinery be removed to Germany.) When a number of Vichy ministers and German commanders attended a requiem mass in Notre-Dame for the victims, PWE begged everyone not to be impressed or even disconcerted by critical comment in the USA. The frequency of the bombing soon increased, though several promising targets were forbidden to the RAF for fear of even heavier casualties. The War Cabinet permitted the RAF to attack moving freight trains and, in the belief that French passengers had to travel by day, all trains by night. Within weeks the Free French became alarmed at stories of the daylight machine-gunning of passenger trains—about which the Air Ministry knew nothing—and persuaded PWE to call for a modification of the rules of target selection. The political departments—the Foreign Office, PWE, and SOE— responded immediately, and Lord Selborne assured Eden in October that SOE had been told not to attack passenger trains or, for the present, even goods trains unless they were carrying important freight. But the RAF were reluctant to relinquish any permission once given. In March  London heard that a ‘Front National’ promoted by the communists, had called their armed force the ‘Francs-Tireurs et Partisans’. There were, at that point, few F Section circuits capable of even sporadic action. An agent parachuted into the Vichy zone on / May  became ‘the first man to explain to any substantial number of Frenchmen . . . the uses of plastic    

SOE/PWE French meetings,  Apr.,  May,  June , FO /. Black Report: France,  May , Fo /. S. E. Mangeot to D. Bowes Lyon,  Mar. , FO /. Cherwell to PM,  Apr. ; PM’s minute,  Apr. : FO /.

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[explosive]’. Progress was slower than expected in . If ‘gaullist’ resistance—assisted by SOE’s RF Section—achieved rather more than the F Section in , the difference was marginal. The FTP—well in the lead— were able to mount a campaign of train derailment in July. De Gaulle took a step in the same direction with a secret message on  June asking for acts of minor violence and sabotage from the three movements associated with Free France. (Moulin replied that the groupes francs of Combat—the leading movement in unoccupied France—were already at work.) On  July  there were eight simultaneous attacks (using home-made explosive) on German labour-recruiting offices in different towns in the Vichy zone. After this the groupes francs began to be supplied by SOE, and the FTP received twelve tons of supplies from RF Section in July. But resistance movements were not able to deliver a large-scale attack even on economic targets. They could not act in place of the Allied air fleets which were now seeking such targets. The aircraft were ready to begin what the movements could not yet attempt. The price of a slow start to sabotage was that the RAF was brought in, however reluctantly, to perform tasks the Resistance could not accomplish. In summer  both the communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans and F Section were badly hit by arrests. Everything depended on improved security procedures. It did not seem right to squeeze from slender resources more than a first rehearsal of the sabotage campaign which might be possible in . The senior figures in PWE knew that there would be no second front in  but also that in France true believers thought the invasion was imminent. They were instructed to allow a degree of artificial excitement, but they did not add to it. When Pierre Villon, the leader of the PCF’s Front National, first made contact with the Free French agent Rémy, he was scathing about the BBC’s antipathy to the theme of armed resistance. Of course, open disapproval had already disappeared. On  August  the FTP made their boldest attack so far by opening fire on a group of Luftwaffe men out for some exercise—two were killed and fifteen injured. Five days later ninety-three hostages were shot in retaliation. The BBC’s Trois Amis discussed the news. Duchesne admired the courage of the attackers (‘terrorist or not’), and Oberlé observed that the French people had the right to do what the Spaniards had done to Napoleon. From this point the BBC would be used as much to reflect the trend of violence as to set it. Fighting French money was given to the communist-led Front National as a gesture of recognition and good faith. F Section decided to give guns to the communist FTP wherever agents were impressed by local leaders. Contacts with the Paris FTP led to more substantial deliveries from the end of the year.   

M. R. D. Foot, SOE in France (), , . Noguères, Histoire de la Résistance, ii. . Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, ii.  ( Aug. ).

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In occupied France police vigilance scythed through the list of early resistance organizations. This was as true of the independent movements as it was of the circuits started by SOE. Most did not last. The strength of the communists in the north owed much to the survival training as a clandestine party in –. The relative weakness of the communists in the south—before —reflected pre-war weakness (except in Marseille), effective police persecution, and faults of leadership. In the Vichy zone the non-communist resistance went through the chrysalis stage in –. Lyon was the nursery of resistance movements because it was a much less hostile environment than Paris. The connection between de Gaulle and the Resistance developed first in the unoccupied zone. The London links were established before Laval invited in the Gestapo.

 Turning a New Leaf I N January  the BBC’s Free French period Honneur et Patrie included a rebuttal of political misrepresentations of de Gaulle. De Gaulle was neither the unscrupulous subversive ‘haranguing his red guards’ invented by the Paris press nor was he to be found ‘straddling Boulanger’s horse’ or plotting ‘on a direct line to one Pretender or another’. De Gaulle would never use his powers to favour a monarchist restoration or any kind of dictatorship; the only regime ‘known’ by Free France was the Republic. This was the BBC contribution to a season of reassurances. Dalton wanted SOE to make socialist contacts in France. He did not trust all of his officials, but his fear of Tory obstruction was probably misplaced. SOE dutifully looked for patriots without murky royalist pasts and they tried to check the rumour that the CGT, suppressed by Vichy in autumn , was enjoying a clandestine revival. SOE’s F Section—entirely independent of the Free French—sent Jacques de Guélis to contact socialists trying to rebuild something from the ashes of their party, the SFIO. There was a wild goose chase of SOE and Free French agents around Léon Jouhaux’s résidence surveillée which was, in part, an attempt to get a syndicalist sponsor for Woburn’s Radio Travail. De Guélis was in due course arrested. Before this he may have passed on some criticism of de Gaulle. In any case, the views of London dissidents reached France and raised questions. The judicial charges laid in the court at Riom against Blum and the chief men of the Third Republic crawled slowly towards a trial. The case created difficulties for the Resistance and the British. The first BBC criticism of the prosecutions was very careful: one noticed that those guilty men who joined Vichy were immune from prosecution. In  Vichy became impatient. Without suspending the legal preliminaries at Riom, a new court of political justice was set up and promptly handed down verdicts of guilty in advance of the main trial and its bulky dossiers of evidence. This further affront to legal seriousness made a difference. As respect for old-fashioned legality revived— Newsome’s prediction—the defendants recovered a certain dignity. The BBC broadcast a sympathetic commentary on Blum’s letter to the Riom court in February . The cases came to court, but they were abandoned in April when the Germans grasped that the real charge was not that the accused planned the war but that they failed to plan properly. This closed the period in which Vichy could exploit the anti-political rage unleashed in . Léon 

J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac (ed.), Les Voix de la Liberté (), ii.  ( Jan. ).

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Blum was the chief beneficiary. The clandestine efforts of the two Comités d’Action Socialiste (CAS) to restore the prestige of socialism no longer needed to fight shy of the SFIO party background. Blum, and the deputies who voted against Pétain in , had achieved greater prominence than the majority who voted the other way. Blum asked his colleague Félix Gouin to go to London to represent the party. De Gaulle had a service d’action politique which did not neglect the syndicalist world. Yves Morandat, a Catholic syndicalist who undertook the mission to the syndicalists, was probably more successful than de Guélis. He, like Moulin, was a missionary sent to find a resistance which would look to Carlton Gardens for leadership and sustenance. In December  Morandat was crossexamined about de Gaulle by the southern CAS and he gave reassurances. If, as Morandat reports, the socialists seemed more curious than sceptical about the General, it was a triumph of tact over political instinct. Whenever Free French agents met potential recruits in France, they spoke from a position of advantage and reputation created for them by Radio London. Morandat provided the cash to launch a clandestine version of the socialist daily Le Populaire in April : a major step in putting the socialists back on the political map. He also joined, and so helped rescue, a faltering resistance movement called ‘Libération’. (Sometimes ‘Libération-sud’ to distinguish it from the northern movement of the same name.) Its leader, d’Astier de la Vigerie, became a great figure in the Resistance. D’Astier was a writer who had shed right-wing sympathies in the course of the s and learnt his anti-fascism as a journalist in Spain and Prague. Before Libération obtained Free French money, d’Astier had wondered whether his faith in his socialist recruitment policy was mislaid. Then came Morandat with gold, introductions, and de Gaulle’s reputation. The CAS advised their people that Libération was the resistance movement to join. D’Astier later explained that, although his movement was at first independent, the drift towards a gaullist allegiance was inescapable since the membership assumed it to be a fact. But d’Astier did not see his Libération as a resistance movement representing the SFIO: he was mining the ruins. The parties were thought to have collapsed in fact after Vichy abolished them in law. The communist Front National was itself weak in the Vichy zone, but there were many ‘communists’—lapsed, lapsing, or recoverable—who wanted to resist. Some had considered themselves in breach with the party before June  and could not make contact afterwards. They were found in several resistance movements, and often kept quiet about their past affiliations.  Gouin (–), a lawyer from Marseille; a deputy; voted against Pétain’s powers in ; president, Constituent Assembly, –; Prime Minister, .  H. Noguères et al., Histoire de la Résistance en France,  vols. (–), ii. . The Germans tried to muddy the waters. Black ‘Gaullist’ leaflets were dropped from aeroplanes at night in imitation of RAF leaflet raids.  Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie had married an American and worked for Time and Life.

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D’Astier promised Léon Jouhaux, the leader of the CGT, that communists would not secure leading positions in Libération, but his promise was ineffective. When in  the communist presence within Libération became considerable—in some districts they set the political tone—the socialists complained that the movement had been captured. Libération became large and successful, but it did not match its rival ‘Combat’. Combat, untypically, was a secret army from the beginning. Henri Frenay set about creating a secret army before SOE turned up to recommend the secret army strategy. He was an army officer, and his contacts, at the beginning, were on his social level. His movement was, accordingly, considered more bourgeois and right-wing than Libération. (Combat was the product of Frenay’s movement, the MLN, and another of Christian democratic inspiration which merged at the end of .) Frenay was young and open-minded. He did not consider resistance a purely military activity. When Yves Morandat first made contact with Combat, Frenay was in Paris. Morandat was told that Combat would be delighted to work with de Gaulle but not to subordinate itself. At the same time Frenay encountered les Anglais in the shape of Pierre de Vomécourt, the most important of F Section’s agents in the occupied zone. Had the organizational tangle been different, this meeting would have been important. But de Vomécourt tried to acquire Combat for F Section by persuading Frenay that the British could offer professionalism and guns whereas Passy ran an amateur service for the less serious. This alerted Frenay to de Gaulle’s difficulties. Frenay replied that Combat would only work with London through de Gaulle. A Free French allegiance was, for many movements, obligatory. It was contrary to all expectations that resisters had to choose between a close relationship with the British and a political commitment to de Gaulle. Frenay and d’Astier had already crossed this bridge. They had told General la Laurencie, who proposed an American-financed anti-Vichy intrigue to provide political leadership for the Resistance, that the British had chosen de Gaulle and there was no more to be said. Bourdet argues that there was scarcely a decision at all: We had so hoped for, and awaited, this London liaison, we were so amazed that it had not come earlier, that it was unthinkable to debate the matter once the opportunity arrived. . . . [But] this signified merely, at the political level, the official ratification of an existing state of affairs; we were ‘gaullists’ before Moulin’s arrival, but we were not more so afterwards. The already vast organization [MLN/Combat] that had developed in the course of  was the product of our own ideas, without orders or directives or even advice from London. We intended simply to continue the same job without any change other than the new assistance granted to us, and we did not think at this time that anyone would ask us to change anything whatever.  C. Bourdet, L’Aventure incertaine (), . The journal Combat adopted a new motto apostrophizing de Gaulle as the sole leader of the struggle for ‘our liberties’.

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Not all groups and leaders felt so ineluctably gaullist. A few conservatives, disliking de Gaulle’s blanket condemnation of Pétain, swallowed F Section’s bait; others were so non-political they ignored Free France; the communists, sensibly, took what they could get from wherever it came. Jean Moulin’s task in  was to prepare a fusion of friendly movements in the zone non-occupé. This was the measure of the BBC’s success in establishing ‘de Gaulle in London’ as the first password of the unrecruited resistance. Union was the fruit which Moulin picked: his own contribution was ensuring that Combat did not dominate the southern Resistance. The quality of Frenay’s organization was good and his regional leaders were much admired. But d’Astier argued that Combat was too right-wing for the Left to be absorbed into it. D’Astier’s immediate complaint, soon corrected, was the reluctance of the journal Combat to denounce Pétain. As Combat grew, its political centre moved leftwards as did the patron himself. In fact Combat recruited a larger number of socialists than Libération, although this was not understood at the time. But Libération had a special value for de Gaulle as a conspicuously left-wing movement. The Free French wanted resistance unity but not a spontaneous combination that preceded their own federative efforts and leading role. If de Gaulle had never been invented, Moulin might not have unified the Resistance. Once his claim was established there was certainly no other prospect of unity. ‘De Gaulle in London’ absorbed Britain’s promise of material support and military guidance, which is why the existence of F Section was a puzzling clandestine variation on a theme Radio London made abundantly clear. Combat and Libération were the first movements to accept the fait accompli. They did so without serious regrets, but they reserved a liberty of political action that left the Free French determined to secure a more complete allegiance. Rémy, the principal Free French agent in the occupied zone, performed miracles in finding resistance needles in the haystack. He reported that the communists might offer some sort of recognition of Free France in return for weapons and freedom to practise their chosen ‘offensive tactics’. Rémy also reported that the communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans were being promoted as a nationwide fighting force open to all political colours. He received permission to supply the FTP with radio sets in return for a promise to accept Allied orders. In July the FTP received their first consignment of Free French weapons. The correct but never warm relationship between de Gaulle and the PCF began without undue difficulty. But there was at first no political alliance. The British, on the other hand, did not accept that the resistance movements could, through sheer curiosity and militancy, be enlisted by de Gaulle’s recruiting sergeants. The process was only beginning and the  Noguères, Histoire de la Résistance, ii. , –; Rémy, Mémoires d’un agent secret de la France  Libre (), . Noguères, Histoire de la Résistance, ii. , , .

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success of Rémy, Morandat, and Moulin was not clear until the summer. F Section had their own irons in the fire, which they considered more important, and it was F Section that gave PWE their first direct link to resistance opinion. SOE provided a small number of agents to be trained by PWE for their own needs. In April  three such field officers arrived in Lyon, ClermontFerrand, and Toulouse; they recruited six-man teams to help them in Limoges and Perigueux and were soon able to report by radio. Two reverted to normal SOE work under the pressure of events. But the sort of information service PWE envisaged was soon provided by the gaullist resistance movements. In the Vichy zone Moulin took up Morandat’s contacts. The rivalry between d’Astier and Frenay was his preoccupation from the start. He welcomed a new movement, ‘Franc-Tireur’, into the gaullist connection. This movement, the smallest of the leading trio of southern movements, had a liberal, anticlerical hue. Moulin found it particularly congenial and worked more closely with its leader, Jean-Pierre Lévy, than with any other leader in . Although Lévy was not quite ready for unqualified commitment to Free France, he too had kept his distance from F Section and refused their money. When, towards the end of the year, the three movements did agreed to combine, Combat was the most formidable component. But Moulin ensured that the two smaller movements achieved a reverse takeover of the larger and obtained a promise to accept London rules of organization and the authority of the London CNF. Moulin’s success was founded on the willingness of Combat to pay a high price for unity. In the north Rémy was a pathfinder not exactly a delegate to the Resistance; so the Resistance took the initiative. One of Rémy’s contacts, Pierre Brossolette, suggested to the northern Libération that it was time to start working with London. Christian Pineau convinced his syndicalist colleagues, not without some difficulty, that he should consult the other movements he could find and go to London on their behalf. Pineau became the first French resistance leader to reach London. Libération was aware of its southern cousin but quite distinct and more the product of syndicalists. Its original programme was the defence of syndicalism and it was slow to start preparing for paramilitary action. Partly as a result, it was outpaced by other northern movements, in particular by the communists and an almost non-political movement known as the Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM). But Libération remained significant and no movement could claim to be older. Pineau spent March  in the non-occupied zone meeting resisters and syndicalists and acquiring a sort of mandate to represent their opinions to London. He saw Frenay, French Black Report, – Aug. , FO /; Noguères, Histoire de la Résistance, ii. . Christian Pineau, secretary of the CGT section fédérale banque et bourse; later Foreign Minister, –. Pierre Brossolette, a socialist; fired as a radio journalist in  for criticism of Munich; editor of Résistance, ; agent for BCRA, ; died in enemy hands in .  

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d’Astier, and André Philip, a socialist deputy who belonged to Libérationsud’s comité directeur. All emphasized that de Gaulle needed clearer political positions about Pétain’s État Français. André Philip, in particular, asked for a political manifesto addressed to the Resistance movements: ‘If it roughly corresponds to our thinking, we can, by turning it into our charter, unify the spirit of the Resistance.’ Pineau’s mission, earlier than Gouin’s, was inquisitorial but friendly. All these people were brought to London. After Pineau came Brossolette, who quickly made a good impression in the BCRA. Then d’Astier of Libération-sud sensed that something was afoot in London and came over courtesy of F Section. André Philip, of whom de Gaulle thought well, arrived from Lyon. These arrivals started a stream which flowed until liberation. Most of the early visitors had something to say about propaganda, and Brossolette had an influence which preceded him on account of his reports on the press and radio in the occupied zone. Pineau spoke for those who saw de Gaulle as leader for the battle and wanted for ‘gaullism’ a quick, respectable, and familiar definition. He saw de Gaulle immediately. Passy made it plain that London wished, above all, to know whether the Resistance accepted the General’s authority. Pineau risked a simple affirmative—he considered a truer, but weaker, response too discouraging —but he added that only a political statement could obtain universal acceptance of de Gaulle’s position. PWE asked Pineau the same question as Passy, and heard the mental reservation. De Gaulle agreed to give Pineau a ‘letter for his friends’ but warned that he would not approve ‘a Republic without authority’ or ‘a regime of parties’ he had already condemned in public. He knew the arguments. Pineau’s requirements were close to the accusations of the London dissidents. On  April de Gaulle had given a speech attacking the good faith of critics of Free France. He attacked the ‘derisory snobbery’ which moved some Anglo-Americans to regret the absence of yesterday’s names in his movement, and warned that ‘France in revolution’ would always prefer Danton to exhausted notables: ‘for it is a revolution, the greatest in its history, which France, betrayed by its governing elites and by its privileged, has begun to accomplish’. Pineau consulted the socialists in London and was told by Louis Lévy, the dissident who had given Morandat his socialist contacts, that de Gaulle was a Maurrassian who would be dangerous after the war. Lévy wanted Pineau to distinguish strongly between military command, which was acceptable, and political leadership, which should be refused. Pineau held to the position that de Gaulle was the channel through which the Resistance could speak to the Allies whilst  C. Pineau, La Simple Vérité (), –; M. Sadoun, Les Socialistes sous l’Occupation (), –.  Pineau, La Simple Vérité, , .  De Gaulle, Discours et Messages—Pendant la Guerre, Juin –Janvier  (), .

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remaining under French authority. He cannot have dismissed Lévy’s warnings lightly. Pineau noticed de Gaulle’s lack of apparent interest in his resistance work. Free France was, still, less the London bureau of the Resistance than the empire defence force. Pineau was disconcerted by scepticism about resistance. Both SOE and the Free French had abjured hand-waving estimates and resolved that counting must replace conjecture. The BCRA existed to measure and manage resistance. F Section did not yet much affect the measurement: they were in grave trouble in mid- and several circuits had already been destroyed. The capacity for armed action was confined, at this time, to a number of communist FTP groups in the occupied zone and to the groups francs belonging to Combat. Pineau, and those who followed him to London, sensed there a low opinion of the military value of resistance. Bogomolov, lately Stalin’s man at Vichy and now the Soviet ambassador to the governments exiled in London, was more winning. Soviet pep talk was much appreciated. British voices did not communicate approval as readily. Pineau felt much more at home with Bogomolov, and the warmer Russian style, than with Passy, whose professional detachment from ‘politics’ did not strike the right chord, or with Desmond Morton, who allowed his disbelief to show when Pineau told him (‘despite my wish to be objective’) that the French nation was against Pétain and the Resistance was behind de Gaulle. The BCRA seem to have exceeded the British in icy objectivity. At the BBC Pineau detected a ‘reticence’ about de Gaulle. He repeated his support for the General and asked for more political analysis. The French, he said, were less interested in the evils of the Armistice—the gaullist theme par excellence—than in the daily treason of the Pétain government, the evolution of opinion within the Army of the Armistice (particularly, no doubt, in North Africa about which PWE had prohibited discussion), and the future. These requests picked up where the MOI had left off. Schumann, de Gaulle’s porteparole, accepted them as a true expression of resistance concerns. Pineau did not, of course, represent non-gaullist resistance. Apart from the communists, there were military groupuscules and ultra-left groups. F Section found both. They had hopes both of Marseille Trotskyites and of Army officers with access to hidden weapons. F Section learnt in  of a strictly non-political movement led by a painter called André Girard. On investigation, this movement and its leader, both known by the pseudonym ‘Carte’, proved to be antigaullist. Carte possessed qualities attractive to SOE: scorn for publicity, devotion to preparing for insurrection, and contact with dissidents in the Armistice Army. Girard was seen by a succession of F Section agents who were so impressed that by mid- SOE decided to treat the movement as their main  Pineau, La Simple Vérité, –. Pineau’s impression that Morton ‘never believed in the French Resistance’ is striking but unconvincing.

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commitment in the south. This meant radio sets and even weapons at a time when the BCRA and SOE’s liaison group—RF Section—could only send money to their movements. F Section had made slow progress with circuits created by their own trained men. The hopes for Carte are easily understood. De Gaulle agreed to prepare a political text for Pineau’s ‘friends’. Pineau’s influence was reinforced by Adrien Tixier, an eminent syndicalist who had represented the Free French in Washington. Pineau, Tixier, and Hauck told de Gaulle that, after the Riom trials, it was impermissible to speak about pre-war politics in language sounding maréchaliste and difficult to allow criticism of the defendants. But de Gaulle was difficult to move. To the complaint that he judged the errors of the Third Republic as severely as the crimes of Vichy, he answered that the former had engendered the latter. De Gaulle’s first draft triggered a campaign to get him to improve it. In the process the statement grew into a manifesto for the Resistance. A few hours before Pineau returned to France, a text was produced which included what the General could not be prevented from saying: ‘A regime, in all its moral, social, political and economic aspects, abdicated in the hour of defeat. Another has been born and feeds off capitulation. The French people condemn both of them.’ The last draft even increased the force of his attack on a pre-war regime ‘paralysed by moral disorder’. But the future held a sweeter perspective for the Left: ‘we wish . . . that in a mighty renewal of the nation and the empire, through a state-directed technique, the traditional French ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity should henceforth be realised among us.’ The genuflection was not to  but to  and technocracy. De Gaulle, without renouncing anything, had found an acceptable way of touching upon difficult subjects. Pineau returned to France carrying the text of de Gaulle’s message. It started to work like yeast. On  April  Pierre Laval returned to power in Darlan’s place with the new title of chef du gouvernement. German influence at Vichy began to approximate to German control. A more active form of industrial collaboration was required as the war in Russia strained Axis resources. De Gaulle responded with a BBC talk whose argument was that the French were now ready to use any means to get rid of Vichy. He sounded almost Jacobin: ‘national liberation cannot be separated from national insurrection’. The single phrase said a great deal: force would be used to depose Pétain and his prefects. De Gaulle was reinforcing the apparent ambition of the Resistance. Vichy had handed out death sentences; Carlton Gardens hit back with ‘insurrection’. The slogan was to haunt the General. The Resistance Left, especially the Front National, embraced it almost as a military directive. But the original context was political. De Gaulle did not believe that resistance should  

 M. R. D. Foot, SOE in France (), –. Pineau, La Simple Vérité, , .  Ibid. . Discours et Messages,  ( Apr. ).

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be a long levée en masse. He meant simply that the destruction of Vichy must be part and parcel of the defeat of Germany. Moulin wanted the demonstrations planned for May Day to include the communists, the CGT, and the Catholic syndicalists—the CFTC. He was able to promise BBC pre-publicity for the demonstrations; and de Gaulle would make a statement to French labour the day before. Combat felt a little uncomfortable about the CGT. It was still not a name to conjure with. CGT and CFTC leaders accepted an umbrella title: the demonstrations were called for in the name of Combat, Libération, Franc-Tireur, the PCF, the Comité d’Action Socialiste, and a hitherto unknown ‘French Workers Movement’. Schumann spoke, as promised, to relay back to the French working class an appeal made by its own organizations—‘all the more alive because they are secret’—asking for  May  be marked by silent demonstrations in every town of the unoccupied zone. De Gaulle’s  April message saluted the patriotism, courage, and self-sacrifice of the ‘French labouring classes’ as the ‘pure source’ of French grandeur. Remarks about the ‘dark times’, now past, when Frenchmen struggled against each other and lacked either ‘mutual understanding or mutual respect’ suggested a truce about . The wellprepared public demonstration that followed realized what Harvey and Ritchie had wanted twelve months before. It also conformed to the approved political warfare model: British and French working together using propaganda and secret service techniques. The search for local ‘cells’ of resistance to provide London with pegs on which to hang their appeals had succeeded. The formal decision that these ‘cells’—in reality strung together as movements—could be left to Free France was taking effect. The May Day demonstrations were widespread and sizeable. They showed that opposition to Vichy was possible and arguably popular. A hundred thousand gathered in Marseille and perhaps as many in Lyon, where the police were ordered not to intervene. Smaller events took place in most large towns. The FTP organized a day of sabotage in the occupied zone, but it was the political message from Vichy France which filled the BBC news bulletins. The resistance movements had found a response that went beyond their membership. They had shown all France they were in touch with London and proved to the Allies that they had mass appeal. An examination of the clandestine press has shown that after  May the journals were more confident and assured, especially on the Left. There was an exchange of courtesies. Moulin sent a signal to thank the General, on behalf of the Resistance, for having ‘solemnly affirmed that the workers, today’s principal agents of liberation, will tomorrow obtain their place, based on respect for working-class   

Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, ii. – ( Apr. ). Discours et Messages,  (BBC,  Apr. ). H. R. Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France (), .

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tradition, in the construction of the new France’. Perhaps he meant that de Gaulle should promise to restore the CGT. On  May Hauck read out a message from French syndicats to the trade unions of the free world which promised industrial sabotage, invited the Allies to bomb French factories, and asserted that France was still at war because ‘the representative of the people of France, General de Gaulle, fights at the side of the Allies’. Three weeks later Schumann risked the prophecy that the clandestine journals of the unoccupied zone would ‘unite spontaneously’ around de Gaulle and ‘fighting France’. The Resistance was no longer a hypothesis. When Leclerc’s Free French brigade covered itself with glory at Bir Hakeim, the propagandists seized their chance with both hands. ‘Free France’ was relabelled. When the movement changed its name, with Churchill’s encouragement, in June , the expression ‘Fighting France’ had already been used on the BBC for some time. At the end of May de Gaulle held a press conference to advertise his new claims. He responded to strong pressure to be sensible about his status. He admitted that Free France could not be the ‘political representative of the French nation’ but announced that he wanted ‘men as representative as possible’ to come to London and share in his work. This would make the London critics less significant. France had changed beyond their understanding: In its grief, the French people, believe me, have made a revolution . . . There are the movements of resistance—groupings such as, for example, the syndicalist people who constitute one of the principal resistant elements, such as Libération, Franc-Tireur, Combat, which are resistance associations. Well, the chiefs of these movements are the new men; we know them and we are in touch with them.

Two weeks later de Gaulle spoke to France of ‘a common ideal of liberty and justice’ which the nations had evolved over centuries of progressive development, an ideal which bound together the opponents of the German and Japanese empires. This was Newsome’s whiggish idea of the anti-Nazi coalition. The General was becoming respectable. When the letter which Pineau took back to France gained a favourable reception, Moulin asked the clandestine journals to print it. It was published in London on  June. Next day it was printed simultaneously in the clandestine press and the text was read by Schumann on the BBC. This, says Frenay, was the moment de Gaulle became the political leader of the Resistance. Schumann called the letter a pledge ‘unanimously and unreservedly accepted’ by the movements. De Gaulle had blended reassurance with his sense of constitutional reform:

  

Noguères, Histoire de la Résistance, ii. –; Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, ii. –. Discours et Messages,  ( May ).  Ibid.  (BBC,  June ). H. Frenay, La Nuit finira (), .

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The totalitarian system . . . as well as the system created by the coalition of special interests which, in our country, has militated against the national interest, must simultaneously and forever be toppled. Practical guarantees, assuring to each his liberty and dignity in work and life, must be devised to deal with the tyranny of perpetual abuses. National security and social security are, for us, imperative and conjoint goals.

De Gaulle had just made an  June second anniversary speech delivered to a large gathering of the London French. This explored a range of issues in a feat of exposition reminiscent of Churchill’s parliamentary war reports. It included warm references to ‘our dear and so effective Union Syndicaliste’, to Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, and to the Anglo-Soviet Treaty. The high point was the assertion that the majority of French leaders and the privileged were ‘disqualified’ by their treason and attentisme, that the masses were valiant and faithful, and that the existing ‘social and moral regime’ could not be left in place. Anxiety about de Gaulle’s hidden preferences was made difficult to sustain. The General’s profile as an enlightened traditionalist was now regularly supported by the BBC and the clandestine journals. PWE had been wondering fitfully how to get a reorientation, but it was de Gaulle’s need for election by acclamation which did the trick. Once a few suitable words had been uttered, commentary consolidated the picture. This accomplished, as a shift to the Left, the democratic readjustment demanded in . As it took place the BCRA brought over the public figures they liked best. De Gaulle had been particularly pleased to learn that Pineau had been in touch with André Philip, a socialist known as a post-marxist technocrat. Before Philip arrived in June, Brossolette prepared the ground for his appointment as National Commissioner for the Interior. Félix Gouin, Blum’s colleague, arrived in August  and was put out to find Philip already filling the slot in the National Committee reserved for a French socialist. Gouin had come to preach unity and keep Fighting France under scrutiny. He said the Free French of  had consisted mainly of right-wing figures with unpleasant ideas, but the British context had saved them from denouncing the constitution of . Moreover, de Gaulle was both formidable and ‘extremely intelligent’. Whatever his point of departure, the General had drawn conclusions from the attitude both of ‘British official circles’ and of the Resistance; there had been ‘a profound change in the evolution of his thought’. Bourdet, less flatteringly, says that de Gaulle changed as Free France changed ‘with that mimetic ability of which he has always given proof ’. This gave the Resistance ‘an image of the real man very different from that which the future was to reveal’. It was an essential defence against Allied disapproval.  Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, ii. – ( June ); de Gaulle, Discours et Messages, – ( June ).  Gouin to Blum, Oct. : J.-P. Cointet, La France Libre (), –.  Bourdet, L’Aventure incertaine, .

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The authority of Vichy, though still important, was stretched thin. There had been acute shortages of food, wine, clothes, and shoes in the winter of /. Police collaboration became much worse as the patriots in the Vichy security forces lost their influence. On the other hand, an Allied victory seemed as far away as ever. Tobruk surrendered and the BBC admitted that the re-equipment of the British Army had been rushed. Laval advocated a German victory. Schumann called for further demonstrations on Bastille Day, and assured listeners that de Gaulle’s readiness to define war aims derived from a ‘mandate decreed by all the organizations, all the groupes francs, all the avant-gardes’. Once again, the movements sent descriptions of the Bastille Day demonstrations back to London, and Schumann gave vivid accounts over the BBC. The response exceeded that of  May. The Gestapo, with radio transmission detection vans, began to operate in the unoccupied zone. In occupied France the Abwehr lost its contest with the SS for the control of anti-resistance activity. A new SS police chief was installed in Paris with the power to elbow aside the military commander. Laval’s call for a German victory marked the turning-point in collaboration— for the factories, the police, and the Jews—and it prefaced a grand appeal for Frenchmen to volunteer for work in Germany. In July and August teams of French police, obedient to the SS and operating in all zones, arrested thousands of non-French Jews. French bishops—once loud in their support for Pétain—became cool and sometimes critical. The Vichy regime lost a good part of its prestige. There was no sudden collapse in Vichy’s authority, but the idea of illegal opposition had matured. 

Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, ii. – ( and  July ).

 Torch I N  Washington received more eminent Frenchmen than London. Americans could also believe they had the clearer view of French affairs. The French embassy in Washington kept almost its entire staff through ; the Washington journal Amérique took the rather State Department view that ‘Pétain, Weygand and de Gaulle are the three colours of our flag’. Of these colours de Gaulle’s became the least popular. Algiers, even after Weygand was withdrawn, became the most interesting place. Admiral William Leahy was the US Ambassador in Vichy until he came back in  to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was also Roosevelt’s chief of staff and his principal adviser on France. When the British took Madagascar from Vichy control in May , the Free French were neither consulted nor invited to assist. This discourtesy was supposed to please Washington. De Gaulle was forbidden to complain in public, but he made vehement objections behind closed doors. PWE considered they frequently saved de Gaulle from making remarks which would destroy any chance of mending his position in Washington. When Vichy pointed to the Free French humiliation, de Gaulle used the BBC to assert that the movement stood for French sovereign rights: Of course she is pro-British, pro-Russian, pro-American . . . She remains in their camp, in spite of what this costs her, because it is in their camp that one may serve, defend and represent the soul, honour and interests of France. . . . It would be as pointless for her to claim her rights while refusing her duties as it would be for others to bury themselves in their duties while denying France her rights.

This was careful and courteous. But to the well-informed de Gaulle had almost pronounced the word ‘Madagascar’. The next humiliation would be worse. Operation Torch, the Allied seizure of French North Africa, was planned when the Axis was still successful. Churchill was so grateful for Roosevelt’s support that he accepted American conditions: the Fighting French must be excluded and a pretence should be made that British troops were not in the assault force. Churchill assured Roosevelt that Torch was an American operation which Britain was assisting. Clandestine preparations in French North  Guy Fritsch-Estrangin, New York entre de Gaulle et Pétain: Les Français aux États-Unis de  à  (), .  De Gaulle, Discours et Messages — Pendant la Guerre, Juin  – Janvier  (),  (BBC,  May ).

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Africa were in American hands, but the planning was Anglo-American and done in London with the assistance of a small PWE team. Ever since  senior French officials in North Africa had been asked, privately, how they would react if confronted with a large American expeditionary force. Robert Murphy, the American Agent-General in Algiers and Roosevelt’s ‘personal representative’, had tried to make a plan to fit the answers. Murphy considered that the French commanders and administrators would accept an American fait accompli, but it was decided not to trust them with advanced knowledge of the landings. Murphy had also received approaches from officers prepared to betray Vichy and from some civilian resisters. These more reliable volunteers were told what would happen, though not—until the last minute—exactly when. They were also promised arms, which SOE did not manage to deliver. Lockhart, Sutton, and the Torch team in the French region were told about Murphy’s arrangements. Kenneth Johnstone, Leeper’s personal assistant in , put on his uniform and went in with the commandos. The most dangerous part of Torch began as the troop convoys left the Clyde and Norfolk, Virginia. Two weeks later  ships had slipped past the U-boats and were approaching their destinations. At  a.m. on  November troops came ashore and started to fight their way into Algiers and Oran; there were also landings near Casablanca. Three days later, as a prepared response, German troops overran unoccupied France. Sutton made the usual appeal for nothing special: ‘the patience, courage and dignity with which you have met your previous trials are the pledges of the calm which you will show. . . . Calm, dignity, confidence. Such are the instructions for today.’ This was quite unnecessary. No appeals were made to the Army of the Armistice. The Army obeyed Laval’s call for non-resistance, though Lattre de Tassigny asked his troops to open fire. Ambushes and a bonfire of police records were the least that the occasion demanded. General Giraud, a soldier who outranked de Gaulle, was collected from France and delivered to General Eisenhower in Gibraltar. Giraud was the centrepiece of the Allied plan of political warfare. On Vichy he was a moderate. He would later say that he had disliked de Gaulle’s ‘calumnies’ against ‘so many good Frenchmen’. His code-name was ‘King-pin’. But in Algiers Admiral Darlan, Pétain’s deputy, turned up at exactly the wrong moment. Murphy, who acted as Eisenhower’s political adviser even before the Allied Forces HQ (AFHQ) reached him in Algiers, could not prevent Darlan assuming command. Murphy invited Darlan to change sides and rally North Africa for the Allies. Giraud approved this dramatic rearrangement. It was not wholly unforeseen. Before AFHQ had left London the Americans had been  

J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac (ed.), Les Voix de la Liberté (/), iii. . Pierre Bourdan, Carnets des jours d’attente (), .

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asked whether they proposed to confirm Pétain, Darlan, or Laval in office if they chanced to be in Algiers when Torch lit up—‘to which the US representatives were only able to reply that they hoped it would not happen’. When Murphy elected to employ Darlan, there was a British suspicion that his presence in Algiers had been arranged. On the other hand, Darlan refused the American offer for several days. The landings were announced as American; French accounts still refer to the ‘American’ landings of . But the decisive Allied advantage on the Algerian coast was the RAF concentration at Gibraltar and Admiral Cunningham’s big guns offshore. The planning principle that British troops should come ashore in disguise vanished in the execution, but the French garrisons showed no favour to American uniforms. The landings at Casablanca, which were entirely American, and at Oran, where the landing force (,) was American, were both hotly opposed. The all-important landings at Algiers were undertaken by a mixed force (, British and , Americans) set ashore by a largely British convoy. This was resisted with less energy. The Algiers garrison, outgunned and short of ammunition, surrendered in the evening. The second stage of Torch was the attempt to snatch Tunis before the enemy did. Admiral Cunningham, the naval commander of Torch, deeply regretted that his instructions had not been more ambitious. The Americans had vetoed landings east of Algiers until Algiers was secure. Though paratroops were dropped at Bône on  November, the advantage of surprise had been conceded. Tunis was within range of Axis airfields in Sicily, and French commanders were free to choose what to do. The strategy chosen meant that the Allies could not secure Tunisian ports and airfields without an almost immediately friendly French reaction to the landings at Algiers. PWE were told to be the ‘handmaid’ of General Eisenhower’s AFHQ in the planning stage of Torch. They were anxious on several counts. British military prestige was in some disrepair, and Lockhart asked if Torch might be announced as undertaken with ‘full military support’ from Britain. This was refused, although in the event Eisenhower relented. After some experience of handmaid’s work, Lockhart had warned his ministers that political warfare was not in safe hands: the AFHQ military staff were not very impressive, but they were in control. The political specialists from the US Office of War Information (OWI) were ignored. The final plans were described as ‘so vague as to be of negligible assistance to anyone charged with the execution of political warfare’. PWE warned the Americans that British policy must remain anti-Vichy whatever the political consequences of Torch. PWE’s one clear achievement had been getting Churchill to ask Roosevelt to remove the  Heads of Enquiry,  Feb. , FO /. Churchill refers to Darlan’s presence in Algiers as an ‘odd and formidable coincidence’: Churchill, The Second World War,  vols. (–), iv. .  Lockhart to Foreign Office,  Oct. ; Lockhart to Eden and Bracken,  Oct.; Sterling (FO)  to Lockhart,  Oct., FO /. Heads of Enquiry,  Feb. , FO /.

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words—‘my dear old friend’—from the President’s invasion day message to Pétain. The AFHQ plan was silent on political personalities since Murphy needed freedom of action. PWE could not discover who might or might not be used once the troops were ashore. Murphy, however, was a known quantity in London. He enjoyed a large range of contacts, but he favoured Vichy personalities that PWE did not like. PWE liked General Giraud—he was famous for his POW escape from Germany, and he held no Vichy appointment—but warned against his friends and acquaintances. Torch was not the political warfare triumph it might have been. It did not secure Tunisia or the Toulon fleet for the Allies, and it did not, though this was not envisaged, bring down the Vichy regime. But it started well. A band of  civilians—followers of de Gaulle or the Comte de Paris—raced about Algiers arresting senior officers and disorganizing everything. They started with a coup de théâtre. Radio Algiers broadcast what purported to be an appeal by General Giraud for co-operation with the Allies. The resistance had improvised a fake statement since the Allies, and their chosen General, had not entered the city on schedule. But the appeal was without apparent effect. The radio station passed back into official hands and fell silent. At . a.m. the BBC put out Eisenhower’s communiqué stating that an American expeditionary force, supported by the RAF and the Royal Navy, was landing at various points in French North Africa to counter the German threat to the French colonies. (PWE had opposed this fiction as demeaningly apologetic.) An hour later, Roosevelt’s statement was read. It promised that the Americans came as friends who posed no threat to French sovereignty. But what the Allies needed was for French commanders to disobey orders to resist the landings. The first Allied statements did not go so far or make threats against French commanders issuing or accepting such orders. De Gaulle had not been forewarned; but he swallowed his wrath and produced the best Allied appeal. He asked the military and officialdom to join the Allies ‘without reserve’ and to forget about ‘names and formulas’. By the time he made this broadcast—. p.m. on  November—the fighting in Algiers was over, although many lives—mostly French—were still to be lost elsewhere. Radio Algiers, the obvious instrument for claiming the obedience of French North Africa, remained silent between  and  November. Murphy had not quite convinced Darlan to help him, and AFHQ did not yet know what to say. Only on  November did the Governor of Algiers use the radio to read out Darlan’s proclamation appointing himself High Commissioner for North Africa. This was not in the plan. Bracken had warned Eden, earlier that day, of ‘a fantastic suggestion hatched in Washington’ that Darlan should be kept on as leader of French North Africa. The British reaction, from the Foreign  

Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, iii. –. Bracken to Eden,  Nov. , FO /.

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Office to SOE, was hostile. Disapproval of Murphy’s judgement turned to indignation. British officials, and journalists on both sides of the Atlantic, were soon hotly engaged against Darlan. Harvey was incredulous: How can we work with Darlan who is a traitor and who has failed either to deliver the French fleet or even to pacify N. Africa without fighting? Darlan is the slipperiest politician, in the Laval class, and Murphy . . . is infatuated with Vichy. Our [Admiral] Cunningham is the biggest bloody old fool off his ship, and the American generals are as simple as lambs. . . . I fear our blind self-effacement before America over this whole business . . . Darlan has been represented . . . by HMG, and rightly, as the archtraitor of France, second only to Laval for collaboration with Germany and for the overthrow of French democracy. He is now on our side.

De Gaulle was permitted a brief statement, broadcast by Schumann on  November, which explained that the National Committee renounced in advance anything that might ‘consecrate the Vichy regime in North Africa’. PWE suppressed all rumour or mention of Darlan until the BBC repeated as news the Allied recognition of his new position already broadcast by Radio Algiers. The BBC French staff found that political silence was enforced strictly and there were threats of resignation. On  November Duchesne argued that France was joining the Allies despite some difficulties. He quoted patriotic statements by the Fighting French generals Koenig and de Larminat; he mentioned Giraud; he announced—it was a bit premature—that French troops were resisting the Axis in Tunisia; and he saluted Lattre de Tassigny, the only commander in France known to have opposed the German invasion of the southern zone. But he was unable to make any straightforward reference to events in Algiers. Next day, Jean Marin surveyed the military situation in terms of Stalingrad and Libya. He did not refer to the Americans or Eisenhower, but he argued that while Tunisia was at stake there would be problems one might have preferred to avoid. Victory would restore everything ‘trampled on by the enemy and his imitators’. On  November Schumann spoke at length on the instructive story of Madagascar, the island where ‘Antifrance’ [Vichy] had opposed British occupation in May. But it had just been handed over to the Fighting French. The soldiers and sailors in Madagascar who had foolishly resisted the British were now in the ranks of Fighting France, but for the commanders now trying to repudiate their treacheries it was ‘too late’! The PWE response to the Darlan ‘deal’ was to instruct broadcasters to ignore it in the hope that French listeners might infer that de Gaulle was still roughly in tune with his allies.

J. Harvey (ed.), War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (),  ( Nov. ).  Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, iii. . Ibid. iii. -.  Foreign Office to Cairo (from PWE),  Nov. , FO /. The situation in Algiers differed ‘from any reasonable forecast’.  

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Solidarity with the Fighting French was expressed by reinforcing de Gaulle’s broadcast with analogies and implications. Lockhart advised against the Darlan deal as soon as he heard of it. If ‘the secret organisations’ in France felt double-crossed, they might ‘disintegrate’, and there could be bad reactions in other occupied countries. Worse still: ‘the most serious consequences may well be in Russia and in this country’. The Resistance was undoubtedly scandalized. On  November the southern movements sent a collective message to de Gaulle insisting that the ralliement of traitors must not win them pardon for their crimes. SOE ensured that Churchill knew the full force of resistance dismay. Darlan, as ‘High Commissioner’ for North Africa, did not secure for the Allies what they had omitted to take for themselves. The Germans seized Tunisia. Admiral Esteva, the Resident-General in Tunis, and his subordinates were confused and then intimidated by instructions from Vichy. Even the French warships at Bizerta fell into German hands. But General Barré kept his distance and eventually rejected a German ultimatum on  November. Most French troops in Tunisia did rally to the Allies, but only after hesitations had let their best opportunities slip away. In Algiers Giraud lost confidence in himself, and the resistance group so helpful on  November dropped from the political picture. Murphy had never intended that the royalists, gaullists, officers and desperadoes he knew as the Group of Five should replace the Vichy authorities. Those that thought so had been deceived. PWE understood the choice before them. They could give the Americans full backing in the hope of sharing influence in Algiers or keep as discreetly distant from American’s clients as the Americans had kept from de Gaulle. They preferred the latter. If London was going to be detached, the French region proposed, Washington should be told that Britain’s post-war relations with France required her to state openly and ‘without any humbug’ that ‘we reserve judgment’ on the Algiers experiment. If the future of France belonged to the Resistance—an idea suddenly promoted to a belief—Russia must not be ‘the only power whose unequivocal distinction between patriots and traitors corresponds to their own’. Radio London was not, of course, so blunt, but such a message could be detected peeping through the mask. In Washington Roosevelt tried to placate his critics: We are opposed to Frenchmen who support Hitler and the Axis. No one in our Army has any authority to discuss the future Government of France and the French Empire. . . . The present temporary arrangement in North and West Africa is only a temporary expedient, justified solely by the stress of battle.

Lockhart to Eden,  Nov. , FO /. C. Bourdet, L’Aventure incertaine (),  and ; ‘we could only fear the worst and curse the  Americans’. S. E. Mangeot to Sutton,  Nov. , FO /.  R. E. Sherwood, The White House Papers of Harry Hopkins (/), . 

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This surprised the Americans in Algiers, but they ploughed on regardless. Lockhart went further than the French region. He recommended that the ‘handmaid’ period of PWE juniority to the Americans should be closed, that Eisenhower’s control of political warfare should be confined to the battle zone and that even this should be exercised through a joint Anglo-American body in Algiers which must accept an agreement to differ. (This, in outline, is what happened after Harold Macmillan was sent to AFHQ as Minister Resident.) Lockhart acknowledged Churchill’s motives: ‘PWE fully understands the importance of maintaining the best possible relations with the Americans, without whom we cannot win the war and who in fact are paying for it’. Nevertheless, London had been kept in ignorance of what was afoot and enlightened Americans had been ‘submerged by the military and Mr Murphy’. PWE had obtained permission from OWI to use as a leaflet for France the text of the President’s promise that Darlan was a ‘temporary expedient’. But AFHQ had cancelled the permission and, for good measure, claimed authority to censor anything which the RAF were carrying to France. Eisenhower and Murphy did not consider their hands tied by the President’s promise, and AFHQ recommended against any ‘further anti-Darlan statements’. AFHQ was making a serious demand from Algiers that London demonstrate loyalty by eliminating criticism of the Darlan deal. When de Gaulle wanted to warn against a further entrenchment of Darlan’s authority, Eden passed his text for broadcasting. There was a precedent, and the General’s proposed criticisms were diffuse and restrained: The French nation foresaw that, in spite of the arrival of the Allies, the liquidation of Vichy in North Africa would not take place without delays and equivocation. But . . . the nation has been shocked to learn that the delays are such as they are and the equivocation no better.

Churchill seized the chance to be of service, stopped the broadcast, and telegraphed the President: I felt that . . . I should not allow anything that might compromise arrangements made by Eisenhower . . . I accordingly vetoed the broadcast, which will now not be made. De Gaulle was told that . . . if your view was that broadcasts of this kind were undesirable at the moment, being your ardent and active lieutenant, I should bow to your decision without demur.

The text was mild enough, but it supplied the occasion for a gesture which Churchill wanted. When he then stopped another de Gaulle broadcast on  December, several BBC speakers went off the air in sympathy. However, the  Lockhart’s ‘Anglo-American Political Warfare Relations in the Western Mediterranean’,  Nov. , FO /.  Smuts to Churchill,  Nov. : Churchill, The Second World War, iv. .  Text in French of a broadcast for  Nov., FO /B.  PM to President,  Nov. , FO /.

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Prime Minister failed, or did not try very hard, to impose his views. British policy evolved on lines already laid down. Brendan Bracken pushed a piece of paper to Eden in Cabinet: I know how wrong this Darlan policy is—if only for the reason that Barrington Ward [editor of The Times] now says he agrees with it! . . . what must be done is to warn Washington of the dangers of establishing Darlan as Chief of the Government in N.A. This Judas will not hang himself. On the contrary, he will bask in office. And the State Department will catalogue his services on his own valuation. The Hoare–Laval business may look clean by comparison with the setting up of a Darlan administration. We must get a time limit to the Quisling sailor’s rule.

The virtual silence imposed on the BBC was a reluctant holding operation. It merely softened the rebuke to Washington delivered by the British press. Bracken summoned an MOI/PWE conference early in December to reconsider the Allied political machine in North Africa ‘while the situation is still fluid’ and before ‘the Americans are running everything’. He was unusually explicit in exhorting his officials to ‘press our interests most urgently and vigorously’ and hinting that he might be able to help them in Cabinet. Churchill was on his own. Eisenhower was told that Darlan’s authority would allow him to deploy eastwards without delay. The argument seemed good but lost force quickly. Darlan’s decision to change sides followed not the surrender of Algiers, after which he was passive and still in touch with Vichy, but the German seizure of unoccupied France. French opposition ended wherever the Allies appeared in force. Even then, the co-operation Darlan obtained for Murphy was limited and grudging. At the end of the year Johnstone, PWE’s eyes and ears in Algeria, was writing from Constantine—halfway to Tunis. He said that any idea of opposing the Allies had collapsed before Allied firepower and the order from Algiers, but that there had been ‘continual but diminishing passive resistance’. French West Africa accepted Darlan, but his instructions were ignored until the Americans had full control of Morocco. The French fleet at Toulon, despite Darlan, refused to put to sea and join the Allies. When the Germans tried to seize the fleet on  November the ships were scuttled. Three capital ships, eight cruisers, and twenty-nine invaluable destroyers went down as German tanks approached the Toulon quayside. It was claimed that Darlan’s orders had helped. The case is difficult to sustain. Darlan’s actual orders were ignored. A handful of French officers destroyed a powerful fleet built at great cost to French taxpayers: the battle of the Atlantic was at its height. AFHQ wanted the event celebrated as noble defiance, but the Fighting Note signed BB,  Nov. , in Eden’s papers, FO /. Bamford (MOI) to Sutton,  Dec. , FO /.  K. J. Johnstone to Dallas Brooks,  Dec. , FO /. At first the population were told not to show support for Allied troops.  

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French thought it was criminal. If British officials held the latter view in private, they believed the other version made better propaganda. De Gaulle was allowed to say that a great fleet should not destroy itself when its country was at war. Pierre Bourdan was permitted a reproach: ‘One cannot, before such a disaster, forbear to ask oneself “Why?” ’ On the other hand, the scuttle was saluted next day, in Les Français Parlent aux Français, as a gesture without equal in naval history, a sacrifice that was a victory, an immolation intended to assist the rebirth of the nation. The French audience for this cannot have been the Resistance. Darlan declared himself representative of all French overseas interests until liberation. London had not been consulted about this direct challenge to de Gaulle, and Eden’s response was to tell the Commons that nothing announced by Darlan committed HMG. Cadogan believed negotiations in Algiers took the form of ‘the Vichy French telling the Americans what they want, and the Americans giving it to them with both hands’. Once the fleet was gone and Tunisia was in enemy hands, Murphy clung to the Darlan deal against the collective British view that Darlan must be discarded. This was surely quite clear to de Gaulle. The level of feeling was quite high enough for someone to have passed on the Foreign Secretary’s view that ‘we haven’t a dictatorship here whatever the P.M. may imagine’. PWE allowed the Fighting French some compensation for what they endured. The ‘Trois Amis’ reported that Vichy now believed o per cent of the French were ‘gaullists’. They also complained that France had expected ‘the re-establishment of liberty’ in North Africa. Duchesne was allowed to admit the ‘reserve which is imposed on us here’, and said he would not add to the ‘moral confusion’ of the moment. Duchesne prayed this was ‘lucid’. Schumann ceased to speak on the BBC at all, claiming that he would not risk being misunderstood. The PWE French region struggled ‘to prevent an explosion on the part of the BBC personnel’. PWE’s black station Radio France (F) came to an end when the chief speaker refused to broadcast. PWE allowed broadcasts which implied anxiety, which did anything but support the Americans, and which did not offer reassurance about Darlan. These negatives were intelligible. The military authorities were warned to keep Darlan out of the news and away from journalists. From Algiers and Washington it seemed that everything from London had a critical Anglo-gaullist tone. Anglo-American differences were underlined by Vichy Radio. The Fighting French could say whatever they dared from Brazzaville, and in London they pulled hard against PWE controls. There was a scriptwriters’ strike imposed by the Fighting French Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, iii. , . D. Dilks (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan (),  ( Dec. ); Harvey, War Diaries,  ( Dec. ).  Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, iii. – ( Nov. ); Heads of Enquiry,  Feb. , FO /. 

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when de Gaulle could not speak. (When the ‘strike’ ended, the BBC had almost exhausted their stock of recorded talks.) The regional director realized that the integration of Fighting French broadcasts in the wider BBC French programme was exposing Radio Londres to the risk of collapse. PWE even felt let down by de Gaulle’s decision that Fighting Frenchmen should not speak on Radio London. It was logical, but PWE were doing their best for him, and it was painful to see Fighting France exploit a dependency PWE had allowed to develop. Leslie Beck tried to convince Georges Boris, now the leading official in the Commissariat for Information, to be patient. A political alliance was tested and improved. It was held together by a body of intermediate officials, in all departments, determined not to allow the Fighting French to push themselves, or be pushed, into a sort of schism. There was one attempt to argue the American case. Ian Black, the French Talks Organizer, wondered whether Oran, Dakar, and Syria () were all mistakes which had alienated Vichy ruling circles; an ‘exaggerated idea of Vichy villainy’ had been fixed in the propaganda ‘once the political dogmas of de Gaulle and his followers were accepted at their face value’. It had fitted  Francophobia to believe the worst of France; but America had shown that the Vichy regime had been usefully ambiguous, and it was even possible that Darlan had ‘been playing a most astute and dangerous game’. The American guess had been vindicated and the reasonable course for Britain was to appoint a major figure to work full-time on reducing the importance of de Gaulle and his Committee so that policy ceased to be in flat contradiction to America’s. Black’s conclusion was close to Churchill’s position over the next six months. Kirkpatrick was intrigued that a colleague regarded as a left-wing journalist should make this case. The answer from the FO French department was that Black was altogether ‘off the rails’, though the reason was unpublishable: The Leahy–Murphy approach would—if followed up unchecked—result in the establishment of a semi-fascist oligarchy in North Africa with sufficient force behind it to impose its will upon the exhausted and impoverished population of Metropolitan France, thus making civil war certain instead of probable.

In any case, circumstances had altered. On  December Churchill asked Harold Macmillan to go to Algiers to rescue Eisenhower from Murphy. Two days later Darlan was assassinated. The assassin was tried and shot within forty-eight hours. He was a young royalist with connections in all directions— even to Giraud. The guiding hand, if any, remains concealed, and everyone had a motive. General Giraud took Darlan’s place, but he had no political head and was run by the local establishment. The police in Algiers (and surely in Casablanca) arrested their usual suspects.  Ian Black ‘The Lack of British Policy to France’,  Dec. , FO /. The London dissidents often called tolerance of de Gaulle’s ambition an absence of ‘British’ policy.  Speaight’s minute,  Jan. , FO /.

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PWE had not taken at face value Roosevelt’s impromptu claim that the Darlan deal was temporary and local. Darlan’s authority, or Giraud’s, could license a Vichyite version of Fighting France which Roosevelt would try to impose first on the British and then on the Resistance. When Cadogan first heard secret service evidence that the ‘Americans have been playing with Darlan all the time’, he threatened (in his diary) a ‘God Almighty show-down’ with them. Murphy’s show of surprise at the Pétainist ethos of ruling circles in Algiers was now unconvincing. The Prime Minister’s reaction was equal but opposite. He behaved as if he had avoided a ‘show-down’ with the President more by good luck than judgement. Churchill grasped that American dislike of de Gaulle did not resemble the ebb and flow of his own mixed feelings; it was the decided opinion of Roosevelt, as advised by Leahy, Alexis Léger, and Jean Monnet. Despite his friendly interview with de Gaulle on  November, Churchill suddenly swung into action as the critic of the critics of the President. Having spoken for Whitehall until  November, Churchill became the spokesman of Washington. The man that had, in de Gaulle’s recollection, said on  November that Darlan ought to be shot, told Eden ten days later that Darlan had done more ‘for us’ than de Gaulle. Whitehall was nerving itself for an assault upon American policy and even good faith. But Churchill was determined not to embarrass Roosevelt. He wanted to spare the President a humiliating rebuff in his first essay in European power politics. His technique was to stop his ears to the alarm bells clanging all round him, to expound the American case, and pretend an exaggerated consent to it. He decided that the British case was too potent and must be diluted. He went deaf, or half-deaf, to Whitehall advice on French matters throughout . Giraud’s Algiers would be dealt with in good time. Public opinion might be left to act on Roosevelt without assistance from HMG. The better PWE understood matters in Algeria, the worse the problem seemed: The more I see of things here, the more imperative I feel is the need for policy to be formed and enforced from London. You cannot rub this in too much. If we repeat the tragic mistake of letting things slide and awaiting events, there is no telling what ghastly muddles we shall not be involved in—wading across Europe in tow of incredible American ignorance and even more incredible American personalities. All the good work that PWE have done from London will be wasted, and we will appear as first-class hypocrites or plain fools, or both.

Suddenly an un-American foreign policy seemed attractive. Before Torch Churchill may not have foreseen this threat to his relationship with Roosevelt, but once he understood his reaction was energetic. He became the noisy   

Dilks (ed.), Cadogan Diaries,  ( Nov. ). F. Kersaudy, Churchill and De Gaulle (), ; Harvey, War Diaries,  ( Nov. ). Mangeot to Paniguian,  Mar. , FO /.

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advocate of Washington idées fixes, and relied on Macmillan to save him from himself. The Darlan deal stripped away reservations. British foreign policy departments acted together to support the new alliance between the Resistance and the Fighting French against what they interpreted as Roosevelt’s attempt to keep France in the rut formed by Vichy. De Gaulle’s position in France improved dramatically. The PCF took de Gaulle’s part, though not blaming Eisenhower for using Darlan for whatever he was worth. Rémy tracked down a Communist with authority to negotiate for the leadership. This meeting produced a political agreement. They allowed that the Allies must do what was necessary to ‘consolidate’ in North Africa, ‘took note’ of Roosevelt’s promise, but warned that the French people reserved the right to put traitors on trial and regretted that American statements ignored de Gaulle. The PCF thus chose a ‘bourgeois’ alliance with gaullism rather than a lonely bid for leadership. The insurrectionary appeals of  had not obtained a sufficient response. The Darlan episode may have been the trigger, but the party already wished to be less isolated. The political concession was not the support for de Gaulle against Darlan, it was allowing L’Humanité to mention for the first time Combat, Libération, and Franc-Tireur as resistance movements. Party propaganda did not become anti-American. During the planning stage for Torch there had been a proposal for a radically different project of political warfare. The working hypothesis was that loyalties inside the Vichy apparatus had been tuned by Germany not by the USA, that Vichy represented a German political investment, whose purpose was to keep French North Africa and the French fleet out of Allied hands. On this theory the landings would certainly be opposed and Algiers would be mulish thereafter. The way to circumvent the enemy’s long preparation was ‘to spring a political surprise of the first magnitude’: a new government of France should be proclaimed as Allied troops hit the shore-line. This government should be the best and broadest available—not a ramp for Washington’s favourites. It should absorb Fighting France, and might be led by Giraud. It would be put together in Washington and inherit the gold of the French Republic. It would denounce the Armistice and resume the war against Germany. Its first decree would threaten Vichy commanders and officials that failure to obey would be punished as treason. But Washington did not share the British understanding of Vichy, and so the scheme was too hot for PWE to handle. The Americans intended to work on not against Vichy. The results, and the implications still more, forced the British into discreet support for a slow-motion alternative: the takeover of Murphy’s Algiers by de Gaulle.  S. Courtois, La PCF dans la Guerre (), , . But Courtois detects indications of a ‘political alliance with two branches: one gaullist, the other darlanist’.  Memorandum by H. A. Paniguian,  Sept. , FO /. This government needed a member of the PCF: ‘any person acceptable to Premier Stalin will do’.

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In Washington Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, had developed a close interest in ‘de Gaulle’s propaganda machine in England’ even before Darlan’s death. He meant more than the British newspapers. This machine, encouraged by British reluctance to support AFHQ , was ‘grinding out violent attacks against the French set-up in North Africa’ and making ‘scarcely veiled assaults against the USA’. Hull began a long, almost brutal campaign to get the British to silence de Gaulle, support Giraud, and retune both the BBC and the press. He was unreasonable but not exactly wrong. (The editor of the Daily Express reported to Beaverbrook the ‘strain of anti-American sentiment’ in a briefing from the War Secretary.) Five months later Hull was still trying to persuade Churchill that ‘the British’ were ‘behind’ every piece of gaullist impudence ‘with money, the aid of their radio stations, and through other methods’. Churchill promised, swore, and pretended otherwise. PWE gave him loyal, indeed essential, support in cosmetic particulars. Constant American reproaches forced PWE to be extremely careful, but everyone could see that the British were holding their noses in Algiers. Whitehall was keen to see the Fighting French HQ packed off to Algiers, but not to see Giraud end up on top. Giraud had an opportunity to force the Fighting French to come to Algiers as an adjunct to his colonial regime. De Gaulle could not stay much longer in London. But Giraud enforced Vichy’s laws, incarcerated the wrong people, and was soon in deeper water than he could fathom. He was always someone else’s cat’s-paw. His reputation was sinking like a stone when Washington sent out Jean Monnet to be his manager. Giraud was already too damaged by his maréchaliste entourage. Monnet came too late. De Gaulle’s brinkmanship, as he prepared to fuse his movement with Giraud’s, was infuriating but more or less well judged. The British in Algiers, including PWE staff, helped to neutralize Murphy, while PWE in London explained to Fighting French officials exactly how not to overbid a strong hand. In May de Gaulle arrived in Algiers on his own terms and then elbowed Giraud aside. American opposition was alarming, but it was not insuperable. The Algerian legacy was the discovery that Presidential preferences could be resisted, inside Anglo-American institutions, if one brought a thoroughly understood position to a delicate job. Britain’s handling of Vichy had been neither subversive enough to develop the British analysis nor emollient enough to support the Americans. The German occupation of the Vichy zone, and Laval’s complaisance, blocked the American attempt to acquire Vichy loyalties, and it made Giraud’s remounting of the attempt rather pointless. London was spared difficulties it would C. Hull, Memoirs (), . Christiansen to Beaverbrook,  Jan. , Daily Express box, Beaverbrook Papers; Hull, Memoirs, . 

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have faced if the Darlan deal had been a bargain of substance and promise. If Pétain himself had declared for the Allies, if the fleet had sailed for Gibraltar or if Admiral Esteva had stopped the German move into Tunisia, there might have been a different story. November  was not too late for maréchalisme to be vindicated in the eyes of a large segment of French national opinion. Churchill would not have been alone in welcoming a spectacular change of course. But Leahy and Murphy had demanded too little in – as they attempted to be attractive to personalities they did not trust. Hitler watched French soldiers fight for him in Morocco and Algeria. Then he tore up the Armistice and occupied Vichy France. He was able to do so without losing the fleet to the Allies or anything at all in Africa that was not already lost. Berlin had understood Vichy well enough to prevent a genuine double jeu in which pro-Americans disguised themselves as pro-Germans or stood ready to replace them. This was a success for German political warfare. If the Americans had always been likely to fail, they could blame British gaullism; if the British had failed, they could remember that Murphy had been playing their cards since . It was the beginning of the ‘special relationship’. It was also the beginning of a long and unfortunate relationship with France in which the mutual support implicit in the structure of Anglo-French interests would often remain unrealized. The wartime alliance with the Fighting French was, by May , strong enough to weather Churchill’s hostility. But it functioned as a painful and partial exception to new Anglo-American rules. It was not supported by a strong headline commitment giving France and Washington an idea of British post-war intentions. Half the Fighting French knew that Britain was their firmest ally, the other half believed in a fickle Britannia gazing out to sea.

 Resistance by Radio T H E black broadcasts were meant to say what the BBC could not, but outside German black this requirement was less than supposed. If Woburn’s Radio Travail (F) was much more specific in its advice to industrial workers than the BBC, it is not evident in the surviving summaries. SOE did not want sabotage techniques made public. Black broadcasting to French audiences undoubtedly had a following, but no one knew how much. Even heroic market research could only supply anecdotal evidence. The original purpose of black broadcasting had been political (‘subversive’). It was only after the V campaign was a success that Woburn had introduced ‘F’—Radio Gaulle or Radio France—as a vehicle for operational propaganda. Radio France was not thought much of a success, though Anglo-Free French quarrels in – had interrupted its work. In any case, Radio France was no more inflammatory than the BBC. The cautious view of armed resistance applied, in practice, almost as much to black broadcasting as to white. Radio Travail was closed down in May . (It was meant to close only until a CGT figure came to Britain to run it but was never revived.) Some of its themes were transferred to Radio Inconnu (F), which was more seriously black—vulgar and Jacobin—and speciaized in anti-Vichy material. Radio Inconnu elaborated a long-term conspiracy theory about the Synarchie—the high priests of financial collaboration who were in control of France. This coincided with an independent rumour in Vichy. F became the main channel for propaganda against German recruitment of labour. After the Catholic F and the gaullist F, the next in the sequence of French ‘Research Units’ was F. This was PWE’s attempt to assist SOE with what was, briefly, canvassed as the most exciting discovery in France to date. When F Section came across the resistance movement known as Carte, it had instant appeal. The leader, André Girard, was against ‘politics’ and wanted nothing to do with de Gaulle. The movement seemed well implanted in the southern zone and its centre was on the Mediterranean coast. It became the mainspring of SOE’s hopes, and had first call on their modest supplies, throughout . Girard’s card index of enrolled resisters was impressive, and his contact with the French Army was tempting. It is, however, all too likely that Carte was favoured largely because Girard, unlike more important figures, had said yes to F Section. Bourdet claims that Carte was ‘one of the first attempts by the British to short-circuit Free France and organize “their  Black reports for France, May and July , FO /; Ellic Howe, The Black Game (), –. F lasted until Jan. .

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resistance” in France’. That was, no doubt, how it seemed. The purpose of F Section was not to frustrate de Gaulle; but it seemed to them evident that since no one could force all France to take orders from de Gaulle, the BCRA should not monopolize the link between the Resistance and London. This permissive approach to using non-gaullists could, in the hands of zealous officials, amount to proselytizing anti-gaullism. In August the leadership of FrancTireur made a formal protest to the British government after another attempt by SOE to short-circuit de Gaulle. The investment in Carte was one of several attempts to strike up a close relationship with a resistance movement. F Section badly needed to step up the scale of their operations. They were very much the senior French section. Maurice Buckmaster, the head of F Section, believed that his section’s contacts were the hard core of real activists—outside communist ranks at least—and, somehow, he acquired the idea that the movements rallying to Carlton Gardens were less serious. In August  he told PWE that he regretted the new ‘Fighting France’ label as a misnomer, and explained that ‘on the whole those in France who look to de Gaulle as their leader are more pre-occupied with manifestations which possess only nuisance and publicity value than with para-military organisation and the organisation of effective resistance and sabotage’. This was departmental chauvinism. Perhaps it was also meant seriously. But in October Combat could boast of groupes francs in almost every department of the unoccupied zone. There is little to suggest that F Section, with the lion’s share of slender resources, had been more successful than ‘Fighting France’—the BCRA and SOE’s RF Section—in establishing sabotage teams. F Section circuits were, in fact, in crisis in summer . The point about ‘manifestations’ was inexcusable; it is difficult to conceive how Buckmaster could fail to know what the three movements already named by de Gaulle were trying to do. Movements not subject to F Section discipline did propaganda work; this did not preclude other activity. A year later the groupes francs of the gaullist movements were the spearhead of active resistance in the southern zone: Carte had been broken up by arrests and abandoned by its best people. F Section recovered, but Buckmaster’s account of his section’s superiority was mistaken. F Section sent Nicholas Bodington to France to cement the alliance with Girard’s Carte. André Gillois, who had worked with Carte since , met  C. Bourdet, L’Aventure incertaine (), , . He considers its structure reflected a typical London failure to distinguish between a circuit (réseau) and a movement.  PWE/SOE meeting attended by Buckmaster, Neame, Spinks (for SOE) and Brooks and Gielgud (for PWE),  Aug. , FO /.  H. Frenay, La Nuit finira (), . They were, like the FTP in the north, still short of explosives and arms.  H. Noguères et al., Histoire de la Résistance en France,  vols. (–), i. . M. R. D. Foot, SOE in France (), , admits that, even five months later, F and RF ‘had not yet performed much’. He considers ‘the tone’ of work done by the BCRA and RF was ‘still amateurish, even by F’s hardly professional standards’.

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Bodington and put to him the idea that British money could be used to help ordinary workers take to the hills to evade the labour recruiting campaign. Bodington had also met Colonel Vautrin, Carte’s main Army contact. Girard was taken very seriously, and he bid high: , Sten guns; radio transmitters; , tons of stores; and daily BBC broadcasts at the disposal of Carte. It was the last request which, in altered form, led to Radio Patrie—a short-wave black station. The BBC was not available, on a regular basis, to anyone but the Fighting French; but PWE were no more tied to gaullist resistance than F Section; the French region were happy to implement the SOE request for an operational RU to promote Carte. SOE deliveries were, of course, less than Girard asked for, but the gaullist movements were much less fortunate. At a time the groupes francs of Combat had only the weapons they found for themselves, members of Carte boasted of their new British guns as evidence of what de Gaulle could not obtain. When two units of Combat defected to Carte to get their hands on these weapons, indignation ran high and Frenay threatened F Section that their agents would be treated as enemies unless the poaching stopped. In September Gillois came to London and was introduced to PWE. SOE, PWE, and Carte agreed on joint control of the new black broadcasting station—Radio Patrie (F). F was ‘black’ only in the technical sense that it pretended to be located in France. But PWE did not explain F Section’s business to the Fighting French. Radio Patrie was to provide the means to expand Carte and to issue instructions rapidly. This proved controversial. Bodington persuaded his superiors that Carte was tremendously important. SOE brought the movement—and its requirements—to the attention of Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff. Bodington seemed to think Carte was some sort of extension of the Armistice Army. In London Gillois found himself treated as an emissary of the French Army staff. He was interviewed by Gubbins and other senior SOE officials and asked to give an assessment of senior Army commanders. Buckmaster demanded to be told if Darlan was involved in the Army conspiracy. Gillois was mystified by all this. Unfortunately, he supposed that Girard—still in France—must know something which he did not. He did not voice his puzzlement and scepticism to the secret service eminences gathered around him. If SOE had an excuse for grasping at straws, it was the proximity of Torch. SOE wanted to discover which rabbits would be conjured out of Uncle Sam’s top hat. If Girard’s contacts could determine whether Allied landings in Algeria would be opposed, Carte might find the key to Tunis. As PWE prepared for the launch of Radio Patrie, Carte seemed unable to  A. Gillois, Histoire secrète des Français à Londres (), –. Bodington gave some money to Jouhaux, but this was to help the clandestine CGT.  Foot, SOE in France, ; Frenay, La Nuit, –. The traffic was not all one way. Arms sent to the Coq Enchainé group, another early F section favourite (to whom PWE sent newsprint), found their  way to Combat later in the year. Gillois, Histoire secrète, .

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furnish Woburn with material, not even operational instructions. The objective, set down in September, had been to broadcast advice from military specialists on organization, passive resistance, and sabotage, with the aim of ‘accustoming resistance groups and their members to receiving and accepting instructions over the air in preparation not for isolated coups but for the day when resistance groups will come out into the open’. Radio Patrie started transmitting on  October. SOE tried to send another agent to Girard, but he arrived as the Vichy zone was being overrun by the Germans and was captured. The only message that came from Girard at this time—as a military instruction to be broadcast—was a delphic: Ralliez-vous au Général Foy! This meant nothing to SOE. After Torch illuminated the political landscape, SOE and PWE acknowledged a stronger commitment to the ‘gaullist’ resistance. But work in hand still generated complications. Radio Patrie started to issue advice—its consignes militaires—after it was ‘discovered’ by the BBC in December. Then the ‘gaullist’ F was taken off the air. It was not allowed to disapprove of Darlan and so succumbed to the North African crisis. F could not have found a more controversial moment to start its real work. The Fighting French heard Radio Patrie and guessed exactly what it was. They disliked F Section altogether, but hitherto British broadcasting about resistance had suited them. Suddenly, in the wake of the Darlan episode in Algiers, PWE ‘black’ was proselytizing in favour of a movement which wanted nothing to do with ‘the Symbol’. Henri Frenay, leader of Combat, was in London in October and November ; he had made a particular point of criticizing the multiplicity of organizations and movements at work in France, and asked for an SOE liaison officer. On his return Frenay learnt about Radio Patrie. No one in London had asked him about Carte—a movement whose leaders were known to him—nor had he been consulted about Radio Patrie. In his telegram of protest, Frenay described Carte as a minor Provençal group whose expansion around Lyon and in the Jura ‘appears scarcely to go back further than the month of May–June and seems to coincide with the mission of Mr Bodington in France’. He demanded to know what lay behind this willingness to promote little groups and to keep the major resistance movements at arm’s length; he complained that recruits to the Radio Patrie movement were in some sense paid; and he disliked the boasts of a nonpolitical status: ‘a utopia which experience shows to be a danger’. The main point, however, was about weapons and manpower: [Carte] receives or pretends to receive great quantities of matériel . . . These quantities surpass its real needs and yet the organisations attached to the Fighting French continue to receive only derisory quantities in spite of the incontestable superiority of their effectives. Must one recall that the Armée Secrète of the Fighting French [i.e. Combat] already has 

Ritchie Calder to N. Sutton,  Sept. , FO /.

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, men at its command and that the fusion in the course of taking place with another organisation [Libération] will bring the total of its effectives up to ,? Which other organisation can stand comparison with this? In London . . . a programme of  tons was envisaged. But there has not been even the smallest part of a beginning of this programme. Must we conclude that only les organisations anglaises in spite of their numerical inferiority, will receive supplies? If this is so, it would have been honest to have told us.

Fernand Grenier, a communist sent to London to explain party policy, joined in the criticism of Radio Patrie. The Fighting French were also convinced that what was put out by Radio Patrie as advice was dangerous nonsense. There was an intricate wrangle between Nigel Sutton and André Philip, de Gaulle’s Commissioner for the Interior, about the security rules expounded by Radio Patrie. Philip cited messages from France claiming that Radio Patrie would have been taken for German black propaganda had it not been for friendly references on the BBC. The Radio Patrie theory of organization was based on self-recruited three-man cells which were not to seek other threes but to wait until found by an itinerant organizer whose introductory password would later be validated by Radio Patrie. The threes would have no other contact with the wider movement, but they would compose lists—employing codes not plain language—of friends, foes, and targets, of those who had deserved well and those destined for future punishment. Listeners were warned that these lists should be coded and anonymous, but not every injunction to compile lists was coupled with this warning. The absence of daily reminders persuaded André Philip that the whole project was disastrous. The charge is scarcely answered in the defensive note prepared by Leslie Beck, who was responsible for the French RUs and liaison with SOE: there ‘could not have been more than two such small pieces of paper (special instructions were given as to the smallness of the paper) in each house’ and there was advice on how to hide them. I fully understand, as do all those connected with RP, that some people in France may give themselves away by foolishly acting in such a way as to betray that they are attempting to form a link in the general organization. Such people exist in all countries, and it is better that they be eliminated or eliminate themselves at the very beginning.

Girard himself neglected the finer points of the advice his colleagues were transmitting. He kept plain language lists of adherents; the loss of one such list—two hundred names—by a courier who fell asleep on the train to Paris ensured the eventual destruction of Carte. A number of Carte activists had already gone independent. To be fair, SOE staff developed reservations about Girard, and they sided against him in January .  Rapport de Combat sur l’organisation Radio-Patrie, sent  Jan. , circulated  Feb. , FO /. The message is evidently from Frenay. Girard claimed to have , armed men.   Philip to Sutton,  Dec. , FO /. Beck to Sutton,  Dec. , FO /.  Foot, SOE in France, , .

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PWE sensed something amiss and became reluctant to engage, unsupported, in further technical arguments about security. Colonel Vautrin came to London and told Philip’s staff that he condemned the consignes. During February  PWE realized that SOE was backing off from Carte. But complaints continued to flow in. Morton could hardly believe that a Woburn RU should recommend keeping lists of supporters to all and sundry and he asked whether there had been ‘some German trick’. SOE brought Girard to London and accused him of being a plausible rogue who had mislead everyone. He clung to his stories and protested, shrewdly, that the British had changed tack and were now supporting de Gaulle’s campaign to control the French Resistance. When Girard was dropped by SOE he was acquired by the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and went to Washington. All that SOE could do—in London—was to make peace with Carlton Gardens. PWE had been put in a false position. The idea of two operational RUs—F and F—had been problematic, though it was high politics not PWE that took F off air while F was issuing its consignes. The solution was to finish with both and to convert Radio Patrie into a radio station with the Resistance as a whole as its audience. In May  F, relaunched as ‘Honneur et Patrie’, broadcast ten minutes daily under the fortnightly supervision of a committee composed of PWE, SOE, and all the important Resistance figures available. At the first meeting d’Astier of Libération gave his blessing but he insisted negative (attentiste) instructions should never be given without Resistance consent. He also wanted a clearer line on sabotage. Buckmaster reissued his warning not to disclose sabotage techniques in broadcasts, but he was told that the Gestapo knew these techniques already. Honneur et Patrie warned against keeping lists. F Section became more discreet, but they did not give up the search for non-gaullists and they had the skills and resources to succeed. A rivalry which had begun as mere concurrence became edged with political suspicion and danger. The technical SOE objection to a unified structure of support for all resistance was that the BCRA was inadequate. True or not, the objection was not good enough. The BCRA worked into France with British permission and British training, and responsibility lay with their mentors. SOE could monitor the Fighting French but not vice versa; the BCRA were not in a position to defend themselves by compiling lists of British mistakes. Nevertheless, SOE favouritism was more technical than political. PWE were not at all disturbed by the prospect of de Gaulle’s authority being accepted by the entire French Resistance, and SOE were no more concerned to save the movements from de Gaulle than they were to protect them from the encroachments of small groups able to obtain British supplies on a privileged basis. Beck to Leeper,  Jan. , FO /. Morton to Sutton,  Feb. , FO /. C’ was said to be ‘most perturbed’: Note of conversation between Sutton and Philip,  Feb. , FO /.  Conférences, Honneur et Patrie,  April , f/a/ (AN). 

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 Maquisards or Slaves B Y spring  , Frenchmen had chosen to work in Germany. In May Fritz Sauckel, the German plenipotentiary for labour, requested , more, and Laval, the chief minister, accepted the demand. But voluntary recruitment was too slow and new manpower legislation was promulgated on  September . Workers ‘designated’ for Germany were disqualified from employment in France. Vichy was edging towards industrial conscription. Industrial collaboration was difficult to make hugely controversial. Resistance propaganda made slow progress; the conscription of labour—just one factor of production—gave everyone something else to think about. Ne Vas Pas en Allemagne was the principal BBC message to France in  and . The , already at work in France producing munitions were mentioned far less often. Laval’s first bargain with Sauckel—called la Relève—had been an agreement to release a given number of French POWs in return for a much larger number of French recruits for German factories. The Ne Vas Pas campaign was the BBC response; it condemned this poor bargain as scandalous. The French certainly wanted the soldiers to come home, and Laval’s initial appeal to this sentiment revived his reputation as a resourceful politician, but voluntary recruitment fell behind Sauckel’s targets. Reducing the loss of French labour became a primary goal for the Resistance. But effective opposition did not really start until the second phase of recruitment. There was new legislation in September and a register was compiled of workers deemed not fully employed and henceforth unemployable in France. At this stage it was not very difficult to avoid designation or, failing this, simply to abscond. In the northern zone the so-called relève obligatoire may, ocasionally, have been close to forcible deportation. Reports reached London that in November the Germans had seized some designated workers in the factories. Laval hoped to avoid bare-faced compulsion. Until February  the French administration did not physically compel anyone to go to Germany. But the BBC labelled every kind of transfer eastwards as ‘deportation’. They may have hoped to alarm workers by painting the whole business black, but the constant BBC reference to the element of compulsion in the Relève risked intimidating the target audience. Passivity was the problem. The contest was  German statistics: N. Rich, Hitler’s War Aims (), ii. , ; J.-P. Azéma, De Munich à la Libération ‒ (), , gives ,, of whom only , were still in Germany in June .  Auguste Lecoeur insists that all workers who left for Germany before Feb.  were really volunteers: La Strategie du Mensonge (), –.

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quasi-industrial: the Germans were hiring blackleg labour and the resistance movements were the picket lines. Crowds sometimes gathered at railway stations begging the young men not to go away and calling on the railwaymen not to take them. Some serious protest strikes encountered little judicial retaliation. This second phase of recruitment was clearly intermediate. PWE detected a crisis for Vichy authority and guessed, correctly, that the Germans would soon want more drastic measures. The occupation of the Vichy zone was foreseen for this reason even by those who knew nothing about Torch. Direct conscription for work in Germany, the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), started in February ; it was the third phase of the Sauckel/Laval collaboration. The decision to make the French people slaves of the New Europe followed instructions from Hitler to Sauckel. French consent did more than anything else to shrivel the authority of Vichy. Once this collaborationist Rubicon had been crossed, the Resistance gained a serious claim to be the state-in-waiting. The BBC announced a German manpower crisis. Going to Germany was assisting the enemy in a war that was being lost, and German towns were dangerous places. The clandestine journals asked workers to disrupt the machinery of recruitment and conscription. The personal dilemma for each worker —whether ‘designated’ or later ‘requisitioned’—was acute. Apathy offered no refuge. The middle ground vanished. To go to Germany was to vote with one’s feet for collaboration, but to refuse was resistance. Young men who left the towns to lie low were starting a new form of disobedience whether or not they expected to bear arms. Most of the réfractaires dispersed into various casual rural employments, but a minority were gathered into disciplined groups by local resistance leaders. The great deterrent was not the initial difficulty, nor even the risk of arrest, but the strain of independent existence and the lack of help. Resistance movements did not foresee the flight from conscription, though they were immediately aware of it. They could provide only a fraction of the leadership and support the emergency demanded. The huge obligation for the movements—it helped them come together—was the creation of a structure of social security for the réfractaires; but twelve months later the maquis even in the most promising districts were still short of cadres. If the majority of réfractaires never became maquisards, this was part of the reason. The American Embassy at Vichy had some useful sources: French conservatives have been deeply concerned about the CP’s ‘monopoly on patriotism’. . . . Therefore many factory owners, such as Michelin, have adopted a policy of nonco-operation with requisition [of labour] and Michelin has denied access to his ClermontFerrand factory to official government propagandists and has encouraged his workers not to go to Germany. In order to combat Communist influence and regain lost popularity, factory owners are reported in some cases to be privately subsidising locked-out workers. 

Message from US Embassy, Vichy,  Oct. , FO /.

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When this was passed to the Foreign Office, Charles Stirling, the new head of the French department, asked SOE whether they could provide funds and organization to maintain ‘any large number of resisters’. A fighting force of draft dodgers was not directly envisaged in this discussion; but in France matters were no more advanced. One of the first maquis groups in France is held to have been that assembled in the woods of the Limousin by the maverick communist Georges Guingouin in the last weeks of . At the same time messages reached resistance leaders about the hundreds of young men roaming the mountains of Haute-Savoie who were willing to fight if any attempt was made to arrest them. The resistance movements were soon inundated with appeals for help. Resistance movements needed cash for the black market on which the fulltime organizers and réfractaires were largely dependent. Funds provided to the Fighting French were already distributed to the movements each month by Moulin’s Delegation. De Gaulle could not easily increase the allocation. The newly united gaullist movement of the southern zone, the Movements Unifiés de la Résistance (MUR), were reduced to asking the Americans (in Switzerland) for a subvention—and were duly rebuked by the Fighting French—after Moulin cut their subsidy in February . But London appeared to be abreast of events. The southern movements had a reason for finding themselves unprepared. They had tried to identify a syndicalist resistance movement for the industrial working class. But the clandestine CGT did not mean much until after April , when it renewed the pre-war fusion with the communists; and the communists themselves were not yet established outside industrial areas. Syndicalist officials who could still work openly immersed themselves in legal work and offered little to resistance movements. But the non-communist movements respected the potential of the trade unions and had not encroached at the industrial level; they were less active in factories and workshops than they might have been. Bourdet admits Resistance mistakes, but argues that once the flight from conscription gathered pace London fell several months behind the facts: The truth, I believe, is that the Allies, and de Gaulle himself, never grasped the full power of the Allied radio. Allied propaganda said ‘Ne Partez Pas en Allemagne’, but as seriously as one throws a message in a bottle out to sea. I think that no one in London, in the British general staff or at Carlton Gardens, ever believed that it would be effective at that precise moment, and asked themselves what they would do if it were!

Stirling to Keswick,  Oct. , FO /. H. Frenay, La Nuit finira (), . The term ‘maquis’ appeared in April and was ‘everywhere’ by June: H. R. Kedward, In Search of the Maquis: Rural Resistance in Southern France ‒ (), .  Frenay, La Nuit finira, , . The economies made possible, amongst other things, support for  the réfractaires in the Vercours. C. Bourdet, L’Aventure incertaine (), –.  

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This is exactly right. After Torch too much attention had shifted to Algiers. Russell Page, then in Washington for PWE, asked the right question (‘about French workers disappearing into the countryside’) very early in , but the French region replied that nothing would happen ‘on a very large scale’. The labour campaign was always a substitute—not a bad one in principle— for the active resistance still thought to be premature. PWE did not want to ask, or expect, too much of young workers. The idea of a responsible Ne Vas Pas campaign was to be ready to switch it off if France became overheated. This meant shifting to a theme known as ‘Trojan Horse’: persuading workers willing to go to Germany to act as saboteurs. The central directive defined ‘Trojan Horse’ as subordinate to the main Ne Vas Pas objective. Sutton imagined he could reconcile the two campaigns: the first was for hardline resisters, the second for the majority ‘who will go like sheep and for whom the Trojan Horse message may be useful’. This was very pessimistic; it also assumed a fixed social pattern not a mounting wave of excitement. On the other hand, it was wildly optimistic about motivation: ‘Trojan Horse’ made no sense unless people who refused to live rough in France were going to find their courage in Germany. The clandestine militias of the resistance movements, the sédentaires as they were called, were currently being reorganized—at least in the southern zone— as one single Armée Secrète (AS) which was commanded, in theory, by a single officer appointed by de Gaulle. London tried to extract and isolate this prospective D-Day army from the resistance movements. It seemed logical: the movements were insecure; the AS must remain hidden; therefore the AS should be separated from the movements. The resistance leaders protested that this was nonsense, but they deferred, against their better judgement, to the higher authority. But just as the movements surrendered formal control of the armée secrète, the so-called maquis appeared on the scene, wholly distinct and entirely in the hands of the movements. Were the MUR leaders— particularly Henri Frenay, patron of the largest armée secrète—trying to reproduce what they had just lost? Conversely, resistance leaders asked themselves again why London was so anxious to devise structures of command which forbade the use of most of their members. These mistrusts were later adjusted to a certain extent, but they were never removed. In spring  it dampened the resistance response when réfractaires appeared in mountainous and wooded regions. In April, six months after the early warnings, the monthly grant to the gaullist movements for the purpose of ‘action’ was doubled—to £,—and Selborne asked for three times this figure. Even at the beginning of , the MUR put the number of réfractaires at , for the southern zone alone.   

Basil Keates to Page,  Feb. , FO /. Sutton to Gielgud,  Feb. , FO /. Selborne to Attlee,  May , CAB /; Bourdet, L’Aventure incertaine, .

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By the autumn many had become discouraged, had given up and were lost to the Resistance. The BBC placed most emphasis on interfering with the formalities of registration. On  January  Maurice Schumann announced that the resistance of French workers had deprived Germany of , pairs of hands— the difference between Laval’s promise to Sauckel and the workers actually in Germany. Two weeks later the BBC gave news of a demonstration against deportation at Montluçon station, and reported that Combat, Libération, and Franc-Tireur (on the eve of their delayed fusion as the MUR) and the Front National had called on policemen, civil servants, and employers to help workers about to be designated for Germany. As carried by the BBC, this Resistance appeal made no mention of escape into the hills and woods. Yet the réfractaires were already gathering into groups. There were three kinds— Maquis-AS, those connected with the MUR, the Maquis-FTP, and independent groups. When Henri Hauck spoke about the ‘immense movement of active and direct opposition to the deportation of workers’, he implied that this activity consisted of blocking railway lines and strikes. But he also mentioned rural refuge: Comrades, don’t go to live with the Boche, but take refuge in the countryside and hide there. What do you risk? If you are caught, a few weeks in gaol, which will not be worse than the brutal penalties or tortures in the German punishment camps to which French workers are sent for the least peccadillo. . . . But why should you be caught? . . . In this maquis of the Resistance, you will have, to aid and to feed you, the peasantry of France whose love of liberty sets them against Nazi tyranny. You will be surrounded by the solidarity of thousands of patriots. . . . Any gendarme, whose job it is to catch thieves and not to arrest good Frenchmen, will think twice, if they have a local reputation to lose, before coming after you with the heavy hand of the law. Through strikes and sabotage, through flight and escape . . . [you] must learn how to start a vigorous offensive on the home front.

Hauck was introducing an important new theme, but it was still indistinct. The escape from ‘designation’ was the ‘vigorous offensive’ required. It was militant talk but it fell just short of a call to arms. The maquis was not exactly Hauck’s lesser risk. The conscripts were not taken from their homes under arrest. They all had their chance to escape. But PWE could not expect a majority response without developing a general summons to rural resistance. The call to choose freedom did not combine well with the reassuring observation that not everyone, of course, would be able to avoid ‘deportation’. The nettle was never grasped firmly. Thousands submitted to conscription—even in country areas—before it became apparent that the occupation regime had no obvious answer to a  

J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac (ed.), Les Voix de la Liberté (–), iii. , . Ibid. iii. – ( Jan. ).

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mass refusal to go. In the department of the Lot—in the rural south-west— only  per cent escaped the STO before June , but by August the rate was  per cent and the local conscription system was in tatters. Boldness could succeed, but the advantages and difficulties had to be stated plainly if radio broadcasts were to have an effect. The Fighting French saw the STO as another episode in their recurrent nightmare. On  March Schumann drew a picture of France ‘emptied of its youth’. The risks of evasion, he said, were incomparably less than the possibility that Hitler would turn these captives into Germany’s last army (‘under Prussian non-commissioned officers’). Another thought was that victory might be imminent; the period of flight and refuge could soon be over. The BBC used Churchill’s promise that there would be substantial developments in the Mediterranean and perhaps elsewhere before the leaves had fallen. Schumann promised that the resistance movements were ready to join this offensive. The rural reception of the réfractaires varied greatly, and Vichy believed, quite plausibly, there was strong ‘anti-bandit’ resentment. There were places where the response of the peasantry matched Hauck’s predictions. The MUR set up a Service Maquis which tapped the capacity for inventive action that existed within the movements. The hard work of finding, protecting, and supplying the réfractaires and maquisards, helped the apparatus of clandestine resistance become more functional even in rural areas least touched by the occupation. Every maquis group owed a debt to farmers, shepherds, and forestry workers who functioned as scouts protecting camps from unheralded visits by the gardes mobiles or enemy troops. Some regions, like the Cevénnes with its old radical traditions, provided warm support for maquisards. Far less friendly was Haute-Savoie, the most northerly of the Alpine departments, but the mountains promised safety and even this unpromising corner of conservative France could furnish some support. The Swiss press made Haute-Savoie the first and best known location of French maquis activity. The organizing initiative in Haute-Savoie was socially respectable. After the Italians occupied the Alpine departments in November , a few officers and men of the th Chasseurs Alpins retained their weapons and started a small secret army. The réfractaires were gathered into groups and taken up into the higher villages and farms where they could find shelter, a little useful employment, and rudimentary military training given by the soldiers. The department became known as a safe refuge and it was suggested that the police would come off second best if they went up into the mountains.  Pierre Laborie, Résistants, Vichyssois et autres: L’Évolution de l’opinion et des comportements dans le Lot  à  (), . This preceded the September Speer–Bichelonne agreement to protect the workforce producing for Germany, which some consider the main reason for the failure of Sauckel’s system: Rich, Hitler’s War Aims, ii. .   Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, iii. . Ibid. iii. .

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In March Swiss reports of this gathering of réfractaires in Haute-Savoie claimed that only  out of an expected  conscripts had reported to the authorities in Annemasse; a ‘tense situation’ was created by gardes mobiles carrying guns; there was one -strong group of réfractaires led by French officers; and the Italians had left the problem to the French authorities, who hoped to end disobedience by persuasion. Next day ‘French guerrillas’ were refusing surrender: ‘the guerrillas are said to be commanded by British and French officers under a French general’. The British officers may have been mythical. (There was an F Section circuit, a fragment of Carte called ‘Director’, which received supply drops and had a sub-circuit near Annemasse. But Director had no London-trained agents and their activity is obscure.) The French general was, presumably, Colonel Valette d’Osia, who had ordered his men into the hills. He had made contact with the MUR who sent messages to London asking for arms quickly. Six Halifax bombers carrying containers full of arms were sent to Haute-Savoie on the night of / March. When the bombers arrived there was severe flak. RAF interest in the maquis of the French Alps was not sustained. London preferred secret armies to be secret and PWE did not want to see the young men challenging the authorities to retaliate. On  March Schumann saluted the Savoyard ‘legion of the mountains’ ensconced in remote valleys to the horror of Laval and the fury of the Germans. This was raising the stakes. PWE had been inattentive. The news was out, but celebratory publicity—‘not so much an example to the world as the portrait of a nation’—was asking for trouble. Schumann’s general advice was moderate as ever: patriotic songs should be sung at the medical inspections. He told a Swiss newspaper story. German troops were seizing workers at the gates of a large factory. A priest, hearing the ‘Marseillaise’, called out ‘Yes! Sing, my friends, you’re right. Patience! . . . It’s not for long.’ The priest’s advice—passive fortitude—was the cue to roll forward ‘Trojan Horse’: The advice was easy to give, perhaps facile. And we would abstain for our part from dispensing it to those who—after exhausting all ways and means of hanging on at home—are obliged despite everything to go, unless we could say this: the patience to which we exhort them is not the patience of the resigned, it is the patience of fighters. Fighters in the immense Fifth Column which Germany has been forced to assemble within its borders.

To listeners wondering about direct action against conscription, the BBC offered the prospect of going to Germany but with the right attitude. London was caught between the desire to see resistance to the STO succeed and fear The Times,  and  Mar. . M. R. D. Foot, SOE in France (), , . Foot says the aircraft failed to make a drop though half was delivered a week later. H. Noguères et al., Histoire de la Résistance en France,  vols. (–), iii. ,  says three planes were shot down.  Cremieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, iii.  ( Mar. ).  

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of the consequences. There was no mention of physical resistance to Vichy administration, and there was a watch for hotheads. André Philip and his Commissariat National de l’Intérieur shared this attitude. Philip reminded PWE that the real problem in France was the belief in imminent Allied invasion; without it there would be talk of betrayal and the risk of sporadic risings. Frustration and the tradition of the barricades still appeared to be the chief danger. Moulin, who was in London in March, absorbed this thinking and confirmed it with his first message on returning to France: ‘Situation worse than I thought—obliged to calm leaders who believe Allied action imminent . . . deportation continues at fearful pace—If massive deliveries not begun immediately impossible to count [after] short period on French Resistance.’ Frenay dismisses Moulin’s account of over-excited resistance leaders as pure fiction. He complained, at the time, of Moulin meddling in the affairs of HauteSavoie. Two errors of perspective were made. London knew that the Resistance was straining to support mass evasion, and, though unwilling to censure the effort, blamed the new MUR for the over-excitement. For their part, the MUR could not imagine that SOE and the Fighting French did not really intend the STO to come crashing to a halt, did not yet contemplate a physical attack on conscription or—unless there were special circumstances— arming the maquis. A technical argument broke out between Moulin and the MUR leaders about the command, control, and ethos of the Armée Secrète. The underlying issue was the question of attentisme, but the arguments kept shifting. The MUR leaders felt they were losing the struggle against the STO and they wanted new risks. All regions were ordered to produce manifestations spectaculaires against deportation and to use AS militants against policemen who tried to intervene; without some disorder the popular temper would not strengthen. This MUR instruction was treated as insubordinate and reckless by de Gaulle’s civil and military delegates. Moulin and Delestraint insisted that the AS were no longer at the disposal of the movements. General Delestraint did admit, under pressure, that the AS groups could not remain totally inactive until D-Day, but he had not yet accepted local initiative. The resistance leaders retorted that the armée secrète was a mere phrase—a relabelling exercise which would never transform the sédentaires, their people of fixed address and normal employment, into a sealed compartment of the Resistance. The MUR were right: the London view of the AS was unrealistic. If ordinary resisters had believed that their leaders would order them to do nothing they would have deserted in droves to the communist Front National. But London Sutton to Gielgud,  Mar. , FO /. Noguères, Histoire de la Résistance, iii.  ( Mar. ). But see H. Frenay, L’Énigme Jean Moulin (), , .  

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concerns about insecurity and indiscipline made Resistance arguments in favour of local initiative look obstructive. The MUR hoped to use the BBC to publicize the anti-STO demonstrations they were trying to produce, but PWE could not consider, or even expect to receive, proposals which SOE and the Fighting French disliked. A heightened militancy of tone was not contemplated. On  March The Times carried another Swiss story under the heading ‘Resistance ending in Savoie’: the young men were coming down from the hills and surrendering to the authorities. Although relieved to have avoided as ‘tragic a dénouement as a blood-bath would have been’, Paniguian asked for a meeting to review the Savoyard episode. What concerned him was the degree to which PWE had contributed to a fallacious or dangerous sense of crisis and opportunity: Already the Swiss press is taking the line that after encouraging people to take to the hills and promising them help, the British let them down, and now these crestfallen people are being herded to Germany bitter and disappointed . . . All the carefully dosed and balanced directives which satisfy us here do not really mean much on the other side. If there is just one British officer in an affair of this sort Great Britain is committed up to the neck. If we even hint at sending one plane people will firmly believe that  are on their way. This is fundamental and all concerned should understand it.

But was the alternative to say less than ever? The suggestion that Schumann should find ‘other subjects for his evening talks’ meant a weaker Ne Vas Pas. Paniguian hinted that SOE had undermined PWE’s ‘dosed and balanced’ advice by trying to arm the Haute-Savoie maquis. This is instructive: he did not know. It was perfectly possible to state that réfractaires could not expect weapons from Britain, that they should not go into the hills expecting to fight, that they should never turn upland areas into theatres of patriotic defiance. But it would be painfully explicit and might provoke controversy. There was supposed to be a ‘war of nerves’ about a second front—however qualified by regional scruples. PWE wanted to foster ‘the will to fight’ while simultaneously ‘driving home the lesson that the day of combat has not yet come’. It was misguided to discount the power of words to manage expectations when the dosed directives were themselves the problem. Implicit and inconspicuous suggestions were made that maquis groups should not be formed unless these bands were small, secret, and inactive. This was not a convincing component of a dramatic appeal not to go to Germany. Unable to counsel against an armed maquis and unwilling to encourage it, PWE would still not give instructions about how to fight. A disarmed and inactive maquis was unlikely to survive unless it was invisible; an armed maquis—the over-enthusiasm—would recruit well but attract a violent  

Paniguian to Sutton,  Mar. , FO /. Gielgud to Grenier,  Mar. , FO /.

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response. As Paniguian sensed, PWE had not distinguished between talk, where rhetoric can ameliorate a logical difficulty, and practical instruction. The problem was the reluctance to admit that a good response must raise the temperature of resistance. This was aggravated by the attempt, abandoned in June , to secure an inactive AS. The real choice lay between accepting a more turbulent resistance and the most rhetorical solution of all—advising young Frenchmen to go to Germany as saboteurs. The first option, ultimately inescapable, would have been less difficult to face had London not still been thinking of insurrection as a single D-Day explosion. Knowledge and experience had not yet replaced the working hypotheses of . Arguably, the theory of the great day for which the Resistance must save themselves encouraged insurrectionary expectations. In spring  it was not yet admitted that the Insurrection would never happen, that when D-Day came London would not give the promised order to rise en masse and man the barricades. It was difficult to cast aside three years of teaching that the argument for patience was the grand finale. Not until summer  was the prospect of a great rebellion completely discarded. The communists were free both of grand finale thinking and the London discipline placed on the AS. The more they saw them in others the louder grew their excoriation of attentisme. The FTP argued that their own weapons were used to secure more while almost everyone else simply hoarded what they received until the police tracked them down. There were groups who did intend just to receive and hoard. Fitful attempts by the MUR to implement London policy left them open to the charge despite their better understanding and best intentions. By summer  the non-communist Resistance was divided between those who indignantly denied the charge of attentisme and attentistes who were losing the argument. The former, with MUR personalities prominent among them, were willing to shrink differences of strategy between themselves and the communists. Fernand Grenier arrived in London at the end of  to be the PCF’s emissary to Carlton Gardens. He was a well-known Parisian deputy, and an escapee from the concentration camp at Châteaubriant. His mission was to win sympathy and material support for the FTP, and he was as anxious to avoid a quarrel with the Fighting French. His arrival in London was treated as an event of considerable importance and it was suitably announced by the BBC. The British were prepared to listen carefully to Grenier’s advice on certain subjects. As an auxiliary adviser to PWE his voice was quite distinct from that of the Fighting French propaganda committee which met under Georges Boris. This committee had few differences with PWE except those connected with Giraud and the Americans. Grenier’s first broadcast included one discreet reference to the ‘franctireur parisien’—perhaps the first BBC use of the term ‘franc-tireur’ in its

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communist context. The non-specific implication of lower case in the typescript was of course, inaudible. In February Grenier gave a talk on the STO which praised various strikes in the Paris region and the workers who joined ‘detachments of the FTP’ rather than shuffling onto trains leaving the Gare de l’Est. The editor of the gaullist La Marseillaise accepted an article of his which saluted the FTP as the avant-garde of the entire Resistance. But a broadcast based on it and scheduled for the BBC Home Service was stopped by Kirkpatrick. PWE had to give the Fighting French an official explanation. At this time Lewis Gielgud was Sutton’s successor as head of the French region and Jacques Soustelle was the CNL Commissioner for Information. Gielgud read in the text a note of enthusiasm which carried ‘an implication of encitement to guerrilla activities’ best avoided. Grenier’s Home Service text had announced the FTP as ‘the underground army of France, of which so far nothing has been said’ and cited an FTP communiqué which claimed  Germans killed in two weeks. PWE Intelligence decided that all sabotage news should be treated as ‘unhard’ unless Carlton Gardens could give precise dates and details. It was a measure of Grenier’s status that Soustelle should, in form at least, have attempted to get clearance for a text which clearly implied a leading role for the FTP in France. A slightly emended text, this time for the French Service, was resubmitted by Soustelle but was still rejected. The burden of disappointing the PCF had been passed to the British. It is unlikely that André Philip and Georges Boris were displeased. Grenier was at first undismayed. He started a correspondance with PWE about resistance and the BBC. He heaped praise on the BBC in . But now, he thought, London broadcasts ‘risk being constantly behindhand in their estimate of the degree of resistance on the part of the French people’, while the ‘political line’ apparently in force about the FTP was in ‘the most absolute state of error’. Throughout  there had been nothing but a few dark references to attentats terroristes in terms ‘almost analagous’ to those used by Radio Paris. It was odd that one British organization—presumably SOE—worked with the FTP whilst another, the BBC, ignored them save for ‘brief allusions’. The news from Haute-Savoie encouraged Grenier: Our action [should] be popularised and sustained by the BBC, so that the mass of the nation which we can reach only insufficiently through our literature, gets to know its force and draws inspiration from our struggle. The anger of France grows rapidly. This anger ought to be channelled, organised and utilized. There exists no means other than the FTP, led by officers of all opinions, ranged under the leadership of Fighting France, and intending to work . . . in full accord with Allied high command . . . [Outside the FTP there is] anarchy, putsches, premature actions, useless sacrifices, [but within it] order, discipline and method

 Cremieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, iii. ; text of Grenier talk included with Soustelle to Sutton,  Mar. ; Gielgud to Soustelle,  Mar. , FO /.

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. . . It is then indispensable to make known to the French that there exists a centralized and disciplined organization.

PCF frustration and their scorn for resistance rivals was rarely so evident in London. FTP organization was probably superior to anything else in France, though the Armée Secrète of the MUR was substantially larger. It was premature to challenge the enemy to come up into the mountains and chase maquisards; small-scale operations by urban guerrillas, by contrast, were timely. Hence the reference to ‘premature actions’. The FTP were very critical of what they called maquis campings—bands of scarcely armed réfractaires persuading themselves that they could fight while in no position to do so. PWE were conciliatory. Grenier was welcome at Bush House, but there was further trouble when another talk was held up because of references to francstireurs: I will never associate myself with those who do not wish it to be known to the whole of France that its sons have as much courage as the guerrillas of Yugoslavia or the partisans of Greece, Norway and Russia. What is the premature action abstention from which I ought to recommend? Because the francs-tireurs are not engaged in anything premature: they strike blows at the enemy and they demolish its machinery of war. If this action is premature, why is the RAF bombing our railway lines? If you fear a premature action, that is one more reason for a centralized, disciplined organization. If we cannot have publicity, why is it given to the Yugoslavs?

PWE did not really want to know whether the FTP were special and preeminent; the facts were unclear, but the claim was unwelcome a priori. Even before the events in Haute-Savoie, PWE had decided against broadcasting the detailed and enthusiastic accounts they received of FTP activity. The term franc-tireur was licensed provided that it did not refer automatically to the FTP. PWE were careful. The FTP were mentioned more frequently in BBC broadcasts; their status, as one elite force among others, received occasional acknowledgement. The BBC preferred to speak of ‘patriots’ and ‘guerrillas’; the term ‘partisan’ was reserved for the Russians and ‘franc-tireur’ meant an armed individual. This obscured, deliberately, distinctions and nomenclature increasingly used in France but which London was unwilling to reinforce. If Grenier helped along a natural process, it was the tendency to compensate with passion and warmth for an absence of specific injunctions to fight. PWE accepted, despite occasional wobbles, that they must not weaken the claim that ‘anything is better than going to Germany’. In May Grenier was even allowed to preach in his own style, when he congratulated the clandestine comité populaire at the

  

Grenier to Gielgud,  Mar. , FO /. Grenier to Gielgud,  Mar. , FO /. PWE directive for BBC French Service,  Mar. to  Apr. , FO /.

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steel-works at Firminy (Loire) for getting five thousand workers out on strike against labour conscription. It was unfortunate that it fell to a member of the PCF central committee to tell PWE that the Resistance was ready for bigger and more costly tasks. The claim that Radio Algiers and Radio Moscow were ‘much more combative than Radio London . . . [and] reflect better the present state of French feeling’ would have been more uncomfortable from anyone else. When he complained that the BBC spoke too rarely of the ‘daily deeds of French heroism’, of executed hostages and political prisoners, and when he recommended a more emotional tone, he was asking too plainly that the BBC accept the PCF house style. This sort of rhetoric—uncomplicated, nearly unpolitical, and bellicose —was hitting the target in France. It became a model for others. Still, London had the big propaganda guns, which is why Grenier was so exasperated. PWE confessed the awkwardness and difficulty of their case in the April directive: ‘we should be very careful not to give the impression that our restraint [implies] that we are in any degree indifferent to the heroic efforts being made by Frenchmen in France . . . We yield to no one in our admiration of the resistance . . . But we cannot make ourselves in any degree responsible for premature armed conflicts and bloody reprisals.’ Thoughtful listeners were already struck by the paradox of lavish BBC tributes to the activities of the very people who were intent on ignoring BBC guidance. The tributes were not always specific. News of major acts of sabotage was given, when believed, but the talks reflect the PWE injunction to weigh everything against the need to avoid ‘encitement to general sabotage’. Trying to keeping resistance cool and submerged, while yielding to no one—that is, Moscow—in doffing one’s cap to the militants, was a difficult formula. PWE wanted the BBC to sound completely in touch with resistance affairs. The flow of material from France made this possible; but recommending an obscurely prudent sabotage to people who had started something different, which they wanted London to announce and support, was uncomfortable. PWE intended to teach ‘an increasingly realistic view about resistance’, and to show an exact understanding of clandestine realities by cutting out pseudomilitary terminology—‘headquarters’, ‘communiqué, ‘effectives’—from material sent to London as useful publicity. Resistance hyperbole was worth discouraging. But when the BBC tried to display familiarity with resistance, the categories were those of PWE propaganda: they still defined as resisters those conscripted for work in France and Germany. This was fantasy. Going to Germany to work was, except in quite extraordinary circumstances, a refusal to resist. But this was too unwelcome to be obvious. Colin Gubbins,    

Grenier to Gielgud,  Apr. , FO /.  French Directive,  Apr. , FO /. See Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Voix, iii. . Foreign Office (PWE) to PWE Cairo,  Mar. , FO /. PWE directive for  Apr. to  May , FO /.



F R A N C E : R E I N V E N T I N G A N A L LY

after reading a PWE central directive in June, agreed that PWE, throughout Europe, should prepare conscripted workers ‘from a psychological point of view’ for undetectable sabotage; SOE would ‘restrict’ themselves to ‘direct training of the limited number whom we may contact before they are conscripted’. Gubbins was saying, yet again, that PWE should not explain sabotage techniques. If he could take ‘Trojan Horse’ at all seriously, he was thinking more about Poles than Frenchmen. In France ‘Trojan Horse’ just faded away. The October central directive reported that the clandestine press had dropped the idea altogether and refused to regard deportation as inevitable. The resistance journal Combat had produced the slogan ‘Leaving is for traitors and for traitors there is death!’ Any communist leaving for Germany was automatically expelled from the party. French workers with the commitment to accept training as saboteurs could escape the STO; they were all needed at home. PWE learnt that SOE intended to censure their country sections for neglecting ‘Trojan Horse’. They had better things to do. Something else was required if the BBC were to appear knowledgeable. By early  some , workers had been taken to Germany. It could have been worse; but the most serious theft of French labour had taken place inside France itself. A swelling army of workers laboured on coastal defences, military construction, and munitions. The campaign against deportation, whatever its value, addressed the slightly easier target as the more difficult problem of industrial collaboration in France grew worse. The challenge was to place two or three million younger workers under a strong obligation to take risks and resist. What the maquis needed was to be told not to collect in pockets of upland defiance where they might feel safe for a while but lose mobility and be trapped. The resistance movements knew that the BBC remained the main channel through which their demands were heard. What they discovered was that the British were full of praise for the activists but would not, in France, allow them to set their own standards of resistance.   

Gubbins to Brooks,  June , FO /. PWE directive for – Oct. , FO /. Occupied Countries, Policy Planning committee,  Nov. , FO /.

PART III

Denmark: The Velvet Glove

Here is the danger, that we come through and out of this war in a well-nourished Denmark which eats well and has taken no notice of the great gangster in the south, because the country has lain in the shelter of his one velvet glove. Report for SOE, 1941: Hæstrup, Secret Alliance (1976), i. 101.

 The Status Quo W H E N the Germans invaded Denmark on  April  the first response of the Danish government was to order armed resistance to cease. No state of war was declared. The Germans explained that they had come to forestall the British and had no intention to extinguish Danish sovereignty. The government continued to assert Danish neutrality despite the occupation, though ministers did not pretend that neutrality had not been violated. Almost everyone recognized a case for limited collaboration. The occupation force was small and the Gestapo had only a small office of no immediate importance. The Danish government was broadened and the main parties tried to present a united front. Foreign Affairs was the crucial Ministry. Thorvald Stauning, the Social Democratic Prime Minister, ignored Conservative opposition and brought in Erik Scavenius. This appointment was intended to please the Germans. Scavenius had held the office during the First World War. He had been long out of politics, and his record was not clouded by anti-Nazi statements. There was a small but excited Danish Nazi party which the Germans encouraged. It was a sign of strong nerves and undivided counsel that in July the Copenhagen police arrested one hundred and fifty Danish Nazis for illegal demonstration. No party saw an alternative to digging in behind what remained of Danish neutrality. It was even held to be in Britain’s interest. The political parties accepted that Denmark must pay a price to preserve self-government and the judicial system. The policy of ‘negotiation’—forhandlingspolitik—was the practice defended rather than kollaboration, which was just as pejorative as in France. Unlike Vichy, the Danish government was not trying to re-engineer Danish public life: their concerns were genuinely defensive, but what they defended was continuity and a bureaucratic layer of insulation between the people and the occupier, and they redefined neutrality as freedom from obligations to anyone outside Denmark. A few leaders like Christmas Møller, a senior Conservative, thought the price of self-government could be almost entirely economic. Denmark was now dependent on Germany for coal, oil, and many industrial goods. Danish farmers needed a market for the bacon and butter no longer sent across the North Sea. The Reichsmark was set at twice its previous market value. Suddenly the Germans were paying better prices than the English ever did. In effect Denmark paid Danegeld.  Hans Kirchoff, Augustoprøret  (), i. –, discusses the types and degrees of collaboration known in Europe; see also Henrik Dethlefsen, ‘Denmark and the German Occupation: Cooperation, Negotiation or Collaboration?’, Scandinavian Journal of History,  ().

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D E N M A R K : T H E V E LV E T G L OV E

Christmas Møller, who had recently retired as Conservative leader, joined the government, but he also became the first leading politician to offer warnings about what was necessary and what was not. In the winter of / some anti-Nazis formed discussion groups. One was the product of a speaking tour Møller made. After this tour he was forced to resign first from the government and then from the Rigsdag and to stay silent. For Møller’s circle, which expanded in  to include the communist Mogens Fog, there appeared to be two distinct courses of action. The first was already apparent: to prevent the government slithering into Germany’s pocket; but the second was to prepare an underground organization against the day the Gestapo took over. Both were foreseen when SOE’s Charles Hambro met an important Danish contact, Ebbe Munck, in Stockholm in October . Munck, a journalist and explorer, had come to the British Legation with microfilms from Danish military intelligence. He stayed in Stockholm as SOE’s chief contact with Anglophile opinion in Denmark and represented informally a group of foreign affairs journalists in Copenhagen who had once worked in London and were willing to provide the British with contacts and advice. Ronald Turnbull, recently Press Attaché in Copenhagen, led the Danish SOE section in Stockholm from February . The few who foresaw active resistance did not move quickly even towards producing clandestine publications. The small, but well-rooted Communist party had worked with German refugees before the war and acquired clandestine skills, no doubt with the help of the Comintern office once stationed in Copenhagen. Leadership in the clandestine press was, from June , theirs for the taking. But even the communists were, until late , sadly convinced that open appeals for sabotage would be counter-productive. The most familiar criticism of the government was that they would neither state plainly their sticking points nor contemplate a collective resignation which would force Germany to import hundreds of civil servants and thousands of policemen and soldiers. Only patriotic brinkmanship, went the argument, might seriously limit collaboration. But neither the Foreign Office nor SOE wanted to push Stauning into an early confrontation, and Hambro requested restraint from the BBC until SOE was up and running. The ability of London-led agitation to undermine the regime in Denmark was taken for granted. The Germans would, of course, be easy to provoke. Denmark was friendly territory for SOE, yet for two years SOE made very slow progress. The Social Democrats were the most stubbornly self-centred party in Denmark, but their general outlook was shared by the other three large parties: they wanted Britain to survive and if possible to win, but they did not want to help. The Danes started the occupation a long way from being ready  

J. Hæstrup, Secret Alliance (), i. –. Hambro (SO) to Laurence Collier (Foreign Office),  Jan. , FO /.

T H E S TAT U S Q U O

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to provoke direct German rule. London was fully aware of the difference between an early Nazi takeover, leaving a large rump of neutral opinion believing it had been induced from outside, and the same event occurring later when events had sharpened patriotic feeling. When SOE and the Danish opposition groups made contact each side was, basically, wanting to be told by the other what could be done. Munck linked Danish military intelligence with the British in Stockholm. The Danish armed forces were largely intact, and could not be prevented from knowing a good deal. It was from this source that the British heard of a German demand for Danish naval torpedo boats, and through their couriers the British sent back an unsuccessful request for the boats to be sabotaged. The military intelligence passed to SOE was accurate, but the ‘Princes’—as SOE knew the source—did not intend to harm their government. They hoped to acquire enough leverage in London to induce the British not to make difficulties. SOE tried to help an opposition to form but they were asked not to put this source at risk. Christmas Møller was invited to come to London to strengthen the Free Danes but the invitation went astray. When it was renewed it was coupled with a similar invitation to a leading Social-Democrat, who consulted Prime Minister Stauning and then refused. Møller accepted, but by the end of the year plans for his departure were still not definite. Ebbe Munck’s contacts did not see themselves as part of a concerted opposition to the government but as elements in a patriotic milieu with various views of the government. The senior officials in London took the sceptical view that Stauning’s careful collaboration in defence of living standards and self-government was unstable. As a tactical phase, it had advantages, but only as a preparation for something else. Christopher Warner, the Assistant Under-Secretary in the Northern department of the Foreign Office, was more sceptical about the Danish politicians than his juniors. In PWE Barman and Brinley Thomas, the Welsh economist who succeeded him as regional director, agreed with Warner. Warner, Barman, Brinley Thomas, and Robert Jørgensen, the BBC Danish Editor, constituted a well-placed layer of expertise. They were willing to be patient because Danish national unity was clearly a value, but they all disliked official collaboration more than the BBC were allowed to say. In  they were sceptical about suggestions that the Copenhagen politicians were performing well. Christopher Warner looked forward to a patriotic agitation in Denmark: I doubt whether it is in our interest to encourage at this moment useless activities against the Germans, which would be easily suppressed and would merely lead to the loss of potentially useful anti-German personnel. It is better that German control should remain lax in order that those who are active in the cause of the Allies can express themselves openly and keep up pro-Allied feeling etc., so long as the nation does not become increasingly collaborationist and soft. 

C. F. A. Warner’s minute,  Feb. , FO /.

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D E N M A R K : T H E V E LV E T G L OV E

The strategy of vigilance and agitation recommended by the Copenhagen journalists who briefed SOE in Stockholm found favour in London. The Danish Army—a tolerated anomaly of six thousand men—had their own plans for secret army activity. General Goertz, the Danish Chief of Staff, did not want SOE in Denmark, except as messengers, and did not want British-trained saboteurs. He was friendly—the flow of intelligence established his credentials—but the Danish Army was sure to be dissolved if sabotage became a problem. Goertz was loyal to his government and did not want SOE to precipitate its removal. After SOE made their first attempt to work into Denmark—the man’s parachute did not open—the ‘Princes’ tried to head off any further SOE activity. They explained the Army’s secret army preparations. SOE Stockholm were, of course, very excited. But the Princes did not quite promise SOE active co-operation; they merely revealed their plans for action at the end of the war. There was, it appears, no indication that the ‘Liga’—the secret army—would come under Allied command or do any sabotage. This apart, the bait was dangled artfully. In February  Turnbull came to London and made, or passed on, comments on British propaganda which reflect pressure from the ‘Princes’. It has been suggested that this pressure altered the tone of BBC broadcasts. But this is far from certain. There was a PWE rebuttal of the Stockholm complaints: I’m afraid that both  [Turnbull] and S are labouring under a misapprehension. . . . Request by  of  February to cease drawing special attention to and praising Danish patriots such as la Cour, etc., has been very carefully considered and we reached the conclusion that it would be a mistake to act upon it. If la Cour or other patriots make speeches which are reported in the press or publicly circulate pamphlets written by themselves without any attempt at secrecy, they obviously want publicity and incur the danger of German reprisals with their eyes open. It would be a serious mistake for us to ignore propaganda activities in Denmark . . . It has never been our policy, as S suggests, to create martyrs in Denmark, so the question of stopping this line does not arise . . . Danes are not outraged by our broadcasts. S is quoting here from a BBC intelligence report which is compiled for the sole purpose of discrediting Jørgensen [BBC Danish Editor].

Curiously, the SOE Danish section in London accepted this correction quite affably and promised to keep up with propaganda questions. There is no sign here of an SOE/Danish agreement which produced a period of ‘great restraint’ on the British side noticeable in the spring and summer of .  J. Bennett, British Broadcasting and the Danish Resistance Movement (),  speaks of ‘a complete reversal’.  SY to S (Barman to Hambro?),  Mar. , FO /. These SO/SO cryptonyms lingered in this SOE/PWE correspondence. ‘SY’ is evidently Barman. S may be Hollingsworth, head of SOE Danish Section. In Aug.  Vilhelm la Cour, a medieval historian, and his publisher received short prison sentences for printing patriotic pamphlets. When la Cour came out of gaol he was invited to the  Palace. Bennett, British Broadcasting,  and Hæstrup, Secret Alliance, i. .

T H E S TAT U S Q U O

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PWE knew nothing about it, and SOE in London did not promise what the ‘Princes’ wanted. There is, however, one apparently clear indication of changed policy. After consulting London, Turnbull made a promise to the ‘Princes’: London will modify its radio-propaganda in order to avoid upsetting the status quo inside Your country and steps are being taken to bring American propaganda into line . . . London radio have abandoned the policy of attempting to form a split in your government and agrees that nothing must be done which might cause a change in the status quo. It is realized that the present Quisling government must remain for the time being if we are to preserve the organization which the ‘Liga’ has under its control.

But there are serious problems with this. Since there had been no such policy, what was the promise worth? Even half-serious references to ‘the present Quisling government’ were extremely rare in London and sound curiously out of touch. The expression must have left the ‘Princes’ shaking their heads in disbelief. Furthermore, Turnbull’s comforting words about radio-propaganda stand in crisp contrast to the rejection of the specific pleas the ‘Princes’ had made. More agents were sent to Denmark; SOE did create its own sabotage organization; spectacular sabotage was intended; and even the ‘Princes’ were invited to study undetectable sabotage. Turnbull’s assurances exploited, quite deliberately, misconceptions about British propaganda. The promises to adjust the BBC and delay sabotage work until the ‘Liga’ was ready for it were empty or unreliable. There was a brief reconsideration of bringing Møller to London, but the original decision was confirmed—he left in May—despite Danish fears that the flight of a leading Conservative might disturb the coalition and invite further German interference. Both SOE Stockholm and Danish military intelligence were trying to frustrate each other’s less convenient intentions by affecting to accept commitments while not really doing so. Turnbull had just been told that the BBC were not trying to create martyrs. He surely understood how little he was promising. Woburn’s ‘Radio Danmark’ had supported the V campaign and even made favourable mention of arson and sabotage. ‘Black’ stations were allowed to be spicy. Stauning, for instance, was called a traitor to the working class. The RU did, in fact, close down at the end of April , but this may have been in the pipeline and perhaps it gave Turnbull a pretext for his offer. The RU was replaced in July  by ‘Danish Freedom’. PWE were not told about Turnbull’s propaganda contract. Since the contract was hollow, there was nothing to explain. PWE could be difficult; they had, after all, only lately Turnbull to the ‘Princes’,  Apr. : Hæstrup, Secret Alliance, i. –. Bennett, British Broadcasting, . Hæstrup, Secret Alliance, i.  considers Turnbull’s letter ‘bursting with glaring contradictions’.  Radio Propaganda Policy Committee minutes,  Aug. and  Aug. , FO /. ‘D’ ran from  Feb.  to  Apr. : E. Howe, The Black Game (), –.  

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D E N M A R K : T H E V E LV E T G L OV E

accused SOE of failing to ‘realise what we are aiming at’. SOE did consider whether to make real concessions to the ‘Princes’. One official, admitting that everything hinged on the good faith of the Danish officers, recorded philosophically that little or no sabotage ‘would be no worse a fate than we have to bear in Czechoslovakia and, until recently, Poland’. The question was referred upwards. The Joint Planning Staff showed no interest in the ‘Liga’. Sir Frank Nelson, in his last days as ‘CD’, recorded that any trimming of propaganda or neglect of sabotage to suit the Danish preference for a small German occupation force could not be justified. Hambro, on replacing Nelson, doubted whether SOE could work with the Danish secret army without persuading the Princes to change their policy. SOE London became reserved about the Army conspiracy and, when persuasion failed, more cynical. The only concrete effect of this episode on SOE work was that a new organizer flown to Denmark in April  was left for several weeks without a clear directive. There was a trace of the ‘Liga’ perspective in the Foreign Office Northern department. Rodney Gallop, the senior Danish specialist, believed that in  Britain had forced the pace of opposition too strongly: the Danish government was ‘engaged in a difficult rearguard action with insufficient arms (a position we ought to appreciate by now!)’ so that ‘although the masses, and those on whom we should count in the event of an outbreak, ought also not to be left out of account, I think that we should recognise that their opportunities will largely depend on the result of the rearguard action, and we should be careful not to prejudice it’. Gallop was not just concerned, like everyone else, to give SOE time to get established. He thought the government’s ‘political rearguard’ might actually create ‘opportunities’ for the militants when the ‘outbreak’ came. He was inclined to be hopeful about forhandlingspolitik. He too wanted stronger public feeling but not through sounding inflexible. His department did not rule out the possibility of becoming either more tolerant of the government’s existence or less. Declining a Danish suggestion to do nothing was one thing, starting something was another. SOE were willing but unready and PWE were in no hurry. These departments sent representatives to the Foreign Office to form the ‘Danish Committee’. It was an important gathering. In  it brought together Warner, Hambro, and Barman—the most senior ‘Scandinavian’ figures—as well as the Danish specialists. The committee decided in July  that the time had not yet come for pushing the Danish government into a fatal confrontation. In September Rodney Gallop tried to clarify and justify this position for PWE: the Danes had preferred national unity in the modest SY to S,  Mar. , FO /. C. Cruickshank, SOE in Scandinavia (), . But this book is of very limited value. Though written with early access to the extant SOE archive, it is not an official history of the kind published by  HMSO. Minute by R. Gallop,  Apr. , FO /.  

T H E S TAT U S Q U O

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work of limiting German demands to getting stronger resistance from a minority: In this policy, the Danes have been remarkably successful, and . . . the Danish Committee . . . decided that our propaganda should not conflict with it. The Danish Committee policy is not to change the status quo and to avoid a situation in which such a change would seem to be produced by us rather than by the Germans.

The ‘status quo’ formula was a holding position, an extended moment of hesitation. SOE’s Danish circuit ran into terrible trouble in September. Christian Michael Rottbøll, the young man SOE sent to lead their work, had reached Denmark at the end of April—to the alarm of the ‘Princes’—but without specific orders about sabotage. Rottbøll felt frustrated. He had plainly been told to work with the ‘Princes’, on the assumption that their secret army might start sabotage. He and his group of volunteers found the ‘Princes’ unhelpful, though their security was good. Rottbøll even made contact with the communists. But he was shot in a scuffle as he was arrested in September. The small SOE circuit was paralysed once again. SOE needed to efface the record of failure which was clear both to friends in Copenhagen and critics in London. 

Gallop to Brinley Thomas,  Sept. , FO /.

 Scavenius and Koch E R I K S C AV E N I U S was the chief representative of the view that what was good for Danish–German relations was good for Denmark. BBC attacks on Scavenius seemed the obvious way to contest this opinion, and permission was confirmed in March . The foreign minister was not fussy about neutrality and was unapologetic about treating Germany as victorious. He was the minister who tried to please the Germans. The British would, he said, understand and their protests were—perfectly understandable—hot air. The BBC won him extra credit in Berlin. But Scavenius acted with full parliamentary authority and he never controlled the government. He was used by more cautious, more political, figures to conserve their own credentials. Scavenius took the blame. The British adopted this convention, partly aware of its artificiality. In November  the government were told to aplaud the anti-bolshevik crusade. They were invited to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact—a recycled declaration of solidarity originally made between Germany and Japan in . Scavenius almost lost the ensuing argument. Though not a military alliance, the Pact explicitly compromised Danish neutrality. He persuaded his colleagues by promising that, though Berlin would not tolerate a refusal, Denmark’s signature meant nothing. There were demonstrations in Copenhagen when the surrender became public knowledge. It was a humiliation, and it earned Soviet indignation. Stauning died and was succeeded as Prime Minister by Vilhelm Buhl, another Social Democrat. Buhl announced that ‘the fight against Communism’ was a ‘common European interest which concerns all countries on the Continent’. This was very disappointing, yet it was excused as a sort of feudal fine which the Danes had to pay for the right to choose a new Prime Minister. Buhl, it was thought, was less indifferent about Britain than Stauning, and his appointment had been opposed by Scavenius. Christopher Warner did not think that the Danish government deserved full marks for effort. He had come to the Northern department after two years as Leeper’s deputy at Woburn and knew how an important sticking point can disappear in the infinite regress of pragmatic justification. When Rodney Gallop, his Danish specialist, produced minutes suggesting that the Copenhagen response to German demands had some merit, Warner often appended a sceptical negative. At the beginning of  Gallop’s sketch of the ‘strange, aloof and unsympathetic figure of Erik Scavenius’ was almost tolerant and far from contemptuous: 

Reuters telegram,  May , FO /.

S C AV E N I U S A N D KO C H



All Danes agree that he is a law unto himself. He is a cold, sceptical and sophisticated intellectual—attributes which are bound to take on a perverse and sterile complexion among so warm and simple-hearted a people as the Danes. He is not merely clever but ‘clever-clever’, and he cannot forget that it was during his previous term at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that Denmark kept out of the – war. . . . M. Scavenius is no Nazi, but he regards Nazism as merely a passing phenomenon, a cloud-shadow temporarily darkening the face of that eternal Germany which he admires . . . To call him a Quisling would be a clumsy error. Only Frits Clausen, the ‘leader’ of the Danish Nazis, qualifies for that title . . . He has no personal ambitions, nor does he seek the affection or gratitude of his countrymen. For the first eighteen months of the occupation he was, Danish Nazis apart, Public Enemy No.  of all good Danes.

For the next eighteen months he surprised his critics by seeming no worse. BBC criticism was meant to stop the politicians getting complacent and to prepare Denmark for the moment they were arrested. The Danish opposition, or proto-resistance, shared these intentions. Their call was for the politicians—in government or the Rigsdag—to lead public opposition to consistent compliance with German demands. Christmas Møller said this, anonymously, in the first number of Frit Danmark. This clandestine journal appeared in April  and grew into the leading voice of of Danish resistance. Frit Danmark was an attempt to bridge the gap between unqualified opposition and reasoned criticism of a lawful government. It was the product of contacts (via Mogens Fog) between Møller, the Conservative, and Aksel Larsen, the leader of the Danish Communists. Its success was due in large part to the clandestine facilities of the DKP. The communists may have thought they were helping to launch the governing organ of a ‘national popular front’ which would, eventually, provide leadership for the bourgeois resistance. When Møller told his readers that the journal was produced by ‘just a small circle’ of patriots, he meant ten men and the Communist Party. The founders of Frit Danmark believed that the time would come for sabotage work, but they did not know how or when; nor was the editorial committee entirely agreed on how strongly to argue against the government. When Møller left for England he took with him the first number of Frit Danmark and was irritated to read that Scavenius was a traitor. Such an emphasis could limit the appeal of the new newspaper-movement. One possible source of support had been the Danish Youth Union, founded by the theologian Hal Koch in  as a democratic opposition to Nazification. Koch was plainly a critic of the government and he was very popular. After a long discussion with Aksel Larsen, Koch concluded, correctly, that the journal would try to to bring down the government. In Koch’s view, this was not intrinsically valuable, so he refused to join the editorial committee. Thereafter  

R. Gallop, ‘Political Review of Denmark ’,  Jan. , FO /. Hans Snitker, Den Illegale Frit Danmark — bladet og organisationen (), .

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he threw his weight against Frit Danmark’s militancy. Koch would not have approved Frit Danmark’s praise of the ‘Churchill Club’, the Aalborg schoolboys who were Denmark’s first saboteurs. This appeared in the second number: ‘Elsewhere it is the grown men who commit sabotage and kill Germans. In Denmark it was eight underage boys who took the lead.’ In August Frit Danmark rejected the government’s forhandlingspolitik on the grounds that it was not the lesser evil, that it enervated opposition, and created mistrust of Denmark among the Allies. Møller reached London in May and was introduced to the world press at the Ministry of Information. He became the most distinguished Danish speaker for the BBC. But his time in Britain was disappointing. He was given no important work and SOE remained hidden from him behind a wall of secrecy. But his appearance in London provoked some excitement in Denmark. It annoyed the ‘Princes’, who begged SOE Stockholm to prevent him using the BBC for ‘propaganda purposes’ or from getting ‘carried away in front of the microphone’. Møller kept advice and analysis distinct. Like Koch, he refused to take an exaggerated view of the government’s faults. He could see only one serious mistake—the Anti-Comintern Pact—and he explained that BBC reports of impending antisemitic legislation and attacks on certain personalities had been wrong and unfortunate. Most Danes did not ‘want to be told from outside what to think and how to act’. If the BBC called for sabotage and disturbances there would be a response from patriotic young men. But it should be clearly understood that the government’s goals were shared by the people. This was not Møller’s main theme. What he offered at the Foreign Office—to Warner and Sargent, the Deputy Under-Secretary, and then to Eden—was the opinion that Denmark must attempt whatever the Allies required. He did not altogether know what this should mean and he refused to pretend it sprang from Danish interests. It was not the result of any interpretation of collaboration, but if Britain wanted ‘Norwegian conditions’ there would be ‘no difficulty on the Danish side’. Resistance in Denmark did not require a sour view of the politicians, it needed a decision in London. On paper there was already one idea. The Chiefs of Staff, since they were asked, agreed that Denmark should become a drain on enemy resources. But in reality the British were really waiting for something to happen, the Danes were waiting for new and worse demands from Berlin, and the Germans were watching for organized sabotage.  Mogens Fog tried to tempt Koch, but Koch warned others against Fog’s veiled communism: F. Jakobsen, I Danmarks Frihedsraad,  vols. (), i. .  Snitker, Den Illegale Frit Denmark, .  ‘Liga’ to Turnbull,  May : Bennett, British Broadcasting and the Danish Resistance  Movement (), . PID interview with Christmas Møller,  June , FO /.  Memorandum of conversation between Eden and Møller,  June , FO /.

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When the new Danish RU came on air in July , it was meant to be more anti-German and less concerned with collaboration unless the facts were clear and compelling. Scavenius was not spared the lash, and the new station supported the campaign for transport sabotage. Otherwise the station was simply collecting an audience. In August Møller and three other Danes wrote a critical paper for PWE complaining that the silence about active resistance was illadvised from a ‘Danish political-psychological point of view’. Besides, it was wrong for SOE to send young men to Denmark ‘when we over here know that they will have to remain idle’. The broadcasters, said Møller and his friends, could not change Danish opinion while working to a directive which left the population ‘so badly informed’ that the Danish government could damage Allied interests without this being understood: ‘the Danish population is made dull and do not understand when and why the day of action has come’. Resistance might even be the government’s strong card. The Germans feared ‘open revolt and chaos in production’. The strength of the government was ‘therefore dependent on the population and the atmosphere. The more explosive the better.’ This statement by émigré representatives of Danish resistance was presented in the same month that Frit Danmark warned the government that ‘the country’s children will not be forbidden the battle for Denmark’s freedom’. The critics of the Buhl–Scavenius regime were not united in their understanding of the government or resistance. But it was difficult pleading with farmers and fishermen to produce less food for Germany while saying nothing about the authorities organizing the export of bacon and fish. Sinclair’s call for transport sabotage—see Chapter  above—was broadcast in Danish. Quite by chance, Buhl chose the same September evening to make a broadcast the Germans had been requesting. Thirty minutes after Sinclair’s BBC talk, the Danish Prime Minister was heard making his first appeal to the nation to have nothing to do with sabotage. Buhl said that a few incidents obliged him to ‘speak a few serious words’ explaining that it was the custom of belligerent nations to respond to sabotage with the death penalty: ‘Do not allow the few irresponsible and inconsiderate people to play their own game and ruin the state of calm which all sensible Danes wish to safeguard.’ This was a useful windfall. The apparent reply was much preferred to indifference. On  September—the recent war news was horrific—Møller spoke on the BBC to contrast the appeals of Sinclair and Buhl—‘fire and water, night and day’. His friends in Denmark were now functioning as an SOE support-group, and he voiced their willingness to accept risks:  Report on Danish and Norwegian RUs week ending  July , FO /. Reception was excellent in most of Denmark, but there was jamming around Copenhagen.  Memorandum,  Aug. , by Sten Gudme, Eyvind Knauer, Christmas Møller, and Sven  Tillige-Rasmussen, FO /. Snitker, Den Illegale Frit Danmark, .  Radio talk,  Sept. , FO /.

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I know well what I am doing when I tell you at home how really deadly serious the situation is for us all. Denmark and you at home must take your share of the burden. Now it is transport that matters. The sinking of a ship or a ferry immobilises trains . . . Damage and delays, bombing and Resistance action—these are the means by which, with increasing effect, we will suffocate and strangle the German transport organization.

The BBC Danish section, unlike the Norwegian, favoured the attempts by Newsome and Ritchie to ginger up the broadcasts. But Danish was understood in Norway, and the Norwegian broadcasters opposed the transport campaign. They complained to the Foreign Office. Norwegian conditions were so painful that the BBC was asked to do nothing to push matters further. Warner thought that Buhl had gone further against sabotage than strictly necessary but Rodney Gallop did not see the intervention as disappointing or even German-inspired. In the country the ‘blacks’, led by Barman who became Leeper’s deputy at CHQ in August , pondered how to convert Gallop to a more forward policy. In Denmark Frit Danmark printed Møller’s talk under the headline ‘Yes Christmas, Our Nation is ready!’ Not everyone was so convinced. The Frit Danmark group in Esbjerg, for example, pointed out that the Norwegian Prime Minister, also speaking on the BBC, warned Norwegians not to attempt minor sabotage actions because of the reprisals they brought. Reports from Stockholm still represented these sorts of doubts as the norm. Møller was not invited to repeat his appeal. Even those most anxious to get a lead from Møller were not very pleased to have been asked to target the railway system rather than factories producing for Germany. Berlin deduced a potential for organized resistance in Denmark from the increase in clandestine journals. A general resistance movement was assumed to be only a matter of time. In July some attempts at arson were detected, and the police discovered that the Communists were sponsoring Frit Danmark. Two E-boats were destroyed. The government were told to choose between introducing the death penalty for sabotage or leaving such matters to German courts martial. The Danes inclined towards the latter though they tried, not always successfully, to ensure that prison sentences were served in Denmark. Buhl’s anti-sabotage speech was an attempt to ease the pressure. What London found disappointing was greeted by the legal Danish press as a legitimate warning against troublemakers. Yet it was not enough for Berlin, where Møller’s talk was treated as proof of the intentions of the ‘parachutists’. Hitler was considering a quarrel when King Christian provided a pretext. The Führer sent his good wishes on the royal birthday. The royal telegram acknowledging receipt was so terse, it provoked ‘the Telegram crisis’. The Danes were told that there would have to be a new government. It appeared Bennett, British Broadcasting, . Frit Danmark, Oct. . In September the journal suggested targets for sabotage: Snitker, Den Illegale Frit Danmark, . 

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that the velvet glove had been taken off and that ‘official’ Denmark would have to choose between a German-nominated government and ‘Norwegian conditions’. The crisis lasted eight weeks: the Danes were left to stew in their anxieties. Hitler delivered threatening monologues to Ribbentrop, to General Hermann von Hanneken, the new Army commander for Denmark, and to Dr Werner Best, an SS lawyer and police specialist whom Himmler chose to take over at the Copenhagen Legation. Hitler told Hanneken to start treating the Danes like enemies. But he then overcame his personal preference for meeting Danish nationalism head on. His second thoughts were to corrupt Danish institutions. He did not want to throw leading politicians or the King into heroic exile. When the war was won the Danes must become Germans, but the transition would be smoother if they surrendered by stages. The first move for Dr Best was to get the Rigsdag to approve an unpopular government, the second would be emergency legislation to render the Rigsdag superfluous. The cult of Danish monarchy could be toned down by the new regime. Scavenius’s sophisticated mockery of the ‘royal hysterics’ of his countrymen was a point in his favour. Danish politicians must connive at the subversion of sovereign institutions. On  November Dr Best came to Copenhagen as Reich Plenipotentiary. He had previously worked in Paris, and he was convinced that the economic value of occupied countries was impaired by German high-handedness. Danish politicians expected a demand to bring the Danish Nazis into the government, and they were, on the whole, resolved to refuse. The demand was made, but only as a bruising preliminary. The politicians told themselves that they could prevent a forced reconstruction if they kept their nerve. Scavenius and his Foreign Ministry officials, on the other hand, thought the end was at hand if the parties would not yield. The Germans did insist that Buhl and two other ministers must go, but Best had not been instructed to end Danish selfgovernment. After  November the dispute was reduced to whether Scavenius himself could be accepted as Prime Minister by the Rigsdag parties. The initial view was that he was too unpopular, that he would provoke the saboteurs and hotheads. Almost all politicians resented popular agitation. The objections of all but thirteen Conservatives crumbled when the Germans offered to tolerate a Scavenius Cabinet containing a majority of party politicians. Scavenius took office as Prime Minister knowing that the co-ordinating committee of the parties was a grand jury vetting his administration. The politicians’ confidence that they could circumscribe the new regime was buttressed by the news of El Alamein. Møller’s September talk had been a false start, but it had helped to produce a crisis in Denmark. London had not been fishing for a crisis. But Brinley  An expression attributed to Scavenius: ‘Denmark in Political Warfare’,  Feb. , FO /.

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Thomas, the regional director, thought that ‘sabotage and the rising temper in Denmark’ had implications for political propaganda which must soon be faced. Barman proposed that SOE and PWE prepare a new position before the next meeting of the Danish Committee. But SOE simply did not consider themselves under existing restraint. Any contradiction between sabotage and keeping the political status quo was a problem for someone else: ‘we [SOE] are to do all we can against the Germans in Denmark . . . there is no call on us to modify the line on which we have worked hitherto, but rather to intensify it’. If there had ever been a sabotage ‘pause’, SOE considered themselves to be beyond it. PWE wanted to know not just whether SOE were serious but what sabotage was all about and whether the trickle of incidents in the summer should be ascribed, if welcome, to the communists or to ‘patriots’, or, if unwelcome, to Danish Nazi provocation. The truth was that sabotage activity was rare and mainly communist. SOE’s circuit in Denmark was growing but it was still in disarray and was not equipped. Once the Telegram crisis was running Møller broadcast an appeal to reject German political demands: ‘We do not now want to experience a moral and spiritual th April.’ On the same day Newsome instructed all the editors whose output could be heard in Denmark that the Danes had reached the crossroads at which they would either choose the way of ‘honour and ultimate selfinterest’ or become a Romania. Next day he strengthened the directive: ‘If anything, we should err on the side of suggesting [the government] are capitulating. Should this crisis blow over we can assume that they have yielded.’ Brinley Thomas did not like sounding remorselessly critical. He instructed the BBC to cry foul at Danish concessions, but if the government resigned they should applaud. Encouragement had a role to play. During the crisis the British view of the status quo was more positive. Indeed, events made the status quo consistent with standing firm and risking everything. London wanted the Danish politicians to accept the risk of a break with Germany. Collaboration d’état was a balance of risks. It was not a fixed asset to be retained at any price, and its collapse might be welcome. British ambivalence had a militant side. Capitulation was not the status quo. An imposed Reichskommissar did not seem the most likely outcome but, if it happened, it would be the lesser evil. The Danish economy was exploited by a hundred German civil servants and a very modest occupation force. This was galling, and the British intended to push up German occupation costs. Nevertheless, Warner had to correct Møller’s impression that Sinclair’s Transport Campaign text signalled a change of plan. Provided resistance was SY(A) [Brinley Thomas] to S.(),  Sept. , FO /. S to SY(A), (SOE to Brinley Thomas),  Oct. , FO /. Turnbull was just as blunt with the Princes: J. Hæstrup, Secret Alliance (), i. –.  Møller’s text,  Oct. and Newsome’s directives: Bennett, British Broadcasting, , .  Warner’s minute,  Nov. , FO /.  

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not blocked and the profits of occupation were not increasing, the Danes were welcome to try to retain what autonomy they had. When the news broke that Buhl had resigned and that Scavenius was in charge, judgements differed. Warner felt hostile: I rather think the Germans have been clever . . . They have succeeded in giving power to a strong and dictatorial collaborationist, while preserving the facade of legality and constitutionalism and getting the King’s consent. They will almost certainly get what they want out of Scavenius without trouble from the people . . . PWE will at least imply that the Danes, if they value their reputation, would be well advised to show by demonstration the feeling of their country is against Scavenius’s appointment.

Warner grasped Hitler’s intentions. A moment for shocking the Danes into opposition had passed and they might now remain quiescent. Nevertheless, many of the old ministers remained in office, and the idea of a ‘strong and dictatorial’ Scavenius was a misconception. The relative weakness of the new Prime Minister was soon common knowledge. Warner and Brinley Thomas agreed to call the new ministry a one-man government. Scavenius did introduce special powers legislation in December—as the Germans had demanded—but it was self-repealing in the event of a change of government. Scavenius had no power-base. The political parties retained control of the Cabinet and could use the Rigsdag to stop unauthorized measures. German policy, as refined by Dr Best, was more flexible than London suspected. Best intended to show what could be done with subtlety and a long rein. For the next eight months he gambled, almost recklessly, on running Denmark so smoothly that Berlin would leave him alone. Gallop admitted that attempts to avoid categorizing Scavenius were problematic. The ban on comparisons with Quisling or the leading lights of French collaboration failed to meet the difficulty. The war was changing. The Allies were in Algiers, and Darlan had just been acquired by Eisenhower. The Danes might start seeing Scavenius in a very new light: ‘If we don’t draw the analogy with Laval, the Danes may draw an analogy with Darlan.’ The politicians stated their support for the new government in minimal terms. Scavenius had been unpopular, but being Prime Minister did him no harm. There were no demonstrations. The risk of Scavenius becoming less unpopular had not been foreseen. There was a second wave of arrests of communists. But there were still scruples and the Danish police threatened to stop making arrests if more prisoners were handed over to German custody. The legal press became more grey and less patriotic. London expected some sort of conscription for work in Germany. But this was one of several steps which Scavenius could not take. The political establishment now felt edgy and exposed. The Danish  

Warner’s minute,  Nov. , FO /. Minute by R. Gallop,  Nov. , FO /.

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Committee in London, learning that Scavenius had not even wanted to be Prime Minister, decided not to maintain an ‘all-out attack’ on him. The party leaders, of course, remained determined to ignore London’s preference for open opposition. Scavenius denounced ‘Danish voices in the ether and elsewhere’ that ‘irresponsibly or recklessly’ advocated sabotage. The Danish Committee, still unconvinced about the strength of Danish opinion, permitted another of the postponements which Hambro had first recommended in January . Hal Koch had demanded public opposition to each and every injury to Danish rights. While the government was plausible, he was the voice of patriotic vigilance. What he valued was public honesty; he insisted that government policy might be defensible but dangerous as well. He denied that criticism of the government was harmful or that political action should belong to a ‘freemasonry’ of ‘specially initiated people’, but he did not contest the censure of ‘irresponsible acts’. Even if a majority tolerated the government’s concessions, the death of debate would be harmful. It might facilitate the loss of working-class radicals and patriotic youth to the leadership of the clandestine press. Koch wanted a tougher national unity than was imagined in the Foreign Ministry press department: No, we must know why we are united, and we must know today what the preservation of the Danish government is costing: for it certainly does cost something, and there is not the slightest reason to hide it. We are—let it be said again—democrats not anarchists: but just because of this everything must take place openly and publicly. . . . The road we have chosen will cost us dearly. The price, it is true, is not very concrete and can easily be turned to look like foolish idealism. . . . it is easier to shrug the shoulders at them than at guns, butter and machines.

But the government did obstruct public discussion of collaboration and retreated into silence. Koch had to reconsider and assess the logic of his support for open debate. In May  he offered a Lutheran doctrine of submission to the magistrate revised for the age of citizenship: It is not our task to act wisely and to keep silence—for that we have the statesmen. Bound by the law of necessity they have, against their will, been compelled to agree to acts obnoxious to them, and they have had to be silent when they would have preferred to speak, but that is their task. Our task is to oppose with hands and feet the transformation to a principle or even only to a precedent of anything that we have been compelled by the law of necessity and under protest to accept. Our task is to speak the truth and thereby prepare the road back. . . . The [present government] must resort to measures that violate justice; it must often make encroachments that are an insult to freedom; it must often make Minutes,  Nov. , FO /. Rigsdag debate: Stockholm Fortnightly Report, – Dec. , FO /.  Hal Koch in Lederbladet, the organ of the Danish Youth Union: Fortnightly Report to  Jan. , FO /.  

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statements which do not harmonise with the truth . . . Each time it happens it is our duty to protest. This odium and this unpleasantness the politicians cannot escape . . . It is they who must act and who must have have the right to be silent. We others only have the duty to speak. . . . regardless of whether any result can be achieved or of whether the cause that we plead is already lost. If . . . the politicians are compelled to interfere, compelled to stop our papers and take from the people the right to speech, then they must do so. It is their affair not ours.

This was a strenuous attempt to define a moral witness which would not be disloyal to the government. As a non-clandestine voice, Koch could not ask whether Denmark could or should make any contribution to German defeat. (Møller’s  October broadcast had been plaintive: ‘it would be too hard to bear if we do not show the same resistance as the others’.) Koch’s summons to loyal dissent had seemed the quintessence of Danish resistance, but as the war changed it lost some of its allure. Frode Jakobsen, travelling secretary of Ringen—a clandestine organization which became a resistance movement— submitted a rebuttal of Koch’s views for Frit Danmark, but Fog decided the polemic was ‘inopportune’. In his memoirs, Jakobsen recalls Koch’s efficacy as a barrier to active resistance: ‘The answer I met with time and time again was: “Even Hal Koch condemns the active line”. It was this “even Hal Koch” which was dangerous. No one said “even Scavenius” and therefore Scavenius was not the danger.’ The clandestine press called for resistance, but the supporting arguments were the same appeals to national honour and democratic defence which Koch used, with greater eloquence, in the cause of submission and moral dissent. The most extensive summons to a resistance beyond mere opposition was Mogens Fog’s ‘Open Letter to his Friends’ which was distributed at the end of . Fog had gone underground. His letter was sent to fifty acquaintances to explain his disappearance from normal life. Fog started, as did Koch, from the argument that shoulder-shrugging resignation would be a moral catastrophe. But he added that the government made the catastrophe possible. Fog provided a little catechism which answered well-known queries about the ‘active line’. The Danes should not ‘let everybody but ourselves fight for what we think is right’; the yearning to act was ‘not always in conflict with the intellect’; Denmark’s industry and even her unemployed had been made ‘a competent part of the German war machine’; had people ‘noticed with what increasing coolness Denmark’s name is mentioned on the BBC—even if it is mentioned at all?’; the only way to resist was ‘the primitive way’; if the government dared to resign the people would be ‘welded into an unbreakable unity’. If the government’s example was bad, tolerating its authority would compound the Koch to Lederbladet: Fortnightly Report to  May , FO /.  Bennett, British Broadcasting, . Jakobsen, I Danmarks Frihedsraad, i. .  PWE passed this text to the Foreign Office: FO /. The original is in Fog’s memoirs: Efterskrift (), –. 

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problem. Fog did not match the eloquence of Koch, the Kierkegaardian adept, in arguing for the ‘foolish idealism’ of vocal but passive opposition. He was not wholly explicit about violence, though ‘primitive’ was intelligible. Fog’s text would have passed BBC policy censorship unscathed. Fog’s letter caught the initial wave of alarm about the Scavenius regime, and he probed for the wellspring of Danish guilt which Buhl tried to block up and Koch to control. A woman who had escaped across the North Sea in a fishing boat at the beginning of  stated this unease: There is a tendency among many Danes to congratulate themselves on being ‘clever’ and yet behind it all a realisation that they are not playing a very admirable role. They long to play a big part, but find it hard to make the smaller sacrifices. Their materialism makes it difficult for them to realise the value of imponderables.

British broadcasting tried to touch such unease. London was repeatedly told that Danes did not want to be told what to feel. But was that entirely true? Sentimental instruction might be resented, but it was not therefore ineffective. The occupation was resented more. Denmark’s placidity was exaggerated by its homogeneity and by a shortage of trail-blazing mavericks. London shared Fog’s fears about police collaboration. Whenever the Gestapo could show good cause, Danish policemen accompanied German officials to make arrests. A few resisters had already been taken to concentration camps in Germany. Ole Chievitz, Fog’s Frit Danmark colleague, was held in the new German section of Copenhagen’s Vestre prison. The principle that Danes should remain under Danish jurisdiction when under arrest, though violated, was a vital point in the government’s raison d’être. Scavenius set up factory guards—the anti-sabotage corps—and soon they were armed. The BBC seized on this as the beginning of the killing of Danes by Danes at German behest, and renewed open appeals for systematic, undetectable sabotage. PWE wanted to get back to the point at which Christmas Møller had been told to leave off. 

Gallop’s minute on Mrs Coffey,  Feb. , FO /.

 ‘A Rift Must Appear’ I N July  Eigil Larsen, a shipyard worker, escaped from prison and started a sabotage group in Sjælland. In November Larsen’s communist saboteurs managed to blow up a munitions wagon. This was the first important act of sabotage in Denmark. On  January  the Copenhagen shipbuilding yard of Burmeister and Wain was bombed in a low-level attack by RAF Mosquitoes. It was the first, and last, such raid on Danish territory. The yard made diesel engines for submarines, but the motive for the raid was political. SOE Stockholm had asked for a conspicous RAF raid to establish the argument that British bombing was the painful alternative to Danish sabotage. The target was well chosen. Previously sceptical informants admitted that the RAF raid was approved of by most Danes. The legal press showed why Denmark was unique: they applied the rule that if Germany was above criticism so was Britain. General von Hanneken’s response was to remove all Danish soldiers from Jutland. He also asked for more press attention to sabotage. (Detectable sabotage had been reported only briefly in the local press.) Wehrmacht concern at a handful of sabotage incidents pushed the government into unwelcome publicity. But the SS Plenipotentiary, Dr Best, refused to become excited. He liked the status quo. Best thought that neutral-minded pragmatists in office were his best defence against trouble, and he did not want Hanneken to stir up Berlin. Danish ‘official’ opinion was as co-operative as it was ever likely to be: there was police action against clandestine newspapers; King Christian, so advised, pronounced himself against sabotage; and the newspapers supported the government. But normalcy implied elections. Stockholm observers were ‘certain’ that the Germans would not permit the  Rigsdag election to take place if it threatened their only supporters in the Folketing—the Danish Nazis and the ‘Farmers Party’. But Best had deserted the Danish Nazis in November, and he did so again. He wanted to consolidate collaboration, and he became enthusiastic about a general election. The governing parties promised not to campaign against each other. The election would be a virtual referendum on the coalition as supported by the four large parties, though in form it would be a normal election with all the parties standing against each other. Opposition was permitted. The tiny Dansk Samling (Danish Unity) put up candidates though the party was openly against Scavenius and implicitly pro-resistance. The Communists (DKP), however, were excluded. The politicians did not consider this a serious impediment to a true test of opinion. 

Fortnightly Report,  to  Jan. , FO /.

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Voting day was  March—three weeks after Hitler gave his permission. The gamble was that the brevity of the campaign and the strength of the coaltion parties would prevent anyone from mounting a challenge. The clandestine press fell into the trap laid for them: they denounced the election as a fraud. The DKP and Frit Danmark called for spoilt ballot papers. The danger in this was obvious even in London. Dansk Samling was the target of all-party denunciation, with Hal Koch leading the attack on members of the party associated with the extreme right before . The BBC described the party as respectable but took care not to recommended it; the advice from the BBC was to elect ‘strong national-minded personalities’. Voting against the government, though possible, had little appeal. Scavenius was not a candidate. Buhl, who still led the Social Democrats, warned that the clandestine call to abstain (‘vote blank’) could strengthen Scavenius by weakening the parties which monitored his interpretation of forhandlingspolitik. A blank vote would not be counted in the non-Nazi total. Some Conservatives and the Liberals tried to suggest, discreetly, that they were a sort of opposition to Scavenius. The BBC did not label any major party as worse than the others or recommend anything that could show up in the results. A vote for any of the coalition parties was allowed to be a vote for parliamentary rule. It was safer to accept the election as a chance to strengthen the hands of politicians presenting themselves as agents of democratic vigilance rather than as the authors of collaboration and to prove again that the local Nazis were unpopular. Ninety per cent of the electorate voted on a day of bright sunshine and Danish flags. The governing parties obtained an overwhelming victory. This gave the coalition parties every appearance of solid electoral strength. There were only , ‘blank’ votes: less than the DKP vote of . Dansk Samling quintupled its vote; but with three members in the Folketing they were only on a par with the Nazis, who took votes from the collapsing Farmers Party. The Social Democrats (+.%) and the Conservatives (+.%) did best. Most of the new Conservative members were ‘nay-saying’ antiScavenians; but the Radicals all but held their position although they were considered the party most friendly to collaboration. The BBC celebrated a great result—Democracy , Nazis . But the election was what Best and Scavenius hoped for. It was what is often called a propaganda triumph: an event managed to make an impression, which is easy to see, but without proof that an influential result has been obtained. Best had done the unexpected and Frit Danmark was caught off-balance. During the election the Danes were told they were reinforcing popular authority rather than electing a government. The element of fraud came in afterwards, when the press was invited to put away this distinction and recognize the election as a ratification of government policy. The purpose of the whole exercise was to make this confusion possible. 

Brinley Thomas, ‘Danish Propaganda Notes’,  Mar. , FO /.

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But it has been argued that politicians who represented themselves as democratic watchdogs and critics of the government created expectations beyond their real intentions: ‘interpreted so, the election becomes an important phase in the undoing of the status quo’. The election, by seeming to strengthen official collaboration, was certainly a challenge to the clandestine opposition. There were two attempts made from inside Denmark to communicate with Christmas Møller about the election. The first was a letter sent by three Conservative leaders on the assumption that, despite the rumours that Møller was working with the communists, ‘you have not lost your head’. But they plainly suspected his head might be working its way loose, and warned him not to oppose the coalition parties or to support the abstentionist position of Frit Danmark. The other message was sent by Mogens Fog in protest at the divergence between the BBC and Frit Danmark. Fog reminded Møller that Frit Danmark had been meant to provide a common resistance policy and asked for a dialogue ‘across the North Sea’. But the BBC had done the right thing. There had been arguments inside the clandestine movement and some districts chose policies of their own; the ‘vote blank’ concept was an awkward compromise between the original clandestine intention to abstain and the London encouragement to vote. The Esbjerg group had accepted abstention only when told the BBC would adopt the same position. The distribution network had to be assured that the DKP was not dictating policy, but the Frit Danmark editorial committee had in fact produced an election appeal to suit the communists, who were naturally indignant about their own exclusion. At the beginning of  SOE, after arrests and casualties, had two ‘parachutists’ at large in Denmark, excellent clandestine contacts through Frit Danmark, and some almost functional but incomplete reception groups. Eight new agents and the first explosives arrived during the election campaign. The new leader, Flemming Muus, was able, well-trained, and persuasive. Muus settled in a flat on Jagtvej, a few minutes’ cycle ride from the centre of Copenhagen, and started to see useful people. Danes of rank or reputation were unlikely to disgrace themselves by luring one of the so-called englænder into a trap, and there were police officials who were willing to send him warnings. SOE intended to make up for lost time. Within weeks Muus had arranged for the saboteurs of the communist ‘BOPA’ groups to obtain SOE explosives and training; then he traced the new non-communist sabotage organizations—the Copenhagen-based ‘Holge Danske’ became the biggest— and provided the same service. Muus had not been given political advice in England, but his sabotage campaign would obviously put the government at risk. He assumed that London must be ready to see it fall. This was, at any  

H. Kirchhoff, Augustoprøret  (), i. . Fog to Møller,  Mar. : J. Hæstrup (ed.), Christmas Møllers Londonbreve (), .

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rate, what he said to doubters. But this message was not yet confirmed by the BBC. The communist clandestine press went for the Social Democrats with hammer and tongs, but from London came only judicious reproof of one or two of Buhl’s statements. Ole Chievitz, one of two editors of Frit Danmark before his arrest in December , had sent messages to London warning Christmas Møller that his sabotage call had failed and must fail until the British declared themselves. After his release Chievitz said London must choose between asking for more or becoming less censorious about what they would not condemn. He guessed that London would eventually go for the jugular. Chievitz explained that there was general sympathy for sabotage work, but little belief in its importance. He tried to explain the Danish mentality: In my mind there is no doubt that the election showed an unconscious support for the government to continue its present policy as hitherto, i.e. that under no circumstances whatever must blood be spilled . . . In this country one has the distinct impression that the Allies share the view of the Danish populace . . . There will always be some of us here who, to suit our own consciences and without reference to anything else, will help the Allies in their fight. But if the Danish nation is to participate in their own liberation, it must be demanded quite clearly, otherwise they will believe it is superfluous.

The matter was seen in just the same way inside PWE. Gentle hints that postwar Denmark would somehow benefit from her contribution to liberation were not credible. Brinley Thomas, who had wanted an initiative for months, tried to clarify the issue: There are two national fronts in Denmark: the large passive front headed by the good elements in the Cabinet, and the small active front the core of which is the vigorous band of saboteurs and underground newspapermen. . . . The object of political warfare for the last six months can be summed up as follows: to promote the growth of the small active front at the expense of the large passive front without going as far as to drive a wedge between the government on the one hand and the people on the other . . . The cautious like to think that the two fronts should continue as complementary parts of the general scheme of resistance . . . But it is clear that the active front can only reach maturity by competing with the passive front; and so, at some point, a rift must appear between the collaborationist government and the militant element among the people. . . . We know that as soon as the Germans took over in unoccupied France sabotage increased in leaps and bounds.

Thomas wanted instructions from ‘the higher level’, but up there Denmark was almost invisible. The COS would want a strong recommendation: the Derry to Brinley Thomas,  Feb. , FO /. Chievitz to Møller,  May , FO /; original in Hæstrup, Møllers Londonbreve, –.  Brinley Thomas, ‘Consideration of Political Warfare to Denmark: possible changes’,  May , FO /.  

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eagles of the stratosphere would have forgotten who Erik Scavenius might be. To the Foreign Office Thomas proposed a closer scrutiny of collaboration; the publication of blacklists; a warning to Denmark against having a collaborationist Prime Minister in office when the war ended; and a formal statement that resistance was a present not a future requirement. Without stronger support for the active front PWE could not make the German occupation less profitable. Thomas expected opposition. But the Northern department saw no political objection to the PWE prescription, and Warner even doubted whether the Germans would react violently. Warner’s grudging tolerance of a quiet policy had always been provisional. At the Danish Committee on  July there was no problem at all. The committee gave Brinley Thomas most of what he wanted: The SOE representative stated that their present policy would mean an increase in sabotage and that it was desirable that at the same time our propaganda should aim at an increase in anti-German feeling on the part of the population. It was therefore agreed that PWE could go ahead with their efforts to work up the general feeling in Denmark.

SOE already knew that their plastic explosive was being used more extensively. In any case, they had countenanced open support for the ‘active front’ since . Even Rodney Gallop shifted position: ‘we surely need something more than undetectable sabotage to heat up the atmosphere if we do not want things to remain as they are’. SOE and SIS did, in fact, consider the risks in a preliminary session before the Danish Committee next met. SIS withdrew their previous objections; some sort of nihil obstat was obtained. There were, of course, still limits. Sabotage was to be reported and praised, but it was decided not to demand unorganized, freelance sabotage. PWE rarely asked for this. Such an appeal was still supposed liable to overshoot the mark and end in massacres. Detectable sabotage was work for organized resisters. Sabotage propaganda was intended to increase social support for their work not to unleash mass violence. The resistance appropriate for the common man was recommended more clearly: industrial malingering, undetectable sabotage, work stoppages, strikes and outright refusal to work directly for German war industries. The Danes were told that  per cent of the workforce ‘let themselves be used by Nazi Germany’; that calls for restraint addressed to the Norwegians, who had done all they could, did not apply to them; and that England was keeping a blacklist of collaborators ready for post-war use: ‘there

Brinley Thomas to Warner,  June , FO /. Warner’s minute,  July , FO /; extract from Danish Committee minutes,  July , FO /.  Danish Committee minutes,  July , FO /; Gallop’s minute,  July , FO /.  

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are quite enough good Danes for the bad ones not to be missed’. Danes were invited to register their opinion of collaboration, and warned that the consequences for the government would be painful. The new militancy did not start in the BBC but it was welcome there. This time Frit Danmark did not go beyond the BBC position. Even at the end of July, the editorial committee decided not to demand the fall of the government but to ask the Rigsdag to rein back collaboration. It was, of course, unlikely that the Germans would permit any contraction of the scope of collaboration particularly after public debate. Frit Danmark’s demand coincided with some rethinking in Conservative circles; it was subversive because it was impossible. SOE’s work expanded quickly:  explosions in June;  in July; and  in August. Flemming Muus decided to check with London in early August: ‘By that time I informed you by W/T that if we continued at the present rate of sabotage, the Germans would be forced to take over within three weeks. On receiving your “go right ahead” we did so.’ PWE’s reward came first. There was a series of strikes and demonstrations in the main provincial towns in Jutland and on the large island of Fyn. It began in Esbjerg on  August. Sabotage, the clandestine press, and the strike wave reinforced each other. Within seven weeks of the Danish Committee decision to develop a sabotage campaign and heighten anti-German feeling, there were violent street confrontations between civilians and German troops and the country was crackling with electricity. Explosions, riots, and, above all, the strikes produced a political crisis. General von Hanneken, pushing Best aside, made impossible demands. The Rigsdag leaders felt the wind changing and forced Scavenius to resign. The government collapsed, and a state of military emergency was declared. Kirchhoff ’s superb study of the ‘August revolt’ admits a chorus of testimony on the importance of the BBC, but he does not consider the crisis ‘a natural child of the strategy of the Western Allies’. The external influence was, it is true, neither American nor military, but the crisis was not a conjunctural accident. The two July meetings of the Danish Committee give London a fair claim to paternity, and though the resistance was under age it had just been married to British policy. Of course, the disorder in Jutland and Fyn stemmed in timing and detail from local events. But there was in London a new and clearer strategy. The Danes were asked to take sides before it was too late. PWE did not, it is true, devise specific anti-collaborationist initiatives. As news of strikes and disturbances came in, PWE followed events too slowly to  J. Bennett, British Broadcasting and the Danish Resistance Movement (), –, . The last remark was made by Gallop in his broadcasting role of ‘a good friend of Denmark’.  Muus wrote this in Nov.: Kirchhoff, Augustoprøret, iii. –.  Kirchhoff, Augustoprøret, i. , –; iii. –. Kirchhoff, however, is uncertain about broadcasting policy during the crisis. Aage Trommer was just as sceptical (‘without new evidence’) about British intentions: Myte og Sandhed i besættelseshistorien (), –.

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improvise practical enhancements. The town strikes had specific local causes. But if the strike committees, where they existed, were not preoccupied with Scavenius neither was London. The strike committees and the clandestine journals wanted to excite feeling, and they could hear the BBC encouraging them. For the clandestine journals the strikes were the answer to the March election. A decision had been taken, and PWE, SOE, and the BBC exploited their directive to the full. True, the Foreign Office remained discreet. Warner told a group of ‘free Danes’ in London that Britain wanted less economic collaboration but not ‘major risks’. But he was in mixed company, and it was prudent to avoid statements which might make HMG responsible if the Danish government should fall. On  August the Washington Embassy forwarded an American complaint about an ‘abrupt stiffening of tone’ in the statements of the London Danish Council. A reply was sent to cover up the failure to consult the State Department. The PWE claim to have made a ‘change of emphasis’ rather than ‘an abrupt change of policy’ was not very frank. The OWI were told that greater passive resistance had been demanded, but that since sabotage had been ‘going well’, British propaganda would, without disadvantage, refrain from any ‘general excitement’ which would not hurt the enemy. This was an attempt to soften the impact of news that SOE were blowing things up while the BBC called for strikes and protests. Washington’s new interest in Danish affairs was simply unwelcome: an American contribution to the agitation was not required. A month later Turnbull produced the Stockholm version of what had happened. He said that the disturbances were provoked by the Germans to justify martial law. His political informants regretted the disturbances. Theirs was the swansong of forhandlingspolitik: ‘there was no question of a Danish revolt or rising. The final break came as the climax to a carefully sustained German plan, originally put into operation by Hanneken, but later . . . sponsored by the Reich government in Berlin.’ Certainly, Hanneken was determined to dissolve the Danish Army. SOE had told the ‘Princes’ in  that Danish soldiers would not retain their weapons indefinitely. But German concerns did not generate the August crisis. Extensive examination of the disturbances in Odense, Aalborg, and other towns, establishes that the local German commanders were not looking for trouble. A few German soldiers courted trouble and reacted when they were stoned, but there were, surely, more Danes who went out to provoke scuffles and incidents. Kirchhoff, Augustoprøret, i.  quoting Reventlow’s diary for  July . Foreign Office [PWE] to Washington,  Aug. , FO /. ‘Propaganda will refrain from general excitement to subversive activities which would do no harm.’ Deliberately opaque?  FO Confidential Print,  Sept. , FO /.  For a discussion of the most violent case—in Aalborg where German soldiers killed two Danes and wounded seventeen others: Kirchhoff, Augustoprøret, ii.  ff. 

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The strikes began in Esbjerg, the main fishing port and an industrial centre on the west coast of Jutland. On  August communist saboteurs burnt down a fish-processing plant. German troops turned up to discourage lethargy on the part of the firefighters. A crowd then gathered to jeer the Germans and the troubles began. A curfew provoked protest strikes on  August, and two days later the whole town was on strike against a local state of emergency. German troops did behave rather badly on the streets, and Danish officials pleaded to have them taken indoors after  p.m. Trade union officials explained that they needed fewer provocative assertions of authority if they were to win back the initiative from the communists. In fact, both the strike and the emergency in Esbjerg were, in different ways, political gestures. Esbjerg calmed down when both were called off. In Odense, on the island of Fyn, SOE managed to sink a German minesweeper in late July. German attempts to improve security provoked a strike which secured the removal of military personnel from the shipyard. The real trouble came two weeks later when news of a brawl between Danish and German soldiers created a tense atmosphere on the streets. A few Danish youths became recklessly insulting and some German soldiers fixed bayonets and attacked cyclists. By  August there was a town strike as in Esbjerg. Again, the street disturbances were the trigger but explosions prepared a mood. It is possible that a majority of the citizens of Esbjerg and Odense listened to the BBC almost every day. (Allied troops entered Messina on  August.) BBC news from Denmark could be no more accurate than its source—the Swedish press—but it caught the excitement and fed it back to other Danish towns which were getting tense. A favourable attitude to sabotage was apparent in Aalborg in northern Jutland. The troubles there started with a successful strike by cement workers against the employment of Nazi sabotage guards. A week later there was a gunfight when a German patrol surprised an SOE reception committee. One man was killed. His burial was the occasion for a gathering of ten thousand patriots. During the afternoon German armoured cars cleared the main streets while in the side streets groups of young men broke windows. This was the pattern in several other towns. The strikes were demonstrations of resentment at occupation and its humiliations. But the disturbances do not prove that the nation yearned for violent resistance. The young men on the streets, and perhaps even the workers who went on strike, were minorities in their own communities. Yet a famous clandestine opinion poll taken in July  indicated that  per cent of men were unreservedly in favour of sabotage. The poll was undertaken by Ringen, the largest clandestine organization, as a genuine attempt to sample opinion.

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The highest figure of disapproval—among provincial women—was %: ibid., iii. –.

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Before the strikes the politicians were opposing a German demand for the deportation of political prisoners and had thought they were doing well. They were angry when the town strikes prolonged a crisis which had seemed about to blow over. SOE’s best source of regular political information was Conservative; London knew less about the Social Democrats, whose commitment to a quiet life was underestimated. None of the politicians wanted active resistance—the all-party appeals against sabotage in April and May were genuine—but the Conservative leader, Ole Bjørn Kraft, suspected that it would one day become advisable to discontinue official collaboration. A growing fraction of Conservative opinion wanted some dissociating gesture. This was probably also the case in the lower ranks of Social Democracy though the leadership was insulated from it by trade unionists, who feared that if collaboration broke down the Germans would pass their unions over to the Danish Nazis and so push the rank and file into the arms of the DKP. The coalition parties nursed an anti-communism which Best worked on during the crisis. On  August Best warned the newspaper editors that the battles of Sicily and Kursk did not mean that the war was about to end. (He prophesied that an Allied invasion would devastate Denmark and that an end to Nazi power would mean a communist Germany arising from a Bombenproletariat.) But the politicians did not intend to disappear when the Allies won. In August  they knew that the issue squarely before them was collaboration, more exactly the price they would pay for any further surrender of Danish neutrality. On  August the Danish Cabinet discussed tendentious reporting from London and there was some annoyance at political leaks from the Conservatives. Most politicians were disturbed by British trouble-making. Since Danish official sources stayed silent on the strikes and demonstrations, BBC reports were particularly important. The politicians and trade unions were not impotent. They and the police managed to prevent an explosion of feeling in Copenhagen, which was more liable to be disturbed than anywhere else. This success in Copenhagen impressed Best and his officials but not the German Army high command or Hitler. On the eastern islands—Sjælland, Lolland and Falster—strikes were prevented or extinguished after a day or so. On  August the Rigsdag politicians, after much discussion among themselves, composed an appeal for peace and calm. Had the strikes stopped immediately, this proclamation might have been more consequential. In Copenhagen the line held, but the worst in Jutland—in Aalborg and Aarhus— was still to come. As the leader of the largest party, Buhl cast his weight against any extended collaboration for which the parties would be responsible. The Conservatives  Ibid., ii. –. Kirchhoff confesses that his professional uncertainty about BBC influence stands ‘in sharpest contrast’ to the weight of testimony in German and Danish official sources about the ‘devastating effect of English radio-propaganda’.

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were edging towards opposition, and the Germans were losing the war. He dared not have his party identified as the anti-Allied faction in Denmark. The comfort once provided by British indecision had vanished. As Denmark awaited the German ultimatum, Christmas Møller could be heard predicting that ‘Whatever order Best brings back from Berlin, there is no doubt that the people will act.’ Another BBC speaker rejoiced that ‘the Danish population has gone over to active resistance’. Several Conservatives were considering some kind of symbolic break with Scavenian collaboration as a friendly signal to the Allies. The political removal of Scavenius, which even the journal Frit Danmark demanded only on  August, was hinted at by the Conservative leader Ole Bjørn Kraft, who invited the Rigsdag to produce a ‘national, parliamentary government’ in his Ollerup speech five days later. This was language the British had wanted earlier. The pressure from the clandestine press and the BBC dismayed the government because the strikes in the regional centres were seen as a response. But even in a changed situation, many politicians saw their duty as opposition to madness and disorder. Best rushed about trying to persuade the Social Democrats that they were strong enough to ignore both the Allies abroad and the resistance at home. Scavenius observed wickedly to the Swedish Minister that the Germans’ first great mistake had been pushing Christmas Møller out of politics. For a time Best seemed to be winning. The politicians made their joint statement against sabotage in the name of democracy and national safety and the Social Democrats and Radicals dispersed to their constituencies to take up the struggle against patriotic hotheads. But when Aalborg became disturbed the German ultimatum could no longer be postponed. Best warned that a military response to the crisis would play into the hands of the British, but Hitler refused to see him and ordered the Army to take over. Best presented Scavenius with an ultimatum: a state of emergency, death penalties, and German censorship. It was not intended to be acceptable. Scavenius, despite his personal inclinations, made no attempt to impose it. When Buhl decided that political collaboration must finish, Scavenius did as he was told. There was some support for the non-political government of eminent persons which Scavenius suggested to the King when he resigned, but the party leaders refused to permit it. German troops took the obvious precautions. The Royal Guard opened fire on the troops who came to detain the King. The Danish Navy, faithful to a secret promise to SOE, scuttled almost everything it had. The Army, obedient to the government’s last orders, allowed its equipment to pass into German hands. The British contribution to these results is plain, its precise weight is not. There was a decision in Bush House to trust intelligence that the Germans had  

Bennett, British Broadcasting, . The broadcasts were made on  and  Aug. respectively. Kirchhoff, Augustoprøret, ii. .

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demanded custody of resisters convicted of serious sabotage. Thus in the second week of August the Danes obtained correct news of a political crisis in Copenhagen. This fed public anxiety and helped give the strikes the appearance of protests against collaboration. In so far as it was the Germans who then made trouble, they too were responding to the campaign of provocationsabotage fuelled, then ordered, by SOE in London. The young men on the streets had not been asked by Radio London to stone German soldiers, but they had certainly been asked to demonstrate. The BBC gave only belated and sketchy reports of the strike movement, but they were inflammatory where trouble was simmering. In the week before it happened, the BBC referred to the probable fall of Scavenius. PWE had never made pushing Scavenius out of office an immediate requirement, but no handling of the news could sustain a distinction between a short-term push and preparing for his eventual departure. The prediction became prescriptive. Denmark escaped from its regional niche in Bush House. The PWE planners wondered whether to go for broke and try for resistance so spectacular that fresh German troops would be rushed into Denmark. When, on  August, the Danish parties made the joint statement repudiating sabotage, PWE believed that one more push could bring down Scavenius. Officials who rarely thought of Denmark sensed a professional triumph was imminent. PWE advised the COS that if a movement of German troops to Denmark was useful, the effect could be obtained. On  August Harry Lucas, Calder’s deputy in the Directorate of Plans, recommended that the time had come for ‘Norwegian conditions’ and asked his staff to work on that assumption. Lucas contemplated a dramatic London appeal for as much sabotage as possible. This went beyond any existing plan. It was designed to impress the Chiefs of Staff, but Lockhart told ‘Plans’ to take their proposal first to Warner in the Foreign Office. This was almost a veto. The ‘Northern’ specialists, reasonably enough, did not think that Denmark needed another twist of the propaganda screw, and ‘Plans’ did not want to consult them. Both Warner and Brinley Thomas were ‘negative’. Lockhart understood that a PWE proposal to the COS might amount to a decision. In the pugnacious mood before the landings at Salerno anything might be approved. ‘Plans’ retreated but hoped to ‘insinuate our line into the Directive’, though Lucas conceded that Lockhart was anxious not to ‘get Denmark out of proportion’. Lockhart knew the matter remained political until the COS was promised a military dividend, in which case they would want permission to collect. But the new spirit in ‘Plans’ almost brought to Danish affairs the considerations operating in the Balkans. On  August German military action in Copenhagen resolved the matter. Lockhart H. O. Lucas to R. O’Neil,  Aug. , FO /. Lucas to O’Neil,  Aug. . Lucas had been warned that the Northern region would not start anything ‘not in the interests of Danes’ without definite instructions: O’Neil to Lucas,  Aug. ,  FO /. Lucas to O’Neil,  Aug. , FO /.  



D E N M A R K : T H E V E LV E T G L OV E

had been right to reject the warning that the crisis might go flat without a fresh input from London. The politicians did what they could to prevent Norwegian conditions. Martial law stopped the strikes. A council of senior civil servants acted as an undeclared provisional government and provided Denmark with the sort of administration to which it was accustomed. This body had secret dealings with the political leaders to obtain their approval when difficult problems arose. Best was willing to negotiate and the civil servants had some of the old cards to play. The anti-communism of the politicians, especially the Social Democrats, was inflamed by the August uproar. Alsing Andersen, the veteran Social Democrat anti-militarist, issued a party circular. It came into the hands of the clandestine press, and it was printed to show how difficult the Social Democrats could be: During the last three years our policy has shown its justification and its durability. . . . It is certain that it could have continued in this way right up to the end of the war . . . but this too has been undermined by Christmas Møller’s radio agitation, in alliance with the chauvinists and communists who irresponsibly and secretly have sought to discredit the aims and expediency of the Coalition and have succeeded in producing another mentality in part of the population.

Andersen’s undisguised hostility to London broadcasting was disappointing as was his total rejection of criticism. The fact that before July the BBC had scarcely breathed a word against the governing parties helps explain this selfabsorption. It was the counterpoint to his sour awareness that London had changed the rules. The Social Democrats should have been warned. What had been an uncertain, almost faltering sequence of urban disturbances in one half of the country, was reported as a more widespread and simultaneous strike movement than really occurred. Then there were excited rumours about armed opposition as the Germans took over. The BBC rejected some of this material but not all of it. No news editor wanted to pour cold water on every story of Danish soldiers opening fire. In any case, a few were true. At the end of August the established clandestine groups, including the SOE (the ‘parachute-folk’), came together as the Danish Freedom Council. Møller announced and saluted the Freedom Council on the BBC and PWE recognized the Council as the representative of Danish resistance. A letter from Frode Jakobsen, a leading clandestine organizer and the first to propose the Freedom Council, begged for rather less BBC congratulation: The Radio’s exaggerated reports and exaggerated praise have had two unfortunate consequences: ) it damaged its prestige as witness to the truth and made the best of us a little embarrassed; ) they gave those who wanted it a pillow to sleep on. ‘Now we may lick our wounds and can allow ourselves to rest’ can be heard even among excellent people. . . . We 

Fortnightly Report,  to  Sept. , FO /.

‘A

RIFT MUST APPEAR’



are pleased with what happened, but the danger is still not that we shall come out before the others [in Europe] but that we shall lag behind and slide back into circumstances similar to those from which we have just dragged ourselves.

The Freedom Council was more determined than London to push active resistance. SOE had bouts of unease about becoming the British support service of the Freedom Council, but PWE were content. London had always expected a German takeover and, for that reason, active resistance was long postponed. Before the battle of the Atlantic was won, the secure source of naval intelligence provided by ‘official’ Denmark was more attractive than popular resistance. But the suspicion that the Germans were getting the best of the economic bargain grew strong. The British goal had been modest, but it was never less than to persuade Denmark, including the government, to prepare for direct German rule. By June  it seemed to the regional specialists that this message had not been communicated, that the government wanted to sit tight until the war ended, and that even the popular mood was still too passive. In the decision to make trouble there was impatience with earlier procrastination. Openly expressed distaste for official collaboration coincided with a serious wave of sabotage activity and, soon, with a movement of industrial and civic protest. The reward for three years of restraint was immediate good luck. PWE and SOE moved in rare unison, and neither disappointed the other. They both wanted a sort of founding crisis for popular resistance. The Army plans for an underground military organization, which had been dangled in front of SOE in , were dusted off and cautiously implemented. There followed a difficult relationship between the Freedom Council, the Army officers’ resistance, and the politicians. The Freedom Council had the BBC’s steady but careful support in the debate; this was a great support in forcing the officers and the politicians to put away their resentment and join the Council. London could claim a good deal of the credit for obliging the ‘little general staff ’ to treat the active resistance as something more than the foolishness of fellow-travellers. In any case, the social authority of the unified Danish Resistance in the last period of the occupation was unrivalled in Europe. London had accepted the warning that Best and Scavenius were putting the nation to sleep, and a perfectly timed attempt was made to reverse the trend. The specialists did not want Scavenius to stay in office, but neither did they want a crisis which eliminated Danish administration altogether. This, as it happened, was the outcome: a government fell but an administration remained. But the BBC had announced that the Danes had chosen resistance, and there was no inclination to rediscover collaboration in a new location. This was partly a deliberate oversight, partly a wish to be quit of the business of 

Magister [Jakobsen] to Christmas Møller,  Sept. : Hæstrup, Møllers Londonbreve, –.

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making judgements about Denmark. In any case, with the elected government went a very serious obstacle to active resistance. Underlying the August disturbances was the euphoric anticipation of Nazi failure which reached Denmark, with the smoke from burning Hamburg, like a sudden change of weather. But there was no cloudburst in Copenhagen. A smaller contribution from London might have failed to exhaust the ingenuity and energy which the government applied to keeping itself dry.

PART IV

Poland: Chivalry or Suspicion

 Partition Again A F T E R the Germans had overcome the Polish Army, Russian forces crossed the eastern borders. Government ministers retreated into Romanian internment and resigned. A new Polish government was assembled in France. The outgoing ministers transferred the Presidency to Wl/adysl/aw Raczkiewicz in Paris. Raczkiewicz was a friend of the pre-war regime, the Army-based Sanacja, but he appointed General Wl/adysl/aw Sikorski, a democratic critic of the pre-war government, to be both Prime Minister and commander-in-chief. Sikorski had been Prime Minister in – but was later an exile in Paris. Britain pledged to restore Poland but gave no territorial guarantee against the USSR. When the Poles transferred from France to Britain in June , Churchill was already considering how to secure Russia as an ally. The Nazi occupation in Poland began with a frenzy of executions and expulsions. The execution of contingents of the best educated Poles in the ‘General Government’ was accompanied by the murder or expulsion of the Polish population of the western provinces annexed to the Reich. The Nazis hammered Polish society and the economy into fragments. Political collaborators were for the most part unwanted. In the districts incorporated into the Reich, Poles not eligible for ethnic redefinition in the Volksliste, or refusing to sign, faced immediate humiliation or casual murder: two million were deported to the ‘General Government’ in central Poland. Even here, Polish commercial and industrial property was confiscated, and the Poles had to develop a black economy for every need. In the General Government the Poles were meant to diminish in number, and to learn a future role as serfs for resettlement further east. It was difficult to deny a Russo-German intention to obliterate the Polish nation. Both occupiers targeted the professional classes. In the west many were sent to camps in Germany or, in Warsaw, simply shot in the local woods. Later, the victims of constant rounds of arrests were sent to the new concentration camp at Auschwitz. Two million workers were sent to Germany as forced labourers. In the east the social elite became political prisoners held in concentration camps. In Russia three NKVD detention camps accommodated Polish Army officers and reservists. In March  there was a Gestapo– NKVD conference in Cracow. In April the Polish officers were taken away in batches and never seen again. Those from Kozielsk—,—were found in



Stefan Korboński, The Polish Underground State (), .

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 buried in Katyn forest near Smolensk. Of the five million Poles acquired by Stalin . million were deported to Arctic and Asiatic Russia, where half perished. The two occupations were not exactly equivalent. Stalin occupied territory where the Poles were outnumbered. Hitler took the main body of the Polish nation. The Polish resistance, usually called ‘the Underground’, formed in the German-occupied core of ethnic Poland. They learnt, at great cost, that activity in eastern Poland—what became part of the Soviet republics of Lithuania, White Russia, and the Ukraine—was almost as difficult as in the west—in the Reich’s acquisitions in Upper Silesia, Wartheland, and West Prussia. In the ‘General Government’ all secondary schools were closed; the national archives were destroyed; and the statues of famous Poles were knocked down. The Poles seemed to hold a unique place in the Nazi scheme of things—as chief victims. In November  half a million Polish Jews were interned in the ‘Warsaw Ghetto’ and sealed off from the rest of the city, but only a year later were the Polish Jews promoted to the top of the death list. The Polish talent for romantic nationalism was a double-edged gift. The charge that Polish patriotism was infected with a narcissistic intransigence was reinforced by the gentry tone of the intelligentsia. Poles seemed too proud to avoid making enemies of their two powerful neighbours. This darkened their reputation. Perhaps the Second Republic had been an aberration and there would be, again, no room for Poland in the jigsaw of geopolitics. If so, her champions would respond, again, with a gambler’s defiance of long odds. The two great cities of eastern Poland were Lwów, the capital of Eastern Galicia, and Wilno, the old Lithuanian capital which had Polonized, along with the gentry, centuries before. On ethnic balance, both were Polish but their extensive hinterlands were not. These semi-Polish territories had been taken in war from the young USSR and so Poland incurred a risk. Once the French started to lose interest, there was no real support in Europe for a big Poland; the country became, over time, an inconvenience. Public commentary can sustain a sort of conspiracy to punish inconvenience and to cement a negative reputation. Molotov invoked this reputation when, in October , he described the country as ‘that monster child of the Treaty of Versailles’. The war changed in , but not in all respects. The Soviet Ambassador attached to the London Poles told his American colleague that the Poles ‘lacked the qualifications for nationhood’. But it was her evident nationhood that made Poland likely despite everything. It was vexing for the British that the Polish question, after June , seemed more Russian than German. But the  But  had been taken away—and survived—before the rest were taken to Katyn. Graves of victims from the two other detention camps were examined in : See Salomon Slowes, The Road to  Katyn (), , xxix. A. Werth, Russia at War ‒ (), .  S. M. Terry, Poland’s Place in Europe (), .

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argument that the Poles should prefer Russian problems to German solutions seemed to the Poles beside the point. Circumstances did not pose the question that way. Polish truculence was an attempt to deter encroachment by a prior affirmation of militancy. The romantic Polish style was often accompanied by a brutal clarity about international affairs. Despite discouragement from Paris after , a firm refusal to yield territory was Poland’s response to Hitler, and it was not altered in Stalin’s favour by defeat and occupation. A warning instinct spoke against bargaining, even with allies, without a bargaining position. As General Sosnkowski, the Commander-in-Chief, explained in , ‘one must make no concessions unless they will save something’. This was at bottom a pragmatic position, but it was uncomfortable for the British, who had no clear interest in any of Poland’s borders. British advice was, in effect, to gamble something on a Soviet victory. There were two crucial Polish issues: the eastern borders and Poland’s freedom to make the post-war regime. The Poles would not freely concede the Ribbentrop–Molotov line in advance of a complete settlement: the old borders might not be sacred, but they were legal. Besides, if Stalin wanted Wilno and Lwów, he would take them; if he thought the Poles were malleable, he might annex Poland. (Lockhart thought there was a special Polish dread of Soviet Russia: the fear that Bolshevism was a sucessful pan-Slavic engine for creating one Red Tsardom.) If the Poles were too prickly to be swallowed, truculence had a role to play. The pre-war regime was created by Marshal Pil/sudski and the Army, after a coup d’état. It was not anti-democratic in inspiration but had become authoritarian. The coup of  had been more offensive to the Right than to the Left. Pil/sudski, a remarkable and popular figure, had been a socialist before  and retained his status as the national hero even when his regime ran out of ideas. But when Pil/sudski died in , the Sanacja was unpopular. The ‘colonels’ had then done battle across the political spectrum until they were showered with (tolerated) abuse from all parties. The socialists had been closest to Pil/sudski, but their tolerance of him did not extend to his successors. The Comintern called the regime ‘fascist’; but the Polish pattern was nonstandard: the Army and the socialists combined to block the prospects of the leading antisemitic tendency, the National Democrats. The Pil/sudski regime had a doctrine of cleansing reform—Sanacja—which became the name of the regime itself. The political parties turned against a government which would not finish ‘cleansing’, and the ruling clique set up their own political bloc and rigged elections. Mild political repression gave the parties a training in clandestine precautions and technique. The Nazi occupation then forced these discordant and ferociously competitive bodies into national solidarity. The Polish



Jan Nowak, Courier from Warsaw (), .

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Underground covered most of the political spectrum but it did not include the Ukrainians, White Russians, and Jews of the eastern territories. The Russians worked with some skill to reduce western sympathy for the Poles. They said, quietly at first, that the London Poles were congenitally antiRussian, undemocratic, antisemitic, and champions of landlordism in the eastern provinces. The charges were tendentious but not entirely absurd. Many Poles had preferred pre-Nazi Germany to any sort of Russia. The antisemitic element on the Polish Right was strong, though it was politically isolated before and after . Poland had not secured non-Polish loyalties in the eastern territories despite important land reforms. Polish–Jewish recrimination, in particular, damaged the political combination with the best chance of influencing the Anglo-Americans to strain every nerve to rescue the Jews and save Poland. Soviet ill will and Zionist antipathy made the Polish question repulsively propagandistic even on the pages of British newspapers. Many meanings of the war were at stake in Poland. British feelings of obligation and apprehension separated into different camps. When the sense of obligation was strongest, before June , Poland raised no immediate problems. PWE did not have a Polish region (with Czechoslovakia) until February . Leeper, who understood Polish, foresaw post-war trouble even in , though he hoped for the best: a weakened Russia and a federation of small states around Poland. Newsome hoped for nothing of the kind but was just as apprehensive. Churchill announced to Parliament in September  a policy of non-recognition of territorial changes which took place during the war ‘unless they take place with the free consent and good will of the parties concerned’. This constraint guaranteed secret diplomacy, though the principle was virtually repudiated in . In July  Moscow cancelled the anathemas against Poland and signed a Polish–Soviet Treaty. Sikorski agreed to postpone the borders question despite fierce opposition from colleagues who argued, plausibly, that the opportunity to force Moscow to renounce Soviet gains in  would never recur. Sikorski could claim success in one legal point. Stalin was obliged to denounce the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact. The British, Sikorski argued, would provide future support in return for Polish good behaviour. With something close to British encouragement and no immediate Russian objection, the London Poles asserted that Stalin had, mutely but legally, acknowledged the pre- borders. Without this Sikorski’s colleagues would not have signed. But Sikorski’s hopes were dashed within weeks. The Russians gave notice of their future demands. In public the Russians defined the border question as an issue left ‘temporarily open’. The British Cabinet, for a time, refused to match J. Coutouvidis and J. Reynolds, Poland ‒ (), –. Bogomolov to Sikorski,  Feb. : Documents on Polish–Soviet Relations ‒ (), –.  

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Ribbentrop’s generosity with Poland’s eastern territories. But the territory the Soviets wanted did not contain a Polish ethnic majority, and the issue remained unresolved as indignation about the Nazi–Soviet Pact receded. Lockhart urged a deal at this stage, though not out of concern for eastern Poland, and later he ascribed even to Sikorski—it was true of many Poles—the assumption that Russia would be defeated. The London Poles were aware from the beginning that the British needed Russo-Polish compromise. But there was a degree of British political neglect. The first BBC Polish editor disliked the Polish government intensely even before the German invasion of Russia. But the MOI had considered him unsuitable and in February  he was sent to Woburn as the PWE regional intelligence officer. The replacement, Gregory Macdonald, was a better intermediary for dealing with the Poles who ran Radio Polskie—the government’s free time. The Polish-language press in Britain and Radio Polskie (BBC) were allowed to describe Russian-occupied Poland as part of Poland, and they still did so when it became German-occupied. But even in  Newsome had treated assertions of Polish territorial integrity as objectionable and had reduced their frequency. The Poles never agreed to keep quiet on the matter, and they took comfort when PWE accepted the Russo-Polish agreement at its nominal legal value. But PWE remained anxious. What Polish statements the Russians would tolerate was uncertain. They might plead provocation at any time. Nothing could guarantee Soviet restraint, but the optimists believed that the Russians would not make trouble during the war if discretion was imposed on the Poles vigorously. Newsome thought that realism was threatened by sentimentality in the Foreign Office and that the need for careful censorship of Polish views was beyond dispute. Sikorski was described to Lockhart as ‘ per cent vanity,  per cent flair and only  per cent nationalist’. He was either disliked as a flashy politician or admired as one of the few Poles who understood that Russian ambitions might be limited by conceding crucial demands. Sikorski had serious difficulties with cabinet colleagues. He thought the Poles should be dignified yet cooperative and win Western support by deserving it. The critics saw this as weak, divisive, and wrong. They thought Soviet expansion—a moral certainty— would be challenged by the Western powers when they were ready to do so in their own interests. Poland’s mission was to say unwelcome things and bring forward the moment of reckoning. It is still far from certain who was the wiser. Bene˘s gambled that the USSR, in return for loyalty, would tolerate liberal client regimes. Sikorski’s problems were worse at every turn. He knew that Soviet political tolerance even for rump Poland would be difficult to obtain, though Moscow seemed likely to accept some sort of Polish state. Lewis  

K. Young (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, ii, ‒ (),  ( Jan. ). Ibid. ii.  ( Jan. ).

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Namier, a confidant in –, reported that Sikorski was ready to lose Ukrainian-majority territories but could not say so. Unlike Beneš, he had to offer all reasonable opposition to the loss of two great cities and the expulsion of his people from ancestral lands. The friends of Czechoslovakia were critical of the Poles. Bruce Lockhart, when he was accredited to the Beneš Committee, had been irritated by their popularity. As head of PWE, he still saw Beneš weekly and was supplied with anti-Polish gossip. Even before Beneš became, in Beaverbrook’s terms, ‘a Russian agent’, he was not an impeccable source. Lockhart thought the Czechs the most reasonable people in Europe and the Poles the most dangerous. He was not perversely anti-Polish, but he did disapprove, and he disliked romanticism in international affairs. His Scottish warmth about little nations was qualified by a sober and Unionist grasp of their dependence on larger ones. He was sarcastic about Polish folies des grandeurs, and distrusted Polish judgements; he thought the Poles were ‘the worst and most dangerous kind of deceivers, for they succeed in deceiving themselves’. He blamed Churchill, and like Newsome he blamed the Foreign Office, for ‘our follies in championing the Poles’. Lockhart gave Eden his opinions, but in his use of PWE he was completely straight. Newsome would have been more troublesome. PWE’s regional director for Poland was Moray McLaren, a well-travelled man of letters and a Scottish nationalist. McLaren, unlike Lockhart, had to master a strong impulse to support the country he admired. The Polish alliance was neither traditional nor a favourite anti-fascist project. The right-wing case for the Poles—anti-bolshevism—was in recession. There was a low view of Poland as a backwater cursed with a haughty elite. Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard was alert for expressions of objectionable Polish opinion from the moment the Poles came to Britain. The sceptics, or anti-Poles, were afraid Britain might end up making some sort of costly exertion on Poland’s behalf. PWE supposed themselves to stand for a certain British ‘leadership’ in Europe, but it was alarming to envisage leadership as protection for Poland. Polish resistance was unique. All the main political parties survived and functioned as resistance networks in a way that was elsewhere the hallmark of the communists. This applied as much to the Right—the National Democrats— as to the Peasant Party, the Socialists, and the Christian Democrats. These were the dominant four groups. The Polish Underground was a carefully negotiated alliance of the Army and these four parties, whose militias, in due course, accepted both Army leadership and the London government. In K. Young (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, ii. ,  ( Feb. ). Ibid. ii. – ( Jan. )—see also remarks on the Polish ‘Herrenvolk’ complex vis-à-vis the Czechs—and  ( Nov. ). ‘The Poles are suspicious of the Russians even when they carry gifts’: Appreciation,  Jan. , FO /.  

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– Sikorski was, like the parties, suspicious of the Sanacja rump still prominent both in exile and the Warsaw Underground. But as an organized force the Sanacja had dissolved, and the survivors were trying to allay the suspicion that they remained a potential ruling clique. It was quite wrong, though the idea was persistent, to see Sanacja influence at the root of opposition to compromise with the USSR. The civilian part of the Underground had the same objections as the Army to alterations in national territory. The London government did not have the natural authority or, Sikorski apart, the charisma to rival the Underground. The government was valued as a legal instrument; it was not the heart of Polish resistance. In Warsaw organized resistance was launched by the military command which had conducted the defence of the city. The Army officers promised the political parties that the pre-war autocracy had abdicated. The parties, who showed an astonishing clandestine vigour, were determined not to be fooled. This is why the senior Army officer in exile, General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, was adamant that Sikorski’s record as an opponent of the Sanacja was indispensable to the government. Apart from Auguste Zaleski, who had been Pil/sudski’s foreign minister until , most of the leading figures in the London government were opposition leaders of the previous decade: Stanisl/aw Mikol/ajczyk and Stanisl/aw Kot for the Peasant Party; Jan Sta´nczyk for the Socialists; and Stalisl/aw Stro´nski, a nominal National Democrat, but a long-term ally of Sikorski. Mikol/ajczyk was Sikorski’s deputy and Prime Minister after his death; Kot was Interior Minister before he went to Moscow as Ambassador. The soldiers in Warsaw were impressed that the exiles composed their differences and that Sikorski and Sosnkowski were now colleagues. But though General Sosnkowski wanted Sikorski in office he was also prepared to be his chief critic. When Sosnkowski resigned as Minister of War in protest at the Soviet–Polish treaty in July , he became a Soviet bête noire. Anti-German propaganda in Poland was superfluous. Polish resistance began at an advanced stage of competent underground conspiracy. Warsaw had a command network in place as soon as the regular fighting stopped. Resistance in eastern Poland stemmed from the same Warsaw initiative. The chief organizer was quickly tracked down by the NKVD, but the Gestapo in the General Government were on more difficult, entirely Polish, terrain and found it more difficult to lay hands on the Warsaw leader, General Rowecki. Irregular warfare had petered out in summer  and did not recur until . Sikorski demanded and obtained the subordination of the Warsaw high command to London. With the watchful support of the government, the officer’s movement secured the support of the parties gathered in a Political Consultative Committee. More gradually the party militias—including the very well-placed Peasant Militia, which provided most of the reception committees for SOE drops—came under Warsaw control, that is, under what was renamed in  the ‘Home Army’—Armia Krajowa or AK. This choice was

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helped by the financial resources of the AK—obtained from London or gathered at home—and by the general wish to prepare a concerted rebellion. The Polish Underground could communicate by courier through Slovakia and Hungary. After June  the Poles were allowed to work from British bases into the Polish territory the Russians had once occupied. Polish Intelligence could operate inside Germany; their privileges included use of their own ciphers. In Warsaw Stefan Rowecki was an educated, competent and, by degrees, a trusted figure who won control over almost all armed resistance groups. He was captured—four days before Sikorski’s death in a plane crash—and executed in July . Rowecki and his successor Tadeusz Komorowski, who would lead the Warsaw Rising in , were assisted by the Delegatura, representing the government. Russia was accepted as an ally in Polish clandestine publications, but Soviet appeals for sabotage were not reported. There was, however, no early Soviet demand that the Underground should deal with Moscow rather than SOE, and the London Poles were left to conclude what they could from Soviet sponsorship of a new Workers’ Party (PPR) started in . Moscow broadcasts praised the Polish Underground in , but also made it clear that partisan warfare was an urgent and neglected requirement. This was unwelcome. No military opportunity was evident and new weapons were almost unobtainable. From Warsaw the prospects of armed resistance seemed extremely poor. The Polish achievement in railway sabotage was considerable and sustained, but Rowecki complained in September  that BBC reports on sabotage had cost hundreds of lives and asked that they should stop. Neither the extreme right—after a split in the National Democrat militia— nor the revolutionary left accepted AK authority. The former were more substantial but the Stalinist slice of the latter represented Russia. Stalin had dissolved the Polish communist party in —he killed almost all the members he could lay hands on—but at the end of  he permitted a successor. Two survivors were dropped into Poland by parachute; they set up the Polish Workers’ Party, the PPR, and proposed a ‘national front’. The PPR was instructed to make Polish resistance more violent and more helpful to Moscow and Soviet broadcasts declared this requirement before the new party made an impact. In February  the Soviet Radio Ko´sciuszko spoke of the Polish Underground with both praise and blame: The deeds of the Polish patriots resulted in much damage to the Hitlerites, but . . . these results are simply nothing when compared with the means at the disposal of the Poles dwelling in the very rear of the Germans. Polish partisans should operate in thousands, not in small parties. Millions should participate in Partisan battles, and the working class should be in the front rank.



Soviet broadcasts in Polish,  Mar. : Documents on Polish–Soviet Relations (), –.

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The new PPR, though clearly Marxist-Leninist, was more nationalist than its predecessor and was not affiliated to the Comintern. The PPR even wanted, at first, to be represented in the Polish government in London. But the leaders did not pretend that their foreign policy could vary from the Moscow directive or that the eastern borders were open for discussion. However, they advocated Polish expansion westwards against Germany. At the end of  the PPR militia, the GL or People’s Guard, had perhaps two thousand members, largely, as in other militias, unarmed. The PPR was considered slavishly proSoviet by all other parties. This heavy political liability was still a guarantee that the party would be noticed and, eventually, armed. The GL caused an early stir by censuring the AK for reluctance to begin guerrilla warfare, and proclaimed themselves the spearhead of the Polish resistance. They could not imitate the Yugoslav partisans, but they shot Germans on the streets of Warsaw in the style of their comrades in Paris. The AK did not dare ignore the PPR even though it was very small, and they believed that the GL would grow. Though the cost of any rebellion in the General Government would certainly be terrific, the hunger for retaliation and revenge was fierce. Whoever had guns would find recruits whatever Sikorski or Rowecki said about it. In the course of  Rowecki changed AK rules and gave permission for partisan activity designed to preserve the leadership of active resistance in AK hands. In some measure this justified the communist claim that a more violent resistance was feasible; it did not, of course, establish that it was more useful. The assassination of German officials was allowed; by the end of  it was a frequent event in Warsaw. Gestapo reprisals took the form of street-corner executions of people picked up at random. As a federation of organized clandestine militias, the AK reached a national strength of , in March . Rowecki could activate a number of guerrilla brigades in the provinces. But they were not sent into open partisan warfare. Unrewarded destruction seemed a certainty even to keen officers who knew the reckless courage of their followers and would have grasped at a true half-chance. A partisan rising would have needed to be self-equipping. For the RAF even small deliveries of weapons were extremely difficult. The guiding principle was to fight only one battle. The AK created an organized field force for deployment as the Wehrmacht fell back through Poland. This guaranteed nothing, but it was reasonable to hope that a useful AK contribution would somehow sustain Polish authority. There was an obligation not to waste the Home Army before its half-chance came.

 Friends and Allies I N July  Moscow acknowledged a vested British interest in Poland. The mass deportation of Poles to Soviet labour camps was still recent news, and the question of their release was inescapable. No Russo-Polish agreement, however provisional, could fail to provide for this. There were , Polish soldiers in the Soviet Union. The British, in effect, held the keys to the camps. The Kremlin was evidently apprehensive about the several thousand Army officers and men killed in ; they would give no lists. Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador, asked the British to make no formal request on the subject, and he did not soften his attitude to the ‘reactionary’ and hostile Polish government. But the Russians conceded something. They invited the Polish government to create a Polish army in Russia, a force loyal to the Polish Republic. This was of tremendous importance. If Polish soldiers were not pressed into Soviet service or placed under Soviet political discipline, Moscow would lack Polish tools. The difficulty of an unmediated subjugation of Poland by Russian forces alone would be a useful deterrent to it. The Russians might even be grateful. General Anders emerged from the Lubianka prison to sign a military agreement. Anders was told to get his first division ready for action in October. Tens of thousands of Poles were released from camps and prisons in Siberia and Kazakhstan and began to find their way across the Soviet Union to join Anders. The Polish Embassy threw a social security net across the USSR to catch them. The travelling organizers were repeatedly arrested and harrassed, but the network still functioned and it remained Polish. The Soviet security objections to this organization must have been formidable. In September, when Stanisl/as Kot arrived in Moscow as Ambassador, Anders foresaw a Polish fighting force of ,. Beaverbrook and Harriman arrived in Moscow as the first high-level visitors from the West. Roosevelt had asked for the Poles to be supplied from American stores delivered by British convoys, but Beaverbrook guessed that the Russians would not like this; he wanted no special conditions attached to the Western offer of supplies. Beaverbrook was not a friend of Poland. Lockhart complained that in foreign affairs ‘Max is always for the simple one-hundred-per-cent solutions which sound so easy and may have such unforeseen consequences’. The idea of reserving some Anglo-American equipment for the Poles was discarded.  

S. M. Terry, Poland’s Place in Europe (), . K. Young (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, ii, – (),  ( Feb. ).

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Ambassador Kot later complained that Beaverbrook seemed not to want to know what was at stake. The Russians saw that the Polish army was not as important to their allies as they might have thought. Sikorski went to Moscow in December. Stalin invited him to bargain: to accept the principle of Soviet expansion westwards and to bargain about its extent. This meant surrendering the point of principle with no clear reward. The Poles argued that they could change their borders only when the war was over. Though a settlement with Moscow would have been invaluable, Sikorski could not investigate the offer. His political position was not strong enough. He tried to manage the Russians and British with hints of flexibility while presenting a more nationalist front to his colleagues, who were not deceived. To cede the eastern provinces during the war would split the émigré community and the Army and scandalize the Underground; it might obtain nothing tangible from the Russians. The Anders army was indiscreet, anti-Soviet, and immune to political reorientation; the soldiers had been drawn back from a lost world, and they were difficult to intimidate; their Polish insouciance was flourished under the noses of the NKVD. Stalin’s attitude to the London Poles was at best ambiguous. His officials felt able to obstruct the decision in favour of Anders ostensibly made in August. Anders had to turn away recruits for lack of rations, and his troops were never armed for action. The Soviet amnesty seemed to be dishonoured: hundreds of thousands were still unaccounted for. General Zhukov warned Anders not to cause offence by pressing enquiries about his missing officers, but it was an impossible request. Cripps, the British Ambassador, warned that Polish soldiers would soon start dying of starvation or typhus. Sikorski passed on a British suggestion that some of the Poles could be withdrawn to Persia to receive British rations. Stalin accused him of wanting to abandon the Russian front. When Sikorski demanded an alternative, Stalin had none. But GHQ Cairo was pleased to secure Polish reinforcements. Stalin did not dispute Sikorski’s good faith, but someone was blocking the creation of a Polish army on the central Volga. The equipment for the second Polish division never arrived. The Polish army moved to Tashkent, and Soviet liaison officers encouraged the idea of leaving Russia. Poles were no longer sent to Anders but into Red Army labour batallions. One evacuation followed another until by the end of  a hundred thousand Poles had crossed into Persia—and started on the long road to Monte Cassino. The door was then slammed shut behind them and the episode of the Anders army in Russia was finished. The Polish Embassy was never allowed contact with Jewish citizens from eastern Poland, but the Russians sent a surprising number of Polish Jews to Polish army recruitment centres. Anders had to issue an order declaring antisemitic behaviour to be dangerous and unpatriotic, but he also imposed a 

John Erikson, The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin’s War with Germany (), –.

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 per cent numerus clausus on Jewish recruits. The Soviet authorities told some Jews that the Polish antisemites did not want them. Zionist officials in Palestine and New York had been determined to secure the evacuation of Polish Jews from the USSR, and they refused to accept Polish protestations of innocence. Polish antisemitism was a damaging argument in Soviet hands because it was a theme no one needed to invent. The open phase of the long crisis of Russo-Polish relations began on  January  as a propaganda campaign against the London Poles. The Anders army was accused of refusing to fight. Poles remaining in the USSR were not allowed to join their compatriots in Persia. While Anders was in Russia, the Polish citizenship of ethnic Poles from eastern Poland was recognized. Once he left, this dispensation was cancelled. Polish soldiers in the Middle East, especially those who had expected their families to follow them out, were enraged and almost mutinous. They had been betrayed in , deported and enslaved in , starved in –, and betrayed again in . Inflamed anti-Soviet feeling would have halted Sikorski’s diplomacy had it not already hit a brick wall. PWE were faced with the distasteful prospect of having to educate an irate Polish audience to a British sense of realities before damage limitation could even begin. Britain had been given some Polish manpower; Russia kept the rest. There was a crude imperial courtesy in it. The Russians showed goodwill to Britain, but then they started to make a second, pro-Soviet military force from the larger number of Poles who remained. Without any announcement a new Polish force was created—the ‘Ko´sciuszko’ division—whose rank and file were ordinary Poles released from labour batallions, and pleased to be given familiar uniforms, Polish flags, and the prospect of marching home; but the officers were different: many could not speak Polish and most were Soviet citizens. The priority in the new division was political education. In November  PWE started the black station Świt (internally ‘P’) as the voice of Russo-Polish military solidarity. This was a year too late. Harold ´ Osborne, the intelligence officer for Poland, was the first controller of Swit. When the intelligence officers left Woburn for Bush House early in  Osborne came too and P was managed on a daily basis by Major Bryson. Świt was under joint PWE/Polish control for development as a vehicle of daily communication between the London Poles and the Underground. Sikorski ´ had agreed that the two guiding political principles of Swit should be RussoPolish co-operation and the idea of a confederation of smaller Eastern European states. Both these favourite themes were already implausible, and to sound Polish at all Świt needed a few anti-Soviet remarks. Osborne recommended that the RU should be closed down: ‘there remains no possibility of collaboration between Russia and Poland’. McLaren, the regional director, 

H. Osborne to Moray McLaren,  Feb. , FO /.

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told Lockhart that Osborne had contended with ‘heartbreaking difficulties’ and told Sutton—DPW(O)—that the worsening of Soviet–Polish relations had coincided with ‘an unusual attempt at reasonableness on the part of indi´ vidual Polish officers in this country’. He knew that both Swit and the BBC ´ needed a revised directive but could suggest nothing for Swit beyond the idea that expressions of gratitude to the Soviet liberator be mixed with references to the British instinct for justice. He expected to be ‘accused of hypocrisy and of a “typically British” avoidance of the issue’. But PWE could not, he argued, side with the Russians and advocate the Soviet version of ‘ethnic’ Poland before HMG had announced an opinion. Gregory Macdonald, the BBC editor, helped to prepare the PWE directives he received from Moray McLaren. But neither Kirkpatrick nor Newsome were as susceptible to Polish charm as the two Scottish specialists. Above the Polish region, PWE officials were close to the pro-Soviet mood of Churchill and Eden, although PWE refused to be stood on their head overnight and the Foreign Office Central department did not rush to abandon the Polish cause. Britain’s moral credit in Poland was sky-high; the idea that this should be discarded was very painful. The political reorientation of the Poles and the reduction of their expectations could not be quick. The BBC did not have much direct access to the Polish public. Wireless sets were extremely rare in Poland; they were also forbidden on pain of death. The BBC Polish Service was principally a news agency for the Underground, which was said to have  listening posts and , multilingual monitors who passed on BBC material to daily news-sheets reaching up to half a million people. Whatever the radio monitors really disliked would simply not get into the news-sheets. Any alteration in the propaganda message would have to develop gradually. The BBC started to hint that even legal borders could be revised. It was difficult to admit how little Moscow had to fear from the Polish refusal to ratify, immediately, Soviet demands. The idea that Soviet requirements were more than territorial was too pessimistic. Lockhart thought the Bolsheviks were touchy about their new great power status and required extravagant reassurance. But Soviet diplomacy was more assured than this suggested. In any case, the Poles preferred their own Kremlinology. They assumed Soviet avarice but believed, genuinely, that the Allies could restrain it. This made alarming the growing British inclination to tolerate Soviet expansion. Did London want a pretext for disengagement or, on the contrary, was there a dependable commitment mixed in with the idea of territorial sacrifice? The Polish government could detect the decay of British opposition to the Molotov–Ribbentrop line, but they could hardly announce this to Poland.  

McLaren to DG,  Feb. ; McLaren to Sutton,  Feb. , FO /. BBC Survey of European Audiences, Mar. , FO /.

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The Underground leadership never imagined the Russians had dropped their claims to eastern Poland. Some Poles argued that their Ukrainian and White Russian citizens did not want to join the USSR. The contrast between the western Ukraine, where Polish landlords held the best land, and the east, where there were no longer any landlords, had lost its appeal even if the nationalists did not dislike Poland less because they feared the kolkhoz more. Even in  an Underground report stated that there remained a strong feeling that fellow-citizens could not be abandoned to Sovietization without protest. Although the AK intended to attempt an unsupported national levée en masse if Germany collapsed, General Sosnkowski found support in Warsaw and London for his argument that the AK should stay clandestine if the Russians were not prepared to respect ‘London’ allegiances. No one expected to block the advance of a successful Red Army across Poland, but the AK resolved to defend the country somehow or other. This caused consternation. The Polish army in Russia, which Sikorski had seen as his best card, had only made things worse. The dispute had also given German propaganda something to strike at. The BBC reported the Soviet break with Anders factually. Sikorski told the New York press that Poland demanded from Russia ‘reciprocal recognition of the separate political outlooks of both nations’. But Soviet restraint was coming to an end. Moscow reasserted its claim to everything annexed in –. Nine days after the German surrender at Stalingrad, the Russians announced—by radio in six languages—that the Baltic States and Bessarabia were parts of the USSR. On  February Soviet Ukraine contained an article by a newly appointed Vice Commissar of Foreign Affairs attacking ‘large groups of Poles in London who are doing their best to shatter the united front of Hitler’s enemies’. On  March Poland’s eastern territories were added to the list. Next day a TASS communiqué stated that the Polish claim to Ukrainian and White Russian territory was contrary to the Atlantic Charter and unworthy of Lord Curzon. A new ‘Union of Polish Patriots’ (UPP) appeared in Moscow. Its journal, Wolna Polska, began with attacks on the Polish government and referred to Polish ‘quislings’. (The London Poles and the Underground were intensely proud that Poland was the only occupied country with no quislings.) There was no British response, although the Polish region knew a turning-point had been reached. The Russians did not offer their allies any way to ameliorate or even handle this open dispute. Radio London was, of course, hard at work celebrating the victory at Stalingrad. The central directive prescribed ‘no further reference to Polish–Russian controversy in any language’. Poland could not be remembered at such a moment. McLaren warned that unless the London Poles were  Memorandum by H. Osborne on interview with M. Lerski,  Apr. , FO /. Ritchie Calder considered this ‘nationalist megalomania’.  Annexe II, PWE Central Directive,  Feb. , FO /.   A. Werth, Russia at War ‒ (), .  Mar. , FO /.

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given a British certificate of political health, the Soviet suggestion that they were a quasi-fascist rump would be widely accepted. His region could not be effective if the rest of PWE had no appetite for the defence of the Poles. The AK had rivals in eastern Poland. Soviet soldiers cut off by the German advance had escaped into the forests and survived as partisans, and they were joined by Jewish refugees. This Soviet resistance did not, of course, enjoy much popular support. But the Soviet partisans managed to persist, even west of the old borders. They were traced, armed, and provided with leaders by the Soviet Partisan Command. At the same time the Polish Underground created the resistance network they had been trying to plant in Soviet-occupied territory since . Where a sufficient Polish population remained, AK partisans operated both as rivals to the Soviet partisans and as protection against them. There existed from  to  a complex of truces and aggression between these two resistances. Neither side had much ability to prevent extensive German reprisals for their activity. The Poles were the least anxious to provoke reprisals, and tried to avoid doing so lest, caught between the Soviet partisans and the German army, the Polish minority should be obliterated. SOE estimated there were about , Soviet partisans on former Polish territory. They were found as far west as the forests around Lublin in the General Government. The Polish region made an attempt to look at Soviet political intentions and the Soviet view of Polish resistance. The Soviet partisans and the communist rivals to the AK were the subject of Polish reports to London. These accounts were meant to be alarming, but they were persuasive. The Polish region circulated a memorandum ‘The Soviet in Poland’. Soviet partisans were described as bands of escaped Russians prisoners, Jews, and a few Poles, who distributed Soviet propaganda and terrorized the Polish population. It was thought— though the Poles were not certain—that they did little useful sabotage. This, of course, did sound tendentious though perhaps not unlikely. McLaren and Osborne accepted the picture, though some PWE colleagues were sceptical; they suggested that the Poles wanted better relations with Russia while doubting whether this could be obtained on a Russo-Polish basis. The memorandum summarized Polish opinion: the Underground agreed that without the determination to stand firm Poland’s leaders would be swept aside and Poland swallowed; so they said that a ‘suicidal war’ would be preferred to the renunciation of all hope. (This was less a feeble attempt at deterrence than a matter of selfrespect and a warning to London and Washington.) The Underground, it was said, had ‘firm confidence’ that Britain, ‘supported by America’, would intervene. But if Poland was violated, ‘our responsibility to future generations’— as General Rowecki put it in Warsaw—would make obligatory some last-ditch 

MX to AD/P,  Feb. , HS /.

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act of defiance. This was a provisional conclusion. It was clearer in Warsaw than they liked to confess how difficult it would be to sustain a firm political front against Stalin through the elation, relief, and moral exhaustion of the liberation period. Lockhart, much later, explained how Polish prejudice might yield to emotion: there were insults which ‘cut far deeper than deportation or even mass execution’; the Russians had not ‘vilified the Polish nation and blasphemed against the blood that flows in Polish veins in the way the Germans have’. If the Russians really wanted it, the Red Army would be received with gratitude and joy. Newsome had a reputation as ‘one of those Englishmen who imagined Poland to be a country of feudal landowners living by oppressing peasants and workers’. When Newsome heard from Macdonald about PWE’s memorandum, he became agitated; and when he saw the document he composed a furious rebuttal. He viewed Poland as another place where communist activists were challenging a wait-and-see establishment. In part, but only in part, Newsome misread Osborne’s account of Polish opinion as pure advocacy. His pencil-work on the PWE memorandum reveals as much livid hostility to Polish nationalism—immediately after Stalingrad—as it does disbelief in PWE conclusions. (On the Polish people’s attachment to Wilno and Lwów: ‘Why? They had no estates there’; on the AK objection to Communist calls for armed risings: ‘Why should a suicidal people object to this?’) But what most provoked him was what he took, correctly, to be the memorandum’s tolerance of Polish anti-communism and of related criticisms of the Soviet partisans appearing in eastern Poland. It also appears that Newsome was ready to see in the communist PPR the expression of a broadly based popular will to fight and to receive the Russians in friendship, an attitude which the official Underground could be expected to fear. In Newsome’s opinion there was no room in the BBC for the suggestion that Polish anti-communism was legitimate; equally, there should be no intrinsic British objection to the attempt of Polish communists to take the resistance initiative away from the AK. When , Poles were expelled from territory annexed by the Reich, the Poles were helpless; but when the SS started to depopulate villages in central Poland and plant German settlers, the local militias started fighting. The AK accepted this context and there was a desperate struggle in the Zamo´s c´ region near Lublin in winter /.  villages were cleared, but  remained. The SS could not spare the manpower. The AK destroyed farms from which Poles had been driven and hit communications. This presumably increased the manpower requirement to the point of serious inconvenience, even though  ‘The Soviet in Poland’,  Feb. , FO /; for Rowecki see J. M. Ciechanowski, The Warsaw Rising of  (), .  Lockhart, ‘Appreciation’,  Jan. , FO /.  Jan Nowak, Courier from Warsaw (), .  ‘The Soviet in Poland’, Polish folder, Newsome Papers.

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London insisted that such partisan operations be confined to the area affected. In Zamo´s c´ the AK, the Peasant militias, and the People’s Guards fought on the same side, but there was controversy in the clandestine press between the AK and the GL, especially since the German plantation failed. Newsome knew about the guerrilla warfare in the Zamo´s c´ district, but probably not that Jan Piekal/kiewicz, the government Delegate, was negotiating with Wl/adysl/aw Gomul/ka about communist participation in the Underground. The Gestapo caught Piekal/kiewicz before there was a decision, but British propaganda had little to contribute. PWE had no position on the points Newsome raised. The Underground wanted the PPR to promise to be independent of Moscow. On this point the PPR were unbending. Newsome begged Kirkpatrick to help him challenge the ill-omened loyalty of the PWE Polish region to the Polish government and the AK. He produced a philippic. Poland had ‘invited the fate’ that befell her by sabotaging an Anglo-Soviet alliance in ; ‘influential Poles’, fortified by ‘thoughtless or deliberate encouragement’ in the Foreign Office, were giving Germany ‘her only chance’ of rupturing the alliance once more; the war could still be lost or end with an Allied victory that was only ‘precarious and short-lived’. The immediate object of his anger was the PWE document ‘The Soviet in Poland’. This revealed that the London Poles were trying to stop Soviet parachutists working with ‘Polish guerrillas’; it asserted that the Poles were confident of Western support against Soviet encroachment, and dared to state that Polish ‘resentment and distrust of Russia’ were ‘not without justification’: I find it impossible to believe that this represents the policy of H.M.G. [IK: ‘No. You are quite right’.] . . . I should, furthermore, challenge most emphatically the assumption that the views expressed in this paper really represent those of the Polish people as a whole in their own country however truly they may represent the opinion of those sources from which the Poles in Britain derive their information.

Newsome demanded to know who was encouraging the Poles to expect Western support against Russia. However unkind, the question was a good one. SOE, SIS, PWE, and the Foreign Office had drifted apart. Gubbins, at SOE, felt for the Poles what Lockhart felt for the Czechs. Gubbins’s biographers suspect that his emotional commitment ‘contributed to SOE’s failure to face the Poles sufficiently brutally with the facts’. Darsie Gillie, the BBC French editor, blamed SIS as well. But a full answer to Newsome’s question would have stretched from the War Cabinet in  to the US Congress. Newsome interpreted the Nazi–Soviet Pact as the inexorable product of the Polish defiance of power and logic. Kirkpatrick did not accept this, but he agreed that the Polish problem was Germany’s only hope.  Newsome to Kirkpatrick,  Feb. , ‘The Soviet Union, Poland and Great Britain’, FO /. Kirkpatrick’s marginal comments are found on the signed original in the Newsome Papers  (Polish folder). P. Wilkinson and J. B. Astley, Gubbins and SOE (), –.

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Six weeks before the Katyn crisis, Newsome was demanding a safer policy. He knew that there was a crisis ahead. Newsome was drawn to the Polanddoes-not-matter thesis though his internationalism was not adapted for such a repudiation. He felt that the Polish government, like its predecessor, was a hazard to shipping and should be well marked with lights and foghorns. When he conceded that ‘our attitude to Poland’ was ‘one of the most profound admiration and unreserved friendship’, he was struggling to keep all his principles active. He knew that the kindest thing one could do for the Poles was to be blunt. When TASS stated on  March that the USSR regarded the Polish East as Soviet territory, press commentators signalled British consent. This was a crucial moment. On  March Maisky called on Eden to confirm that Russia wanted the Curzon line, the Baltic States and bases in Finland and Romania, and did not want a Czechoslovak–Polish confederation. On the same day The Times published ‘Britain, Russia and Europe: conditions of continental security’, a famous article, which insisted that Russia’s frontier was on the Oder just as Britain’s was on the Rhine. Lewis Namier sent Lockhart his article supporting Soviet expansion in the name of ‘a clean frontier’. Europe required a Poland that was not always quarrelling with Moscow; a solution could underpin ‘complete non-interference’ in each other’s internal affairs; an exchange of populations would tidy up the region. Namier understood the trend of policy. The reluctance to make it clear had been, in Newsome’s eyes, foolishness. Moray McLaren and Harold Osborne believed that British policy would, eventually, mix uncomfortable territorial medicine with political support in proportions which they could not dispense as propaganda before major decisions were made. The Russians, without consulting the British, had set up a pro-Soviet Polish organization with its own military force: the UPP in Moscow and the Ko´sciuszko division commanded by Colonel Berling, once one of Anders’s officers. The Ko´sciuszko division, though not publicized until May, was evidently recruited earlier. The UPP staple was, from the outset, leftish diatribes against Polish reaction and vitriolic hostility to the London government. The Soviet Polish language ‘black’ radio (already ‘Ko´sciuszko’) denounced the ´ ´ was nothing of the kind. It was strictBritish equivalent (‘Swit’) as Nazi. Swit ly controlled, though it was more polemical than the BBC. The RU was permitted to be annoying, but it was not—in principle—allowed to say anything  N. F. Newsome, ‘The European Service: Principles and Purposes’,  Jan. , Newsome Papers, Policy file.  Namier to Lockhart,  Mar. , FO /. Lockhart thought Namier a ‘bore’ and disliked his ‘fanatical Zionism’: Young (ed.), Lockhart Diaries, ii.  ( Oct. ). See also P. M. H. Bell, John Bull and the Bear (), .  Minutes of meeting attended by Sargent and Lockhart,  Apr. , FO /; Bryson’s report for Apr. , FO /.

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truly objectionable not also allowed to the BBC. The Russians were left, offi´ cially, in ignorance about Swit, and there was some concern that Maisky might get British communists to attack it. The Russians had given Britain and the USA eighteen months to define their Polish interest. Once their anxieties were clear to Stalin—and they were surely transparent to Maisky—exploratory opposition to the London Poles began. There was no British reaction. If the problem was genuinely a dispute about swapping scattered minorities, perhaps the Poles should be left to adjust at their own pace. In February  it was possible, if only just, for Kirkpatrick and Newsome to regard optimism about Stalin’s Polish intentions as obligatory. Yet a measure of distrust remained. It was not quite illicit. But it was misplaced if one believed that Soviet bad temper was provoked, purely and simply, by Anders and his tactless officers. After Stalingrad the British people were in no mood for Polish polemics. It was not yet certain that Stalin had become too proud to deal with any Polish regime which failed to state openly that the new Poland must be made with the Kremlin’s consent. Newsome believed that a tussle for pre-eminence in resistance—familiar from Yugoslavia and Greece—had started in Poland. The model was weak, conservative exiles versus radical new forces. He was sceptical, wrongly, of the strength of ‘legal’ Underground within Poland; but evidently someone had told him that the official assessments were incorrect. It was also conceivable that the disloyalty of the GL expressed significant Polish opposition to the imposition of Russophobe strategies from London, though it was not in fact the case. The AK militias shared the anti-Soviet assumptions of the AK leadership and the government. The Polish mentality which disturbed or infuriated British observers was a posture of national defence; it could not be relaxed without, eventually, dividing Polish opposition to an imposed Soviet administration. Newsome identified this unwavering Polish distrust as ideological poison. It was to the BBC Polish editor, Gregory Macdonald, that Newsome had first unburdened himself. Macdonald was a typical Polish specialist experiencing a tragic conflict of interests and duties. He sent Newsome an immediate corrective; it is quite clear that he did not see Newsome as a pro-Soviet dead soul: I have thought over your remarks and while understanding the reason for them I also see in them a great danger—the danger by which honest men may espouse all the arguments for Munich so long as the Power to be appeased is Soviet Russia . . . It is unjust for us to condemn Polish policy as suicidal if it is one of absolute resistance. At the same time I agree that we must keep them from excited mistakes and withstand Goebbels’ attempt to split the Coalition. No easy job! My main point is that we must not even appear to disinterest ourselves in the fate of a very gallant and much suffering people. I am as convinced as you are that these complications will ultimately sort themselves into a just peace. 

Macdonald to Newsome, undated [Feb. ], Newsome Papers.

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‘Absolute resistance’ as an unimpeachable value was, surely, a reference to summer . London did not want to estimate Russian intentions. Hence the tendency both to leave the Poles nursing their hopes and to leave the way clear for a British retreat. The next retreat might be to accommodate Stalin by forcing a reconstruction of the Polish government. PWE did not suggest signalling to Moscow the possibility of British displeasure—the course the London Poles advocated. It was still possible to blame the territorial question or Soviet crudeness or Polish arrogance for what was happening. But the expulsion of Anders had been unnecessary, and so was Soviet sponsorship of the PPR and their attempt to press the Underground to distance themselves from the London government. Russian choices were as remorselessly political as Polish analysis. Newsome wanted, rightly, to be frank with Poles, but not with the Russians. He was not so much anti-Polish—outside moments of intense annoyance—as aware that his sort of policy would give timely expression to a clear trend. The Polish specialists also wanted clarity. Without new decisions, however painful, the Poles would learn nothing and PWE could not distinguish conciliation from limitless appeasement.

 Katyn: ‘A Gift for Goebbels’ T E N thousand missing Polish officers had plagued Soviet relations with General Anders. There were a number of Soviet explanations including the suggestion that the Germans had overrun the camps in  and a rumour that Beria or Merkulov had said ‘We made a big mistake’. The NKVD knew what had happened. Stalin even might have been warned that the graves were in enemy hands; he might have considered the option of arresting a guilty person. There was perhaps a specifically NKVD anxiety to get Anders out of the Soviet Union and to give his followers a bad name. On  April  the Germans collected some eminent Poles and flew them to Smolensk. Next day the German Transocean agency reported that ten thousand bodies of Polish officers had been found in Katyn forest—apparently shot in February and March . Two days later German radio released their story: All these officers were shot in the nape of the neck, the method by which millions of people have already been despatched . . . By murdering over , officers, the Jewish-Bolshevik butchers exterminated over one-third of the peacetime officer-establishment of the former Polish Army . . . Jewish Bolshevism shows the world its horrible grimace. The discovery of Smolensk is a stirring warning to Europe and a roll call for an unrelenting struggle against the most terrible enemy humanity has ever encountered.

The Soviet Home Service made no immediate comment but knew how to react. They presented, on the same day, the findings of their own investigation of Nazi atrocities in the Ukraine: two million killed in the first eight months of the occupation; , murdered at Rostov, and , corpses discovered in a ditch near Mineralnye Vody. To those unfamiliar with Polish affairs, nothing could have sounded more likely than that the Nazis had attributed one of their own crimes to their enemies to cause bad blood between Poland and the USSR. There were so many massacres—larger, more recent, or still taking place. Five days later nearly two thousand Jewish street fighters in Warsaw began the defence of the fifty thousand Jews in the ghetto who had not yet been sent to Treblinka. The AK conceded that the ghetto had nothing to lose by fighting, and gave some very limited help—one machine-gun, some rifles and pis´ tols, and five hundred grenades. Radio Swit made a broadcast based on ´ Underground signals, and Reuter, on the basis of Swit, reported that the last  

S. Slowes, The Road to Katyn (), . .,  Apr. , German Home Stations: BBC, Daily Digest of World Broadcasts.

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´ Jews in Warsaw were being killed. This report included Swit’s warning to the public about unfriendly elements trying to produce May Day demonstrations. Most of the Jewish fighters were dead by  May. But the name Treblinka, though heard of, was not yet stamped on the public mind. PWE did not dwell on what the Allies could not prevent. A different withholding of full attention operated in the smaller matter of Katyn. For all but the Poles the German accusations about Katyn were eclipsed by other war news. The story washed over minds excited by victories and crowded with greater catastrophes. The German story of the Katyn graves confirmed existing suspicions. Sikorski could not enforce absolute silence. Churchill saw him on  April— the day the Russians denied guilt and claimed that the officers had been near Smolensk in autumn . The Poles had to say something, and they were not asked to support the Russian story. On  April the Polish Minister of Defence announced that , Polish officers were missing and that the International Red Cross would be asked to investigate. This one gesture of moral independence was much less than most Poles wanted to hear. The British had not wanted it but did not predict a disaster. In Bush House it seemed, of course, right to nourish such doubts about the German version as occurred to the well-disposed mind. Indications of Soviet guilt were not lacking—Churchill and Eden both feared the worst—but it was a few weeks before officials in PWE felt able to dispense with inverted commas. Later, when a Soviet Commission of Investigation made its report in , Osborne recommended that the BBC ignore it since ‘there seems to be no real doubt’ about what had happened; and Churchill warned that ‘we should none of us ever speak a word about it’. Lockhart was on sick leave from mid-April  until the end of June. He, at least, was not entirely convinced by the German story. PWE guidance about Katyn tried to cover two possibilities: the German version was not to be believed but it was permissible to point out that the Russians had not produced the missing officers. The Polish communiqué was not used by the BBC, except in Polish, since it was ‘awkward’, but an ‘unofficialmoderate Polish version of their case’ was put out in connection with the Soviet denial. On  April the full Polish communiqué was published after negotiation in Downing Street. The Polish government took responsibility for the Defence Minister’s request to the Red Cross to examine the evidence; the ‘hypocritical indignation of German propaganda’ was noted and the Germans were denied ‘the right to draw from the crimes they impute to others arguments in their own defence’. This statement was later circulated with a further Polish condemnation of ‘German criminals who prey upon the corpses of Osborne to Sutton,  Apr. , FO /. Osborne to Ritchie Calder,  Jan. , FO /; Churchill’s minute,  Jan. , PREM /.  FO to Washington,  Apr. , FO /.  

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Polish officers’. The Poles did not prevent the British from contesting the German story. Their text conformed to the London instinct, which was to raise every objection to the story except that it was untrue. But the full Polish communiqué was broadcast only in Polish. This lacked the courage of the conviction which allowed it in the first place. There was an urgent need to signal to Moscow that Polish official statements had been commendably reserved. Nothing terrible was expected and so nothing was said to restrain the Russians. Bracken’s talents might have been made for such a crisis. But he did not congratulate the Poles for their loyal restraint; still less did he applaud the Polish appeal to the Red Cross as a move to expose Nazi manipulation of the evidence. (PWE compiled German statements on Katyn and soon had a list of minor contradictions.) British authority was not interposed between Soviet resentment and the Polish government. The limited support—more strictly, permissions—given to Sikorski did him little good. Churchill did not want the scandal to ‘interrupt the more or less weekly flow of friendly messages’ to and from Stalin. The Russians were begged to consider Sikorski’s difficulties. They might have been told to be grateful for British influence and not to pick a quarrel in a case where the facts, known before Katyn was heard of, were damning. The first Soviet statement on the subject ignored the willingness of the London Poles to be non-committal. It was conceded that some Polish officers were dead but the ‘graves which the Germans are supposed to have discovered near Smolensk’ were really ‘archaeological excavations’. On  April Pravda printed an article under the heading ‘Hitler’s Polish Collaborators’ which provided no better excuse but which accused ‘the ministerial circles of General Sikorski’ of taking up the fabrications of Dr Goebbels; the Polish Ministry of Information had asked the International Red Cross ‘to “investigate” something that never existed, or, rather, had been fabricated by the hangmen of Berlin, who are now trying to attribute their crimes to the Soviet organs’; this request was a ‘demonstration of their desire to give direct aid to Hitler’s forgers and provocateurs’. Two days later TASS deduced the existence of an agreement between the Germans and a pro-Hitler faction in the Polish government. Stalin then warned Churchill that he was about to break diplomatic relations with the Poles. This was much worse than expected. Only an immediate retort might have stopped him. Oliver Harvey blamed the dangerous Poles who had ‘upset the applecart’ and needed ‘firm treatment’. Britain had not seconded the Polish appeal to the Red Cross. But there was a hint that Britain could be made guilty by Statement of the Polish Council of Ministers,  Apr. , FO /. Churchill to Clark Kerr (Moscow),  May : M. Gilbert, Winston Churchill (–), vii. . A year later Churchill concluded that ‘my very courteous and even effusive personal approaches have  had a bad effect’: ibid. . A. Werth, Russia at War – (), –.  

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association, and so a fear of being dragged into the quarrel through sheer Soviet excess. For a moment the problem seemed to be how to stop reckless people taking up cudgels on Sikorski’s behalf. But by the time the rupture of relations took place, Harvey was worried about Soviet motives: This will be a gift for Goebbels . . . The Poles will manoeuvre to do the maximum harm to Russian relations with ourselves and America. Why must Stalin work like this? [Next day] . . . A.E. is at a loss to see what Stalin is up to. It is too like Hitler and Bene˘s [] to be pleasant. Is it wounded self-respect at the Smolensk revelations just when Stalin thought he had been received into Society? Is it the frontier question? Is it fear of Sikorski’s Poland . . . in future?. . . If like that other gangster Hitler, he has a passion for legality, then he may be wanting, even so, to get out of us now our official endorsement of those frontiers. But it is a dangerous game for all concerned.

The danger for Moscow was pondered for several days before the suspension of diplomatic relations was announced. The Polish use of all discretion short of capitulation was loyal and impressive. (Even in Poland, despite German threats and offers, the Red Cross team returning from Smolensk refused to give interviews. After consulting these eyewitnesses, the Polish Underground reported that the German descriptions of the graves were correct except for the number of bodies, which was estimated at two to three thousand.) The Poles had given Moscow, as the British knew, the option of not taking offence, but it was flung aside. There was a great performance of being offended. The Pravda article was extensively reprinted. Soviet propaganda did not offer any plausible account of what might have happened to the inmates of the Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov POW camps after April . Between the Pravda attack on Polish ‘collaborators’ and the suspension of relations there was a week in which the Russians could listen to London with care. The advantages of damaging Sikorski’s government might not equal the disadvantages of controversy between the major allies. A British protective statement was required when the second Polish text was issued—four days after the Katyn revelations had been announced in detail. The lapse of time between the alleged insult and Moscow’s response suggests that the Soviets weighed the British commitment and then exploited the British suspicion, unconcealed in London, that it would have been safer to silence the Poles altogether. If this is true, British trepidation helped the crisis to escalate. Clark Kerr the British Ambassador, reported from Moscow that Stalin was aware of British public opinion and that signs of displeasure could be used on him with effect. But the press had ‘a concentrated attack of realpolitik’. After two weeks it was too late to form British opinion. J. Harvey (ed.), War Diaries of Oliver Harvey (), – (– Apr. ). S. Korboński, The Polish Underground State (), .  P. M. H. Bell, John Bull and the Bear (), . Only the Scotsman would publish Polish evidence. 

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The assumption that Berlin’s chief aim was to produce an Anglo-Russian breach still held. Enemy propaganda announced that the British would swallow anything, and there was satisfaction at the loss of British prestige. That was likely to be the end of it, although there was a German black ‘whisper’ that Britain had encouraged the Poles. London would not step back from ‘unconditional surrender’ simply because the Polish problem had revived. Goebbels wanted discord, but it was Stalin’s response not the revelations that damaged the alliance. The real targets of the Axis propaganda exercise were the ‘satellites’ and European fence-sitters who needed reminding that the USSR would be unforgiving. The Katyn commentary on the Italian Home Service explained that the little nations were liable to be chewed up by the ‘continents’: ‘Stalin is a man of very clear political ideas; Russia would have no wish to see the rebirth of a Polish state on her confines and doubtless all those Polish officers were incorrigible Polish patriots.’ Or, as a German spokeman said shortly before Katyn: ‘If Europe wants to survive, then its future is entirely dependent on its strongest exponents.’ The Germans used Katyn to strengthen fortress Europe. Anglo-Soviet relations were considered as fixed. The material was not adapted for British tastes. As Orme Sargent had predicted in February—the Deputy Under-Secretary was speaking privately—the ‘sentimental communism’ of British opinion made it largely invulnerable to anti-bolshevik propaganda. But the reluctance to assert that the Katyn massacre must be German was a scruple which signified long-term unease. On  April Newsome instructed all services to use a model commentary on Katyn. It reviewed Axis attempts to counter military reverses by a ‘diplomatic offensive’ to complement a ‘whitewash’ of the New Order; it supplied a summary of Russian denials, a brief and neutral reference to the Polish request to the Red Cross, and an almost verbatim rehearsal of Polish anti-German statements. The idea of the ‘German political counter-offensive’ was soon lodged in the central directive. The BBC was instructed not to ‘get involved’ in the mass graves controversy but to treat the German story as an attempt ‘to revive the Bolshevik Bogey’; the Katyn story should be treated by implication as false, but not by assertion and never in detail. After the Russo-Polish diplomatic break, Newsome called it ‘calamitous’ but, unlike the Darlan affair, not Britain’s fault. The next task, he argued, was to reassure Europe that the alliance was undamaged; persuading Europeans that the Anglo-Saxons would protect small nations was a subordinate concern. In itself, this made sense. But

M. Balfour, Propaganda in War ‒ (), . Italian Home Service, .,  Apr. ; German Home Service,  Apr. , ‘Political Review by Dr Max Clauss’: BBC Daily Digest of World Broadcasts.  K. Young (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, ii. ‒ (), .  News Talk by the diplomatic correspondent,  Apr. , FO /; central directive,  Apr. , FO /; memorandum by D.Eur.B.,  Apr. , FO /.  

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what Stalin and Goebbels had done between them suggested that the USSR would subjugate Poland. This is how it was widely understood. Until PWE decided what to say, Newsome was the key figure because he gave instructions to editors and his drafts were forcing bids for the central directive. PWE were less certain than Newsome about how to limit the damage. An appeal to ministers was composed demanding a ‘forthright pronouncement by HMG’ the absence of which would be interpreted by the European audience as ‘a political defeat or a renunciation of British leadership’. No suggestion of how to be forthright was offered. The central directive which followed the severance of diplomatic relations was Newsomesque and no doubt drafted by him. The pre-war journalist wanted to frustrate the old enemy and served up a plate of yesterday’s journalism: It is our job to help to ensure that history will record the Katyn forest incident as a futile attempt by Germany to postpone military defeat by political manoeuvres . . . the Reichstag Fire succeeded for one reason: because Hitler’s opponents were bamboozled by it into disunity and defeat. If they had dealt with it coolly and sensibly, it would now be remembered merely as a last desperate gamble of the Nazi leaders before defeat. We can legitimately expect that diplomacy will prevent the exploitation by the Germans of Doctor Goebbels’ initial success.

Cool, good sense was required. But the warning to the Foreign Office and the strained analogy with the Reichstag Fire, though hinting that the time had come to take sides, did not offer the BBC anything to say. The directives were not always models of crisp instruction, and this one seemed drafted to keep up morale in Bush House and to minimize overt sympathy for the Poles. In the Directorate of Plans—particularly important in Lockhart’s absence—Henry Lucas drew no comfort from the central directive: The Germans have merely set fire to this smouldering schism. You will remember that at our Wednesday morning [directive] meeting there was a tendency to underestimate the present dispute and particularly to belittle the propagandist success of the Germans. This seemed to me to be based on the desire of the propagandists here to deny the magnitude of the German propagandists’ achievement. In fact it showed a guilt complex . . . we have little to our credit in such respect.

Lucas was wondering why PWE could not devise similar strokes of sorcery. But the Germans had only done the obvious: they probed what had just been made public—Soviet animosity to the Polish government; they asserted that British weakness and cynicism had adapted to Bolshevik callousness and that PWE draft minute on the Russo-Polish Situation,  Apr. , FO /. Central directive,  Apr. , FO /.  H. O. Lucas to Ritchie Calder,  Apr. , FO /. Lucas was a wealthy City businessman well known to Eden. Calder later wrote: ‘I was beset by romantics and needed a cynic . . . [to ensure that] propaganda would not make policy’: S. Zuckermann, From Apes to Warlords (), . In  Lucas’s health broke through overwork, and he died soon afterwards.  

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everyone’s fate was dark unless Europe helped Germany to defend itself. No one imagined that Poland needed a German victory, but that was beside the point. There was not going to be a huge Nazi empire in the east. As the military balance swung against the Wehrmacht, the severe limitations of fascist Euro-patriotism meant that ‘Katyn’ could help conserve existing German authority but not expand it. Newsome became scathing about the sort of advice he still received from the Foreign Office, and stood on his right to resist anything similiar unless it came from the top of PWE. It was prudent to repeat that the Anglo-Soviet alliance was a union of absolute necessity and was too valuable—for Poland not least—to be undone by old crimes and future anxieties. There was one audience which wanted reassurance and another whose faint hopes for a compromise peace had to be extinguished. This was not difficult. PWE chose to avoid explanations. None could have been given without higher encouragement. Some found this a serious handicap; others, resenting the note of anti-Soviet reservation the Poles had been allowed, were simply relieved that it would now be easier to censor the Poles. Newsome believed that pro-Soviet pugnacity was a sufficient response to any question Berlin could propose. Though the BBC did not support the Soviet claim about Katyn, Newsome came as close as he could. As the ‘Man in the Street’ he used an anti-fascist table-thumping style, which was not over-employed in BBC broadcasting: The German Press and Radio . . . have been flooding the world with stories about the alleged mass-graves of Smolensk, supposed to contain the bodies of Poles executed by the Russians . . . There are no words capable of describing so utterly inhuman and fantastic a perversion of the truth. When cynicism passes certain bounds it reaches a realm of craziness which baffles the power of expression in words. . . . It is plain to me that something is snapping in the Nazi mind, that their nerve is giving way . . . But if anyone imagines that our nerve will break and that we shall be so appalled by the savageries and horrors of their war that we shall falter in our resolve, he can dismiss that illusion at once. The conditions for a negotiated peace can no more be created by Nazi savagery than by Nazi suavity. Mad brutes, mouthing a ghastly travesty of human speech, have Europe in their grip. They must be stamped into the dust and the mind and soul of man cleansed of their memory.

As reassurance, this was perfect: the touch of Ilya Ehrenburg was a note of deep solidarity. That it was prompted by an enemy story that was true is a diabolic irony. Only an improbably strict logician would have noticed that the Katyn story had not actually been denied or the Russian version supported. Newsome believed in the simplification of human affairs which Churchill said he believed in. If the Poles were suspicious of Russia, they should keep quiet until their suspicions were less inconvenient; if the Czechs were too blithely pro-Soviet, that was their business. Newsome thought the 

‘Man in the Street’,  Apr. , Polish folder, Newsome Papers.

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inconveniences in Polish policy were infiltrated by anti-communists in the Foreign Office. The specialists were defensive about Poland’s rights, but Eden was pro-Soviet. It was really Churchill’s complex hesitation that had allowed the Poles and their supporters to cling to their hopes. But Newsome felt that the time had come to shut out obscurantists from Radio London, and a case in point was Foreign Office disapproval of the Czechoslovak decision to expel almost the entire Sudeten-German population. Sudeten anti-fascist émigrés objected fiercely. The German Social-Democrat Wenzel Jaksch found his loyalty exploding in his face and he had rebelled. After hearing that a talk by Jaksch was a Foreign Office ‘must’, Newsome decided to fight: Before the Jaksch question came up, the Polish–Soviet dispute was discussed and Mr. Harrison, of the Central department of the F.O., expressed the view that it was essential for us to support the Polish Government’s point of view because the whole question of the status of the exiled Governments was at stake and, unless we supported the Polish point of view, we should be ‘going in with Russia against Europe’ (a phrase borrowed straight from Dr Goebbels) and we should have all the other exiled Governments up in arms . . . . . . I gathered that Dr. Bene˘s’ Government should be excepted from this consideration [about ‘our smaller allies’] for the reason that it was on good terms with Moscow and was critical of the Polish Government’s conduct.

Newsome berated the diplomats for poor judgement: he had warned the Foreign Office about ‘Polish broadcasts which seemed to be too hostile to the Soviet for us to transmit’, but had been told not to worry with consequences ‘of which all were now aware’. This claim was unproven. The Russians did complain about Polish publicity in Britain, but not about the BBC. Molotov asked on  April whether the ´ British ever listened to the secret broadcasting station Swit which discouraged resistance and whose attitude to the USSR was ‘sometimes no less hostile than ´ Goebbels’ own’. Swit had been started so late it seemed an anti-Soviet expedient. The refusal to come clean to the Russians about it had been ridiculous. ´ But Sikorski told Swit to make no comments about Russia unless they would ´ shifted from being an unidentifiable freedom ‘mitigate’ the situation. Swit station to the semi-official voice of the Underground. Soviet criticisms of it continued, but PWE knew they were rarely specific. The reaction to Katyn did strengthen Newsome’s sort of anti-fascism in the short term. It was agreed that the Poles should say less in their own defence, and the convenient opinion was that Moscow might have allowable grievances against certain London Poles. The Foreign Office found that Britain’s right to respond belonged in effect to Bush House. While PWE pondered, Newsome supplied a safe pair of hands. Newsome to AC (Eur.S),  May , Policy file, Newsome Papers. Sargent to Gubbins,  May , HS /; Osborne, ‘The Position of P’,  May , FO /.  

K AT Y N : ‘A G I F T F O R G O E B B E L S ’

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The Russians appeared to be pleased with the British tendency to be apologetic and self-critical. Alexander Werth noticed a marked pro-British flavour in public pronouncements during May; he understood this as relief that Britain’s Polish commitment had crumbled so easily. Newsome felt that he had wrestled with Goebbels: ‘it is not melodramatic to say that we have passed through the supreme political crisis of the war’. Melodramatic as this was, it was sober by comparison with his rhapsody on the dissolution, in May, of the Comintern: ‘It is the most significant historical event since the publication of the Communist Manifesto. It closes one era in the political evolution of mankind and opens another.’ After dining with Eden, Newsome took away the impression that: Eden is entirely on the Soviet side tho’ he thinks the Russians probably did kill the Soviet officers [scilicet Polish officers]. He declared it was not the Soviet intention to set up a rival Polish Government in Moscow but that their aim was to force Sikorski to change his Government, throw out the fascists, ban the State Council, control the  odd Polish newspapers in this country. Eden said we were using our influence with the Poles to this end . . . Eden seemed to be unaware of the activities of F.O. officials.

‘Fascists’ is perhaps Newsome’s shorthand not Eden’s. Lockhart blamed Churchill’s ‘infatuation’ with Sikorski for the want of plain speaking. Though he was then on sick leave, he felt the same impatience with the Poles that Eden and Newsome shared. Soviet propaganda against the London Poles, already ominous before Katyn, became brazen afterwards. Detailed Soviet complaints were made public. Claude Cockburn’s newsletter The Week produced on  April a detailed account of Polish–Russian disputes which had only been available to those in government. It tried to establish a Soviet grudge against Britain (‘Polish fascist agitation on British soil’) and warned that there was no Pole in London, except Sikorski and the ambassador Raczy´nski, suitable for inclusion in a reconstructed Polish government. More directly, Newsome received advice from the Chief Correspondent of TASS: ‘Don’t worry. There will be a Polish People’s Army soon on Russian soil.’ This revealed that more was at stake than a formal diplomatic link. The BBC diplomatic correspondent learnt at the Soviet Embassy that ‘the only solution that would satisfy Russia in the long run would be a Polish Government entirely amenable to Russian influence’.  Werth, Russia at War, –. It was essential . . . for the Russians to try to “localise” the Polish problem . . . Hence perhaps the record warmth vis-à-vis Britain and America in May and June  . . . On May  . . . all over the country coloured posters were displayed of the three equal-sized bolts of lightning bearing the British, American, and Russian colours, breaking the Beast’s back’.  ‘Notes on a New Phase in Broadcasting to Europe’,  May , and ‘Notes on the Dissolution of the Comintern’,  May , Policy File, Newsome Papers.  ‘The Polish Soviet Crisis’, sheet from a diary,  May, Polish folder, Newsome Papers; Lockhart diary,  May .  Anna Kallin to D.Eur.B.,  Apr. ; Captain Kennedy to D.Eur.B., ‘Conversation with Mr Tetlov’, undated (probably / Apr.), Polish folder, Newsome Papers.

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Soviet allegations were, after all, as grave as they were fictitious: ‘a hostile campaign against the Soviet Union commenced simultaneously in the German and Polish Press and [was] conducted along the same lines—this fact leaves no doubt as to the existence of contact and accord in carrying out this hostile campaign between the enemy of the allies—Hitler—and the Polish Government’. Privately, Churchill rejected this absurdity, but the affair was now interpreted as a crisis of Soviet amour propre, a problem of how not to overreact. The Poles were allowed to deny the charge of collaboration; there was British displeasure at polemical liberties in Soviet War News; and Churchill rebuked Maisky for sarcasms about the émigré Polish government. None the less, the damage done to the Polish position was evident in a message to Stalin two weeks later in which Churchill promised to make an attempt to adjust the Sikorski government when enough time had elapsed to make an intervention look respectable. Above all, when the Russians announced their new Ko´sciuszko division, in contravention of their agreements with the London Poles, Sikorski was prevailed upon not to make a formal protest. British policy had buckled and veered away from first intentions. But the old formulas lingered. The Poles were still not absolutely forbidden to refer to their eastern frontiers. German gloating over the collapse of the British commitment to Poland helped elicit one gesture of independence. Sikorski, speaking to Poland on  May, argued that no one could reproach the Poles if, after risking national obliteration in  in defence of ‘the integrity, sovereignty and honour’ of the nation, ‘we do not want to sacrifice the same values in favour of one of our allies’. There was not much pressure, outside the Polish region, to say more. In Poland the clandestine press affirmed their belief in an Anglo-American guarantee, a belief above all in Churchill. After all, they now had to withstand the German rehearsal of the evidence that Poland had been abandoned. One AK courier happened to be in Stockholm during the Katyn crisis and studied the available British press. On his return to Warsaw he reported that the BBC was shielding Poland from harsh truths about the West and supplying a false and idealized version of British opinion. Jan Rzepecki, the Underground intelligence chief who supervised the clandestine press in Warsaw, understood the sympathetic disingenuity of the BBC Polish Service, but he delayed revealing, through the clandestine press, how weak Poland’s position had become. Once it was believed that Britain had abandoned Poland, more young people would join the communist-led People’s Guard (GL). The lesson of events was postponed a little. Before the Polish Ambassador left Moscow, he offered the Russians a facesaving excuse. He told the Western press that the crisis was produced by Soviet  Soviet Note,  Apr. , read to Ambassador Romer: Documents on Polish–Soviet Relations  ‒ (), i. . Reprinted in Polish Fortnightly Review,  July .  Rzepecki said that ‘pessimism, which would be premature anyway, would be grist for the enemy’s mill’: Jan Nowak, Courier from Warsaw (), .

K AT Y N : ‘A G I F T F O R G O E B B E L S ’

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reluctance to confess that the Polish POWs had been abandoned in ; a simple statement to this effect before April would have prevented the misunderstanding; he did not believe that the murderers were Russian. This placatory offering was not allowed to pass Soviet censorship of outgoing telegrams. The Russians were determined to take offence and to hear nothing conciliatory. In PWE someone noticed. Lucas, who already distrusted the standard response to Katyn, looked for a better explanation of events than wounded Russian self-respect: Moscow, which instantly denounced the mass-grave story as a German trap, would not have ‘gone all the way’ with Goebbels and risked the disunity with the West which he wanted to promote unless the immediate military advantages which the Soviet was likely to secure outweighed the political disadvantages . . . They want a revolt in Poland. . . . To secure this they want to replace the present Polish Government by one more amenable to Russian policy and prepared to co-operate with Russian strategy. They hope that the distrust and despair which the situation has created in Poland will release the explosion which the Sikorski Government, backed by British propaganda policies, has been damping down.

Lucas had supplied the right question but was wrong about the answer. (His first draft had been better: ‘they must attach great importance to whatever objects they hope to achieve by thus apparently playing into the hands of Germany.’) Anxiety about Soviet military demands for partisan action had been so great that the Poles had already offered Moscow a dramatic coordinated AK attack on the rail network, and in February Stalin himself had advised the Poles not to do anything which would reveal such a capacity for concerted action. Nevertheless, Lucas, though chasing the wrong hare (‘the explosion’), was right to challenge the whole idea of ‘Katyn’ as a German propaganda event: It is flattering the German propagandists unduly to imagine that they hoped to produce either a breach between the Russians and the Sikorski Government or that they could in reality drive a wedge between Russia and the Western Allies by this single incident. Indeed, their propaganda intention was to show that the Polish Government in London, because it was powerless in the hands of the British, who in turn were subservient to the Russians, were not prepared to act in the interests of their ‘murdered’ nationals. This is borne out by the embarrassment which is now manifest in the latest German propaganda which seees in the actions of the Polish Government the risks of strengthening its influence in Poland . . . The Russian reaction to the incident shows calculation in the guise of irritation; they seized on it as a means of precipitating a situation which they wanted to create.

This was correct, but it was just too late to help. Werth, Russia at War, . H. O. Lucas, ‘Interim Minute on the Russian–Polish Breach’, second and third drafts,  May , FO /.  SOE copy of Ambassador Romer’s interview with Stalin,  Feb. , HS /.  

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P O L A N D : C H I VA L RY O R S U S P I C I O N

Stalin’s gambit unbalanced British policy as the specialists grappled with suggestions that Poland required either more support or less. When Moscow turned hostile, the Czechs fell into line. PWE learnt that Bene˘s was objecting to the ‘inability of Poland to democratise herself ’ and, using Soviet jargon, suggested that she ‘cleanse her internal politics’. He told Lockhart that unless the Poles (and the British) accepted Russian demands in time, there would be ‘no Poland’. Harold Osborne protested on behalf of the Polish region about ‘the negative attitude of the BBC’—except in Polish—and ‘the present antiPolish tone of the British Press’; and he warned that both were ‘cleverly utilised by the German propaganda machine’. One MOI official attributed Polish unpopularity to anti-Soviet truculence in the Polish-language press, but Osborne retorted, more plausibly, that this sudden unpopularity was a form of Soviet influence anchored in Fleet Street ignorance. The more time passed, the less the inclination to defend the London Poles. SOE were soon worried that their work among Polish communities in occupied Europe would be damaged by the unchallenged reception of Soviet Polonophobia in the host nations. ‘Katyn’ was in fact the Soviet initiative Sargent and Lockhart had been dreading. In early  Sargent had proposed a comprehensive settlement with Russia about eastern Europe; and he tried again, in briefing Ambassador Clark Kerr, in January . Just before the Katyn crisis Sargent had wanted an Anglo-Russian territorial solution imposed on Poland. This would have made possible a directive enabling the BBC to clarify British interests in Polish and Russian minds. Unfortunately Poland raised Britain’s deepest policy problems about Russia and America. Sargent’s desire to get Stalin to the negotiating table could not be realized unless Eden forced Churchill away from his gamble on Roosevelt, who wanted political postponment. The question of what Britain might countenance in Poland was left unresolved, and events overtook it. Lockhart foresaw that Stalin would set up more national committees on the model of the UPP; even if they began as pinpricks designed to get a reaction, they would be ‘converted into governments’ if Roosevelt and Churchill made no response. Sargent and Lockhart saw the Cold War unfolding before them, though they still hoped to make an impact. Lockhart told Eden that the Americans must, if necessary, be ignored since ‘Europe was largely an AngloRussian problem’, and he prophesied that unless Eden could sell the idea of an early and old-fashioned bargain with Russia ‘he would never be Prime Minister’. The hope for an Eden coalition to make the peace with Russia that the USA would not make is intelligible; the structural logic of Lockhart’s  Note by Moray McLaren on talk with P. Nicols (British Ambassador),  June , FO /; Young (ed.), Lockhart Diaries, ii.  ( Sept. ).  Osborne to Ritchie Calder,  Dec. ; Osborne to Sutton,  Dec. , FO /.

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warning survives in Eden’s humiliation in . Lockhart did not try to plant his message in the PWE directives. Given the wrong policy, there was simply nothing useful to be said. Even the warning that Poland could not expand west without Russian support had been postponed: ‘the Poles however will never understand this until they are spoken to in plain language, and this we will not do’. He stayed gloomily loyal; he stared helplessly at the symptoms because he knew the disease; he did not expect to see a well-constructed alliance with Russia unless Churchill lost power, and the time for that had passed. Lockhart fell back into pessimism and sickness. The Katyn expedient succeeded as a distraction while the USSR took the considerable risk of unveiling Berling’s Polish division. Although Stalin kept his options open right up to every moment of choice, the Russians were preparing to transfer recognition from the London government to a new Polish National Committee in Moscow, and in Poland they wanted the communists to split and reconstruct the Underground. In Poland Gomul/ka did use the argument that Britain was abandoning the London government, but the PPR had not succeeded by the time the Red Army reached Warsaw. After the Rising there was another lengthy attempt to a create a communist-centred, but plural, political system; it lasted until the post-war electoral failure of approved parties left Stalin with the choice of retreating a long way or imposing the communists. But if the outcome was not crystal clear until , Britain’s role did not change much after Katyn. London had refused to make plans. The problem was not that Britain had no influence—an unlikely hypothesis—nor that Britain refused, in principle, to take any sort of risk to help the Poles; it was that the risks could grow into unlimited liabilities. Vansittart thought that the British could not play poker for Poland because they kept letting Stalin see their cards. It might also be that Stalin saw their cards because Churchill and Eden were determined not to start playing poker. Churchill wanted silence. When he did threaten Stalin with a public argument—in August  and June —it was because he wanted the second front agitation to stop. Later he considered using the threat of a public dispute about Poland to prevent one and restore silence. A telegram was drafted: ‘If you want wordy warfare to begin between our two countries on the subject of Poland, you have only to continue the present declarations of the Moscow radio.’ This was a plea for Soviet discretion, and it was not even sent. The immediate political cost of wordy warfare in  would have been great. Even a limited defence of the Poles would need a case pitched high enough to  Young (ed.), Lockhart Diaries, ii. ,  (memorandum,  Aug. , and diary,  Aug. );  diary MS,  May . Nowak, Courier from Warsaw, .  Gilbert, Winston Churchill, vii.  (Churchill to Molotov,  May ); for the second front threats see pp.  and . During the Warsaw Rising Churchill did invoke British public opinion and Bell points out that Stalin was not impressed: John Bull, . It was far too late.

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P O L A N D : C H I VA L RY O R S U S P I C I O N

dispose of domestic opposition efficiently, and a free discussion of the Soviet ally might get entirely out of hand. The Soviet black record was a doomsday weapon. PWE could not explore the value the Russians placed on the post-war concert of Europe; they could use neither an open quarrel nor audacious propaganda which wrapped conspicuous concessions around plain warnings. In August  Lockhart believed the Russians still wanted a diplomatic solution: ‘although they know that no British or American soldier is likely to be willing to fight for the eastern frontiers of Europe, they probably still prefer a plan to chaos, even although they themselves might be the chief beneficiaries of this chaos.’ But PWE could not be exploratory without helping Stalin, however indirectly, to manouevre Britain into a negotiation Churchill did not want. Raczy´nski, the Polish Ambassador, thought that ‘appeasement’ had become a cultural defect in the British understanding of power; Lockhart thought that Britain kept making mistakes about whom to appease. Churchill’s deference to Washington, like Chamberlain’s appeasement of Berlin, made a difficult Russian problem insoluble. O’Malley, the British Ambassador to the Polish government, broke into bitter eloquence: ‘We have in fact perforce used the good name of England like the murderers used the little conifers to cover up a massacre’ but he knew that ‘few will think any other course would have been wise or right’. No ‘other course’ was examined; the departments were left to infer the official motives for British passivity. Of course, Lockhart’s alliance policy might also have failed. But it would have given Moscow a vested interest in British goodwill and supplied a safe and intelligible context for defending the London Poles. An Anglo-Soviet diktat on Poland’s future in  would have pleased Stalin: the Anders Army might have remained in Russia and the UPP in mothballs; the PPR might have been given a place in the Underground. This would have strengthened Sikorski among the London Poles and given Stalin less cause to take risks to give himself the option of an imposed regime; and the Warsaw Rising might, so easily, never have taken place. A Soviet anti-Polish strategy launched in  would not have resembled the careful, incremental game Stalin preferred. ‘Katyn’ revealed part of a far bigger tragedy which informed people already knew about. It was a briefly telling debating point. That Katyn should have been remembered long after other atrocities were forgotten was less a Nazi achievement than a Soviet choice. There did not have to be a diplomatic crisis. After the first shock passed, the London Poles wanted to be helpful. A joint statement, true or false, would have neutralized the story until the war’s end, Young (ed.), Lockhart Diaries, ii.  (memorandum,  Aug. ). O’Malley to Eden,  May , PREM /; for Raczyński’s views: Nowak, Courier from Warsaw, . Churchill showed O’Malley’s dispatch to Roosevelt.  

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but the Russians preferred to take up their cudgels. This decision was not forced by the scandal. Once the Russians had savaged the London Poles, and once Britain tolerated their invective, Soviet power and the mournful truth were so entangled that the Katyn graves became legendary. Stalin’s decision to use Katyn against the Poles made it the defining instance of his policy; the British response was the harbinger of theirs.

PART V

Yugoslavia: Reckoning the Odds

 Disintegration B E F O R E attacking Russia, Hitler took care that his southern flank would never be a soft underbelly. Germany threatened Greece and pressed Yugoslavia to sign the Tripartite Pact. Churchill and Eden threw caution to the wind to improvise a Balkan front on which a hypothetical coalition of Turks, Greeks, and Yugoslavs could defy the Germans and drive the Italians from Albania. This was close to preposterous—political warfare detached from military realism. The Turks kept well clear; the Greek and Yugoslav governments were incredulous and alarmed. But Churchill’s instinct was to be active and belligerent: Stalin was watching, and so was Roosevelt’s own subversive, Colonel William Donovan. In Belgrade the Regent, Prince Paul, refused to accept German troops even in transit, but he attempted to deflect Germany by signing the Tripartite Pact. In Serbia political opposition was lively. The BBC Serbo-Croat transmissions reviled the Yugoslav government as a national disgrace and called for public protests. Large demonstrations took place, and on  March  the armed forces executed a coup d’état. In London, with the Blitz at its worst, this produced a moment of amazed elation. Belgrade was ringing with anti-Nazi slogans. SOE claimed the coup as their first glittering success, which it was not. It was the BBC which communicated British hopes to the streets. Prince Paul might have kept Yugoslavia out of the war—for a year or two—but for British determination to pull the country in. The coup was a largely Serbian event. Paul was deposed, the regency cancelled, and the conspirators invited democratic politicians to share power. For Britain there were few strategic advantages except those which, without the coup, might have occurred in a different form. The Germans would have occupied Yugoslavia at some stage, but resistance starting after El Alamein would have been very different. Two weeks after the coup, the German army overran Yugoslavia. Yugoslav mobilization was confused and the Croat units were unwilling to fight. Belgrade was bombed heavily in broad daylight for three days. The Army fell to pieces, and the government requested a general armistice; but when the Germans demanded unconditional surrender the ministers and young King Peter had already flown. A thousand Yugoslav soldiers, sailors, and airmen reached Egypt. Britain was left as godparent to a new government. Prince Paul’s government had been a coalition of the Royal establishment and the Croat Peasant Party. General Dušan Simović led into exile a broader coalition 

Alfredo Breccia, Jugoslavia ‒: Diplomazia della Neutralità (), .

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Y U G O S L AV I A : R E C KO N I N G T H E O D D S

of politicians and military conspirators. But it did not represent a new Yugoslav synthesis. The Croat leaders had been disgusted by the Belgrade coup but were too shrewd to abandon their links to the Yugoslav project while the war was undecided. Yugoslavia was partitioned: Hungary recovered Bačka; Bulgaria took most of Macedonia and some border districts; Italy’s Albanian protectorate gained Kosovo and western Macedonia, and Montenegro became another protectorate; a Greater Croatia acquired Bosnia and Dalmatia less the coastal distict from Split to Zadar annexed to Italy; Slovenia was divided between Italy and Germany. There was a truncated, obviously provisional, Serbia under German military administration. In Zagreb Ante Pavelić, no longer Mussolini’s protégé, returned from exile to take power. Croatia’s fascists—the violent Ustaša movement—proclaimed ‘Independent Croatia’—Nezavisna Država Hvratska or NDH. For military purposes, the Italians controlled the west of Yugoslavia—including Istria, Dalmatia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Kosovo—and the Germans the east. Hitler gave full civil authority to Pavelić and granted him his own militia: never a very large force—at first ,. In Germany four Einsatzgruppen were being trained for mass murder in the USSR. The Ustaše were, in effect, a fifth Einsatzgruppe, and the first to strike. They yoked their cult of assassination to ultra-nationalist resentment at the presence of Serbs on their territory and went rampaging through CroatiaBosnia determined, in Ustaša terminology, to cleanse it of Serbs. Thousands died every week. The German Army was told not to interfere. By the onset of winter there were perhaps already , dead. (In January  SOE Cairo estimated the ‘disastrous blood-letting’ among the Serbs at ,; a German estimate was ,.) In August a large extermination camp for Serbs, Jews and Gypsies was set up at Jasenovac. But the Ustaše did not try to be discreet. They killed Serbs openly in the towns and villages or even in Orthodox churches. By the end of  , refugees had fled to Serbia, where the holocaust in the NDH was commonly believed to have taken a million lives. The Ustaše claimed the Bosnian Muslims as wayward Croats; and there were suddenly Muslim militias who voted Croat with their guns. (Their predecessors had been the Schutzkorps of – who punished the Serbs of eastern Bosnia for abetting the Serbian incursion of .) The Serbs were a rural majority in many parts of Pavelić’s ‘Croatia’, and in places they could fight back. In Herzegovina and Dalmatia the Serbs persuaded senior  Keble memorandum,  Jan. , CAB /; for the German estimate see Milan Deroc, British Special Operations Explored (), ; J. R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History (), , suggests that Serb victims in the NDH ‘surely surpasses , men, women and children’; Srdja Trifković suggests ,: Usta˘sa: Croatian Separatism and European Politics (), . Wartime Yugoslav losses appear to be about a million including , Croats and , Bosnian Muslims: Lampe,  n. .

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Italian commanders, disgusted by the Ustaše, to extend inland their occupation zone and even to arm Serb ‘chetniks’. A fighting band was a četa, each fighter was a četnik. From Dubrovnik up to Fiume (Rijeka) there was a coastal strip inhabited largely by Croats, but a little way inland there were extensive Serb communities. From  they were looking for protection and revenge. Armed resistance by Serbs revived several overlapping fighting traditions. One tradition of insurrection, in the Serbian heartland on the Danube and Morava, had secured in  the limited autonomy which was the germ of Serbia’s statehood; another, in Montenegro, Herzegovina, and eastern Bosnia, was also nationalist but more crude, rooted in localities, and usually antiMuslim, and its greatest impact had been the rebellion of – which undermined Ottoman rule in Bosnia; the third tradition was not so much chetnik as ‘grenzer’: the professional soldiering of the Military Border, an important Habsburg legal entity whose abolition in  forced the Border (Krajina) Serbs to exchange self-government for a difficult reintegration in Croatia. There had been ‘chetnik’ fighting in Macedonia; a rising in occupied Serbia in ; and ‘chetnik’ violence against Muslim landlords in Bosnia in –. West of the river Drina chetniks now reappeared as a Serbian defence force against extermination. This Serb resistance was sectarian but otherwise malleable: whoever provided guns and leadership had a chance to imprint their own purposes on the men they armed. The Ustaša brought chaos to Bosnia and the old Croatian Military Border and in this chaos a second contest formed. Serbian resistance split apart as new warlords—regional, Yugoslav, or communist—disagreed on how to frustrate the Ustaša. Resistance sometimes became indiscriminate retaliation. In places the Ustaša slaughter was stopped especially where the Italians intervened. But as the Ustaša offensive faltered, the battle between various sorts of chetnik and the communist Partisans—at first almost equally Serb—grew into the principal contest in Yugoslavia. The problem of post-war succession posed itself immediately. Most Croats, all communists, and an uncertain number of Serbs would oppose the recreation of Yugoslav central government without fancy repackaging. PWE considered the mass of Croats, in the Peasant Party tradition, to be mildly anti-Nazi; but independence, even within Hitler’s New Order, was attractive, Croat loyalty to Yugoslavia had collapsed, and the Croat resistance potential was doubtful. The Serbian resistance potential was demonstrated immediately. No people in occupied Europe were as optimistic about a German defeat. Confidence in an Anglo-Russian victory was strong and widespread: the British would presumably land at Salonica and march north in the footsteps of the Allies in . The Croats did not share these fond memories. The British problem was to identify what lay behind old labels: ‘Croatia’ so blood-soaked and unstable; the ‘Serbs’ and what they might mean by a restored Yugoslavia; and the ‘Communists’—destined for British

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inverted commas—who declared, intermittently, that Royal Yugoslavia was dead and gone. For two years only Britain had direct access to the country—from African airfields or submarines. Radio London was well known from the beginning. Radio sets were not plentiful but villages, and guerrilla companies, often had at least one. Radio London explained the war and the future: the words were almost too important. Radio London was well respected up to a point. One SOE agent noticed that the Serbs would accept without question the London version of events in France or Poland; but when it came to Yugoslavia itself ‘the advantage lay with the occupier’ with ‘his finger on every pulse in the country’: BBC news was ‘far more scanty and less reliable’. Broadcasts twice helped an obscure figure become a Yugoslav hero, but on neither occasion were PWE entirely clear what they were doing. Actual opinion and the true response to British broadcasts were always uncertain. So were British motives. In May  Colonel Dragoljub (Draža) Mihailović with six officers, some Yugoslav soldiers, and a priest made a declaration of loyalty to King Peter II ‘on the day of the formation of the first battalion of your Mountain Guard on glorious Suvobor’. Mount Suvobor, near the river Kolubara, was glorious because the Austrians had been defeated there in December . The peasantry of western Serbia, and the authorities in Belgrade, soon learnt that there were fighters in the woods. In August SOE learnt through couriers reaching Istanbul that Colonel Mihailović was resisting on Suvobor and a monitoring station in Malta picked up a radio signal from him. The air route from Egypt to Serbia was a return trip of two thousand miles, but D. T. Hudson and two Yugoslav officers were sent by submarine to the coast of Montenegro and a Yugoslav courier brought money via Istanbul. Draža Mihailović was already known to SOE as a specialist in irregular warfare. He was a general staff intellectual who had been trained in France. He had been a rather political military attaché in Bulgaria in , where he was considered naively sympathetic to Russia; he had been disciplined in  for breaking up a pro-Nazi demonstration in Slovenia; and he was disciplined again after Dunkirk for declaring British sympathies at the home of the British military attaché. British observers both before the war and in late  were convinced that Mihailović was not a Serb chauvinist. Although his first colleagues in resistance were antiparliamentary nationalists—the sort that rallied to de Gaulle—his political entourage later received left-wing support and became more representative. Jasper Rootham, Miss Fire (), . Glenconner (SOE) to Brooks,  Nov. , FO /.  ˘ Lucien Karchmar, Dra˘za Mihailovi´c and the Rise of the Cetnik Movement – (), i. –; David Martin, The Web of Disinformation: Churchill’s Yugoslav Blunder (), ; Rootham, Miss Fire, ; Stevan Pavlowitch, ‘La France Libre et la Yugoslavie’, Münchner Zeitschrift für Balkankunde,  (), .  

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He had a quiet, thoughtful manner and an unaffected modesty, though under pressure he proved independent-minded and suspicious. Mihailović could inspire loyalty but would not, like Tito or de Gaulle, take risks to impose obedience. He had urged military preparation for occupation and for resistance in the mountains. He had also advocated dividing the Yugoslav army into Serbian and Croatian units, and this may have drawn upon him the suspicion of Croat ministers. In April he had started his guerrilla campaign in the Ozren and Romanija mountains of Bosnia. Then he crossed the Drina into Serbia. By July he had gathered together enough officers and peasant followers for his ‘Army Chetniks’ to play a part in the revolt in western Serbia. His Mountain Guard became the ‘Ravna Gora movement’ and then the ‘Yugoslav Army in the Homeland’. But the real Yugoslav Army had surrendered. , Serbian army officers spent the war in German POW camps. Yugoslav communist party cadres had not been interned. The Germans had been still constrained by the Nazi–Soviet Pact. The invading Germans soon departed from rural Serbia leaving behind small garrisons in the towns. A disorderly response to a weak occupation slithered into rebellion. In July hundreds of party members left Belgrade for western Serbia, and started their insurrection by attacking and disarming the police, flaunting red stars, giving orders, and firing on German soldiers. This insurrection was not unpopular, and it fused—in the western Morava valley and on the lower Drina—with the mustering of chetniks aware that the German garrisons were vulnerable. The peasants were puzzled that their Army had not fought better and some wanted another try. Mihailović did not, but he reluctantly joined in. The lightly armed peasant bands which laid siege to small German garrisons were led by an assortment of communists, notables, officers, priests, and ambitious individuals. The communists had a single organization, the rest did not. The German military authorities did not, at first, want to ask for reinforcements and so they turned to General Milan Nedić. On  August Nedić, once a Minister of War, accepted the offer to preside over a Serbian ‘Government of National Salvation’, a curious body which was allowed to govern in the name of King Peter. Nedić hoped that good behaviour could secure protection for the Serbs of eastern Bosnia. He was a Serbian nationalist, a post-Yugoslav and anti-communist, who had many supporters among refugees from the Ustaše. He was not as popular or legitimate as Pétain in France, but his motives were similar and, at first, he was not much resented except by the communists. There was one thoroughly collaborationist movement in Serbia, the ‘Zbor’ led by the quasi-fascist Dimitrije Ljotić. The Zbor had a very small militia, but it was a more disciplined, more strictly anticommunist force than the Ustaša. The Partisans made approaches to Mihailović in September because they wanted his officers. They despised the Army but needed its skills. They were elated by their immediate ability to lead from the front, and they asserted that

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they were in command. They expanded their organizing potential by recruiting left-wing people whose parties had evaporated and who wanted to be active. The ‘Communists’, as they were called by others, or ‘Partisans’, as they called themselves following Russian nomenclature, were pleased to accept chetnik assistance in battle but elbowed everyone aside when it came to local administration. The Army officers who were, at first, their allies were soon at the limit of their tolerance for people who went round the villages sneering at the absent King and burning land registers. When chetniks—including some loyal to Mihailović—reacted violently, rifts developed swiftly. Finding their followers entangled with each other, Mihailović and Tito tried to negotiate. Mihailović was not a dogmatic anti-communist, and he hesitated to start a contest. But he regretted Tito’s appearance and did not hide his conviction that the rebellion was a mistake. Various agreements between the two leaders failed to hold and a struggle for power around the town of Užice grew worse. The Germans did not rush to counter-attack. They watched events from the larger towns and started to execute hostages in hundreds. On  August  the BBC broadcast a Yugoslav government warning against those who brought sufferings on the people by premature action, and on  August the Prime Minister, General Simović, provided the message ‘Wait till the nightingale sings on the pyramids’. PWE’s black station for Serbia—Radio Šumadija—started in August, and took the line that the Serbs were responding to its calls for ‘general restraint’. When a report came from Istanbul that the guerrillas had adopted the slogan ‘Our home is the forest’, SOE asked Ralph Murray, the director of the PWE Balkan region, to emphasize the need for these men to remain in the forest and stay away from the Germans. Radio Šumadija took up this theme next day. Dalton considered that the guerrillas should avoid ‘large scale risings or ambitious military operations’, avoid ‘severe repression’ and conserve ‘key men’; they should, instead, prepare a ‘widespread underground organisation ready to strike later on when we give the signal’. Mihailović would soon confirm that only minor guerrilla operations suited ‘the reality of the situation’. But PWE policy started to drift. Once the Mihailović movement was recognized, the rising was somehow approved. It is almost impossible to extract a clear position from British discussions in winter /, but Lockhart’s claim, next spring, that Mihailović’s ‘quiescence’ owed nothing to ‘our Serbian broadcasts’ is incomprehensible. The broadcast appeals were cautionary.  Miroljub Jevtović, Šta Kaže Radio-London (), ; Elisabeth Barker, British Policy in SouthEast Europe in the Second World War (), .  Progress report for week ending  Aug. , FO /; J. S. A. Pearson (SOE) to Murray,  Aug. , FO /. Murray was important to PWE because he understood the BBC, which he had joined in .  Dalton to Churchill,  Aug. , CAB /; F. W. D. Deakin, Embattled Mountain (), .  Lockhart to Sargent,  Apr. : Simon Trew, Britain, Mihailović and the Chetniks, – (), .

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When Hudson met Tito, there had already been some fighting between Chetniks and Partisans. Tito objected to the BBC’s discovery of Mihailović as a national hero. The Yugoslavs already had a report from Istanbul which mentioned the belligerent attitude of the Partisans and their high morale. SOE do not seem to have known much about the Yugoslav Communist party. It was a party of few workers and many intellectuals, though it had, ever since , enjoyed a useful degree of support among the struggling Serb peasantry of the mountainous west. Where Mihailović had almost no political experience, Tito was both a veteran organizer and a born leader. He ran a party of younger men with a natural and easy ascendency. His political education had begun as a prisoner of war in revolutionary Russia and was completed in Stalin’s Moscow. When Yugoslavia was occupied, his party had seen the potential for resistance. At Tito’s ‘May Consultation’ with regional party leaders, this decision was seasoned with revolutionary audacity: the communists would resist the new Ustaša regime in Croatia but also attack the Army officers understood to be gathering in the woods of Serbia. The destruction of both species of domestic reaction would make revolution inevitable when the Germans withdrew. This goal was qualified, but not altered, when Russia became Britain’s ally. The Comintern recommended ‘national front’ vocabulary but did not clearly stipulate the abandonment of the revolutionary objective set in May. Tito signalled to the Comintern in September that one item of agreement within any communist-led ‘national front’ must be ‘joint struggle against English agents and attempts to restore the old order’. Even if Tito’s radicalism was unwelcome, Moscow could do little with a party well beyond their reach and fizzing with initiative. Mihailović’s loyalties were as firmly committed as Tito’s. Neither side was ready to compromise their duties. The Partisans wished not simply to fight but, incredibly, to hold and administer the small towns and villages they were able to seize. They thought, or pretended, they could defend the districts seized in September. The Germans continued to give notice of their intentions. Hitler insisted that all rebellion should be called communist and that reprisals were to be stated as ratios of  or  ‘communists’ killed for the death of every German. In the towns of Kragujevac and Kraljevo—not far from rebel U žice—several thousands died. In liberated Užice, however, two months of Chetnik/Partisan negotiation ended in a fight for the town on  November. There were apples of discord: the rifle factory and a bank. By this time it was evident both to Mihailović and to Tito that they could only be successful if the problem of the other could be solved. Mihailović aimed to  S. Clissold (ed.), Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union ‒ (), ; see also Milovan Djilas, Memoir of a Revolutionary (), .  Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims (), ii. –. ,, including hundreds of schoolboys, were killed at Kragujevac. The number of hostages executed in Serbia before  Dec., according to one patently incomplete German reckoning, was ,: Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust ‒ (), –.

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preside over a network of clandestine guerrilla units based on army officers. The name četnik, though traditional and applied to the Army movement by common consent, was dangerous. Kosta Pećanac, a Great War hero, led ‘chetnik’ bands which he switched from resistance to collaboration after  June. Even Nedić’s State Guard could be called Chetniks. Nedić and Pećanac were collaborators. They submitted to the Germans so that the Serbian nation could, literally, survive the war. Mihailović shared their alarm, but he believed that only the alliance with Britain could preserve Yugoslavia. Until the war changed for the better his Army Chetniks would live in the woods as full-time resisters. They would learn to defend themselves and accustom the villages to their presence. In Serbia the distinction between real and bogus Chetniks— respectively ‘illegal’ and ‘legal’—was understood but it was not straightforward. A thinly-veiled loyalty to Mihailović was common inside the ‘legal’ militias. News of the Chetnik/Partisan confrontation was obtained when Hudson reached Ravna Gora on  October. Hudson had spent a month with the Montenegrin communists and a short time at Tito’s HQ in Užice before he reached Mihailović. He was, from the first, a critic of the Chetniks using Partisan expressions. With the Partisan example before him, Hudson preferred open guerrilla warfare to the secret work and intrigue that Mihailović thought more timely. He demanded a union of anti-fascists, but he had no instructions on the terms of a union, and there were violent arguments. Mihailović was confident of Allied recognition and approved the realism of London broadcasts. But Partisan attacks on his Chetniks grew worse in early November, and he feared his movement would be forcibly snuffed out. Mihailović became disgusted by the communists and more afraid of them. His men were so desperate for weapons he agreed to meet a German intelligence officer, hoping that the Germans would be foolish enough to supply him. The interview brought only a summons to surrender which Mihailović refused. In any case, the Germans made a judgement. They decided that Mihailović represented their most serious opponent in Serbia. His allegiances were neither concealed nor in doubt. Those he commanded in Serbia—Hudson called them true Chetniks—were genuine resisters, although the Požega Chetniks, the keenest to fight communists, suddenly defected to Nedić. On  November the BBC announced that Mihailović was recognized as leader of all resistance in Yugoslavia. The Partisans refused to recognize this, but they reduced their own claims and offered an alliance. Another truce was patched up in late November. PWE were given the nub of Hudson’s political reports almost immediately: ‘Colonel Mihailović refuses to combine with the Communists, stating that

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For the German version of this meeting see Deroc, British Special Operations, –.

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notwithstanding his loyalty to the Crown, he would rather have Nedić than the Communists.’ Hudson’s messages supply snatches of an argument, and their meaning was not transparent. Mihailović would hardly have declared to Hudson a preference for collaboration. He was explaining his attitude not to resistance but civil authority. He could no longer watch the communists take control of small towns without alarm. Nedić did keep inviting Mihailović to collaborate, but he was also ready to kill him. In time Nedić became seriously hostile to the DM Chetniks, but at this stage exploratory contacts were only to be expected. The Partisans learnt of Nedić’s offers to Mihailović as early as September. In due course this was used as firm evidence of Chetnik collaboration, but not at the time. Preferring ‘Nedić’ to the communists was, in , as consensual in Serbia as preferring Pétain to Thorez in France. In SOE it was not. Nedić had long been known as a pro-Axis, right-wing obstacle to British interests. He was taken for a lesser quisling who just might deserve a question mark. Eden claimed that the revolt was a national rising which might persist if GHQ Cairo could send in substantial support. Dalton saw important work ahead for SOE, and the Joint Planning Staff suggested that the risings might not be premature if SOE was involved, although this did not impress the COS. Eden was displeased to learn that General Simović broadcast on  November asking that all acts which could only provoke the Germans ‘should immediately cease’. But War Office military intelligence (MI) believed that the fighting was indeed premature, and Cairo confessed that the revolt was simply beyond their reach. Open rebellion, as it turned out, was a gamble on the confusions of the Italian zone. The London discussion was unrealistic until the logistical problem of supplying the revolt was recognized. MI advised that a nationwide revolt would be suppressed in the towns and that a simmering movement in the hills was enough. But this simmering needed a definition. The London Yugoslavs were as anxious about heavy casualties as any other government. SOE Cairo were left to do what they could with a share in two or three aircraft. The BBC’s account of the rebellion repeated press reports. The story that the entire rebellion in Serbia was directed by Mihailović came from a Serbian businessman in Istanbul. London was told that Mihailović had , men under arms. SOE did not believe it, but the hyperbole was not stamped out when the story surfaced. Raymond Brock, an American journalist in Istanbul, wrote articles about Mihailović and his army of guerrillas which set the pattern for press accounts of Yugoslav resistance in the coming months. Mihailović was annoyed to hear this material recycled by the BBC and  Glenconner to Brooks,  Nov. , FO /. Such assertions may be SOE judgements surfacing as Mihailović’s reported speech: Trew, Britain, Mihailović and the Chetniks, –.   Karchmar, Draža Mihailović, i. –. Trew, Britain, Mihailović and the Chetniks, –.

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he concluded that the British must be desperate. There was nothing perverse about the intention to promote Mihailović as a national leader. If it was nonsense, it was not the only fable used to strengthen London exiles. It was uniquely dramatic because Mihailović was a named resistance chief. Making him famous was intended to help him to cope with the Partisans but not to accelerate a civil war. The London authorities made Mihailović the Chetnik leader of a rising he disliked. But the Partisans had no intention of tolerating a resistance of the Army officers with a political structure separate from their own. They might use guile but they were not tempted to compromise the demand for a fusion of forces. This was reckless and revolutionary. The Chetniks were seen as raw material to be husstled into an irrevocable choice. If some swerved into the arms of Nedić, the best patriots would more easily concede to the communists the requisite leading role. Tito’s conviction that a revolution had begun was widely shared. The Yugoslav communists had long displayed real bolshevik aggression. The Partisans were not impressed by opposition since it confirmed their chiliastic expectations. Tito was not yet a crypto-revolutionary leading patriots, he was an overt revolutionary driven on by others. Moscow might grumble, but the Russian comrades would understand armed action. Besides, only success could be truly orthodox; it would not merely quieten Moscow but oblige even the British to come to terms. Tito cannot have doubted his ability to swallow the Army Chetniks if they accepted union. Some officers, impressed by Partisan political skills, did join the Partisans, but they had to choose between the party line or silence. Tito’s most generous offer would have made Mihailović his chief of staff for Serbia, flanked by commissars. The Ravna Gora movement could not deal with a lean and hungry political party on equal terms. In London Mihailović was promoted from Colonel to General and Yugoslav Commander-in-Chief. But he was less attractive to the Partisans the more he represented the Yugoslav state. Had this been understood, it would have made no difference. PWE were told that, while Britain recognized the Yugoslav government, British aid could not go to the communists. Hudson had few diplomatic skills, and he got himself banished from HQ for months. The General did not admit this or respond with complete frankness to what he could not see: the sympathy which existed in London. He detested any British assumption that Yugoslav sovereignty was somehow in suspension. Unlike de Gaulle he was not able to be a purist about collaboration. Italian hostility to the Ustaša was too important to be discarded. But in a war of ideologies only a major power can license intrigue. When the Germans finally attacked Užice in late November there was another massacre. The Partisans tried to fight—they killed twelve enemy soldiers— 

.

S. K. Pavlowitch, ‘The Second World War in Yugoslavia’, European Studies Review,  (),

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but the Germans killed  and took nearly  prisoners. The rest fled to the Italian zone. The Serbian Revolt was over. Mihailović reported the last Chetnik–Partisan truce, then that there were no communists left fighting in Serbia. His government ordered a ‘united front of all Patriots’. After a few weeks’ enforced silence, Mihailović explained, correctly, that the Germans were working hard to destroy his movement and he asked for Dimitrije Ljotić to be branded as a traitor. But he also complained that scattered communists were still making attacks on his supporters and had become ‘hated throughout the villages’. In early  Mihailović did not just stop trying to get a truce with the Partisans, he was at war with them for reasons which he did not fully explain. He may well have feared that Hudson truly represented Britain, and he knew that, whatever the facts, London would press him to re-embrace an intolerable ally. Mihailović quickly expanded his authority in Serbia, but elsewhere other Chetnik leaders were always more important even though they used the General’s name. He did not operate as a traditional Chetnik voivoda. Such warlords extended a personal sway over a distinct territory, avoiding or seeking battle according to the moods and opportunities of their localities. Dragutin Keserović on the Kapaonik mountain; Pavle Djurišić in Montenegro; and Momčilo Djujić near Knin were cast in this traditional mould. They were big personalities—locally important, independent and difficult; they accepted Mihailović only as the distant chief. Even in Serbia he did not personally command any large fighting band. He was a wandering commander-in-chief trying to transform every district odred (or, later, korpus) into the open part of a district armée secrète. Chetnik armed strength was not meant to be mobilized or moved very far without compelling reason. Mihailović saw the symbolic value of guerrilla warfare but he did not suppose it could be militarily important on its own. If he saw the difficulty of turning villagers into soldiers without letting them fight, he accepted the limitation philosophically. He had seen in  how little even good infantry could achieve against German firepower, and the lesson had just been repeated. His preference for a secret army strategy and his tolerance of Chetnik parochialism suggests how much he thought about the Germans and how little about the Partisans. SOE shared some his views, although some officials were inclined to ask more of the Yugoslavs than anyone else. This was not argued out with the government or explained to Mihailović. The civil war took hold after the Germans inadvertently pushed the rival leaders away from each other. Tito’s main force regathered inside the Italian zone—in the Sandžak. Here the German pursuit stopped, and the Italians were slow to react. In this thinly populated no man’s land Tito was reinforced by Partisans retreating from Montenegro. He organized mobile ‘proletarian  

Dirk-Gerd Erpenbeck, Serbien  (),  n. . Yugoslav Aide-Mémoire, answering the Soviet note of  Aug. , FO /.

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brigades’—as a spearhead force to fight anyone—and spent six months trying to develop the Partisan insurrection in the Serbian communities of the Sandžak, Herzegovina, and eastern Bosnia. The Muslims were so entirely hostile they were treated as enemies. Between December  and April  the autumn revolt in Serbia was recapitulated. The Partisans tried to capture a genuine and lively Chetnik resistance through a mixture of infiltration and negotiation, but when they failed they turned violent and used their indoctrinated hard core to force themselves on communities that were getting sceptical. The Chetnik leader in eastern Bosnia, Jezdimir Dangić, had been an early associate of Mihailović, but he went independent. He faced the Ustaša problem in acute form. When the Germans first disturbed the Chetnik/Partisan hold on the region, Dangić went to Belgrade to persuade the High Command to transfer eastern Bosnia to Nedić in return for tranquillity. The offer was rejected, and the Chetniks continued to obstruct the formation of the Ustaša state on the left bank of the Drina. In March and April Tito’s ‘first proletarian brigade’ marched into Dangić’s liberated zone conscripting local Chetniks and shooting their officers. Then, avoiding the Partisans, the Ustaša ‘Black Legion’ appeared on the scene. The communists and fascists decided not to fight each other, and concentrated on dismantling Chetnik power in the upper Drina valley. For the Chetniks this was unforgivable. After the Germans drove off the Partisans yet again, most Chetniks in eastern Bosnia came to terms with the occupier. Dangić, however, was eventually arrested. He was sent to a German concentration camp, escaped, and fought for the Poles in the Warsaw Rising; but the Partisans shot him at the end of the war. Many of the Chetniks dispersed by the German offensive in Serbia enlisted in the Nedić militia. Mihailović and his staff, convinced that armed rebellion would not be a serious option in the foreseeable future, allowed this. The more who joined the Nedić militia, the less reliable they would be against his ‘illegal’ Chetniks. This demi-monde of peasant cunning and patriotic manoeuvre was not the resistance the communists were equipped to practise, and they denounced it. Nothing, save perhaps a thunderbolt from Stalin, could have persuaded them to alter their stance. The Partisans attacked every form of local administration: a ferocious political assault on collaboration was needed to justify the strategy. The suggestion that all Chetniks were embroiled in intrigues was an essential exaggeration. It was a radicalizing myth with enough truth in it to convince the accusers and disconcert some of the accused. The claim that Chetnik intrigue was essentially pro-Axis would not, at first, impress SOE. What was pro-Italian one moment could become pro-British the next. Karchmar, Draža Mihailović, i. –. ‘He [Nedić] has not his own army. All are secretly with us. Unfortunately, there are officers who serve him and the Germans . . . I have plenty of officers penetrated in his ranks.’ (Mihailović to Yugoslav PM,  May , WO /.)  

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The DM Chetniks conformed to the wider resistance pattern in having selective quarrels with collaborators. Attacks on Nedić were broadcast by Radio London at Mihailović’s request, but local administration was left alone. Nedić and Mihailović became real and declared enemies. Their antagonism was the main theme in Serbia until . But the Partisans saw nothing but the blows directed against themselves. Their path was blocked by the social symbiosis of monarchist collaboration and royal resistance. Partisan warfare and Chetnik resistance could not be combined. As allies or enemies, one form of resistance had to give way to the other. Partisan warfare took the military form of an endless retreat from superior force, with requisitioning and propaganda as the essential supporting tasks. The Chetniks genuinely believed that this was more political demonstration than fighting, and so they confused themselves: it was both. Indignation prompted the accusation that the Partisans were military locusts whose technique amounted to terrorism. Hence the deluded Chetnik assertions that the Partisans did not really fight at all. Training was a prime military requirement. Tito’s army obtained it from Italian garrison troops who leaked guns and were slow in pursuit. What started as a Chetnik debating point degenerated into self-deception. But a shrewder accusation was that the Partisans employed an unsustainable aggression against the occupier to get hold of recruits—from which point their struggle was mainly indoctrination and civil war. Parents resented losing their children to agitators; there was a generational fracture among educated Yugoslavs. The Ustaša massacres planted the terrible suspicion that, whoever won the war, the Serbs would be so reduced in number that Yugoslavia would be redefined against them. Reckless retaliation—against Croats or Muslims— expressed the mood of Serbs in the NDH, but in time it damaged the political standing of all Chetniks. The massacre of Muslims in Foča, in eastern Bosnia, was the most dreadful. The Ustaše had killed the leading Serbs in the town; when the Chetniks took Foča the ensuing massacre of Muslims was far worse. Widespread attacks by Chetniks on Muslim villages were confirmed to SOE Cairo in July . In Montenegro and Herzegovina, communist resistance was quickly disfigured by executions and murders. Partisan execution squads dealt preemptively with opponents. It was understood by enemies and sympathizers alike that the Partisans were dangerous to know. To the Chetniks they resembled the Ustaše in one respect: their chief victims were the Serbian social elite. When the Partisan fighting force left Montenegro, they had made themselves seriously unpopular. But the Italians and the Montenegrin Chetniks had acted against the Partisans simultaneously. Did they fight together or in parallel? The Montengrin Chetniks fought the Italians in  but their leaders sensed in  that the Italians were a resource not a problem, that they would give up when the war turned against them. This was correct, but there were related risks they did not see.

 Serbs, Croats, and Russians Y U G O S L AV I A had been conceived as a supranational response to imperialism that would create a new ethnic identity in its wake. Loyalty to this ideal was not exhausted. The experiment since  had been notoriously difficult. But there was little suggestion in London that the Yugoslav idea had simply failed. True, the Serbs—the most numerous people—saw Yugoslav identity as an extension of their own, but this was a necessary strength as well as a problem. The Yugoslav ideal remained useful for all Serbs who did not want to define Serbia, and for some who, suddenly, did; and it remained an option, though not the best, for all Croats who wanted the Nazis not to win the war. The communists were for Yugoslavia until  then, after Comintern anathemas and purges, against it. But finally, from , they had decided to embrace the idea of Yugoslavia as a brotherhood of liberated peoples, although in Croatia they had functioned as virtual separatists. Yugoslavia could not be reconstructed without external support and radical promises. This chained the Yugoslav government to Britain, the BBC, and arguments about essentials. A minority of Yugoslavs were fully committed to a restoration—particularly in Dalmatia and Voivodina, where a fraternal mingling of Serb and Croat loyalties had taken place before . But this was not true of the majority. The loyalties which Yugoslavia retained among the Croats of Croatia-Slavonia, the Serbs of pre- Serbia, and the Muslims of Bosnia were at best provisional and complicated, at worst deflated. But educated sympathizers could still feel confident that a new folk-synthesis was inevitable as the peasantries became more literate and the towns expanded. Only much later did it seem possible to conclude that  had been too late to make a new identity. But the future of Yugoslavia—in  as in —remained an endless debate in which solutions were rarely visible but the accusations—antiYugoslav, Croat nationalist, pan-Serb—filled the air. ‘Yugoslavia’ was a black hole of endless recrimination into which foreigners could fall as easily as South Slavs. For critics of the London government the temptation was to look for a Gordian Knot to cut. There was, surely, something firm, competent, and principled which could represent escape from the intractable nationality question. King Peter was a very young man. His ministers were very eminent people, but they were an impossibly broad coalition and they lacked a dominant per S. K. Pavlowitch calls the creation of Yugoslavia ‘both premature and overdue’: Tito: Yugoslavia’s Great Dictator: A Reassessment (), . In  Andreas Razumovsky had warned that the ‘powderkeg of Europe is explosive again’ and that Yugoslavia could be another Lebanon or Afghanistan: Ein Kampf um Belgrad (), –.

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sonality. British officials were not impressed. The assets of the Royal government were a small military force in Egypt and the popularity of the Karadjordjevi´c dynasty in Serbia. General Dušan Simović, the first Prime Minister in exile, enjoyed the credentials of his coup d’état, but he failed to define what it stood for. The politicians in his cabinet were determined that he should not become Yugoslavia’s de Gaulle. Simović was the Serb who carried the burden of not offending the Croat Peasant Party. Anyone less concerned to conciliate the Croats risked attracting the ‘pan-Serb’ label from Simović Serbs, from Croats and, therefore, from British observers. The kingdom needed a new, less autocratic constitution. Simović would have preferred to be a revoutionary, but he was already trapped by politicians and the  constitution when he reached London. The reward for his refusal to be a Yugoslav revolutionary was his vulnerability to political and royal manoeuvre. The PWE Balkan region under Ralph Murray and then under his assistant and successor, Elisabeth Barker, had few formal difficulties with the Yugoslav government. The Norwegians were able to torment the Scandinavian region because they knew their minds; the Yugoslavs were divided. Guidelines for ‘white’ broadcasting in Serbo-Croat and Slovene were supposed to emerge from PWE conferences attended by the BBC and Yugoslav officials. Without agreed positions, the Yugoslavs frittered away this asset. Murray warned that, given the ‘chaotic political conditions’, Yugoslav free time in BBC broadcasts would be ‘absolutely disastrous’. The British side was, at first, more uniform. The senior regional specialist in SOE was Lord Glenconner who became head of SOE Cairo in . Murray and Barker discussed policy with Lord Glenconner, with James Pearson, the Balkan desk officer in SOE, and with Douglas Howard, the experienced Balkan diplomat in charge of the Southern Department of the Foreign Office. Hubert Harrison, the BBC’s Yugoslav Editor and previously correspondent for the News Chronicle and Reuter’s in Belgrade, was one of the editors least amenable to PWE control. He disliked the pre-war regime in Belgrade and its London successor, and he had Newsome’s support. Immediately at stake was the  scheme of Croatian home rule, which the London government could either preserve, revise, or abandon. The Croats feared post-war revenge and punishment; on the Serb side there was confusion; and the British found the Yugoslavs—at every level—infuriatingly disloyal to each other. British specialists were not, on the whole, pro-Serb. Even if they disliked one or two Croat ministers in London, they complained more of the failure of Serbs to conciliate pro-Allied Croats. The true object of loyalty became not the last Yugoslavia but the next. Judged by high standards, some Serbs in London appeared to be niggling the Croats into disloyalty. Serbian officials and officers predominated in the Yugoslav government and 

Murray to Lockhart,  Feb. , FO /.

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Army, and their mistakes, as aberrant Yugoslavs, were visible in detail. The hope that there were better people living—in this case fighting—in Yugoslavia was an old story. In  British Yugoslavism was inaugurated by R.W. SetonWatson, even then the senior British political warfare specialist, denouncing Nikola Pašić, Serbia’s leader, for failing to treat the Austrian South Slavs as equals, that is, for not taking a Croatian view of the natural unity of Habsburg southslavdom and its collective equality with Serbia. (Long before  he had studied the Habsburg nationalities problem as a liberal and continued to approach the South Slav question with the same devolutionist assumptions.) In  Seton-Watson had discerned in Serbia ‘old Oriental tendencies . . . tottering to their fall’ and warned against wasting sympathy upon them at the expense of ‘new and democratic elements’. Although the prediction was wrong—either in its own terms or because of them—it turned out to be indestructible. Simply stated but far from explanatory ideas can persist like bindweed. It was as if there must exist a neglected but known solution to Yugoslav problems which Serbia’s leaders would adopt if they were ‘new and democratic’. Until then political analysis was easy: new points of light were contending with ancient darkness. This view of Yugoslav governments, though critical, felt wholesome because it was notionally optimistic. The ostensible solution to the Yugoslav problem was a new constitution of regions and national equality. The variations were endless and the Serbs, while royal Yugoslavia lasted, could afford the luxury of disagreement. There was no single plan for pan-Serbs. The Serbs were as easily divided in their relative strength as the Croats were united by weakness. Their politicians never established a consensus about ‘Serbia’ comparable to the Croat consensus; they disagreed with each other more, and kept trying to turn the Croat problem by miscellaneous threats and inducements which left them factionalized. This opened them to the charge that the Yugoslav problem was of Serbia’s making. Many of the younger generation of educated Serbs believed that if the bourgeois chauvinism of their elders could be curbed all would be well. The accusation could well describe Belgrade illusions about Macedonia. It was less apt if applied to the large Serbian peasantries outside pre- Serbia: the Serbs of Srem, Bačka, and the Banat, of Bosnia, the Croatian Krajina, and Kosovo, were numerous; they valued Yugoslavia as the realization of a Serbian dream. The idea that the Yugoslav problem was synonymous with the chauvinism of elites, as distinct from real difficulties, was a radical pipe-dream, but the dream was at the core of the Yugoslav ideal. Foreigners could absorb, even from Serbian sources, Seton-Watson’s distaste for Serbia’s ‘Oriental tendencies’. Rebecca West’s dislike for the Croatian superiority complex was common enough; what made her unusual was her  The New Europe,  Aug. : Wickham Steed, Through Thirty Years,  vols. (), i. . This article had the approval of Crewe House.

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sympathy for the national predicament of the Serbs. What did the critics of the Yugoslav government really want? Seton-Watson proposed that Britain’s recipe for the Balkans should be the ‘Peasant State’: ‘improved agricultural conditions among a number of predominantly peasant states, and relations of concord and stability between them’. But this assumed, arbitrarily, solutions to problems which had existed from the moment Serbia exercised an influence in the Balkans. The Croat dilemma was that, without powerful outside assistance, abandoning Yugoslavia was as bad as staying inside. The Agreement of  had defined Croatia as an autonomous object in a non-federal state. When it was accepted—as a first instalment—Maček had joined the Belgrade government. But by then Western journalists were preoccupied by Belgrade’s devious response to German and Italian pressure. This too was arguably the work of oriental tendencies—it was more fashionable to refer to ‘the Belgrade clique’—which had tottered on without falling and so obstructed a strong, modern Yugoslavia. The Croat Peasant Party leadership did not go underground in April . Vladko Maček, the leader, was offered power but he refused and was interned. Everyone listened for rumour of his thoughts but there was no whisper of resistance. For this principled passivity there would be no reward. Maček’s deputy, Juraj Krnjević, was sent to London with the King. But Krnjević, like Maček, felt no loyalty to the Belgrade coup and the reckless Serbs who had dumped Prince Paul. He practised the dreariest nationalist obstruction, and his cabinet colleagues understood his presence in London as an insurance policy against an Allied victory. The Croat Peasant Party had become an dangerously broad church. Though its creators had bequeathed a democratic and egalitarian ethos, political success had drawn into the party a more right-wing and Serbophobic tendency, which included Juraj Krnjević. For most Croats the restoration of Yugoslavia seemed undesirable unless on terms better than the  devolution. Similarly, ‘pan-Serbs’ might even welcome the exclusion of a rump Croatia from the next Yugoslavia, provided that everywhere else remained connected to the Serbian heartland. More charitably, ‘yugoslav’ Serbs might accept the flow of Serb anger, adopt pan-Serb rhetoric ‘to tide over’ resentment, but allow Yugoslav idealism to revive naturally when the Ustaše were less terrifying. This was, arguably, Mihailović’s position. Krnjević was in London less to save Yugoslavia than to do battle with panSerbs. (This old Austrian propaganda expression still echoed the recent thunder of Habsburg anxieties.) The use of the term implied an anti-Serb judgement about territorial quarrels. For that reason it was slippery and  Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: The Record of a Journey through Yugoslavia in 1937 ().  R. W. Seton-Watson, ‘Policy and Propaganda’, sent to Lockhart  May , FO /.  Burr (Istanbul) to MOI,  Oct. , FO /.

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overworked. The expression was reductionist. There were, of course, Serbs with dangerous views, but ‘pan-Serb’ could be deployed to stigmatize any solidarity felt for Serbs living beyond the borders of , a concern which in  was abundantly justified. The commonest Serb assumption about Yugoslavia—that its chief justification was the inclusion of the extended Serbian nation—was patently pan-Serb; but it was not an anti-Yugoslav delinquency, it was the expression of a national solidarity which spanned the political spectrum. Many Serb Partisans shared this solidarity, even if they had been taught to abhor the word. There was British support for the Yugoslav idea but no standard interpretation of its disorders: the external backing for a highly centralized Yugoslavia had come from France. Foreign Office sympathy for Prince Paul had been overturned by the enthusiasm for the coup of  March. A radical could insist that sympathy for the ancien régime was pointless, and that ministers deserved approval only if they sounded more enlightened (or more Croat-friendly) than pre-war regimes. Newsome and Harrison thought so. If their verdict was too summary, they were not given an alternative assessment. The radical view was not only more explanatory than Foreign Office tolerance for royal autocracy, it was older. It dated from the first Department of Enemy Propaganda in . R. W. Seton-Watson was now the grand old man of Anglo-Yugoslav affairs. He joined SO, kept an eye on the Woburn ‘research units’ until , and declared for the Partisans early in . Sir George Rendel, the British minister—then Ambassador—to the Yugoslav government, was a conservative figure much less troubled about pre-war autocracy. His suggestions were modest and he made little impact in PWE. F. W. Neate, who controlled the black stations broadcasting to Yugoslavia from Woburn, remained sympathetic to Mihailović longer than others. Murray, the Balkan regional director, had been from the earliest days at Woburn a star in the political warfare team. He was a Magyar speaker who had joined the BBC before the war. Perhaps he, and indeed Lockhart, found the stable Habsburg culture of Hungary-Croatia more intelligible than the baffling blend of Orthodox, Ottoman, and French influences at work in Serbia. His insistence that the London Croats were ‘irrevocably committed’ to the Yugoslav ideal was, in the case of Krnjević, excessively sympathetic. Murray was, nevertheless, an intelligent observer who shared the wartime shifts in Yugoslav policy. Inside the BBC Harrison supervised a number of Yugoslav journalists as writers and speakers. For Radio Šumadija—the Serbian RU ‘Y’—PWE employed a Yugoslav graduate student as scriptwriter and announcer, who also worked part-time in Prime Minister Simović’s office and supplied PWE with strictures directed against ‘pan-Serb’ politicians—especially the personalities supposed to revolve around Momčilo Ninčić, the vet

Murray’s memorandum,  Oct. , FO /.

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eran Minister for Foreign Affairs. Ninčić was distrusted by Seton-Watson and considered suspect in the Foreign Office—after an outbreak of amnesia—for having been pro-Italian before . Of course, a minister could be a panSerb one month and a good Yugoslav the next. Milan Grol, the leader of the Democratic Party, was at this time—though not before the  ‘Agreement’— considered a pan-Serb, but he later made what PWE thought constructive broadcasts about the Partisans and even joined Tito. Simović was thought promising but he suddenly fell victim to his critics in January . Eden decided not to rescue him. Mihailović was made Minister of War and Chief of Staff. What this meant was that control of the armed forces outside Yugoslavia passed into the hands of a group of officers—Prime Minister Jovanović’s military cabinet—who saw themselves both as rebels against the ghastly incompetence of the generals of  and as Mihailovi´c’s supporters. Independence was welcomed in Croatia. The Ustaša lacked mass support but the initial proclamation of independence was very popular, and the regime was reinforced in office by the right-wing of the Croat Peasant Party and, at first, by the Catholic hierarchy. The frenzied assault on the Serbs provoked widespread unease but not civic resistance, and the unease was too mute to be appreciated in Serbia. In London the ministers fell apart at the first news of the Ustaša massacres. The Times reported on  September  that , Serbs, including three bishops and  priests, had been murdered by the Ustaše. The London Croats blamed the Serbs for passing these reports to the press as a political manoeuvre; many Serbs felt that Yugoslavia could now only be restored on their terms. A quarrel started about the extent and circumstances of the killing. Croat suggestions that Ustaša massacres, though the work of criminals, were a reaction to Chetnik provocations were received very badly. It was likely that something terrible was happening, but Murray complained that he had no certain evidence even from the most secret sources. The Serbs in London demanded Croat contrition and were rewarded with resentment. They were alone in their anxiety that the Ustaše were making an irreversible change in the ethnic structure of Yugoslavia. Though such fears were rational, they were disallowed by a certain sort of yugoslavism. PWE did not want to say much about the massacres. Exaggeration was suspected. Murray thought that the BBC had ‘blundered’ by accepting some ‘tainted reports issued by Serb extremists’. As it happened, the September reports were broadly accurate. Nevertheless, the London Serbs became aware that the British were concerned less to express Serbian outrage than to protect what remained of Serbo-Croat fellow feeling. On  October  Krnjević made one BBC broadcast which was clearly anti-Ustaša. In November Brendan  Memorandum by Murray,  Oct. , INF /. For a defence of Ninčić: S.K. Pavlowitch, Unconventional Perceptions of Yugoslavia ‒ (), –.  Murray to Lockhart,  Jan. , FO /.

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Bracken, as Minister of Information, and the more moderate Serbian politicians asked Krnjević, as London’s leading Croat, to condemn Ustaša atrocities and express sympathy for the Serbs, but he refused. News of Chetnik retaliation fortified his refusal to admit that Serb politicians had a right to demand Croat apologies. He said little until May  when he condemned persecution of the Serbs and called for Croat co-operation with Mihailović, but he declined to broadcast this statement himself. By then the British had started to lose interest in him. Ralph Murray told the BBC not to report too freely ‘Serb allegations’ about ‘massacres and whatnot in Bosnia’, and warned Lockhart that several Serb speakers had ‘gone undesirably far in their warnings to the Ustaše’. Although the regular Croat militia (Domobrans) were censured for operating against Chetniks, Murray hoped to distinguish between those who did and those who did not. Whoever already believed that the senior cause of Yugoslavia’s difficulties was Serbian unitarism, and that Croatian separatism was its echo, would not change their views because the Serbs were angry. It became difficult to discuss anything in a quiet, persuasive way. Seton-Watson’s son Hugh complained from Cairo about Serbian ‘imbeciles’ who spluttered with incredulity on hearing broadcasts—British black stations—claiming that the Croatian people disowned the quisling Pavelić. He thought that ‘the old pan-Serb politicians’ were ‘playing their party game’ and should be ignored or obstructed. He supposed that ‘the best Serbs, as well as Croats and Slovenes, stayed behind’ and were ‘doing the fighting now’. This was the educated hope present from the start. The political warfare conclusion was the one he drew: Britain must not impose the émigrés on Yugoslavia when the war was won. Six months later Murray, citing ‘all reports’, came to believe that within Yugoslavia there was a body of feeling ‘far ahead’ of the London Yugoslavs and that propaganda now required a federal formula ‘acceptable to Serbs and Croats’ to which the main obstacle remained ‘the Serbs here [who] still go looking for trouble and are still thinking in terms of Serbia coming to the Peace Conference instead of Yugoslavia’. The slaughter of Serbs did not strengthen the Serbian position in London because there was not supposed to be one. The news, or handling of the news, launched an accusation which lingered: that ‘pan-Serbs’ wished to wrong-foot moderate, yugoslavizable Croats by provoking them into a breaking with the Yugoslav ideal. Hudson reported violent abuse of the Croats at Mihailović’s HQ. Did General Mihailović have a party game and what were his political motives? The political signals from the General’s HQ were mixed, impromptu, and lightweight: witness the open letter to Pétain in Murray to Harrison (BBC), Jan. ; Murray to Lockhart,  Jan. , FO /. H. Seton-Watson to R. W. S.-W.  Oct. , FO /. Hugh Seton-Watson may just have heard something about the Partisans. Later he did become pro-Partisan.  R. Murray to Lockhart,  Apr. , FO /. Murray was echoing an SIS appreciation.  F. W. Neate to R. Murray,  June , FO /.  

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April  asking him to put France at the head of Europe and declare for the Allies. The only clear message resembled the cry for attention from Poland. Events would be less unbearable if they were reported. The terror was not made less by being ignored. Much more was said about smaller massacres in France and Czechoslovakia. Krnjević liked Woburn’s ‘black’ Croat station, Radio Zrinski, which was an answer to collaboration in Zagreb. It operated on Croat nationalist lines deploying the argument that Croatia could only be defended against its real enemies within a restored, but reformed and federal Yugoslavia. Radio Zrinski was the Croat RU—sometimes known as ‘Y’—the first black station for Yugoslavia. Simović and Ivan Subotić, the Croat who remained Minister at the Yugoslav Legation, advised in a semi-official way on both Radio Zrinski and Radio Šumadija. Krnjević said that German propaganda told the Croats that the BBC had plumped for pan-Serbism and the pre-war regime. Lockhart found him ‘petulant and rather tiresome’ but was disturbed. He thought it would be disastrous to allow Croats to believe that the BBC favoured ‘Pan-Serb ideals’ or the ‘restoration of a centralised Yugoslavia on the old basis’. Sargent agreed that PWE should not interpret British hospitality for exiled kings as a commitment to reactionary restoration. This avoided one risk to run another. To deplore the ‘old basis’ had no exact meaning. It sidestepped the important  ‘Agreement’ with Croatia. Lockhart encouraged the Balkan region to inhibit any pan-Serb tendency in Yugoslav speakers, but there was little if any sign of it. Some scripts Krnjević criticized were checked and found harmless. What Krnjević really wanted was a distinct BBC Croat service. Lockhart sympathized (‘even Scotland liked to have its Scottish announcers’), but Murray accepted neither the accusations nor the full demand, and dismissed the proposal for bulletins in the ‘Croat language’ as ‘philologically meaningless’. Serbo-Croat bulletins were read at times by Croats, at times by Serbs. Murray said that if the BBC had somehow offended when urging Croats ‘to hinder Ustashi persecutions’, the Croats in London should prepare such material themselves as invited. The Foreign Office Southern department agreed the Serbs were likely to exaggerate for their own advantage. Sir George Rendel, the minister, was even displeased that the press made ‘unnecessary’ references to Ustaša bands or,  London was not consulted: S. K. Pavlowitch, ‘La France Libre et la Yougoslavie’, Münchner Zeitschrift für Balkankunde,  (), .  Progress Report for – Aug. , FO /. Zrinski broadcast from  May  to  Dec.  with an output of  hour  minutes per week in : E. Howe, The Black Game (), .  Lockhart to Sargent,  Jan. , FO /.  Murray to Lockhart,  Jan. , FO /. On Croatia’s ‘unique dialectal situation’ see I. Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (), –.

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attempting balance, the Nedić gendarmerie. When the MOI bureau in Istanbul passed on a report about a Croat who had arrived in Split with a bag of Serbian eyes, Professor Seton-Watson exploded. The story was ‘in the highest degree improbable’ and the official in question was ‘under the influence of Serb extremists’; the circulation of such stories by Yugoslavs was ‘the worst form of defeatism’. A bag of eyes seemed too artful an evocation of Balkan savagery, but disbelief could not be sustained. The Ustaše surpassed the savagery of the Ottoman era. This made the heavy lid on Serbian anger a cause for bitterness as well as suspicion. The BBC characterized the Ustaše— incorrectly—as ‘German controlled troops’ rather than as a Croat force. The news of the massacre of Serbs was given a didactic rendering. It was a warning to Yugoslavs not to turn against each other. This could have no immediate appeal. Mass murder in Croatia and Bosnia was such a great political disaster it baffled commentators. It was an insoluble problem for political warfare, and it was related to several others. In Serbia the occupation forces often consisted of Balkan forces—Magyar, Bulgar, and Albanian—who could not be reduced to the category of mere enemy without some political disadvantage. The PWE response to news of the extermination of a Serbian village near Niš by Bulgarian occupation troops was to ‘go on plugging Serbo-Bulgar brotherhood, stressing that the Germans are intriguing to wreck it’. (Teutonic intrigue never failed: Serbs and Bulgars fought in , , , and .) London had no account of different sorts of occupation, and PWE could supply only formulas which struck some Serbs as weird. PWE acknowledged sadly that German propaganda had long found ‘wide support in Croatia and particularly among the Croat Moslems of Bosnia’. The British were alert for signs that Mihailović had not embraced the necessary claim that the Croat nation was not to blame. It was reported that Mihailović had failed to resist the tide of Serbian emotion; indeed, that he threatened to hang Maček. In a Chetnik context, at least before summer , Yugoslav loyalties had to be wrapped in such vehemence. The Serbs did not need to be won over. They were indisputably pro-British, and would probably respond to their king’s call to arms. Murray knew that Serbian resistance was ‘likely to be of considerably greater value’ than Croat resistance. Yet PWE would not concede Croatia to the Germans. Murray knew that a ‘% Yugoslav line’ required by many Serb politicians appeared to Croats as ‘a thinly veiled form of pan-Serbism’. (He meant a centralized Rendel to Southern department,  May , FO /. R. W. Seton-Watson to Howard,  July , FO /.  Barker to Neate,  Apr. , FO /.  ‘Notes for the Yugoslav section’,  Oct. , FO /. Some Muslims were considered quasi-Croat at that time.  Hudson’s telegrams: F. W. D. Deakin, Embattled Mountain (), . In  Maček found that Mihailovi´c wanted to co-operate, while the Partisans were executing Croat Peasant Party village activists: Ma˘cek, In the Struggle for Freedom (London, ), –.  

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Yugoslavia in which ‘Serbia’ would need no territorial definition.) This was arguable. But it was a pessimistic conclusion, and there were Serbs who were certain to be alarmed by it. Murray’s formula was dangerous: ‘it is necessary to speak to Croats as Croats and to appeal to them on the basis of the ties of Serbo-Croat brotherhood, not on the basis of the “Yugoslav ideal”.’ This was a difficult, almost perverse position. Serbo-Croat brotherhood was invisible, and the redundancy of the Yugoslav concept was the staple of Axis propaganda. It was unrealistic to skirt around separatism; to be stripped of selfconfidence, it had to be attacked. Neglecting this work did not help Serbs believe in a decent Croatian nation or to rescue the idea of Croatian home rule. But London intended to sidestep the German appeal to Balkan particularism. The slogan ‘Serbo-Croat brotherhood’ proved that Croatia was not considered the accomplice of Pavelić. Serbs who wanted to hear pre-war Yugoslavia defended were disappointed; they also heard a more scrupulous courtesy towards the Croats than circumstances made easy to bear. Mihailović heard little from the British government, but he listened to Radio London almost every day. There was a tacit, then an explicit, federalism in the Serbo-Croat transmissions. This was also the choice made by the Yugoslav Communist Party. The underlying hope in the BBC was that the real Yugoslavia was better than its government. The ministerial propaganda committee were not allowed to expand their influence over BBC output, and moves were made to turn any programme in which a Croat politician took part into a de facto Croatian transmission. Yugoslav speakers were sometimes difficult to control in the studio and in the course of  various phrases were slipped past the switch censor that caused irritation. PWE told the Yugoslavs they must impose their own political censorship on their speakers, but the BBC had no machinery for allowing the Yugoslav Information Department to do so. Not until May  did Yugoslav officials begin to understand how wheels turned in Bush House, by which time they were identified as an obstacle to good propaganda. Partisans and Chetniks never ceased to accuse each other of collaboration. In March  Mihailović claimed that the invader was using the Partisans to create civil war and that in Bosnia Partisans were working for the Ustaše. On  April Tito told the Croatian Central Committee that he had ‘certain proof ’ that the British ‘through their agents’ were working to intensify the differences between Partisans and Chetniks. (The Partisans did not say this openly, but next year Bailey, the senior liason officer with Mihailović, reported that the Partisans put out anti-British propaganda which was ‘not without effect’.) This ultra-radical charge derived from the ambitious political goal the Murray to Lockhart,  Jan. , FO /. Yugoslav Aide-Mémoire answering Soviet note of  Aug. , FO /; Deakin, Embattled Mountain, –; SOE to FO,  Feb. , FO /.  

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Partisans had set themselves: the offer of a united front which meant control for them and obedience for others. The major obstacle to an accommodation— with anyone—was their own revolutionary purpose. The Russians may, briefly, have seen praise for Mihailović as the best corrective. The Yugoslav government told Mihailović to avoid acts of vengeance and not to go beyond selfdefence, but his comments became increasingly intemperate until there was an explosive retort: Their crimes on Serbs ( letters mutilated—exceed?) tens of thousands of the purest nationalists. They are a collection of international criminals and prostitutes . . . Should I conclude an agreement with them, the people would leave me. As they are liquidated, there is no need to raise them from the dead. . . . I allow any kind of investigating committee to convince itself of their numberless and unheard of crimes and their colossal banditry. Our people want a Russian victory, but will not allow its internal order to be dictated to it. The people want democracy. For the struggle against the occupying forces in the country we have the whole people and we do not need the Communists or any other political party. This is an army and now it is war. The army is unarmed and armaments are needed, that is the kind of help we need, no other. International ruffians can go on being killed.

The Partisans were often feared and disliked. But there was a natural affection for the young people who left to join the Partisans even in communities which looked to the Chetniks to prevent local insurrection. The Partisans did not have Comintern permission for a dispute with Mihailović. They were obliged to step back or raise the stakes and justify to Moscow their antipathy to the soldiers of the King. The Russians had accepted Mihailović as the leader of resistance once the Yugoslav government did. They championed him with an emphasis that implied criticism of Tito’s behaviour. But SOE had allowed the Yugoslav government to veto a joint Anglo-Russian mission to Mihailović in autumn ; and the Russians, though urging moderation, did not pass on to Tito SOE’s suggested instructions. Moscow did not have sufficient motive to commit themselves. There was, after all, no political agreement between Russia and Britain about any European problem. Mihailović made several appeals to his government to intervene in Moscow to stop the insurrectionary madness. But Tito did not buckle and dared to complain that the ‘terrible nonsense’ of Moscow Radio was ‘worse than that put out by London’. A bold telegram to the Comintern asked that Radio Moscow ‘stop broadcasting the nonsense spread abroad by Radio London’ and claimed, improbably, that ‘we have full proof that Draža is co-operating openly with the Germans’. If Tito’s protest was lurid, his political position was correspondingly unpromising and his military prospects bleak. If the two proletarian brigades—at first only three or four thousand men—were destroyed, open revolt in western Yugoslavia might be snuffed out as completely as in Serbia. Only the strongest accusations could possibly 

Bullseye ,  Aug. , WO /.

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Deakin, Embattled Mountain, .

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impress Moscow. Tito’s colleagues urged him to reject Comintern criticism and press on with the struggle against ‘reaction’. Radio Free Yugoslavia— Soviet black—broadcast from Ufa in the Urals from early November . This station broadcast in Serbo-Croat and pretended to be a Yugoslav resistance transmission; it mentioned Mihailović with favour nine days after the BBC first did so. But it criticized the Chetniks as early as April . The Comintern remained an important element in the Soviet system. SOE saw the problem coming. In Cairo, some of the people who had been in the Balkans before spring , shared Hudson’s views. They believed that SOE had, in reserve, an open licence to support the Partisans whatever the political consequences. SOE heard that the Partisans were still active and doing well from couriers reaching Istanbul, whom they did not really trust, and from signal intercepts which, as Glenconner said, ‘may be impartial’. However, it was evident that the contest observed in November was worse than ever and that ‘an ideological gulf ’ had opened up. Hudson was unable to report for months. But when he started sending again he was angry about the way Mihailović and Nedić let each other alone. The Yugoslav section of SOE London explained to their Moscow liaison officer that if London supported Mihailović and Moscow the Partisans ‘we are fighting each other, encouraging internal disunity, and so playing the German game’. In March Tito was told that he enjoyed the ‘complete, unbreakable confidence’ of the Comintern. Radio Free Yugoslavia fell silent about Mihailović. But while Comintern solidarity remained secret the Partisans could not reduce the propaganda advantage which the Chetniks obtained through British support, and Tito continued to complain that ‘London propaganda is deceiving people with its false communiques’. The Russians said that favourable propaganda references to ‘partisans’ could be taken to include Mihailović. James Pearson, the head of the Balkan section, was already recommending that the SOE approach to the Russians should no longer be about confirming Mihailović as commander but about getting an Anglo-Soviet solution to a serious problem. The NKVD officer in London did not offer contact with the Partisans, but he said that Yugoslavia was within SOE’s area, and even volunteered that the Partisans were ‘Trotskyites in the pay of the Germans’. In Moscow the SOE liaison office had just contrived to invite and then disinvite the NKVD to the Jerusalem bureau. Both agencies were agreed about ‘the Mihailović question’ and felt ‘goaded’ by the two foreign offices. The Russians did not admit to S. Clissold (ed.), Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union ‒ (), ,  n. . Telegrams B–, Cairo DPA to London,  Feb. , HS /.  AD to AD [Glenconner to Taylor],  Apr. , HS /.  D/H to ‘Sam’,  Apr. , HS /.  Message to Tito, Mar. : Clissold, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, , .  J. S. A. Pearson, ‘The Yugo-slav Partisans’,  Apr. , and ‘Sam’ to AD(O),  Apr. , HS /.  

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their radio link with the Partisans and no one mentioned Tito’s name in public. SOE wanted resistance unity, but they would not get a solution without Soviet assistance and time was running out. In London one of Pearson’s officials doubted whether Mihailović would bear close political inspection and he pleaded for tolerance for the ‘Patriot forces’ who refused to obey him. It is possible that Moscow was emboldened by information (however obtained) about British doubts and Hudson’s accusations. In any case, the British offer of SOE/Soviet co-operation in Yugoslavia was, at Sargent’s insistence, all but withdrawn before the Russians made any public statement against Mihailović. In June the SOE Balkan section passed around their comments on Hudson’s recent telegrams. One response refers sarcastically to Mihailović having used British weapons ‘to shoot up’ the communists at Užice and concluded gloomily that the Yugoslav people were ‘faced with a straight choice between Communism and something very like Fascism’. This was an early example of a puzzling suggestion about Mihailović’s politics. A Yugoslav known at the Soviet embassy advised PWE that the Russians would not help sort out the civil war since they despised the Royal government as ‘a lot of Fascists’. This was the first Soviet straw in the wind. Kirkpatrick asked that Anglo-Soviet unity be used in broadcasts as a model for Yugoslavs. Harrison then mentioned the Partisans for the first time in a talk on  June : ‘Do not ask if a man is a Radical or a Democrat, a Četnik or a Partisan . . . although I do not wish to bore you, I must repeat what I said last week—the great historical meaning of the Anglo-Soviet Pact for our friends in Yugoslavia is—get together.’ This hinted at some sort of problem. In July  the Russians declared their full support for the Partisans. After the Red Army’s Kharkov offensive failed in May, the Soviet emphasis on resistance strengthened—as if to lure the Anglo-Americans onto the continent by presenting them with an uprising of peoples. Stalin had turned to patriotism and priests in , but he reverted to bolshevism and commissars in . Communist leaders everywhere called for ‘partisan’ resistance. Hitherto the Russians had attributed Yugoslav resistance either to Mihailović or unnamed ‘patriots’. Suddenly they announced battles between the Axis and ‘Partisans’ in Yugoslavia. On  July Radio Free Yugoslavia broadcast a resolution of ‘patriots’ accusing Mihailović and the Chetniks of collaboration, and criticizing the Yugoslav government. This was shockingly abrupt and the initial PWE reaction was to take it as untrue and look for the ulterior motive. Tito’s view was that the British were reserving Mihailović for their own D/H, ‘Aid to Yugoslavia’, sent to Glenconner on  May , HS /. L/IC to D/H,  June , HS /. ‘Flirtation with the Iron Guard’ was the evidence. This looks grotesque. The flirtation was Maniu’s, a British favourite, who expected to lead a disillusioned section of the Iron Guard after Antonescu and the Germans turned on them early in : see E.Barker, British Policy in South-East Europe in the Second World War (), .   F. W. Neate to Murray,  June , FO /. Text in FO /.  

 future uses. This was true, and it surely nettled the Russians, who now published Partisan accusations. If there were indeed Soviet friends of SOE who were critical of Tito, they had been overruled. The Yugoslav Minister in Moscow was given a document outlining collaboration with the Italians attributed to Mihailović. Similar charges were made in London embassy bulletins. Bogomolov, the ambassador to the exiled governments, warned that the British should not conjure resistance heroes out of thin air: such people should emerge of their own accord. If Moscow wanted, first and foremost, to see the DM Chetniks instructed to end their military hibernation, they chose not to say so through SOE and preferred to apply public pressure. The decision to aim straight at public opinion was shrewd. The principal British gift to Mihailović was his star treatment on Radio London. The Partisans supposed, by political dead-reckoning, that this could be changed. Curiously, not until  did Russian domestic propaganda adopt the anti-Mihailović line. S E R B S , C ROAT S , A N D RU S S I A N S

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Soviet Note,  Aug. : Clissold, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, –. W. R. Roberts, Tito, Mihailović and the Allies (), .

 Pinpricks Our policy of pin-pricking Mihailović is beginning to pay some dividends. SOE, Dec. .

I N February  War Office military intelligence (MI) had believed that up to ten divisions might be released if all fighting in Yugoslavia ceased. There was no reduction in fighting, but Italian forces were still thinned out. General Roatta increased his reliance on the western Chetniks, but both Axis partners understood that they could hold Yugoslavia, and keep open the important lines of communication, whilst conceding large areas to Chetniks and Partisans to fight in. The Germans judged both guerrilla movements essentially hostile and the Chetniks the more important. Most German troops were in Serbia. It was not at all evident that the movement most active against soft targets in the Italian zone was the one keeping German and Bulgarian divisions in the other. It was a question of menace and potential, of interpretation not simple fact. The Germans certainly believed in the Chetnik menace, and the British believed in the potential. Tito operated in regions where Partisan political skills and grasp of communal tensions could complement the insurrection. The Partisans, who had started in Serbia as wild radicals, went recruiting in the west as patriots with a Yugoslav gospel. They found recruits among the most desperate or desperately patriotic Serbs. Their core strength increased to five brigades, later called divisions. But Tito found that even the Sandžak and eastern Herzegovina were becoming less hospitable. So he decided in June  to march four brigades into western Bosnia in search of food and a better welcome. Mihailović thought the Partisans were vanishing. They had certainly departed from his doorstep. Tito’s decision to march his main force two hundred miles north-west could not have been better timed. In October  the Italians had taken an extra slice of western Yugoslavia—zone C—from Ustaša control. But in June  they decided to reduce their commitments and withdrew garrisons, quite suddenly, from this occupation zone. The Ustaše were instructed to leave alone those Chetnik bands which had been recognized and tolerated. The Italians were aware that if the Partisans took control in some places, the Chetniks, elsewhere, would be less likely to make trouble. A way through the Dinaric Alps 

SOE to Dixon,  Dec. , FO /.

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opened up, and Tito’s Partisans marched along it to reach the old Habsburg Military frontier—Lika, Kordun, and Banija. This was still largely Serb territory. In Bosnia most young Croats or Muslims were still unwilling to join the Partisans, but they were already reluctant to fight seriously for Ante Pavelić. The Partisans recruited a few by appealing to deserters, and, more importantly, in Dalmatia they took control of the few Croat resistance bands by infiltration. This was just enough to build a Croat presumption in  that resistance meant joining the Partisans. The Partisans now cultivated the goodwill of areas where their militancy won them respect as well as recruits. Their revolutionary style was muted. They offered leadership to Serb communities decapitated but not entirley destroyed by the the Ustaše and to Dalmatian Croats wanting to resist Italian annexation. In November  they reached Bihać—a small Bosnian railway town of , inhabitants—and overran its Ustaša garrison. But in the German zone—in the Kozara hills—the Partisans who tangled with German troops in July were simply slaughtered—as were the civilians. Mihailović realized that the BBC had done him no favours by reporting acts of resistance which could be attributed, within Yugoslavia, to the Partisans. In July PWE decided, all reports being doubtful, to attribute resistance to ‘patriots’. Editors were instructed to avoid the term ‘Partisans’. In August there were press items which PWE expected to produce political complications. The most obvious was a left/right press contest; but it was just as likely that the press would, in deference to Russia’s predicament, accept the Soviet evaluation of the Partisans. Diplomatic correspondents were warned to keep off the subject and the Foreign Office was surprised to hear that Yugoslav diplomats were being very discreet. Before the change in Soviet propaganda, Sir George Rendel had wanted a statement of Mihailović’s achievements. But SOE Cairo were hastily burning their records during the ‘Rommel panic’. All Glenconner could say for SOE in London was that, though the fighting was done by the Partisans, ‘for public consumption, we can see no harm in a certain amount of this going to the credit of Mihailović’. This reflected recent information but not how it was understood. Military intelligence had just concluded that Mihailovi´c was obstructed in his valuable work by ‘wilder elements’ who forced otherwise loyal Yugoslavs ‘into co-operation with any power that can restore a semblance of law and order’; and SOE thought it quite possible that the Partisans survived only in isolated groups in Bosnia. In parts of western Yugoslavia the Chetniks were as likely to be attacked by Partisans as by the Ustaše. Many had arranged truces with their enemies, but in central and eastern Bosnia others  Murray to Kirkpatrick,  June , FO /; Murray to Dixon,  July , FO /.  Glenconner to P. Dixon,  July : P. Auty and R. Clogg (eds.), British Policy Towards Wartime  Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece (), . DMI’s report,  June , PREM //.

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had not and they were still fighting the Ustaše and Germans. In Serbia there was a Mihailović railway sabotage organization which was quite successful in autumn . This was certainly resistance. In early October fighting revived in Serbia, beginning with an attack by an SS mountain division with Bulgarian support on the Kopaonik Chetniks. Still, what the specialists knew in July was not passed on accurately in press briefing. In the MOI the following was offered as the best synthesis available: We must be careful about extravagant, especially American, statements . . . The fact is that Mihailovitch is carrying on a tough guerrilla war against the Germans and Italians, while the local Communists are carrying on a vigorous guerrilla war against the Germans and against Mihailovitch. The Communists are trading Italian prisoners for supplies, and the whole thing is a conventional Balkan muddle.

The claim about the Italians was simply wrong; and the guerrilla of the DM Chetniks in the German zone meant, at that point, not fighting unless the alternative was surrender. But what the briefing meant was that Mihailovi´c should be considered more disinterestedly patriotic than his rivals. In July PWE heard of, but did not see, a Yugoslav government report admitting that the communists had created a strong guerrilla movement. Murray was already sceptical about SOE judgements and complained to Lockhart about their ‘amateur political mystery-making’. The PWE Balkan region made an effort to produce for themselves an independent picture by trawling through foreign press surveys and monitoring reports. In August Ralph Murray circulated ‘Notes on the Partisan/Mihailović Issue’, which concluded, correctly, that most active resistance since the winter had taken place outside Serbia: if one could rely on Axis statements and collated hints from the Yugoslav government, this resistance consisted of operations by ‘partisans of one type or another’. But there was no evidence of a single Partisan command, and Mihailović could still be taken to represent military competence rather than political violence. The PWE paper was sent to the Foreign Office as a warning that it was difficult to continue urging Yugoslav resistance to hold their fire when the Russians wanted the resisters to hold down Axis troops ‘even at the risk of extermination’. But extermination was not discussed: the issue was Soviet political warfare. PWE argued that references in the Belgrade and Zagreb press to ‘communist bands’ must be references to non-Chetnik resistance and that it was ‘difficult’ to understand why Axis sources might exaggerate Partisan activity. This was indifferent reasoning. It was an obvious ploy for the Nedi´c administration in Belgrade to neutralize Serbian hostility by representing itself as deeply engaged against an internal Communist men   

S. Trew, Britain, Mihailović and the Chetniks, – (), , , . A. P. Ryan’s Background Notes,  July , R//, BBC Written Archives. Murray to Lockhart,  June , FO /. ‘Notes on the Partisan/Mihailović Issue’,  Aug. , FO /.

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ace. Collaborators said that sort of thing. Mihailovi´c had just complained that Nedić tried to defend himself by labelling ‘our people’ as communists. Murray believed that if the BBC had attributed the fighting in Yugoslavia incorrectly, something must be done even if ‘an immediate radical change’ was impossible. He demanded some rethinking: ‘our propaganda advocating Mihailović risks bearing little relation to the real situation in Yugoslavia, and our appeals for unity have no real basis’. The PWE ‘Notes’ were a frankly revisionist attempt to redress the presumed bias of SOE; it was now regretted that Mihailović would not modify his decision to stay quiet and avoid reprisals. PWE were not alone in thinking, mistakenly, that SOE were uncritical about Mihailović. Lockhart still hoped for serious Anglo-Soviet co-operation. Murray could count on his support. The BBC Yugoslav section staff were journalists. There was a hot rumour that Yugoslav communism was a major fighting force. Partisan resistance was a story which, if published altruistically, could strengthen the Anglo-Soviet alliance; and they were not allowed to explore it. But the Yugoslav civil war broke into print, spread to America, and became a matter of open controversy. The instinct of the journalist—not to lose contact with a changing story—stirred within the BBC. Harrison’s colleagues were fascinated, and unwilling to conceal Partisan resistance. Among the Yugoslav presenters, Mihailo Petrović and Grga Zlatoper both favoured the Partisans although Zlatoper eventually changed his mind. Slavko Klemenčić, the chief Slovene presenter, was also active on behalf of the Partisans outside the BBC, and within it he was to be able, in Rendel’s opinion, ‘to get a good many of his views across’. Yugoslav ministers were already complaining about Harrison’s political views. Privately, he referred to the Yugoslav government as the ‘Kingston House clique’ and he needed Kirkpatrick’s protection against Foreign Office criticism. The Bush House staff shared a sudden excitement about the Partisans which was common among Yugoslav radical intellectuals working for the Yugoslav government in Britain and America. PWE objected to the freedom which Jovanović gave to his military cabinet to broadcast in the name of the government. These broadcasts were largely in the hands of Živan Knežević, an energetic soldier-politician supposed to be behind some inconvenient intrigues. Major Knežević was keen to emphasize Mihailović’s authority as Minister of War. Murray complained that the broadcasts were about ‘internal affairs’ rather than the military situation and  Telegram,  Aug. , ‘Bullseye’ , WO /. But Zagreb preferred to attribute atrocities to Chetniks in order to heighten Croatian anxieties.  Murray to Howard (FO),  Aug. , FO /.  Rendel to Howard,  Feb. ; Rendel to Kirkpatrick,  July : ‘Yugoslavia File ’, BBC Written Archives. Information on Zlatoper and Petrović provided by the late K. St. Pavlowitch, interviewed on  Dec. .  G. Rendel to P. Dixon,  Oct. ; Harrison to Alec Brown,  Jan. ; ‘Programmes Overseas, Yugoslavia File ’, BBC Written Archives.

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confessed that ‘Harrison has been exercising a pretty close censorship over them off his own bat’. Anti-communist statements were forbidden, so Harrison watched for cryptic hints and stopped them. PWE wanted to suppress the programme. Only these broadcasts allowed the Partisans to claim that Radio London remained pro-Mihailovi´c until mid-. Though the Russians were very likely to influence public opinion, SOE did not panic. They were in two minds about Chetnik hibernation, but they were also annoyed by Moscow and determined to strengthen their position in the field before using maximum authority on Mihailović. They expected that more agents and supplies would get the Chetniks back into action. Always hoping to be better placed next month, SOE did not ask Radio London to expound—for Partisan ears—the case for a loyal resistance. They were optimistic about what could be done once Mihailović was grateful, but this was not an available public argument, nor could they say that the Partisan insurrection was broadly unwelcome. Fighting remained an obvious yardstick of resistance even if the cold intellect consented to a waiting strategy. In  almost nothing went right for SOE Cairo. London suspected that Cairo staff work was seriously deficient. New aircraft were unobtainable; several agents dropped were captured or killed; the Cyrenaica air bases were lost. The sort of air operations, which in summer  might be completed at the first attempt, could be delayed for months in . SOE complained bitterly about their slender air support; they also knew that it had frozen their policy. Military intelligence, unlike SOE, had full access to decrypts of Axis wireless traffic. They did not support Hudson’s call for more sabotage since ‘it would be dangerous to risk reprisals severe enough to cause estrangement among potential supporters’. (As this was written, there was more sabotage and extensive German reprisals in Serbia were renewed.) MI thought Mihailović ‘will have ready for action when the day comes a force of  to , of the best type of Serb fighter’. This appreciation of Chetnik strength in Serbia was not made in ignorance of the Chetnik–Italian relationship elsewhere, but it was accepted that Mihailović was trying prevent Chetnik bargains with the Italians from degenerating into pure collaboration. In mid-August MI answered the attempts to ‘denigrate Mihailović’: A thorough revision of all our evidence has therefore been made, and . . . he is the man whom we should indubitably support both for the present day and the future good of Yugoslavia, and to defeat the Axis. While it is the aim of the Partisans to harry the Axis wherever possible and to try to set up republican states where they can—there is probably a small independent area in North-West Bosnia—Mihailović’s policy is essentially longterm. . . . His whole organisation rests on two distinct bases: firstly the active Chetnik formations which he will employ in limited acts of sabotage in chosen districts, and secondly  Murray to Kirkpatrick,  June , ‘Programmes Overseas, Yugoslavia, File ’, BBC Written Archives.

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a hidden organisation with branches spread in the villages which will remain passive until a general uprising takes place . . . Union with the wilder Partisans he regards as impossible, though possibly if their organisation collapsed he would accept their more moderate followers. For the future, he is clearly nationally-minded [Yugoslav] and in exceptionally difficult circumstances he has avoided exacerbating the conflict between races, religions and alphabets which have so troubled Yugoslavia.

This picture came from all sources. Partisan collapse seemed quite likely. PWE were allowed to stop asserting that all resistance in Yugoslavia was undertaken at Mihailović’s command. But this went only so far: the BBC might report ‘any anti-Axis activity’ but should still conceal the identity of the activists. SOE, on the other hand, accepted the PWE request for ‘judicious and sparing’ references by name to the Partisans. Murray believed that if no mention of Partisan activities were made by the BBC ‘the General may feel that he is alone in the field and that it is not, therefore, necessary for him to make any effort to show that he deserves our support’. This idea evolved into an SOE request for taunts and pinpricks designed to embarrass Mihailović into putting up a better show. If the Chetniks became more active, the contacts between some of Mihailović’s commanders and the Italians would perhaps wither away in a more bracing atmosphere. Though not entirely absurd, this required more leverage than SOE possessed or stronger language than London dared use. In the BBC output the taunts were furtive and oblique—as though someone might notice and obstruct plainer criticisms. The Foreign Office, though unsentimental about Mihailović, were usually active in defence of the Yugoslav government from SOE harrassment. SOE needed to upgrade their representation with Mihailovi´c and chose Bill Bailey—the most experienced wartime agent sent to Yugoslavia. Bailey was a secret service veteran who had lived in Yugoslavia for many years. When he left the Middle East he went to Canada to recruit Yugoslav immigrants for SOE. He then returned to Cairo to prepare for a mission as senior liaison officer with Mihailovi´c. Bailey should have reached Serbia in August, but he was delayed almost five months—at first by malarial fever. He was already distrusted by the Yugoslav military cabinet. SOE did not want to damage Bailey’s position with Mihailović before he arrived. Veiled taunts from Radio London seemed safer than plain criticism. The Yugoslav armed forces were concentrated in Egypt. SOE Cairo needed Yugoslav assistance and a commander willing to support their approaches to Mihailović. The first set of Yugoslav personalities were unsatisfactory except for Jovan Djonovi´c (‘Monkey’), who ran the couriers in Istanbul and provided help in Jerusalem. General Ilić in Cairo was a disappointment, and Colonel Colonel Thornton (MI) to DDMI(I),  Sept. and  Aug. , WO /. P. Dixon (FO) to Murray,  Sept. : Auty and Clogg, British Policy, ; Pearson (SOE) to Murray,  Sept. ; Murray to Howard,  Sept. , FO /. 

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Popović, his adviser, judged SOE a lame duck outfit and wanted to see GHQ take over special operations. Simovi´c had been succeeded as Prime Minister by Slobodan Jovanović, a distinguished Serbian historian. The Jovanović government refilled the important military posts, but senior Yugoslav officers— those close to GHQ—refused to go quietly. GHQ spent months trying to retain General Mirković, the commanding officer, and his supporters, but the Foreign Office remained inflexible about the rights of the government. Mirković was not even allowed to go to London to appeal to Jovanović, and SOE were refused permission to use personnel from the Mirković faction. Reluctantly, GHQ Cairo interned the mutinous officers. Živan Knežević and the military cabinet faction considered General Mirkovi´c an old bungler. They had a case: Yugoslav high command bore the blame for the fact that most Serbian officers were in German camps rather than in the hills with Mihailovi´c. But SOE Cairo pleaded that the Yugoslavs should not be left to manage their own affairs since they were all ‘completely incompetent’ and faction-ridden and Mirković, as a passive figurehead receiving British instructions, was all they deserved. The younger officers promoted by Jovanovi´c were counter-attacked as pan-Serbs. The ‘pan-Serb’ label explains too little. Their thoughts on Serbdom mattered less than the attitude to the Italians and the civil war. The Foreign Office were understandably determined to impose political discipline on everyone in Cairo, but their authority was limited. MI refused to allow the Yugoslavs a direct radio link with Mihailović, because they distrusted the military cabinet. GHQ Cairo lost their interest in supplying the Yugoslavs with long-range aircraft. SOE and the Foreign Office did not forgive each other. Mirkovi´c warned that Mihailovi´c and his officers would be disturbed and confused when news trickled back to Serbia. Mihailović did hear, and said nothing. This was a ham-fisted preparation for political warfare. What was crucial, before attitudes set in concrete, was the Yugoslav advice sent to Mihailovi´c about the Italians and the Partisans. It is still unclear. On  September Sargent claimed that the ‘potential value’ of Mihailović— ‘both military and political, at a later stage of the war’—justified British support even if he refused to be more active. But the Russians were now denouncing Mihailović as a traitor. In some alarm, PWE decided to obscure the British commitment to Mihailović, to ‘temper’ Yugoslav statements of his authority ‘both because it is unrealistic . . . and because our relations with the Soviet government prevent . . . counter-denunciation of the Partisan cause’. Thus a far-reaching change began in the name of expediency. SOE hoped to  ‘SOE Work and the Relationship with the Yugoslavs ..–..’, D/H [Bennett?], undated, and Additional Memorandum,  Apr. , HS /.  DPA to SOE London,  Feb. , HS /.  Trew, Britain, Mihailovi´c and the Chetniks, ,  n. . This opinion may have been a  response to a different SIS suggestion. Murray to Scarlett,  Oct. , FO /.

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be more positive: to sharpen up Chetnik resistance by reinforcing Hudson’s protests with subtle irritants from Radio London. This sort of signalling was too fragile to be reliable, and PWE changed its meaning with an implied political demotion. SOE wanted ‘total support of General Mihailović’ qualified only by ‘judicious and sparing use of broadcasts’ to show him—‘without making him disgruntled’—that London was aware of the Partisans. A series of laconic statements—that Chetnik leaders must now obtain Italian weapons in the same way as the Partisans—would have been more recognizable as constructive pressure on Mihailović. It would also have met the Russians half-way. Britain had refused to open the Second Front. PWE suspected that Mihailovi´c was her whipping boy. The German Transocean agency reported on  October that Mihailović was disbanding his army through disappointment—at the lack of a Second Front. Murray warned Lockhart that Berlin had made its first efforts to ‘put a spoke in our wheel’. The Allied press was now feeding German propaganda. Murray begged for high-level solutions: to control the British and American press, and to spare the BBC the humiliation of ignoring what everyone knew. He concluded that Mihailovi´c’s claim to lead the entire Yugoslav resistance could no longer be given open British support. The new approach allowed the BBC to express disillusion with the Chetnik leader through the management of significant silences where, previously, there would have been invocations of Mihailovi´c’s leadership. This was quickly noticed in Serbia. Salutary criticism of the Partisans was quickly rejected as an option. But if they were above criticism from London, getting Mihailovi´c to follow the better part of their example—by needling him—would demand finesse. The tacit denial of his authority was an unanticipated insult which damaged the terms on which criticism might be taken as friendly and authoritative. Tito’s forces were not yet universally admired, even though Bush House had changed tack. But if criticism of Partisans and Chetniks was the key to restoring British influence, PWE did not suspect it. Hudson was sent a message asking whether, after the Soviet criticism of Mihailović, it was time for an Anglo-Soviet demand for unity accompanied by a promise of political freedom after the war. This question was devised by an inter-departmental committee; it begged several others and should have been addressed directly to Mihailovi´c. Hudson replied that the Partisans were in trouble and would welcome any encouragement to continue active warfare, but that Mihailović would only accept, as his soldiers, Partisans who had not committed crimes against Serbs. He approved the proposed appeal but gave reasons why it might fail. The Southern department could not follow the logic of this response, but they presumed it meant an appeal would be welcome. This   

Pearson to Murray,  Sept. , FO /. Murray to Lockhart,  Oct. , FO /. M. Wheeler, Britain and the War for Yugoslavia – (), .

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is what the BBC were told, but it was not what Hudson had said—about Mihailović—nor was a BBC appeal for unity equivalent to the formal AngloSoviet statement Hudson had been asked to consider. PWE and SOE invited Harrison, the only regular British speaker, to give a News Talk based upon Hudson’s message. Harrison proclaimed that there was a new spirit among ‘all Yugoslavs who loved their country’ because such people had come to recognize that ‘the old Yugoslavia with its many faults, is gone forever’: We, your friends in England, understand them to mean that they are not striving for a return of the bad old party system. . . . They are fighting for a new Yugoslavia from which corruption will have been eliminated. . . . We believe that General Mihailovi´c desires sincerely to collaborate with all Serb, Croat and Slovene fighters who are prepared to strike the Axis forces.

To attempt something new was correct, but this affectation was inept. Murray’s case for this talk was that Hudson had ‘put General Mihailovi´c’s views in a favourable and progressive light’, and that ‘some common ground’ was needed between the rank and file of the rival movements—‘if not between their leaders’—which justified ‘going slightly beyond the limits of the Directive’. But Hudson’s version of the General’s attitude had mutated into the implication of its opposite. A chain of mistakes had followed the enquiry from London: first Hudson’s attempt to make sense of it; then the misconstruction of his reply; and finally Harrison’s broadcast. The talk did not realize the original intention. It was unconvincing as a serious communication and seriously provocative. Apart from one Panglossian remark about Mihailović, the political tone was unmistakable. It was closer to Partisan propaganda than anything else. The ‘bad old party system’ had been disliked, variously, by Prince Paul, Ljotić, and Tito, but the men of  March had revived it in the name of democracy. The broadcast may have been conceived as a well-disguised taunt: a pinprick in the form of a pat on the head. Mihailović identified it as an attack on the existing regime: Mr. Harrison announced new order of our future state and what rights will belong to whom. . . . I consider that this harms general allied cause and especially harmful [to the] English. In spite of the fact that perhaps it has good reception in Soviet Russia in fact neither will Soviet Russia have any benefit from this but only harm.

Prime Minister Jovanović complained that the BBC should presume to abolish the constitution of an ally: the broadcast ‘emphasized the end of the dictatorship’ but then announced ‘the end of the party system which it had been Balkan News Talk (Serbo-Croat) by H. D. Harrison, . GMT,  Oct. , FO /. Murray to Kirkpatrick,  Nov. , ‘Programmes Overseas, Yugoslavia, File ’, BBC Written  Archives. Pearson to Dixon,  Nov. , FO /.  

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one of the main objects of the dictatorship to get rid of ’. Rendel disliked the broadcast and wanted the Yugoslavs to be able to comment on such controversial texts before transmission. He considered Harrison ‘an excellent man but strongly Leftist in sympathy’. Sir George, himself the most anti-communist of the specialists, believed the political opinions of BBC staff mattered, and pained Kirkpatrick by saying so. SOE London, on the other hand, professed surprise that Mihailović could object to an admirable broadcast based on Hudson’s representation of his views. Hudson, of course, was asked to explain the General’s annoyance. He did not give a direct reply, but used his moment of importance to argue that ‘full moral support of Mihailović’ had failed: You should unofficially let me hold mention of Partisans over Mihailovi´c’s head. I shall then tactfully try to offset Mihailovi´c’s self-jubilant inertia. . . . One cannot deal with Mihailovi´c when he sticks to ethics [i.e. avoiding reprisals], as you have not made it clear that any support you give him is based on de facto considerations alone.

Hudson’s hope was to compel Mihailović to tolerate revolts taking place outside Serbia-Montenegro, and to ‘offset’ the defeatism of Nedić and the ‘growing materialism of others who advocate un-Serblike waiting for others to free their own country’. Hudson’s immediate problem was that ‘any support’ was, materially, next to nothing, and that British political support was given de jure. On  October  Radio London had made an appeal to the Partisans or, more exactly, the communists: We know how hard it must be for men whose opinions have been suppressed and despised, always to act with patience and moderation. It is a hard duty, but absolute necessity. The Partisans will win the sympathy of the world if they have patience and moderation.

References to the liberation of specified areas by ‘patriots’, easily identifiable as Partisans, continued from time to time. (There may have been more such references, buried in the process of bulletin revision, than was apparent to PWE.) When Ralph Murray went to Cairo in November, Elisabeth Barker became the acting regional director in PWE. She could not see why Mihailovi´c had become so agitated. The PWE list of broadcast references to ‘Partisans’, if accurate, was quite modest. But Mihailovi´c was understandably agitated by claims that his rivals had liberated areas which his supporters claimed to control. He did not know why this dangerous theme was popping up. In Bush House an inability to identify Chetnik anxieties was mingled with a reluctance to grant that they were legitimate. The trend was to defend new resisters against old prejudice.  Rendel to Dixon,  Oct. , FO /. The reference is to the ‘personal dictatorship’ of King Alexander and to the succeeding Stojadinović regime.  Rendel to Dixon,  Oct. , BBC ‘Yugoslavia, File ’.  Hudson telegram,  Nov. , FO /.  BBC references to ‘Partisans’ between  Oct. and  Nov. : E. Barker to M. Rose, Nov. , FO /.

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SOE had encouraged PWE and Harrison to pretend that Mihailović was ready to work with the Partisans. The subsequent rediscovery of the truth was used by Hudson to strengthen another idea: that it was time to limit London support and so manoeuvre Mihailović into a position where he would have to accept SOE instructions. Indeed, the de facto case for Mihailović was that he, more than anyone else, would accept orders from Cairo. But Anglo-Yugoslav co-operation broke down. The British considered the government was consumed by its factions. There was remarkably little Anglo-Yugoslav discussion about resistance or the civil war; and there was no shared judgement of how far Mihailović had gone off the rails. Under pressure from Moscow and PWE, Orme Sargent accepted that the BBC should not make itself ‘utterly ridiculous’ by ignoring a controversy which had ‘blazed across the entire world press’. He ruled that since the Partisans made the greater fighting contribution, it was ‘no longer possible to avoid mentioning them and mentioning them favourably’, though news items about Chetnik–Partisan hostility were still forbidden. Rendel was instructed to try to stop Yugoslav anti-communist propaganda in America; Harrison’s broadcast was judged to have been an allowable anticipation of the change of policy; and it was decided that the government was ‘merely playing the Axis game’ in making anti-Partisan statements. The new policy was one the Yugoslavs had ‘got to learn to like’. The formal position could, with a determined neglect of nuance, be described as unchanged: ‘Britain’ was still marked down on diplomatic paper as preferring Mihailovi´c. Sargent’s new course was a matter of propaganda, but the old position was not the substance which the new line disguised. SOE were stuck with their Chetniks and the Foreign Office with the government, but Bush House now had a joker. The BBC were less interested in British protégées than in developing a story and promoting a necessarily indistinct ‘Yugoslav resistance’. The Southern department at the Foreign Office still considered that it was ‘fatal and futile to try to back both horses at once’. They might even assure themselves that HMG had not done so, but the propagandists were now free to imply it. Hudson was pleased: ‘I confirm that BBC references to actions by other patriots in Jug is having just the effect on Mvic we hoped for. He protests violently at the word radoljub [patriot] which he tells me everyone sees is British way of making love to Communists.’ This response was taken to be promising. But Mihailovi´c was infuriated. In September he had accepted a formal request from General Alexander to sabotage the Belgrade–Salonica railway traffic. His claims, though probably true, were received with scepticism. His reward was offensive remarks on Radio London. In December the Germans shot some , hostages in retaliation.    

Sargent to Rendel,  Oct. , FO /. Howard’s minute,  Nov. : Auty and Clogg, British Policy, . Hudson telegram,  Nov. , WO /: Wheeler, Britain and the War for Yugoslavia, . Trew, Britain, Mihailović and the Chetniks, , –, –, .

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Radio London’s shift towards provocative detachment would have been more marked had not SOE believed that the DM Chetniks remained the best resistance associates. Hudson—in Montenegro—recommended boldness and threats in a message sent in the aftermath of El Alamein: I believe that if it were made clear to Mihailovi´c that continued support for him from the BBC was dependent on his readiness to undertake sabotage, he would realise the importance of attempting such objectives even at the expense of his main objective of securing the support of the masses . . . . . . When the General is satisfied that victory is certain, blood will not be spared, but until then I consider him capable of coming to any understanding with the Italians or Germans which he believes might serve his purpose without compromising him.

Hudson’s scepticism about Chetnik railway sabotage may have been misplaced, his diplomacy poor, and his attempt to make Mihailović more pliant misconceived. But he was giving him a chance to improve his external political position. His sense of urgency was to his credit. There were worried men at the Mihailović HQ. Hudson did not enjoy the General’s confidence, but rumours and secrets circulated quite freely. Hudson had plainly learnt a great deal about the fighting against Partisans in the West, and his reports could not have been more disturbing. They were even discounted to a degree because of doubts about his state of mind and the influence which his new radio operator—a Yugoslav communist—might be having on his messages. Until the other departments caught up, PWE’s policy had a life of its own. When Murray received Foreign Office suggestions that the BBC could pretend that ‘geographical and not ideological divisions prevent the Partisans and Mihailovi´c from joining forces’ and that Radio Free Yugoslavia could be presented as an ingenious German black propaganda station (since the Russians had never confessed to running it), he could only sense the burden on his shoulders. PWE guarded others against a quarrel with Russia and left-wing sentiment. Nothing was more likely to freeze hopes and dampen European resistance than a dispute countenancing a civil war between two resistance movements labelled ‘reaction’ and ‘revolution’. The idea that the Anglo-Soviet alliance involved some sort of compromesso storico of ideologies was not quite gospel but it was influential. Allied wrangling could not, at any event, precede a second front. PWE did not trust the Foreign Office or the War Cabinet—or Stalin—not to hand Berlin the most disturbing argument of all. A safe position on Yugoslavia was needed quickly. Murray wished to reveal the fact of civil war in Yugoslavia by condemning fratricide, but he guessed that ‘dyed-in-the-wool Partisans’ might react unfavourably to calls for a ‘united front’. (He was quite right, but were  F. W. D. Deakin, Embattled Mountain (),  ( Nov. ); see Trew, Britain, Mihailović and the Chetniks, – for a critical assessment.  G. Clutter (FO) to Murray,  Oct. , FO /.

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unfavourable reactions avoidable?) If the British admitted the civil war without requiring a ‘united front’, the omission would declare a new indifference. British statements struck Partisan leaders as infuriating and wrong, but not as indifferent. But not offending ‘dyed-in-the-wool’ Partisans made it impossible to strike any balance between needling Mihailović and acknowledging his de jure leadership: Murray resolved to ‘to take care editorially not to propagate the claim . . . and we may prevent insistence on it’. Once this editorial twist was detected, Prime Minister Jovanovi´c complained again. Kirkpatrick’s reply was ominous: he could assure Jovanovi´c that ‘full support’ for Mihailović was uncompromised, but had been unable to ‘track down’ the script in question. A new British policy, unless it was simply pro-Partisan, could have no other object than a united front. Woburn’s Radio Šumadija did use the term, but the RU abandoned seriousness by pretending the front existed. The ‘united front’ was a slogan which, unless domiciled in British propaganda, would be given an inconvenient definition. It was bound to find employment. On  November  the Partisans at Bihać responded to Soviet advice by proclaiming a ‘united front’ with democratic and non-revolutionary aims. This claim, however fraudulent, was indispensable. There was no other way to move Partisans and Chetniks into a broader resistance framework than for London to give it a different meaning. Murray’s reluctance to use the slogan was the first sign that the ideological response to the Partisans might be submissive. In Cairo Paul Vellacott had arrived to extend PWE control of subversive broadcasting. Pearson had already detected (‘knowing Murray only too well’) a PWE plot to push SOE out of broadcasting. In Cairo Vellacott and Murray confirmed his prediction, but they hit stubborn opposition. Glenconner wanted to keep the initiative SOE had asserted in Greece and Yugoslavia. Mihailovi´c had just agreed to send up to fifteen telegrams a day for the Jerusalem RU ‘Radio Karageorge’. Glenconner and Bailey looked forward to an SOE/Chetnik joint venture that would, at last, please the General and improve British leverage. The SOE director of special propaganda saw all the messages from the field: PWE could, if they insisted, observe and advise, but they should neither replace SOE nor get in the way. Glenconner did accept a request from ‘head office’ to be co-operative, but he kept up the struggle for months. Murray, as Vellacott’s Balkan adviser, had full access to SOE Cairo. PWE now received an accurate account of what Cairo was thinking. London arrangements to put pressure on Mihailović in BBC transmissions had been made without consulting Cairo, who now warned that the BBC were causing ‘strong resentment’ among the Chetniks; needling the Chetniks had been Murray to Dixon,  Nov. , FO /. Kirkpatrick to Jovanovi´c,  Nov. , FO /.  D/HV [Pearson] to DCD(A),  Oct. , and AD [Glenconner] to London,  Nov. , HS /.  

 overdone, and SOE Cairo had ‘urgent operational reasons’ to demand ‘more economy of items publicising Partisans’ and even the exclusion of ‘all favourable mention of them at present’. But the changes in broadcasting were almost impossible to reverse, and Hudson thought Mihailovi´c had become more anxious to report and claim credit for Chetnik sabotage. All departments in London—even SOE until they caught up with Cairo’s signals—believed in Radio London needling and wanted it maintained. Glenconner now had a very difficult hand to play: the diplomats were breathing down his neck; SOE still had no supply ‘carrots’; and PWE had become difficult. On  December the Evening Standard printed an attack on Mihailović. Rendel feared the Yugoslavs would be ‘more than ever convinced that we are running the Partisans against them’. The Standard story was a brief account of resistance by ‘Croatian’ Partisans in the Dinaric Alps but it did contain the nub of the story which had not been told. SOE became defensive. Hudson’s telegrams had played some part in the trend evident in Radio London transmissions, and they were passed about less. SOE were trying not so much to shield Mihailovi´c as to handle the General in their own way. SOE’s liaison officer with the government, Peter Boughey, used something blunter than a pin when telling the Yugoslavs that ‘Mihailovi´c . . . is a dictator, and that’s why he won’t recognise the Partisans’. This was a strikingly political insult. SOE may have wanted someone else to be made Minister of War— to depoliticize Mihailović—but hoped, in vain, to avoid trouble from the Foreign Office by not saying so explicitly. George Taylor, the SOE director responsible for all SOE missions overseas, came to Cairo. His preference, after consulting Glenconner, was to let things be, to accept Mihailović ‘as he is’ and to abandon pressure aimed ‘at making the leopard change his spots’. Even in Taylor’s very clear mind, the risk of destruction run by the Partisans still disguised the political risk to the Chetniks. Taylor was content to look forward to a low-intensity Yugoslav resistance on the Greek model of occasional but important sabotage. But officials in London and Cairo who understood ‘higher up’ as the domain of political prejudice sensed a contest with political reaction. PWE were entitled to demand a new political standard, but they had yet to explain why. They had known less than SOE or military intelligence about the Chetnik–Italian complication and did not feel bound to share the blame for PINPRICKS

Vellacott to PWE,  Dec. , FO /. Rendel to Howard,  Dec. , FO /. The Daily Worker followed suit on  Dec.  I. Jukić, The Fall of Yugoslavia (), . Boughey was not pro-partisan. The accusation presumably derived from Hudson’s message: see Deakin, Embattled Mountain, . A Southern department official asserted that Mihailovi´c could ‘perfectly well’ have settled with the Partisans in  but did not because he had ‘dangerous’, ‘old school’ ideas about Yugoslavia: Trew, Britain, Mihailović and the Chetniks, .  Taylor to Hambro,  Dec. : Wheeler, Britain and the War for Yugoslavia, .  

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whatever had gone on. BBC references to liberated areas were expressions of approval, and, implicitly, suggestions that opposition to the Partisans was misplaced. In the middle of December  the BBC obtained a new directive: ‘Mihailović should not be called the sole leader of the Yugoslav resistance’. PWE authority was sufficient for this BBC directive, in its negative form, but the government could not lose their right to say otherwise without Foreign Office agreement, and this was not forthcoming. (PWE even tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the official denunciation of collaborators. They feared that military spokesmen were naming Partisans among the collaborators threatened by the mysterious ‘black threes’.) The Foreign Office became fretful. PWE were told to tolerate the military cabinet broadcasts; they were also asked to show controversial scripts to the Yugoslavs before they were used, but the request was, over the next six months, blocked by passive resistance in Bush House. The smooth handling of radio was also disturbed by a dispute about Jerusalem’s Radio Karageorge, which used Chetnik material and was thought in the Foreign Office and PWE to be highly objectionable. Radio Karageorge (‘The Voice of Truth, The Voice of Draža Mihailovi´c’) was monitored by the Balkan region ‘black’ specialist for the period – November. He admitted that it had some virtues and was technically well done. But there was unacceptable material: Brother Serbs, those who today call you to arms are not Serbs but foreigners and agents of the Gestapo. . . . Let every Serb know (that he should not enter?) the ranks of their so-called Shock Brigades [i.e. the Partisans] which are Units bearing a good Serb name but paid big money by the Gestapo.

Internally, SOE thought Karageorge had started well but was failing badly because the material signalled from Serbia was composed by a grandiloquent politician at Chetnik HQ with no news sense. The first purpose of Karageorge was to contradict Radio Free Yugoslavia. SOE claimed that British official support for Mihailovi´c made this project unproblematic, but in January PWE opposed this ‘radical view of the question’ and were irritated to discover that the Foreign Office defended the Yugoslav military cabinet broadcasts with the argument that SOE put out similar material from Jerusalem. Lockhart, confident of Eden’s support, accused SOE of having used material ‘offensive to all decent Croats’. He demanded the closure of the station and threatened Hambro with ‘a first class row which will do a great deal of harm to both our organisations’. Though Lockhart’s criticisms were out of date, the Karageorge quarrel Barker to Dixon (FO),  Dec. , FO /. F. W. Neate’s report, FO /.  B [Cairo] to D/HV [Pearson],  Dec. , HS /; PWE Cairo to Lockhart,  Jan. , FO /.  Lockhart to Hambro,  Feb. , FO /. 

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revived, and settled, the question of whether SOE or PWE should lead in political warfare. In the end Glenconner capitulated: Karageorge was closed down. While this went on no one could be satisfied with the results. Sympathetic criticism of the Chetniks was not attempted, although it was what PWE had in mind in August. At first the Southern department were not ready for it; then the BBC scriptwriters had neither the authority nor the inclination to achieve the combination of rebuke and reassurance SOE thought they had negotiated. More importantly, though SOE felt the position was critical they did not really understand why. Only in one corner of the Italian zone was the Partisan ascendancy clear. It was only sustained at the cost of high casualties though Partisan numbers were growing. Few yet doubted—least of all the Germans—the superior potential for resistance in Serbia. But Serbia’s Chetniks, though better organized than in , were not yet tested, and in the coastal provinces most Chetniks had stopped fighting, unless provoked. Their leaders were allergic to dogmas about ‘the Axis’ and refused to start an unprofitable quarrel with the Italians. The distinction between acts of civil war and collaboration was blurred. The Partisans became increasingly ready to fight anyone anywhere, while the Chetnik rank and file were often reluctant to fight other Serbs.

 Mihailović Reconsidered A N T H O N Y E D E N and Orme Sargent doubted that British policy made sense. They were willing to reconsider Mihailović, but neither wanted to abandon non-communist resistance. Eden believed that the General avoided battles because he was a Balkan politician, an oriental haggler, trying to get something for nothing. He wanted SOE’s minuscule investment to show a profit. Sargent was painfully truthful. He admitted that ‘we hoped that if we waited the Partisans might eventually be wiped out’ by General Mihailović, but he accepted—‘unfortunately’—that it had not happened and that Britain must adapt its position. But the worse the fears of the Yugoslavs ‘the more they and General Mihailović will concentrate on the policy of keeping their powder dry against the time when they believe that they will have to fight for their lives against a Bolshevik revolution engineered from Moscow’. Sargent warned that there was no commitment to continue to support Mihailović. Mihailović was equally annoyed with the British. Ideally, he would have been brought to Cairo at this stage. When Bailey at last arrived as senior liaison officer, he found the British mission in a poor state and, within it, individuals he distrusted. SOE now argued that trying to drive a harder bargain with Mihailović was hopeless: the Chetniks had received only two supply drops in the previous five months, and they perceived no bargain at all. Bailey had come to request more active guerrilla warfare in Serbia, but the evaporation of support from Radio London guaranteed an unsympathetic hearing. Though his advisers were divided about what to do, Mihailović believed that SOE were occidental hagglers trying to get something for nothing. In Cairo Vellacott offered the shocking suggestion that SOE should worry less about political matters. He assured Lockhart that SOE Cairo had no contact with policy, were ill-informed, and had no intelligence about Slovenia or Croatia. Glenconner was determined to cling fast to SOE’s charter right to be political. His Balkan specialists included very knowledgeable people—Bailey, Hugh Seton-Watson—but were told so little from London, by anyone, that they thought for themselves, and so they were not of one mind. Bailey later recalled that some people were ‘prepared to turn a blind eye’ to Chetnik links with the Italians; Basil Davidson recollects pro-Chetnik and pro-Partisan facSargent minute,  Dec. : M. Wheeler, Britain and the War for Yugoslavia (), . Sargent’s minute,  Jan. , FO /; P. Auty and R. Clogg (eds.), British Policy Towards Wartime Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece (), .  Vellacott to Lockhart,  Jan. , FO /.  

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tions: ‘something like battle lines were drawn up by the end of ’. The leading Cairo advocate for Mihailović was Guy Tamplin, one of Glenconner’s three ‘directors’. The conspicuous friend of the Partisans was John Bennett, the head of the Yugoslav country section. Glenconner and Keble, his Chief of Staff, were willing to support Mihailović but they were also looking for others to support and determined to make an impact wherever the attempt took them. Glenconner came under pressure from ‘head office’ about his staff. At the beginning of December he wrote an important letter direct to Selborne. He would dismiss Bennett for ‘definite political bias’ and for ‘passively resisting’ the Mihailović policy. Bennett was replaced by Basil Davidson, with whom Glenconner was ‘very satisfied’. Glenconner also reminded Selborne quite firmly that SOE must be open-minded and listen to all arguments. He promised that the Cairo Mission would try to use the Right as well as the Left, though the main work would continue to be a sort of Balkan alliance of the political centre which would grow out of the Mihailović HQ. This was an immensely ambitious idea—an SOE implementation of London’s foggy aspirations about Balkan federation. The Russians would certainly have heard about it, and detested it. Lt. James Klugmann, an unconcealed communist, started as a minnow in the country section; but he helped Brigadier Keble to his conclusions. By ‘policy’ Vellacott meant the new mood in London. Murray was aware, from the moment he reached Egypt as Vellacott’s Balkan specialist, that intelligence about Yugoslavia including wireless intercepts was underutilized. In January SOE access to signals intelligence suddenly improved. Keble supplied his Yugoslav section with decrypts of Sicherheitsdienst radio signals. Basil Davidson and William Deakin, the section’s intelligence officer, received this material, already translated. Keble was mysterious about its source. It is possible that SIS, invited to bring SOE up to date and happy to explode Mihailović as an SOE asset, started the job by supplying Keble with material previously withheld. Keble was ambitious and energetic. He knew that the Partisans were now considered differently, and he wanted SOE to contact the communists (or fighting Croats) before others did. At this point Churchill appeared in Cairo and consulted SOE on Yugoslavia. Churchill also spoke with Keble and Deakin. They had by now marked up a map of guerrilla activities. But the War Office had kept a Yugoslav operational map—based on Axis signals —since . Two weeks after SOE Cairo had been considered ‘very illinformed’, the Prime Minister turned up for a briefing. An interest in nonChetnik resistance which had developed in London now blossomed in Cairo.  Basil Davidson, Special Operations Europe (), ; Bailey in Auty and Clogg, British Policy,  –. Glenconner to Selborne,  Dec. , HS /.  Ralph Bennett, Ultra and Mediterranean Strategy ‒ (), –, –; P. Wilkinson and J. B. Astley, Gubbins and SOE (), ; Davidson, interviewed  Apr. . Withholding from SOE relevant hand cypher material had, presumably, been malicious.

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SOE, as so often, were under pressure. Vellacott began to prise the whole propaganda directorate free of Glenconner’s control. In London ‘C’ complained to Lockhart—a week before Churchill encountered Keble in Cairo— that SOE ought to be suppressed since they were ‘amateurs in political matters’, instancing ‘all their spoof about Mihailović’ who was ‘far busier fighting the Croats than the Germans’. On any interpretation of ‘fighting the Croats’, Mihailović was not doing it, and his supporters in the NDH were doing it no more than the Partisans. But reinterpreting Mihailović meant saying something new about Croatia. The search for the undiscovered Croat resistance was interwoven with the Partisan issue. From Keble Churchill received a paper which proposed both more supplies for the Chetniks and exploratory missions to contact the ‘Croats’ and the Partisans: demonstrating the capacity to deliver weapons would permit bringing pressure to bear on either Chetniks or Partisans ‘by withholding supplies’. Churchill asked for a monthly report. Keble did not rush his fences. His first task was to make contact with ‘Croatia’, then with Tito. There was no progress at all on the Mihailovi´c question, whose supporters, although on the defensive, still hoped to prod him into action, while his Cairo critics ‘fumed and cursed’ at the obligation to support Bailey with sub-missions. Such critics were losing interest in the DM Chetniks as a resistance movement. Tito decided at the start of  to march back to attack Chetnik Montenegro and, if possible, to get into Serbia. As it happened, a German-led offensive, Operation Weiss, entered the Italian zone to push his forces that way. (The Partisans later called it the ‘Fourth Offensive’: the fourth serious attempt to destroy them.) German troops, supported by armour and dive bombers, moved into Partisan areas in the Krajina. The Partisan movement was now sustained by the military solidarity of the Krajina Serbs. Shielded by the exertions of units which did not survive, and taking serious losses themselves, Tito’s core ‘divisions’—a force of , competent guerrilla fighters—kept ahead of the German offensive and came back into Herzegovina. But in SOE Taylor thought they were ‘done for’. As the Partisan roving insurrection in the NDH became more visible to SOE it also became more desperate. In Dalmatia Ilija Trifunović-Birčanin, an ageing local worthy, had negotiated in the autumn for , rifles from the Italians. When weapons were delivered, he sent a messenger to Mihailović explaining himself. According to the messenger, Mihailović made a reply: ‘Carry on on the same lines, but you bear the responsibility for what you do. You are not acting in this on behalf of myself or the King. I will not inform the British of these daydreams until you have effectual achievements to show.’ Mihailović was now in a muddle made    

K. Young (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, ii. – (),  ( Jan. ). ‘Operations in Yugoslavia’,  Jan. : M. Gilbert, Winston Churchill (–), vii. . Davidson, Special Operations Europe, .  Wheeler, Britain and the War for Yugoslavia, . SIME interrogation of Capt. Ivanisević, – Nov. , WO /A.

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from other people’s plots, but he refused to cut his way out. Dobrosav Jevdjević, the Chetnik leader in Herzegovina, agreed to block the Partisan passage through his territory. This paved the way to catastrophe. When the German offensive began on – January, it employed four German divisions, Croat forces, and three Italian divisions. But air power was frustrated by bad weather. The Partisans moved back eastwards until they reached Italian garrisons in Herzegovina, which they overran in February, capturing ammunition, mortars, and even artillery. Bailey, then in Montenegro, knew there was heavy fighting against the Partisans near by. It was clear to SOE Cairo—from the intercepts—that in Herzegovina ‘Chetniks’ were on the wrong side. In London military intelligence followed events closely: ‘While it is not perhaps true to say that these Četniks are actually fighting for the Germans, there is no doubt that the latter recognise and ultimately regulate their activities.’ Bailey had already said that the Darlan episode had caused a lot of thought at Chetnik HQ. He could not estimate the Chetnik contribution to Operation Weiss, but he did ask Cairo to consider whether the destruction of the Partisans might be ‘the best solution for our long-term policy’. Their destruction had seemed imminent. But the Italians were aware that Mihailovi´c expected to turn his followers against them in the near future; and they also knew that if the Chetniks won the civil war they would lose their hold over them. The Partisan main force had outrun German pursuit, but they had pushed into unfriendly territory. Montenegrin Chetniks had been moved up in Italian lorries. It is unlikely they knew that they would fight in support of a German sweep from the other direction. German troops were appearing in this area for the first time. The orders for Operation Weiss were that ‘no Cetnik formations whose leaders were proved to be in touch with Mihailovi´c are to be spared’.  There were an estimated , Chetniks concentrated by the Italians in the vicinity of Konji´c on the river Neretva. The Chetniks fought badly or not at all, and their leaders were simply outfoxed. The Italians vanished from the scene when least expected. The collaborating units, defending fixed points, were easily dispersed. The civil war was reviving, but this time with the Partisans in the ascendant. The barest outline of the contest and the scale of the fighting became known to the world press; the BBC used reports published in the Swedish Communist newspaper Ny Dag. Harrison managed to make a BBC talk about the fighting which was remarkable for its sudden independence:

 Bulletin minute,  Feb. , WO /. SOE to FO,  Feb. , FO /. M. J. Milazzo, The Chetnik Movement and the Yugoslav Resistance (), –.  F. H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War,  vols. (–), iiia. –. Enigma revealed that the Germans could read Mihailovi´c signals. The German estimate of his hostility to themselves was good evidence, to the few who knew it, in the General’s favour.  

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Recently we have begun to receive at last in London more certain news of the action of Yugoslav partisans. Until a few months ago such information was confused, incomplete and very scarce and, therefore, we were not able to refer regularly to the important and courageous front which represents the only organised military force now fighting in Occupied Europe.

Then the waters of the Red Sea parted. The Italians absconded; the Germans were diverted by a Chetnik threat to the invaluable bauxite mines near Mostar; and the Partisans succeeded in bridging the Neretva on  March despite a Chetnik force holding the opposite bank against them. This was a crucial victory which resounded. Whether Jevdjević had intended simply to keep Tito off his patch or to destroy his movement no longer mattered. Had Tito’s core force been destroyed, Mihailović would have reconciled himself to the way of it, but failure gravely compounded the error. It also left the British inclined to remove the traces of their complaisance. A number of Chetnik leaders, some associated with Mihailović, had compromised themselves and their men. Their confidence that they could fight for the Italians and then brush aside recriminations was misplaced. They were duped by their Italian sponsors. The Partisans emerged not only victorious but wronged. From Mihailović’s HQ Hudson was already demanding hard decisions: Mihailovic´ must be told he has six weeks to split [the Chetniks] into pro-Ally and pro-Axis constituents. That is, to withdraw all his officers and men and senior officials serving the Axis. Otherwise, British will at last insist on calling a Quisling a Quisling and a Partisan an Ally over their own station. We risk nothing by putting this bluntly to Mihailovic´, who knows we could smash him by withdrawing BBC support. [The Chetniks] would throw him over immediately, for now that Germans are losing they look exclusively to British strength to prevent their nightmare of Russia provoking return of Communism.

Such an ultimatum, with full Yugoslav support, would have been well timed even three months earlier, but the events it might have shaped had now taken place. It was rather late in the day for the British to be creatively indignant. During the battle Mihailović was in Gornje Lipovo near Kolašin in Montenegro. Bailey had already reported that he might risk a break with Britain rather than halt the campaign against the Partisans. On  February, with the Partisans getting closer, Mihailovi´c made a speech of pure frustration at the turn of events and the tone of the BBC. It was to serve his British critics well. There was a moment of alcoholic candour at a christening party: The Serbs were now completely friendless . . . The English were continually humiliating Mihailović both as national leader and as informer of Bailey by their refusal . . . to accept his reports of sabotage carried out in Serbia without confirmation of independent sources . . . The BBC, with revolting cynicism, had dropped its support of the sacred Serbian cause and functions and were now publicising a band of terrorists because the latter provided  Broadcast on  Feb. , FO /. Emphasis in text. ‘They think the Germans are going to destroy us now, so they’re chanting our requiem’: M. Djilas, Wartime (), .  Hudson’s message, Feb. , WO /.

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cheap, sensational and apparently false (grp.[code] indecipherable) . . . for which enemy troops were bound to exact captives from Serbian population in Croatia. . . . His enemies were the Ustaše, the Partisans, the Croats and the Moslems; then when he had dealt with these he would turn to the Germans and the Italians.

This outburst was improvised in Bailey’s presence. The Partisans soon heard of it. Djilas calls it ‘a speech such as not even we Partisans could have written for him’. He denounced ‘the Allies’ lust for fraud’ and he ‘bitterly regretted’ not having been a better pan-Slav in view of Western complacency about Slav bloodshed. The Gornje Lipovo speech was, after the event, written for him twice: by Bailey and, in another version, by a group of Chetnik officers convinced that Bailey’s version had been exaggerated. But even the safer version, with its reference to the Italians as ‘that miserable army’, contained stinging insults: You ask me if we shall obtain Allied help in arms and shoes . . . Well, I will tell you. We are alone, and we can depend on ourselves only. Since France is no more, it seems to me we have no one left in the world . . . Allied radio seems to run us down and do everything possible to praise Tito and his men. You have had sad experience of Tito’s Bolshevist regime and know better than anyone what must be thought of those who have sullied our monasteries and our sanctuaries, who have massacred so many good people, who have shown no respect for family or property bequeathed by a glorious past. Yes, we are alone my friends, and our allies appear as merchants of human flesh.

What was said obliged Bailey to withdraw ‘demonstratively’ to his tent. The speech exposed an appalling barrier of indignation and mistrust. The British mission was, no doubt, irritatingly sceptical about minor resistance work, which really did occur, and seemed increasingly uninterested in German reprisals. (In Belgrade large numbers of ‘Mihailovists’ had recently been executed as hostages.) Once his head cleared Mihailović tried to undo the damage. He assured Bailey that the Axis armies were his ‘fundamental enemies’, and Bailey reported that the outburst had cleared the air: ‘a favourable atmosphere for future negotiations has been created at the cost of some uncomfortable moments’. It was too late. The Lipovo speech created a diplomatic incident. Both the Foreign Office and SOE delivered ultimatums but their wires got badly crossed as the inevitable apologies were negotiated. The Yugoslav government had to reprove their Minister of War, and Mihailović even accepted their instruction to stop fighting Partisans. The General’s qualified promises, though finally accepted by the Foreign Office, were easy to discount. There was no mechanism for a change. The Partisans followed up their success crossing the Neretva with a determined campaign against Chetniks in Montenegro. The Partisan commitment to ripping up the Mihailović movement received   

 Undated extract from Bailey’s report, FO /. Djilas, Wartime, . This alternative text is found in a report by Mladen Zujovi´c,  Dec. , WO /A. E. L. Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War,  vols. (–), iii. –.

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almost explicit support from Russia and a moment of discreet encouragement from the German authorities in Zagreb, whilst the Chetniks, up to the beginning of March, received less discreet support from the Italians. London had no answer to this. Djilas felt his comrades ‘were all the more embittered by Eden’s senseless, malicious declarations regarding British efforts to unite all the resistance forces in Yugoslavia’. The British message of peace and reconciliation could be discounted by both sides as obtuse or impenetrably Machiavellian because it was not carefully explained or reinforced by open criticism and plausible threats. Bailey, considering that distance alone would keep Chetniks and Partisans from each other’s throats, suggested that the Partisans should be asked to confine themselves to Croatia and Slovenia leaving Bosnia and Serbia to Mihailović. Significantly, ‘C’ rejected the proposal and remarked that Bailey had simply absorbed Chetnik priorities. But Bailey was the senior liaison officer. If his idea of the right demarcation line was mistaken, he was at least advocating external arbitration. Simple exhortations had no obvious meaning for a Chetnik commander faced with a Partisan offensive. But people further away thought they knew better. A PWE specialist, once a victim of the  Cairo purge, advised Lockhart that ‘political action’ was required in the Balkans, and claimed that ‘this practice of allowing men without political experience to undertake political activity . . . has landed us where we are in Yugoslavia’. (This was the SO grudge against SOE/SO Cairo resurfacing.) SIS claimed knowledge of political feeling outside Serbia. Both Sargent and Lockhart were aware of revisionist ideas developing in intelligence circles and of a related suggestion that exclusive support for Mihailovi´c had been a specifically SOE blunder. Since SOE controlled the liaison with Mihailović’s HQ , and had few other sources of information, SOE could be made to look blinkered. ‘C’ was audacious. He suggested that even the idea of Partisan unpopularity was an SOE fiction. The exchanges between PWE and SOE and ‘C’ all had a basis in knowledge of some kind. Even the Southern department knew what might be at stake, though it was crudely literal for them to suppose Bailey’s proposal would hand over Croatia to communism: the problem in Croatia was the absence of a nationalist resistance movement. Bailey was trying to preserve political options by suspending the civil war. The search for the missing guerrillas of Croatia was the pursuit, until June , of what Deakin later called a ‘dim and indeed contrived image’. Murray was at the centre of the Cairo discussions. He informed PWE that most Chetnik organizations in western Yugoslavia were working openly with  Djilas, Wartime, . For the Partisan–German negotiations see Milazzo, The Chetnik Movement, –, and S. Trifković, Ustaša (), –.  Cabinet Office History, –, CAB /.  Johnstone to Lockhart,  Mar. , FO /.  F. W. D. Deakin, Embattled Mountain (), , .

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the Italians against the Partisans. But the arguments which had once explained this collaboration were no longer repeated. Until January —Stalingrad— this choice seemed acceptable. The Chetniks near the Dalmatian coast were delighted by the victories of the Eighth Army, and had imagined they were accomplishing a triumph of manoeuvre. The Italians had been useful and slothful. They were now doomed and anxious for the goodwill of the powerful; they would be disarmed, or even change sides, when the Allies came. But the Italians in defeat, as the British themselves discovered, were always less useful than seemed possible. In February they betrayed Chetnik hopes when they allowed the Germans into the Italian zone and accepted a change in policy. Partisans, Chetniks, and Germans were all struggling to secure their position in the event of a British landing. Inside Yugoslavia this prospect was supremely important. Only the Chetniks wanted to see the landings happen. There was no fixed Allied commitment to a landing, but a Dalmatian beachhead was considered, sooner or later, quite likely. Some German officers had wanted to negotiate a truce with the ‘rebel’ Chetniks, but they knew Mihailović was an enemy. Others wanted a truce with the Partisans, and Tito suspended action against the Belgrade–Zagreb railway as a pledge of his anti-Chetnik priorities. German intelligence, with access to more than the British sample of their signals, regarded the Mihailović HQ as the core of a network of Chetnik bosses whose bumbling particularism would resolve into a single insurrection when the Allies came closer. The determination not to be tricked may explain German overestimates of Chetnik resistance. Since the Germans were more concerned about an eventual levée en masse than British observers in Cairo, the Chetniks seemed their main problem. An Axis pessimist could even doubt there was any sufficient obstacle to Chetnik/Partisan rapprochement. One Italian observer—aware of Bailey’s spheres-of-influence proposal—predicted, as late as May, that ‘if London insists, the efforts to unite all anti-Axis forces will succeed’. This judgement should not be dismissed lightly; it was, in a sense, what Hudson thought too. But London did not know how to insist. Besides, the sort of political liaison with the USSR which the Italian may have assumed did not exist. Murray’s account of the new thinking in Cairo was rather sour about Mihailović himself: ‘a regular officer in the Serbian tradition of the Yugoslav Army’ who believed that ‘all forces not under him were Communist’. (This was probably the ‘Croats’ again.) There was a silver lining in the Partisan picture hidden from the limited Chetnik imagination: Experts on Yugoslavia made prima facie deductions that the great majority of the [Partisan] men were not Communists, but rather were Left-wing peasants with egalitarian doctrines



Milazzo, The Chetnik Movement, .

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at heart and imbued with a familiar form of Russophile sentiment greatly strengthened by Soviet Russia’s tremendous resistance to Germany. 

Most Partisans were, indeed, not party members. But whoever could not accept communist authority inside Tito’s ‘National Liberation Army’ did not join it, or tried to desert; the rest were looking for an army and accepted what they found. Comradeship developed by sharing Partisan dislikes and associating familiar social ideals—no Partisan monopoly—with the rejection of the old Yugoslavia. Hard fighting created a solidarity which made effective an improved internal propaganda. Anti-Chetnik agitation was incessant. Once the ‘majority’ had undergone a few months of marching and tuition, they were screened from other influences. Nevertheless, the non-communism of the Partisan majority became an important British theme. PWE, then Cairo, then ‘C’ all tried to represent the equation of Partisans and communism as the sort of fallacy one picked up by taking Mihailovi´c too seriously, and to Mihailovi´c they attributed the oafish view that all people of liberal opinion were communists. This accusation accompanied the mirage of a Croat guerrilla movement considered, mistakenly, as a set of non-Partisan bands or, imaginatively, as the Croat Peasant Party wing of the Partisans. Murray had prepared his report with SOE Cairo. The arguments were disarmingly eclectic and a Russophile complacency was not at all proposed: It is plain that the Soviet Government, or a strong influence in it, has in view the extension of Russian influence and . . . the achievement of a ‘Red Balkans’ and is carrying on vigorous and uncompromising propaganda both within and without Yugoslavia.

A good post-war settlement required pro-Western influence in the region, but Mihailovi´c was not the instrument but the obstacle: It cannot be emphasised too strongly that our influence cannot be extended through the agency of Mihailovic´ who represents no basis for approach to Croats and Slovenes, and that a policy of simply backing this Serb general throughout Yugoslavia for the formal reason of his official position (which is purely nominal) can get us no further and indeed is likely in terms of political warfare to be fatal to us.

In form at least, demoting Mihailovi´c was part of the quest for the third resistance. Murray also wanted Britain to advocate a federal Yugoslavia since the ‘Croats will not co-operate with anyone who does not give them a political motive’, and he recommended that British propaganda should no longer be done in the name of the Yugoslav government. These proposals were offered as a means of ‘trumping the Communist ace (we hope)’ though in a manner to which the USSR could not object. PWE now seized the idea that the Partisans



Vellacott to Lockhart,  Feb. , FO /. The report was evidently Murray’s.

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were ‘almost certainly not Communist’. This statement of the Mihailovi´c problem was highly political, and so was the solution. The Cairo picture of quasi-communist Croats capable of being imbued with a loyalty to Great Britain sufficient to balance endemic Russophilia was absurd. It was still assumed that most fighting Serbs were Chetniks and, in the Foreign Office, that within ‘Serbian lands’ Mihailović was or could be supreme. The fact that the Partisans had emerged from Serbia, fought in Montenegro, and were especially active in Serbian districts of Bosnia and Croatia had failed to register. The reappraisal of the Partisans expressed a fixed determination not to allow Serbian bigotry to obstruct a connection with non-Serb Yugoslavia. The idea of a Slovene difficulty about Mihailovi´c was purely scholastic. The Croat difficulty existed, at the level of recrimination and rivalry, but, only six months later, evidence that the Croat Peasant Party was negotiating with Mihailović was treated as a black mark against Maček. Chetnik vengeance was feared in Croatia, but Mihailovi´c could be the Yugoslav handle on that problem even if his men were as bloodthirsty as the Partisans would be. Croat antipathy to Partisans was not much discussed, then or later. Murray’s new opinion projected onto the Partisan–Croat amalgam everything that a progressive well-wisher might want Yugoslavia to possess and projected onto Mihailović the entire burden of the past. The Foreign Office admitted that in Serbia the BBC had been too discouraging. Trying to make sense of Mihailović’s outburst at Lipovo, the Southern department scratched at the surface of the problem: We . . . find that during the first three weeks of February Mihailović was only mentioned once, whereas the Partisans were referred to  times and ‘patriots’ twice, in addition to which there was a formal tribute to the Partisans’ heroic struggle . . . Mihailovic´ seems to have a prima facie case. . . . We therefore suggest that you should try in the immediate future to keep a slightly more even balance . . . either by suppressing some of the messages about Partisans or by inventing news about Mihailović. We don’t really mind which course you adopt.

Such worldly flippancy did not find favour in Bush House. PWE, already finding Harrison difficult to control, explained that the BBC, far from balancing— in the Foreign Office sense—their treatment of two resistance factions, were involved in a quite distinct manoeuvre: The tributes paid by the BBC to the Partisans were intended to counterbalance the somewhat exaggerated propaganda in favour of Mihailovic´ in the Military Cabinet bulletins; they were also intended as a kind of disciplinary measure to meet the Military Cabinet’s refusal to modify in any way the tone of certain of their broadcasts.

  

K. R. Johnstone (PWE) to Lockhart,  Mar. , FO /. Douglas Howard to Barker,  Mar. , FO /. Barker to Howard,  Mar. , FO /.

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In this way the Southern department learnt that their refusal of the PWE request to suspend the military bulletins had caused the BBC to freeze favourable mention of the Mihailović Chetniks. Elisabeth Barker, now the PWE regional director, was aware the BBC were ahead of the directive. She told Harrison to make it clear that the British ‘do not sympathise exclusively with the Partisans’, and warned him that ‘if we lose the confidence of the authorities, we might get ourselves into serious trouble and find ourselves with less liberty of action’. It was difficult to defend ‘exaggerated tributes’, and the BBC need not add to the ‘bitter pills’ which Mihailović would soon have to swallow. Harrison’s tribute and his estimate were unauthorized. But he was right to be excited. Although Harrison had few details, ‘the only organised military force now fighting in occupied Europe’ was—with a heavy emphasis on ‘fighting’—tolerably accurate. There were exaggerations later, but not at this point. The Partisan core force had escaped after six weeks of fighting with four German divisions in pursuit. En passant they scattered Chetniks and even forced an Italian garrison to capitulate. No other resistance movement could have stood such pressure without dispersing; none was mobilized to this degree; there were, in Europe, no parallels. Still, the bare facts of March were that the Germans paused for breath, the Italians had effectively withdrawn from the campaign, and the Partisans celebrated by wiping out Chetnik formations. It was unfortunate, even dangerous, that the BBC eulogy should simply conceal the civil struggle, and hide British doubts about the Partisans behind the excuse of previously poor intelligence. The shift in sympathy was mishandled since it was not explained. The lack of explanation was not exactly Harrison’s fault. In the background fierce arguments were taking place. Few relished the idea of judging the Chetnik/Partisan contest or deciding which charges of collaboration were true. Harrison’s broadcast was a case of a man blurting out something he had wanted to say for some time. It was not rooted in PWE/SOE agreement. Although it sounded like a major statement, it lacked a supporting political intention. It was bewildering. British advice about the Partisans had never gone beyond the official AngloYugoslav plea that the Chetniks confine themselves to self-defence. This was inadequate. Even the Chetniks in Herzegovina, holding the Neretva against Tito, were trying to defend themselves. If it was not understood this kind of Axis orchestration of the civil war might happen, it is difficult to see why not. In March the Germans and Partisans were exploring the advantages of a truce. The offer to negotiate reached Tito three days after the Partisan success against the Chetniks. The German high command in Zagreb had always Barker to Harrison,  Mar. , FO /. Djilas was a negotiator: Wartime, –. S. Clissord, Djilas, the Progress of a Revolutionary (), , raises the question of a connection between the truce and the success against the Chetniks.  

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disliked the Italian–Chetnik relationship. The Partisans were offered a German licence to pursue their war against the Chetniks into the Sandžak. The arrangement was soon overruled from Berlin, but it was an obvious move which the Chetniks had long feared. The Partisans were, after all, a counterweight to the Anglophile resistance. Britain, not the Soviet Union, was the strategic threat on the Adriatic coast. SOE London still saw Bailey’s mission to Mihailović as the centre of their work in Yugoslavia and they grew angry at the BBC. They tried to cancel the BBC’s liberal interpretation of the directive and asked the Foreign Office to ‘go further’ in circumscribing PWE: ‘we entirely agree with Bailey’s earlier requests to stop altogether mention of the Partisans on the BBC as clearly his position has become untenable’. PWE’s wish to be more friendly to Soviet favourites was conceded, but it was also resented: The Soviets have no such scruples. Not only do they ignore Mihailović (the Yugoslav Government’s representative with whom they are supposed to be in alliance and whom they know we support) but in their endeavour to build up the Partisans they openly attack Mihailović, call him a traitor and demand his extermination. We, on the other hand, have not only refrained from attacking Mihailović’s opponents, but in the last few months we have actually boosted them.

At a higher level, Hambro complained that the BBC had ‘caused suspicion and doubts as to whether we are sincere’. SOE were right to feel anxious, but it was now very difficult to find a remedy. The balance in civil war shifted. While Tito pushed on into Montenegro, an SOE mission dropped to the Partisans in Croatia. The Partisans deduced that the British were adjusting to Chetnik failure: the legendary cynicism of perfide Albion seemed confirmed. In May Tito received an SIS/SOE mission from Cairo which included Deakin. The truce was over and the Germans had started the ‘fifth offensive’—Operation Schwartz. Deakin witnessed the stamina and resilience of the Partisan main force under very hard pounding, but, inevitably, did so without reference to simultaneous German anti-Chetnik operations, which were an integral part of Schwartz, or to the larger framework in which it could be said that the Partisans were not so much fighting Germans as trying to escape from them at a time when they preferred to be hunting Chetniks.   

Pearson to Barker,  Mar. , FO /. Pearson to Howard,  Mar. , FO /. ‘CD’ (Hambro) to Sargent,  Mar. , FO /.

 Tito’s Breakthrough ORME SARGENT:

‘If Mihailovitch were a Czech guerrilla leader instead of being a Serb, he would be one of our blue-eyed boys!’ ANTHONY EDEN: ‘Yes indeed.’

A T the end of January  Mihailović’s men had been on RAF vigil for eighty-five nights and received nothing but Bailey. SOE feared that their failure to respond to the Chetnik plea for a few weapons, plus the unwillingness of Radio London to hold a steady pattern of friendly recognition, carried the risk that the DM Chetniks would wither away. Glenconner acknowledged that with only four sorties promised for March, Mihailović might see no alternative to the Italians and Nedić: ‘belief . . . that we are playing a double game is intensified by references to Partisans in official BBC’. Cairo still conceded that Mihailović alone could produce ‘a maximum rising at a time when British troops may be entering the Balkans’, and that propaganda should work towards ‘building him up and bending him to our will’. But this did not clarify what Radio London should say about the Partisan/Chetnik contest. Cairo wanted to prise Mihailović away from the rogues in Dalmatia and Montenegro and argued that Mihailović’s association with them was losing him popular support. They considered Mihailović was waiting for a post-liberation confrontation with Croats, Communists, and Muslims. This should have been a truism: everyone had an eye on the political outcome. SOE London kept warning that activating the Chetniks required a strengthening propaganda for Mihailović. To help Bailey, SOE wanted to stop the pinpricks and keep the word ‘Partisan’ out of the bulletins for a time. But it was too late for courtesies and euphemism. The attempt would have further confused the crossed lines and mismatched phases of policy. In any case, the BBC were unrepentant. They knew that the General was under a cloud and that PWE had no policy on the civil war. No more than the outline of events reached London quickly, and the arguments between SOE and PWE were correspondingly academic. PWE hypothesized a ‘politically indeterminate rank and file of the Partisans’ which would become ‘anti-British’ if an ‘exclusively pro-Mihailović’ line were adopted. SOE replied, without effect, that too little was known about Partisans to frame propaganda on such a basis, and then tried to invert PWE’s argument about the indeterminate mass: Sargent’s minute,  May , FO /. D/HV to CD,  Jan. , and Glenconner’s telegram,  Feb. , HS /; ‘General Mihailović and the Partisans’: CD to Lockhart,  Mar. , FO /.  

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It is possible that if this non-communist mass amongst the Partisans could see in Mihailović’s movement both a genuine intention of resistance and an ideal of social justice, particularly of agrarian reform, there might be a chance of a steady seepage from one side to the other which would in time solve our problem.

This was the last expression of the wish that the Partisans would somehow go away. Seepage was possible from both sides. Radio London had a natural authority on the way the wind was blowing. The voice of London was altering as resistance became—in prospect—both more important and less overwhelmingly Serb. The BBC could now begin to inform the choices of Croats, Muslims, and Slovenes—especially those who expected the next Yugoslavia to be shaped by outside patronage. But the hopes retained in SOE London were preferences not plans. The Partisans were accumulating advantages. The morale of their fighting men had not been eroded by inactivity, and most of them had accepted the order to fight Chetniks and not to distinguish between Chetnik bands. Failure on the part of Partisan commanders to show less than consistent hostility to Chetniks was punished severely. The civil war was passing through its second crisis while PWE and SOE enticed each other with wishful thoughts about a less differentiated resistance. SOE did not persuade Bush House to change other than to prefer the word ‘patriot’ to ‘Partisan’. Bailey detected no improvement and reported more objectionable material. On  April he described as ‘errors of fact’ both the claim that the Partisans had resumed the initiative in Bosnia and the description of Bosnians as ‘enthusiastic for the Patriot Army of liberation’. He added that ‘since . . . principal fighting is against Chetniks and most people in this part of the country know that, it is senseless to talk of patriots assuming initiative in Bosnia’. Hambro added the observation that the BBC Yugoslav Section were now ‘personally enthusiastic on behalf of the Partisans’. Two weeks later he passed on another report from Bailey that the BBC had praised the Partisans, this time by name, for the seizure of four towns which had been captured from the Chetniks rather than Croat militia or Germans. Lockhart agreed to drop the Partisan term ‘the Army of Liberation’. PWE now tried to distinguish between Partisan areas and Chetnik areas. In Bosnia this was impossible. The Serbs were, at this time, still the most numerous people in Bosnia, but Bosnia could not simply be blocked off as Chetnik territory since both Partisans and Chetniks relied on Bosnian Serb districts. SOE knew that Mihailovi´c would react very badly if the Partisans were ceded bits of Bosnia  Barker to Howard,  Mar. ; Pearson to Howard,  Mar. , and Pearson to Howard,  Apr. , FO /.  Bailey’s telegram,  Apr. ; CD to Lockhart,  Apr. ; CD to Brooks,  Apr. , FO /.

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by the BBC. In PWE’s view Mihailović had no right to object to non-Chetniks being credited for Bosnian resistance. The attempt to fit new facts into old analysis was full of traps. In April Sargent advised Lockhart that most Partisans were Serbs, and should not be called ‘Croat guerrillas’, but even this was changing. Tito’s main force was now well inside what had been considered Chetnik territory. SOE asked PWE to remember that press reports in neutral countries were often indirect Russian propaganda. Partisan activity did revive in western Bosnia—the Partisan–German truce may have helped—but Bailey’s point about the offensive against the Chetniks in eastern Bosnia, nearer to him, was never answered. No account of Partisan operations which did not refer to the civil war could be free of deception and rhetoric. Yet PWE had to authorize some version of the news. They knew that the Partisans presented the occupation forces with a real difficulty and did inflict losses; they said that the BBC’s ‘occasional minor deviations from policy’ were due to the disproportion between the flow of news about Partisans and ‘the very small trickle of news about Mihailović’. PWE allowed the BBC to use stories coming from Axis agencies or the Russians when they were the currency of world press comment. Having operated on SOE hints and a shoestring of news in –, the BBC were harvesting the conventional sources again. To SOE surprise PWE did not even use the Mihailović telegrams they were shown. PWE and SOE moved apart. Both avoided the issues—revolution and reprisals—raised in Yugoslavia. Hambro thundered that ‘the policy followed by the BBC, or the interpretation put upon it by the BBC Yugoslav Section, is not only contrary to the policy laid down by the Foreign Office, but is liable to cause serious harm’, and he reminded PWE that ‘our information is available to be used in your directives’. SOE would not accept that Partisan successes had undermined an established choice simply because news policy was getting difficult. Hudson transmitted a long series of retrospective telegrams in spring . These confirmed that only in Serbia had Mihailović been in command of reliable Chetniks and that his status outside Serbia stemmed from the BBC, who had persuaded doubtful characters in western Yugoslavia to reinsure with him. The foreign press reports creating enthusiasm in Bush House came through more quickly than the backlog of SOE signals. These signals would have done little to dilute the new enthusiasm, although once SOE submissions arrived in Serbia in mid-April there was enough sabotage to report for Radio London to have made something of it. But the news came through too slowly and the idea of a constructive Chetnik policy began to fade. Sargent to Lockhart,  Apr. , FO /. Barker to DDG (Brooks),  May , FO /. The BBC reported on  Apr. that the Axis had lost munitions dumps and a hundred soldiers in ‘the battles going on in Bosnia’: Barker to  Howard,  Apr. , FO /. CD to Brooks,  May , FO /.  

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When, in April, the COS asked SOE to obtain more guerrilla activity in the Balkans, Sargent disliked the revisionist current and was explicit about its probable destination. He requested that the increase in activity should not mean very much: It might involve a reversal of the present policy of support for Mihailović which is being followed by the FO, SOE and PWE [sic] since Mihailović s playing a long-term game . . . If the scale of guerrilla activity is to be increased in the immediate future it may require that HMG should switch their support from Mihailović to the Partisans . . . But we . . . would probably have to give them promises and assurances which might be very embarrassing politically.

The reference to ‘promises and assurances’ is striking—all the more so because after this one perceptive remark the idea seems to vanish from the record. But nothing in Sargent’s assessment echoed Bailey’s recent plea for a collective Allied intervention to prevent Yugoslavia from becoming a ‘second Spain’. Sargent had a keen sense of the burden of insoluble problems. (The simple solution was already apparent: one Bailey would dislike.) It was agreed that SOE should send arms to the Partisans. Britain had acknowledged two resistance movements: the attempt would be made to support both sides. But SOE saw not the ‘slightest possibility of running two movements in double harness’, and in London they still wished to see Mihailović prevail throughout all ‘Serbian lands’. This geography meant too much or too little. In any case, Mihailovi´c could not reduce his leadership claims to Serbia (however defined) unless so instructed by his government, and the government was still protected by the Foreign Office, who wanted to stop the initiative slithering into the hands of soldiers and spies. The COS again asked for more Balkan activity—as strategic deception— before the Sicilian landings. This time the Cairo Defence Committee suggested that the Partisans had established a strong claim to British favour. It was only a small further step to making a case for preferential treatment. The Foreign Office and SOE London, briefly united after two years of distrust, were unable to stand against the tide. New opinions came from PWE, SIS, and SOE Cairo; a new political control of clandestine work was imposed by the Minister of State in Cairo—to which Glenconner adjusted as best he could; and Downing Street approved. Official opinion swung towards the Partisans assisted by a feeling of distant comradeship with people taking heavy knocks from the enemy. The unmistakably brave won the benefit of political doubts. At the heart of the intelligence system, an anti-Chetnik case was assembled. Suddenly, the Director of Military Intelligence marked down the Chetniks as  Minutes of meeting chaired by Sargent,  Apr. , attended by Lockhart, Brooks, Hollis (COS), and Howard, FO /. Sargent suggested the Partisans were unlikely to be made more active by anything Britain did: FO draft minutes, same meeting, FO /.  F. W. D. Deakin, Embattled Mountain (), .  Pearson to Howard,  Apr. , FO /.

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‘hopelessly compromised in relations with the Axis’. PWE Cairo made another political proposal: By a multiplication of SOE liaison missions and intense and careful propaganda it should certainly be possible to have the advantages of partisan co-operation without the ultimate disadvantage of a clash with them on account of their Communist aspirations. We should aim at enlisting partisans’ enthusiasm for what would amount to a vigorous agrarian ideology rather than a dogmatic Communist one.

This would be easier ‘if partisans could no longer complain that we were committed to a reactionary collaborationist’. Did anyone believe this? The London circle of interested parties was expanding, and important individuals briefed themselves. Mountbatten, as Chief of Combined Operations, took a proPartisan position. Lord Selborne worked hard to keep Mihailović’s claims alive. The only other minister to test the growing sympathy of British broadcasters for the Partisan struggle was Leo Amery. Amery had some Serbo-Croat and his son, Julian, had worked in SOE Cairo. He wrote to Bracken about communism in Slovenia, and so sidestepped the complicating factor of Mihailović. Amery had been in touch with Miha Krek, the Slovene vice-premier in the Yugoslav government. He made two points: first, the Partisans had done some genuine resistance ‘to get hold of the young men’ but had then reverted to being ‘a Communist and murderous movement’; secondly, that the BBC was creating the impression that Britain was behind the communist movement. The question was whether the White Guards, the Slovene conscript militia, ought to be condemned. Harrison said the White Guards were as bad as the followers of Kosta Pećanac, the collaborationist ‘Chetnik’ warlord in south Serbia. (Pećanac was later killed by the DM Chetniks.) Harrison would accept no middle position. The Partisans were a coalition: ‘the [Slovene] Partisans . . . are not all Communists . . . They are the democratic element among Slovenes of whatever party . . . well-organised and full of courage. But they have the support of most of the Slovene people and this angers Dr Krek and his party [the Slovene Populists] which once controlled the whole people.’ Harrison simply trusted his pro-Partisan Yugoslav sources. Rendel thought Klemenčić’s ‘Verbal Newspaper’ of  June contained a number of implications ‘very damaging’ to Krek and his party. On  June Krek was prevented from saying that there was no collaboration in Slovenia. Amery was helpless.  DMI to CIGS,  June , in F. H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War,  vols. (–), iiia. .  Min. State, Cairo to FO (PWE Cairo to PWE),  June , FO /.  Amery to Bracken,  May , INF /. Rendel too pleaded that it was ‘most unjust’ of the BBC to denounce the ‘Quisling attitude’ of Slovene villages and wanted Harrison made aware of ‘another side to the picture’: Rendell to Howard,  May and  June , FO /.  Harrison to Kirkpatrick enclosed with Kirkpatrick to Sendall (Bracken’s Private Secretary),  May , ‘Programmes Overseas, Yugoslavia, File ’, BBC Written Archives; Rendel to Howard,  June , FO /.

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The Southern department tried to advise PWE: ‘It may not be strictly accurate that there are no collaborators in Slovenia, but it seems to us near enough the truth to be accepted by the BBC. Anyhow it is obviously good propaganda.’ This was not obvious in Bush House, whose mentality the diplomats did not understand. PWE expounded the new judgements: There is even more bitter hostility between the Chetniks and the Partisans in Slovenia than . . . elsewhere . . . It also appears to me that the Slovene clericals . . . are adopting an even more cautious policy with regard to resistance than corresponding elements in other parts of Yugoslavia; to speak of no collaboration would inevitably give unnecessary offence to non-clerical elements in Slovenia.

SOE were not yet represented in Slovenia. PWE were refusing to contradict Partisan propaganda and they let Harrison incline towards the accusations of Radio Free Yugoslavia without openly adopting them. Kirkpatrick advised Bracken against going into the matter with his colleague. The BBC Yugoslavs became waspish. There was an allegorical attack on General Mihailović: Blimp is the type of man who is convinced that officers are people who have imbibed all the wisdom of the world. . . . British democracy in its recent rapid forward strides has buried Col. Blimp safely in the ruins of modern war. . . . [But] Col. Blimp’s continental cousins are all over the place, and after the war they might easily stake out a claim of recognition for their would-be services, conveniently forgetting that the people themselves are the army. If that should happen we should have to witness a return to the spirit of the barrack square, the ordering-about and the dictators. . . . However, as the attack on [Europe] draws near, the spirit of Col. Blimp is giving out all round.

Bailey and the Chetniks heard this in Serbia. Their protests went to Cairo and from Cairo to London. (‘Rapid forward strides’ was surely enough.) A month after the broadcast PWE replied that the Chetnik protest had been ‘fully discussed with the BBC editor’ and was considered to show ‘hyper-sensitiveness on the part of the listener’. Rendel too was hyper-sensitive. He knew it was ‘very much a toss up’ whether the Chetniks could be kept going or not. BBC broadcasts were in the hands of pro-Partisans. Rendel and the Southern department disliked this, but they knew that Bracken and Eden were simply not worried. In May the BBC succeeded in ridding itself of the last Chetnik strand in the Yugoslav broadcasts. The military cabinet programmes died the death of a thousand cuts. The officers simply gave up in disgust. The Easter message to the Yugoslav Resistance had been the last straw: ‘one passage . . . was unfortunately cut out at the last moment for reasons of time, so as to exclude any Howard to Barker,  June ; Barker to Howard,  June , FO /. Extract from Zlatoper’s talk,  June , FO /.  FO to Deputy Minister of State, Cairo,  July ; Rendel to Howard,  July , FO /.  

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mention by name of the geographical area in which Gen. Mihailović has a predominant influence’. It was this straw which snapped Hambro’s patience with the BBC and provoked a clash which revealed to SOE that PWE did not really intend that broadcasting should help to revive the DM Chetniks. On  July Bailey heard one BBC speaker say that it did not matter whether Mihailović or someone else unified Yugoslav resistance and another say that Mihailović was to be confined to eastern Serbia. Mihailović complained again: The propaganda over London radio is provoking greater revulsion among the people, which may turn against those who seek to attain something in this manner . . . [Concerning] the open propaganda in favour of the Communists: the people recommend that our Allies first form Communist military units in their own countries and if it is such a good thing then we will do so. . . . All the shootings in Serbia and other Serb provinces are not announced over the London Radio, neither does it take the part of our people there.

PWE allowed the BBC to use the rule of thumb that the Partisans were the real resistance while fencing courteously with SOE and the Foreign Office, who still insisted that stern words—a few of which the Yugoslav Prime Minister duly delivered—and deliveries of arms could restore both Chetnik morale and British support. PWE could not insist that this formal position was false, but they did not need to. Worse disasters had followed the humiliation of the Herzegovina Chetniks in March. In May Operation Schwartz began with a trap for the largest of the Montenegrin Chetnik brigades. Still trusting the Italians, Pavle Djurišić concentrated his men to face the Partisans moving into Montenegro, but they were taken by surprise by a large German force and surrendered at gun-point. This was a sensational disgrace. Even the Partisans had taken Djurišić seriously as a tough and able commander. He had been Mihailović’s favourite in Montenegro and perhaps the most convincing in his claim that limited collaboration with the Italians was an advantageous bargain from Chetnik strength. Emissaries were sent to Dalmatia warning everyone to break with the Italians. Mihailović’s HQ force was rescued, from Germans and Partisans alike, by a strong escort rushed in from Serbia. But Chetnik Montenegro seemed to crumble in the next few weeks. Bažo Djukanović and some other Montenegrin notables were tracked down and killed. For the moment only a few pockets of autonomous Chetniks were left in the region. But Serbia was near and the Partisan main force could not stay. In September Mihailović would raise new Montenegrin forces. But this capability was no longer obvious. Barker to Howard,  May , FO /. Telegram from Bailey,  July , INF /; Mihailovi´c to Yugoslav PM,  July , INF /. Bailey said that  schoolchildren had just been shot in Kraljevo for belonging to the Mihailovi´c youth movement.  

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After Djurišić the Germans turned on the Partisans. Once again German field reports were read in Cairo and London. The Partisans were chased with more determination and speed than before. An armed ring was drawn around them, and they were not even in friendly territory. At precisely this moment SOE dropped Deakin to join Tito. The Luftwaffe flew , bomber and reconnaissance missions. There was, inevitably, a massacre. The Germans reported twelve or thirteen thousand Partisan casualties including , counted dead. However, the Partisans did what was essential. They broke through the German ring and saved their political leadership. The decrypts put German losses at  killed,  missing, and , wounded. This was reliable evidence of guerrilla skills. Then the Partisans rebuilt their main force. Had SOE succeeded in getting Djurišić—or Djujić in Dalmatia—committed against the Italians before Operation Schwartz, the position might have looked different. But SOE had moved too slowly. For eighteen months, time had seemed to be on their side, but the British were still quibbling about nomenclature—Partisans or Patriots—and without a clear view of the civil war, when the Germans and Partisans, themselves alternating between negotiation and merciless warfare, exposed the disadvantages of Italo-Chetnik compromise and the carelessness it had bred. Cairo first proposed the open denunciation of named Chetnik leaders—General Djukanović and Bajo Stanišić in Montenegro and Dobrosav Jevdjević in Herzegovina—at the end of May. The object was perhaps more to disarm Partisan suspicion on the eve of Deakin’s mission to Tito than to reorient the Chetniks. Indeed, the term Chetnik soon fell into disuse. A month later, warnings were given that all Yugoslavs who ‘up to now have been misled and have misunderstood the purpose of Britain and America must repair their errors before it is too late’. This, at least, was a sustainable line of commentary. The Partisans were immensely pleased to hear the BBC denounce collaboration. But there was no obvious answer to their charge that Partisan success had simply forced the British to abandon their intrigues and act in the Allied interest. Even before Schwartz was over, the Partisans knew they had knocked the British prop from under the Chetniks. They could hear from Radio London how far the British had moved and the likely destination. There were two cabinet reshuffles in summer , and Mihailović knew his ministerial rank was uncertain. He was in fact retained, but PWE believed that certain outgoing ministers might ‘if questioned privately and individually’ agree that the General’s importance should dwindle to something like GOC

MI, June ‘BM’, WO /; Hinsley, British Intelligence, iiia. . Minister of State, Cairo, to Foreign Office,  May , FO /. This was a PWE message agreed with SOE Cairo. The Italians would have agreed that these three were theirs: see L. Karchmar, Draža Mihailovi´c and the Rise of the Četnik Movement ‒,  vols. (), ii.  ff.  Cairo to Foreign Office (Jefferies for PWE),  June , FO /.  

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Serbia. Cairo thought that the best use for their rapidly improving air capacity was arming Partisans alone. The Mihailović commitment was an unwelcome burden, but he was still above public criticism. The working assumption was that for as long as someone received British support, they were not liable to criticism. (Besides, the precedent might be used to demand parallel criticism of the Partisans.) This rule had no high purpose, and it diminished the realism of broadcasting. The trend could flow round the Foreign Office because forcing a diplomatic decision was, in formal terms, premature. Broadcasts did not reinforce Bailey’s attempts to reconstruct Chetnik resistance, they offended those he had to convince by celebrating Partisan victories which were Chetnik defeats. Some Chetniks believed that the British would merely use the Partisans for a season. Others thought the British were captive to the Anglo-Soviet alliance, in which case the remedy could not be to take Bailey seriously or obey Cairo, it was to appeal to the Americans and wait for events to reverse British priorities. Katyn must have supported this conclusion. Deakin reported that his Croatian sub-mission had encountered Chetniks who clung to the idea that the BBC naming Chetnik leaders as traitors was ‘only [the] opinion of speakers, not official’. Certainly, the BBC news service generated warmth for the Partisans but cast no illumination. The suggestion that any kind of arrangement with the Italians was treachery was heard as Partisan propaganda. BBC rebukes were not too strong, they were too few, too simple and unpolitical. Radio London offered no sort of re-education. For much of the time the DM Chetniks had freely admitted their Italian ‘tactics’. Some deserved, and all needed, an explanation of why the British had started to complain. The great British need by June , as everyone could foresee, was not for less Italian collaboration but more. There was an audience anxious for explanations. In Cairo Keble admitted that the Partisans’ ‘Mihailović collaborationist’ theme was in part factitious, but PWE could not say this. Deakin reported a communication from Djuro Banjanin, a Bosnian Chetnik leader: his men had now broken with the occupiers and gone into the forests, but the Partisans must realize that earlier practices had been ordered from above; now that the orders had changed, it was time for the Partisans to join them under Mihailović’s general command. Unrealistic as this was, it was not contemptible. But the Partisans were confident that the Chetniks were no longer serious rivals in western Yugoslavia. Tito would not discuss them beyond rehearsing his determination to finish them off. There was a suggestion that an effort be made, using information from all SOE officers in

  

Min. State, Cairo to Foreign Office,  June ; Lucas to Brooks,  June ; FO /. Deakin’s report,  Aug. , FO /. Report on Chetnik collaboration with the Axis,  Sept. , WO /.

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Yugoslavia, to help the BBC distinguish between good Chetniks and collaborators. It was opposed by Deakin who warned that the Partisans would discount criticisms of Chetniks that excluded their chief. When SOE London saw Deakin’s mission directive they were shocked to find no mention of Partisan/Chetnik peace-making—in sharp contrast to the instructions sent to Mihailović. Hambro was astonished that Deakin had been made independent of Bailey without telling Bailey, and ordered the preparation of a new directive. Glenconner was then in London. He hinted at resignation unless the Cairo Mission was allowed to proceed as they thought best. Without even facing a formal request, Tito imposed his refusal to consider a truce. The British were silenced. This was more important than any later decision. The Partisans crossed a golden threshold; they grasped there would be no penalty to pay for brushing aside the idea that there could be genuine resistance loyal to Mihailović. SOE London had lost control of their Cairo Mission. But they stuck to the claim that the Chetniks might co-operate if the BBC could control themselves. Bailey thought that Mihailović was a chastened man, and reported that an approach from the Partisans, could Deakin arrange it, would be answered seriously. The idea of defeating the Partisans outright had surely vanished. In May the Chetnik sabotage record was respectable and supply drops finally improved. Mihailović learnt for himself that the Partisans were receiving RAF drops. He now saw that less political support was available at a higher price. Some of his advisers wanted to comply, but others clung to their views and constructed theories to fit their needs. The British relationship with the Partisans, which everyone could hear, was beginning to sound like an alliance. SOE missions working with the Partisans—outside Serbia—was not perhaps the end of the world. But the intensity of BBC admiration for Partisan warfare—irrespective of its targets, victims, and goals—was deeply worrying. British reliability was more critical for Chetnik choices than was easy to appreciate. Every SOE request was followed by a debate about British intentions. A promise of ten thousand rifles might have tempted the Chetniks to take more risks or, more exactly, to take them as a matter of course. Mihailović believed that new weapons could deter or prevent the punitive expeditions that would follow the unleashing of Chetnik potential against the railways. But the idea still persisted that there was a fixed quantum of Serbian striking power— to be used or conserved. Doubts about the future allocation of British rifles reinforced this view. For several months Mihailović hesitated. He offered a provisional assent to the general instructions from Cairo, except when they seemed humiliating; he promised, refused, cancelled, and reordered  Deakin, Embattled Mountain, . The Partisans supplied Chetnik documents which convinced him that ‘legal Chetniks’—open collaborators—were acting under Mihailovi´c’s orders.  CD to V/CD,  June , and AD to CD,  June , HS /.

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operations from day to day. He was determined not to be duped, nor to start a major sabotage campaign without a first-class reason and audible political support. He was still opposed to creating liberated areas. There was some prospect of a new leaf, and good evidence of Chetnik fighting. In mid-July the General was hunted by a strong German and Bulgarian force and survived due to the exertions of Miloš Marković, a commander of a regional Korpus, whose skill drew approving comments from Bailey. This battle was considerable by any resistance standards. The DM Chetniks in Serbia were not demoralized and were concentrating in larger numbers than before. Several commanders, by choice or compulsion, were learning a more active guerrilla warfare. Then disaster struck. The Germans ambushed an SOE ‘reception committee’ near the Chetnik HQ. There were no casualties, but Bailey’s archive fell into German hands. The damage was unbelievable: the names and location of all British missions and sub-missions and of the Chetnik commanders with ‘revealing statements’ about their trustworthiness; lists of potential targets; fire signals and code books; orders of battle and mobilization plans; the present and potential strength of the best commanders; commentary on the BBC and on relations with the Partisans and with the Muslims. Mihailović and Bailey were far from the HQ at the time. Glenconner, back in Cairo, seized on this as an excuse: the General and the Foreign Office were to blame; Mihailović, for rejecting an order from Cairo to surrender the Sandžak and part of Serbia to the Partisans, the FO for overruling Cairo. The Cairo mission had become truculent. Bailey heard that ‘Partisan Political Officer, Djilas’ had made a speech in July claiming that the British had changed sides and were abandoning Mihailović, who would soon be dropped as Minister of War by the Royal government. When he asked Cairo to rap Tito’s knuckles, Deakin retorted that Djilas’s opinions were his own business. Bailey was getting out of touch. Djilas was quite right about the British. Selborne, Hambro, and Gubbins were suddenly ineffective against the weight of opinion in several departments, including SOE Cairo, which deduced that promoting the Partisans meant cutting Mihailović down to size or becoming anti-Chetnik. SOE London held on to the fragments of policy which remained in Mihailović’s favour without being able to rely on anything staying in place long enough to rebuild his position. Selborne’s wish to cut out BBC snubs and insults did not meet the problem. It would not have altered the trend. Silence about the Chetniks and enthusiasm for the Partisans produced a propaganda far less conducive to Chetnik reorientation than reasoned criticism and plain reporting. The stance of impartiality did not disguise the transfer of esteem which had caused it. Bailey argued that ‘the BBC is losing its reputation for dispassion 

AD to CD [Glenconner to Hambro],  July , HS /. Telegrams TY/ and TY/ of  and  Aug. , FO /.

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ate and accurate service owing to [the] predominantly Croat character of broadcasts . . . [and] undue prominence given . . . to pro-Partisan propaganda’. Events had reinforced the Bush House pattern. The Balkan region, though satisfied at the shift in recognition, were not malicious. It was conceded that Newsome’s Yugoslav and Greek editors had been getting too independent. Elisabeth Barker did want a firmer grip on the output, but this was the usual Bush House story—another contest with Newsome—not the finetuning Bailey wanted: ‘we therefore propose . . . that Mr Newsome and Mr Kirkpatrick should be asked not to overrule, or to counsel the evasion of, our advice’. Barker wanted the power to instruct the BBC Yugoslav section in urgent matters, and asked for Lockhart’s support in the matter of ‘postmortem criticisms’. But Kirkpatrick, like all the most senior people, seemed to understand very well how matters stood. In Cairo there was an impulse to say something. The press were told that there were now British liaison officers with both Chetniks and Partisans and that Mihailović had denounced certain quisling Chetniks. London was bewildered. The first statement was entirely unauthorized. The second was thought to be an invention. It was useful if true, but if untrue not well meant. In August the Yugoslav government of politicians resigned and were replaced by a cabinet of civil servants, which the British, briefly, expected to like better. The Serbian RU announced that ‘the old political parties have played out their role’: the th March is at last complete . . . Our nation will bring forward . . . new political leaders and new political parties. We see that with victory and with liberation is coming not only the expulsion of the foreign authority . . . but also the destruction of those who only temporarily play the role of national patriots and fighters. The new world . . . is bringing better times of justice and freedom.

Withexplanationsdelayed,thosewhoknewsomethingfeltobligedtofillthesilence. To support PWE and to codify changes in policy, Bracken and Eden produced a joint ministerial directive. The range of commentary and subject matter was restricted, various euphemisms and omissions were recommended and there was a warning—one point conceded to Selborne—that BBC staff should ‘adhere strictly’ to the new position. The word ‘Chetnik’ was banned and references to Anglo-Soviet relations, communism, contacts between Russians and Partisans, and pre- political parties, were to be avoided. Only ‘substantial’ military successes need be reported. Proven collaboration had to be condemned but nothing else. There could be no criticism of organizations and  Telegram from Bailey,  July , INF /. This ‘Croat’ allegation was a matter of ‘accent of announcers, stylisation and text’.  Barker to Lockhart,  July , FO /. The transmission log suggests problems in the studio. An occasional entry is ‘item not read’. On  May a script disappeared. On  May ‘Klemeči´c seems to be becoming unhinged and needs watching’: Yugoslav Service Transmission Log, BBC.  Radio ‘Šumadija’ on the change of government on  Aug. , FO /.

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parties which did not collaborate: a prohibition to be ‘applied fearlessly’ to Yugoslav speakers. Terms such as ‘People’s Army of Liberation’ and ‘AntiFascist Council’ were forbidden, and with them any reflection on Tito’s aims. Yugoslavs were to be offered a picture of non-political ‘Partisan forces’ as the patriotic resistance except for something which had to be described as ‘Mihailović’s forces’. Warnings were to be given that Britain did not support either Croatian or Serbian separatism: ‘British speakers should say boldly that there is no place in Europe for new small independent states . . . and that Yugoslavia’s only chance of survival is as a federated state.’ Nowhere in the Bracken–Eden directive is there a trace of the former commitment to Mihailović as the commander-in-chief of a recognized government. While SOE complaints were acknowledged in the call for ‘a stricter control’ over the BBC’s Yugoslav and Greek personnel, the  August directive cleared the decks of old policy, and of politics, and imposed a new theme. Tito and Mihailović would be awarded arms and encouragement on the basis of a competition which the British would adjudicate. A mild pretence was made that one did not know already the identity of the victor. Churchill writes that during that summer ‘the Balkans, especially Yugoslavia, never left my thoughts’. After an important staff conference on Yugoslavia on  June, he decided to send a diplomat to Tito’s HQ. Fitzroy Maclean had no previous SOE connection; he was retrieved from the SAS and brought from Cairo to Chequers. The imminence of the Sicilian landings enhanced the geopolitical interest of both sides of the Adriatic. The Prime Minister told Maclean to discard anti-communist assumptions: Mihailović was under suspicion; ‘politics’ was secondary; Tito seemed to be fighting hard and Maclean was to say which side was ‘killing the most Germans’. The PWE directive followed. It was the propaganda equivalent of Maclean’s briefing. The powers-that-knew invited PWE to consider, and Maclean to answer, a question which was already quite clear. Politics was ‘secondary’ because Yugoslavia was tied into an understanding of an imminent Italian collapse. If challenged everywhere the Germans, somewhere, would run out of answers. But Maclean’s mission was political; he went to Tito as the Prime Minster’s ‘personal representative’. By providing the Prime Minister with a direct link with Tito he, in effect, erased the remaining political autonomy of SOE in Yugoslavia. Both the PWE directive and Maclean’s briefing called for a certain impartiality but invited a judgement. If Cabinet colleagues were to agree that Yugoslavia was secondary, they would need convincing. Eden, though willing to see the Partisans elevated, did not want to write off Chetnik Serbia during the war or Royal Yugoslavia at the end of it. Whatever Churchill was really Broadcasting directive for Yugoslavia and Greece,  Aug. , FO /. Churchill, The Second World War,  vols. (–), v. .  Maclean’s recollection in P. Auty and R. Clogg (eds.), British Policy Towards Wartime Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece (), .  

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hoping, his commitment was remarkable. He told the COS that he must have extra aircraft for SOE in Yugoslavia, and warned them that ‘a political and not only a military appraisal of the profit and loss must be made’. The political people were told politics was secondary and the military were asked to be more political. Mobilizing Chetnik resistance depended on Bailey persuading Mihailović to accept criticism as intelligible, friendly, and authoritative. But propaganda had already been fumbling when Bailey struggled out of his parachute harness. The Germans were quick to announce that Britain was sacrificing Serbian interests to her need to conciliate Russia. Month by month this fear became more plausible. It was the argument Radio London could not attempt to answer; it enhanced all implications whenever the BBC fell silent about Mihailović or the old Yugoslavia. An SOE liaison officer in eastern Serbia recognized that the enormous initial confidence in liberation from the West was fading: ‘I believe that among the men with whom we were working, the withering of these hopes and the growth of suspicion, not about our efficiency (there is no word for efficiency in Serbian) but about our motives, began with the sequence of events in June .’ This liaison officer did not see collaboration; he saw ‘naivety and self-importance’ and, in his district alone, an odred with weapons for , and the capacity to mobilize, but not to arm, , men in twenty-four hours. After his failure to overturn a veto on action imposed by Chetnik HQ , he and other British liaison officers went through a period of disillusion in which ‘we were to discount virtues which existed, magnify small faults into great and disregard legitimate causes of complaint against us’. These sorts of judgements were flowing in to Cairo before Maclean started his mission, and before the Chetniks displayed an impressive fighting spirit against German and Bulgarian troops when the Italians surrendered in September. London could not put a curb on the Yugoslav civil war while refusing to mention it. A depoliticized account of resistance was unhelpful as well as false. Ignorance had never been a true excuse. Silence about the communists had seemed an obvious ploy in . In October  Sargent had still insisted that the BBC must continue to ignore the civil war. The idea that Britain could have its own favourite irrespective of Russia seemed unwise, at least in SOE and PWE, from the start. It had to be abandoned. The combination of support for a British proxy and praise for the Russian proxy waging war on him was less a policy than a moment of complex disorientation. Only when, in spring , fresh accounts of Chetnik collaboration in Herzegovina overlaid the older story about Partisan terrorism, did the instinct for concealment start  

PM to Ismay for COS,  July , CAB /. J. Rootham, Miss Fire (), , , .

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to weaken. Allegiances were shifting. Radio London combined freelance signals of change with a number of unsatisfactory holding positions. Because there were specialists who supported the Partisans the question took on an ideological colour. For a few—Selborne and Hambro in SOE and Ambassador Rendel—this was provocative, but for others it was a sign of the times and showed that changing horses was quite thinkable. That Mihailović had been up to something, that his government had little appeal and few prospects, and that the Partisans did not make threats against Croatia, were important considerations. Who was ‘killing the most Germans’ was the pragmatic inflection appropriate for a sensitive and dangerous political decision. The decision that seemed likely in spring had been the replacement of Mihailović; in the autumn it would become clear that Cairo wanted to be rid of the entire Chetnik movement and might have the Prime Minister’s support. The success of the Partisans in the mountains of the Italian zone proved something but not everything. Axis communications remained secure, and the liberated areas were remote and not very populous. Resistance in Serbia was always likely to be different. Hudson had called Chetnik attentisme ‘unSerblike’. He was mistaken. Mihailović’s choices, though misconceived as anti- communist strategy, are perfectly recognizable in Serbian tradition. Serbia’s leaders have often been foxy and determined to avoid too great a sacrifice. The Kosovo legend of Lazar and his heavenly kingdom was not a model. If it was an inspiration, it was also a warning. In the Ottoman period revolts had been mostly unsuccessful, and ill-judged revolts had to be cut short. Nothing was more dangerous than to reinforce a failed revolt. Waiting in the woods for someone else to make the Turks hesitate was standard procedure, and the price of miscalculation had always been appalling. Mihailović knew that the Serbs would not liberate themselves. Could the British really demand more from Yugoslavia than he was prepared to attempt? The British considered this question, but finally allowed Tito to answer it. They were willing neither to accept the Yugoslav government as a firm base for political warfare nor to reconstruct it; they wanted Soviet help and discarded the chance of getting it; in one pragmatic mode they did not mind about the Italians and in another they did not mind about communism. Shakespeare’s grave-diggers were right: in England Hamlet’s curious frame of mind could be no cause for comment. It had seemed at first obvious that revolution must weaken patriotic resistance. In a sense it did, but the revolutionaries grew stronger. The British demand that Yugoslavs set aside their disputes faded away; when the point was reached at which SOE expected to trade weapons for a political truce, the ambition to force a compromise was simply abandoned. The longer the Partisans fought, the easier it was to overlook their intentions and to mask them. The idea of revolutionary defeatism was familiar: revolutionary optimism in war was a welcome surprise.

Conclusions I T is natural to wish to know what propaganda or political warfare contributed to the war. If the war means the military outcome, the answer must be that even in  the full yield from resistance was expected later. However, if there were an exact answer—say  per cent or ‘as much as all the bombs dropped on Berlin’—it would not be very interesting. The question, however natural, is partly misconceived. If wars were not decided on the battlefield, they would not take place. Propaganda in war is less an adjunct of battle than an attempt to clarify success or to reassert politics and impurify the arbitration of naked force. Political warfare is a line which intersects the line of battle. Battles are moments when fighting forces are matched. They do not explain, or much reveal, the opinions of contestants. We should not expect to calibrate propaganda work in terms of military force. Its nature is political. Even the most decisive military outcomes usually indicate scope for further political definition. Words can be brushed aside or they can snare the meaning of military exertion and drop a harness on events. Unfortunately, the British unreadiness for war in  was political as well as military. An anti-fascist agitation which could excite the Empire, maximize American support, and pull in the Russians was simply not wanted until well past the optimum time for beginning such appeals; and even in  a limited war to set Germany straight did not require a big drum. After May , the war could not be won except at an unforeseen tangent to the political success thought possible at the start. State propaganda suffered from the uncertainty of British strategy before the war and the obscurity of Britain’s chances in –. Douglas Ritchie was not understood very quickly. The V campaign was only an echo of what it could have been. The question of ‘revolutionary’ war aims was raised only to be dropped. The hesitations of – still went deep; the values that would pay were possibles not probables. At first glance the reluctance about war aims might seem a matter of not using silly slogans, but the decision has this appearance only because of the general puzzlement about whether Britain could say anything fundamental until victory was visible. This crippled pragmatism lies at the root of the impotence of . Victory came but the puzzlement was just as bad. Neither Britain nor Germany could remain great powers without European associates, without—in the British case—an association of maritime states recruited, before Pearl Harbour, to fit her own needs.

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The challenge in  was to integrate the British Commonwealth with a select group of occupied allies. This was actually understood, but not as a strategic emergency. Britain’s missed European opportunity was less Rome in  than London in . By the autumn American and Soviet consent for a new British project—a permanent alliance of the Commonwealth and several maritime states in Europe—would have been very difficult to refuse. London’s difficulty with the Soviet alliance as a propaganda theme derived from the absence of strategic war aims; it was deeper than the sentiment, or the socialism, that spoke in Russia’s favour. The idea that the Soviet Ally should be described at all raised a question of fundamental purpose and authority which seemed best avoided. The goals that might have made meaningful such an exercise of authority did not exist. In Cyril Radcliffe’s MOI a choice was made that the Cabinet seemed able to live with. The decision not to describe the USSR conformed to an ethos of wise, almost judicial impartiality. For others the risk of offending Moscow or provoking Russia’s admirers was reason enough to keep quiet. Whatever the motive, it did not help in handling Stalin later in the war. The root of the matter is that Churchill’s ministry generated too few ideas, and too few commitments, in its early, heroic period. The felt need for revolutionary talk revived in . BBC scriptwriters were encouraged by PWE to offer the domestic debate about reconstruction as a picture of British democracy in action. They were not supposed to go much further. British propaganda steered close to the notion that the war was creating something positive but did not explain it. In this mode, it became a supportive context for the claims of others. The cold assertion that the war was fought simply to destroy a threat, would have been distinctive but uncomfortably dry. In – it was very dry, but this did not last. British propaganda eventually carried a fair amount of other people’s optimistic officialese— American, Soviet, Gaullist, and Yugoslav Partisan. In this context, speculation about great power rivalries and useful reporting of political divisions was impossible. The propagandists never warmed to the Allied governments. The influence they did achieve was resented. Harvey’s strictures on the Belgian government in early  became the prototype of subsequent criticism. When original commitments became a problem Allied governments found their authority reduced or even extinguished. The Free French were rebels. Hence the initial difficulty and their ultimate value. In autumn  the British found themselves confronted with two candidate leaders of French resistance. De Gaulle was taken up, on an impulse, and then almost dropped. He could not do what Pétain would not. The French nation seemed confused and drained of motivation. French recovery was extremely important and impossible to discount but there was no true leader because there was no first-class resistance to lead.

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Since this might not change for several years, de Gaulle was retained without much conviction that Free France was important. The Anglophiles and antifascists learnt to use the label ‘gaullist’. When this was recognized, controlling the propaganda image of Free France became more interesting. De Gaulle had to improvise, but he had the audacity to block further improvisations. Without growing tolerance and support on the British side he would surely have failed. It was difficult to control the consequences of allowing Free France onto the diplomatic stage equipped with de Gaulle’s lurid imagination and his eccentric staff. The White House considered Pétain the leader of French resistance because the Americans saw as clearly as the British that there was no first-class resistance. It was not wholly certain that the circuits, saboteurs, and spies run by SOE and Passy in London would be more important than the flattery and intrigue offered on America’s behalf by Ambassador Leahy at Vichy and by Murphy in Algiers. But it was more heroic and it became more respectable. In spring  de Gaulle began to associate with the sort of people the MOI had hoped to see around him a year earlier. A vision of the Resistance as the New France was soon tugging at British minds and hearts. Ideology began to help fix policy. In  British officials quietly sustained a French policy that was not American. The Fighting French had too many friends in London for Churchill to do de Gaulle the harm he contemplated, but lacking headline commitments the British had to work very carefully. They were so discreet that the Gaullist ultras were less impressed than they should have been. France was not conceded to Roosevelt, but in outward form the priority of the AngloAmerican alliance was asserted with loyal emphasis. But de Gaulle and Mihailovi´c were walking on ice when they started to criticize British attitudes. Mihailovi´c was more vulnerable. He had been embraced by the Yugoslav government, but as its nominee he was interpreted as the symbol of an ancien régime, and was in due course identified as the obstacle to what seemed a farsighted policy for retaining a united Yugoslavia and not conceding it, entirely, to the Russians. Occupation created a legitimacy-vacuum. But a monopoly of violence in the name of resistance implied state power. Resistance bestowed a kernel of legitimacy on those in charge, and BBC recognition magnified this effect. Clandestine newspapers, Woburn’s black propaganda, Soviet and American broadcasting stations were all planets in orbit round Radio London. The Danish resistance, the French communists, and the Yugoslav Partisans all understood that Radio London was an immense advantage. Ironically, this sometimes made the precise tone of BBC broadcasting more important than PWE wished. Nuances are very difficult to control in advance of firm decisions. By  there were resisters almost everywhere who wanted a stronger tone from London. Broadcasters struggled not to sound hopelessly feeble; so

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they were allowed to applaud what they were not to advocate. Open resistance, when it occurred, was almost invariably welcomed in some degree, but the French communists knew they were being damned with faint praise. Radio London, through the early V campaign and suggestive phrasing, sounded more like a clear summons to resistance than a careful examination of what was recommended would justify. The rhetoric was not as halting as the policy. In Yugoslavia PWE wanted to ignore one complication after another. It was difficult to criticize the Partisans simply for being revolutionaries. When Newsome issued a special standing directive arguing that European audiences did not wish to have ‘disturbing events or disquieting ideas withheld from them’ he was inviting his colleagues not to be coy about the ambition of Resistance radicals. He did not mean the audience should hear even polite scepticism about Resistance radicalism or ‘the Soviet experiment’. Britain needed a miracle, ‘the revolution’ was the political miracle for modern minds, and in – a Soviet miracle actually occurred. In spring  America was neither a great military power in Europe nor an ideological beacon. Ideological pressure was a lubricant of policy when it was supported or welcome, but unsupported it was merely a warning light. The ideological pressure to support or procure a violent resistance of blood and social dislocation built up in . It was resisted by PWE in France and Denmark, though summer  provided a welcome release from a depressingly negative Danish policy. The August disturbances gave both British broadcasts and Danish resisters a moment of conspicuous militancy which encapsulated both the will to resist and the awareness of limits. The Danish government disappeared, but the strikes stopped and a Danish administration remained. The occupation of Vichy France left the Pétain–Laval regime shamelessly intact. But PWE never contemplated resistance in France or Denmark leading to the catastrophic social collapse seen in Poland and Yugoslavia. When the French maquisards appeared on the scene, this was confirmed. The pressure to turn réfractaires into fighters was deflected. Churchill’s instruction never to disapprove of killing Germans was already in place. It seemed purely rhetorical, but it established a point about the AngloSoviet alliance: vanguard militancy was above criticism. The Yugoslav Partisans survived the difficult period in which they were vulnerable to Anglo-Soviet political disapproval. Then, in the year after summer , they captured the imagination of many who cherished the Yugoslav ideal. It became obvious, too obvious for argument, that their success in the civil war would solve the problem of who would reunify the country. In Poland the ideological pressure to support Moscow’s complaints about the Underground was resisted as PWE circled endlessly around the political problem, but Yugoslavia was different.  Special directive,  Oct. , BBC E/; [ N. F. Newsome], The ‘Man in the Street’ Talks to Europe (),  ( Feb. ).

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The Polish government was an awkward but valued ally. Whatever the critics said, they would in an ideal world have returned home draped with honours. They might have been defended if Stalin’s timing had not been so shrewd. The London Poles were not forcibly silenced, but they were asked to hold their tongues as the British slowly disengaged in the face of Soviet criticism and they had to remain calm as the criticism took hold in public discussion. Sikorski’s Polish critics predicted that if the Poles kept quiet they would be quietly abandoned; when Sikorski died the prediction was already coming true. If retuning Polish expectations was essential—sooner or later everyone said so—the potential value had gone after the Russians severed relations with the Polish government. There were despairing attempts to do what might have been useful in –, but the Polish region did not expect anything of this belated activity. Yugoslavia was not, for the British, so dangerous and painful. It was a place where something might be achieved. The Poles brought assets to London and they had friends as well as critics. The Yugoslav government secured, at best, polite sympathy and, at worst, derision. British political legitimism weakened, and the ideological pressure to move towards the Partisan standard of resistance became stronger for Yugoslavia than anywhere else. It was less a question of who was popular than who was promising. Yugoslavia was a solution not a people, and King Peter’s ministers could neither restore the previous solution nor invent the next. The Partisans were perhaps not the solution either, but they seemed certain to be part of it, and they did offer new lamps for old. They were more interesting and more difficult to dislike than imagined at first. While the Yugoslav government remained the starting point for British policy, Croatia was the ultimate difficulty. But once the Partisans, and advanced attitudes to national questions, looked like the wave of the future, the problem became the Serbia from which the Partisans had been ejected. The ideological pressure to support violent resistance reinforced the suspicion that Chetniks, of all kinds, must be put in their place if a Serbian revanche was not to obstruct the next Yugoslavia. The Partisan rebellion put political pressure on those who disapproved of it. Yet only in the mountainous, less populated parts of Yugoslavia could such a strategy succeed. Mihailović pursued the contrary policy—with initial British encouragement—of allowing his commanders to conceal their strength until the Allies arrived with guns and shoes. This strategy simply ignored the Partisans. In Serbia it was, for a time, possible to do so, and this disguised from Mihailović the extreme danger to his cause of trying both to obstruct the Partisans—anywhere in Yugoslavia—and to postpone bloodshed. The price was the gradual alignment of Chetniks outside Serbia with the other enemies of the Partisans and the erosion of their resistant status. In  political signals from London were not clear or decisive. But by summer  PWE, without the Yugoslav government’s consent, had

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virtually dismissed Mihailović as national leader, and worse was contemplated. To facilitate change a simplifying formula had been devised—‘who is killing the most Germans?’ The answer was not known to be of real military importance; and the full political consequences of identifying a winner, though apparent, were not yet formally accepted. There was not the slightest interest in the corresponding answer for France, and not much in the answer for Poland; there was no encouragement for killing Germans in Denmark. Furthermore, the military advantages of the Partisan rebellion were available without any political or material contributions from London and Cairo. Tito received both. Once Partisan resistance became conspicuous, the BBC paid compliments. This would not have been so consequential without a civil war London wanted to keep secret. Although the shift away from Mihailović was, on paper, a move towards a sort of sporting neutrality about rivals, there was no serious belief that the rivals could be run in tandem. The Chetniks were threatened and warned to sin no more, but the original intention to instruct the Partisan side to keep off Chetnik turf simply evaporated. The Anglo-Partisan alliance was audible before it was confirmed. The crucial judgements had been made by June . The abandonment of Mihailović at the end of the year followed an impressive surge of Chetnik resistance in the autumn and a relapse once it became clear this meant nothing to Cairo. The details no longer mattered. The caution that applied to Denmark, and the fear of mistakes in French policy, did not extend to the Balkans. Balkan problems were sufficiently marginal for ideological warmth to be felt more freely. The Allied military advance in the Mediterranean repeatedly missed the acceleration hoped for. The search for extra military punch made it easy to pursue and overstate a small military advantage. Something could be done and someone had to be armed. In Yugoslavia special operations might, conceivably, extend Britain’s strategic reach. Nevertheless, the retreat from the Chetniks indicates a puzzling lack of interest in the Italians in the Balkans. Chetnik links with important Italians excited most disapproval just when they might have raised most political curiosity. The British had been losing for too long, and their trenches were compartmentalized. A suspicion always weighing in the Partisans’ favour was that the Yugoslav ancien régime deserved to die and that Mihailović was difficult because he was part of it. This was not just the view of young radicals in SOE Cairo; it was shared by PWE and by many Yugoslavs abroad. Chetnik collaboration with the Italians might have been tolerable in —something was tolerated—but it went off limits. Some of the collaborators did things, during Operation Weiss, no one imagined the British would want to know about. The impact can be compared with the Darlan episode. The British had been prepared to swallow a doubt and take a risk for a practical gain, but when no gain materialized the reaction took an ideological spin. All British hopes and fears for a new France

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supported the destructive coldness about the Darlan–Giraud regime; similarly, when the Chetniks became increasingly reckless opponents of a Partisan movement too strong to ignore, there was a sense of release and openness to the mainstream of the war in turning to the Partisans as allies. But the mainstream in Europe was something London had omitted to define in its own interest in ; and while Darlan represented nothing that was friendly to Britain, Mihailović represented an Anglophile commitment, and a Serbia, whose capacity to fight might still be useful. The Darlan expedient and the Katyn episode were, respectively, American and Russian political warfare initiatives. They offered to PWE the unwelcome lesson that political warfare was not confined to action against the enemy. Katyn proved to Stalin and everyone else that the British would not start any kind of public argument about Poland. The reaction to the Darlan ‘deal’ established that France was a more vital matter. Even so PWE had to reduce the exposure of Anglo-American differences to a bare minimum and could not promise an Anglo-French special relationship after liberation. Churchill’s telegraphic flattery of Roosevelt and Stalin delayed choices and brought him little reward. When the Katyn crisis was identified as Soviet political warfare, PWE did not react. It is easy, at this distance far too easy, to find such passivity merely contemptible, just as it was, then, much too easy to blame the Poles for causing the trouble. No country dependent on powerful allies avoids this sort of dilemma or solves it with a formula. Churchill’s choice bought temporary safety at the cost of piling up the difficulties which formed the Cold War. A bravura response to Katyn might have brought Stalin to heel, but— without treaties or secret promises—only for a short time. There was no case for being bold without a definite idea of what this would lead to: a better and earlier ‘Yalta’. A purely negative defence of Poland would have given critics a false explanation of a decay in Anglo-Soviet relations that occurred anyway. The right moves were difficult to find, but no one said before Katyn that Britain should not make the attempt. Lockhart could not see anything hopeful or constructive except a detailed Anglo-Soviet agreement, a precise contract. There was much more at stake than Poland. When Lockhart thought the obstacle was War Cabinet reluctance about ‘concessions’ to Russia, he demanded a better decision; but when he concluded that Churchill, behind a cloak of Russophilia, was quietly committing Britain to Washington’s refusal to make any wartime agreements, he despaired. The Polish specialists—in the Foreign Office, PWE, and SOE—were condemned to thrash about trying to do something useful until the tragedy of the Warsaw Rising lowered expectations to Lockhart’s level. Lockhart saw pragmatic procrastination as the characteristic British vice. In the Danish case it was indulged so fully that the political parties went to sleep. The nascent Danish resistance had to complain to London before any pressure was applied. This came during the political acceleration of . The entire

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field of political warfare, static since autumn , came alive after Alamein and Torch. In December  Murphy and Darlan so startled London that the remaining British doubts about the alliance between de Gaulle and the Resistance simply vanished; in February the Chetniks of western Yugoslavia went out of control; in March Best and Scavenius put on such a show of German–Danish co-operation that London was provoked; and in April Stalin punished the Poles for having been his victims. London, which had been marking time, came up to speed. A new pattern was clear by May. Macmillan was gently frustrating American hopes for an anti-gaullist Algiers; SOE were in contact with Tito; Polish policy had been brutally simplified; and PWE requested a decision to make life more difficult for Scavenius. Then Mihailović was stripped of his status as ‘king of the mountains’, and the Danish government toppled. Events infused meaning into the ambition to make political warfare and enhanced the capacity for brisk decision. PWE, like the secret establishment at Bletchley Park just a few miles from Woburn, was an intellectual experiment. Bletchley collated enemy mistakes, snatched advantages while they lasted, and concealed itself. Expectations in Woburn were rather in the same mould. Woburn’s results were not so useful. But black propaganda projects to turn the German Army against the Party made sense and might, in different circumstances, have been more successful. Bletchley, unlike PWE, faced a limited number of difficult but precise technical problems. Political warfare was more diffuse and it had an uncertain beginning. Chamberlain’s interest in German patriotism yielded to the view that if the war could be won German power would be dismantled. The agitprop values Münzenberg bequeathed to the Anglo-French seemed like a flying start but proved sterile. The next idea was to challenge Pétain, but it fizzled out quickly. Had a sustained philippic been mounted, Vichy might have collapsed before liberation or become even more dangerous. Political warfare was the attempt to get a handle on such outcomes. Political work was mostly arcane and the ideas half-plausible and contingent, but close observation might suddenly identify a lever of power. Success was a slim logical possibility buried in the junkyard of events; like codebreaking it needed consistent support from other branches of the wartime state. What Turing’s biographer says about code-breaking applies quite well to political warfare: ‘it was so complex, not just within one system but in its meshing of many systems, that a Churchillian “Spirit of Britain” was as good an explanation of how it worked as any.’ And as good an explanation of how something more worldly and less focused might work less well. Intellectual firepower must mesh correctly with everything that can establish its application or it fails. A code is either broken or not: political problems are different. The record is never conclusive: the breakthrough might always come tomor

Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (nd edn., ), .

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row. Confidence is imperative since no opportunity is taken without the will to respond. SOE’s air support could barely reach Yugoslavia in  and SOE did not respond to events while this was the case. When the RAF brought Yugoslavia within reliable operational range—in April —it was almost too late. PWE doubted that the Mihailović commitment was sustainable, and no one had worked out a plan of action for the day when British resources did become adequate. Like Bletchley, PWE had a logical potential that made past results beside the point. The scientific ethos of British war-making ensured the study of a wide range of unconventional ‘weapons’—deception, cryptology, radar, atomic bombs, chemical agents, economic warfare. Political warfare was not very expensive. It was just educated foresight. The objective was to give advanced notice of opportunities, to provide the time to act. Hence the original Woburn/MOI distinction. Propaganda was done all the time, because no one took seriously the option of not doing it; political warfare was studied all the time but not exactly done very often. Leeper’s team at Woburn were closer to being researchers that anything else. But this detachment from the MOI and the BBC was unrewarding. It was right to bring political warfare back to London and for PWE to enter Bush House and sit, literally, on top of the BBC. The Foreign Office did not command much respect. Lockhart, though hungry for approval, judged the Office with mounting severity. He found in it immodesty combined with a disinclination to work hard: ‘what appals me is not the lack of ability (there are plenty of good brains) but the assurance about problems which only real knowledge can help to solve’. Kirkpatrick emerged from Bush House complaining that the Office had offered him ‘no help, no support and no policy’. Eden himself made similiar complaints. (He too would have liked a more independent approach to Russia, and even Bracken became a critic of Churchill’s America-First policy.) Foreign Office sympathy for the London Poles seemed ‘prejudice’ to Lockhart and Newsome; but the call for a strategy to handle Russia’s Polish demands—a pragmatism that was more than tactical—was not quite loud enough, even inside PWE, before the Katyn crisis made everything much worse. The ostensibly radical complaint that the Poles had not been put in their place early enough or firmly enough became the received wisdom; but the wartime refusal to negotiate a post-war place for Russia would have wrecked any Polish policy. This inference was too subversive to express. Lockhart was left to nurse in private his theory that British weakness—or inactivity—was due less to fear of Russia than deference to America and that Churchill was the culprit. The search for extraneous advantages off the battlefield no more guaranteed  K. Young (ed.), The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, ii. ‒ (),  ( Jan. ), and  ( May ).

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success than an exclusive focus on ‘force’. PWE and Bletchley were both implementations of Lawrence’s understanding of modern warfare: that new methods of communication favoured the intellectual over the physical, that one should be concerned less with what men did ‘but always with what they thought’. In a war accepted in  and started in  PWE (mutatis mutandis) might have been more important. In any case, what if the U-boat signals had never been read and it was the diplomacy that was laid bare? If the attack on Vichy, in almost the Bletchley sense, had been a political warfare priority from July , it is conceivable that Vichy would have split violently and evaporated in November . The play for Tunisia could have had a stronger basis. The point is not that this is strictly demonstrable but that political and technical details, invisible at the outset of the war, determined the boffinry which would be most useful. The close analysis of Vichy, Yugoslavia, and Poland could not escape from a political context thick with ideological and doctrinal fumes. But issues that were at first glance theoretical could suddenly resolve into questions with a precise application to the war. The question ‘Who are the Partisans?’ forced a sudden recourse to the stock of ideas. Truth was not reduced to an ideological formula; but ideological warmth, distaste, and suspicion were annexed to what was known. British knowledge of Vichy should have made possible a more successful Torch. Once Churchill decided the British should be handmaidens of the Americans in Algiers, PWE could not base plans on their own hard-won knowledge. Well-founded opinions were set aside in favour of Robert Murphy’s Hypothesis. The ‘spirit of Churchill’s Britain’ included a reluctance to anticipate, or respond to, conflicts of Allied policy, and so British political warfare would appear by turns foolish or devious. Churchill was, of course, entitled to his view of what was at stake. Before Torch a Soviet ambassador had been remarkably frank: ‘Power is the only thing that will count in post-war Europe. We shall have it and use it. The British may want some participation in Western Europe. You Americans will, of course, return to your own hemisphere’. The Prime Minister wanted something else for America. PWE’s search for extraneous advantages—political gambits supplementing Britain’s physical strength—turned up nothing sensational. But there was an impediment. SOE and PWE grew from early attempts to think positively, but they never received a plan of campaign, which was needed if the prize of ‘some participation in Western Europe’ was to be taken. Strategic attention was spread over the whole world. Genuine opportunities were few and mishandled. The North African shore was not cleared in time; and the Balkans might have promised more in  if the British had stayed away in . If there had been a real breakthrough—in German morale, French politics, or  Bogomolov’s conversation with an American diplomat: L. Gielgud to Sutton,  Oct. , FO /.

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Balkan guerrilla warfare—PWE had the talent and experience to react. But the thrust of their work came more often from events than from instructions. The fog of war is more than the smoke of guns. De Gaulle’s Free France secured the leadership of the French Resistance. This was quite an achievement, but the British were uncertain about the solidarity they were nourishing until the response to Darlan made its value visible. The acquisitive pragmatism of SOE would, if Carte had been a success, have given a dangerous intensity to the F Section rivalry with Fighting France. After killing the V campaign, and hesitating about radio instructions on sabotage, PWE and SOE were left at the end of  not much closer to a big sabotage campaign than they had been at the outset. When useful breakthroughs were neglected—the impact in France of the battle of Britain, or of the réfractaires in early —the problem, the deterrent, was the lack of an immediate yield for increasing the risks. The challenge of propaganda is to go public, invest long, and force mistakes. This was understood at the Ministry of Information in –, but because the propaganda sounded like dogma rather than strategy other departments blocked the work and deprecated Malet Street’s ‘ideology’. It became clear that PWE’s principal tool was not the black propaganda ‘Research Units’ cherished in Bedfordshire, it was the political volume and prestige of the BBC. The unwholesome skills developed in Woburn—the concoction of falsehoods, forgeries, and unattributable material—were, in that war and in occupied Europe, only the small change of political action. Where ‘black’ worked was in the non-political shape of military deception. The larger opportunity in – was to combine Newsome’s ‘truth’ with shrewd, and wellmaintained, accusations. Experience and editorial skill were indispensable, but the basis of the BBC effect was the authority created for London by the decision in  to continue the war and provoke major events. The BBC could have no rival because no one else had their opportunity. Radio London was sometimes underemployed. The attack on Vichy started too late and was too consensual; mere grumbling about Danish collaboration d’état went nowhere for too long; the Poles were not told early enough how matters stood between London and Moscow; the Yugoslavs were addressed as though there was not a civil war going on inside the resistance. London might have said more against economic collaboration, but it was a difficult target which could not be hit with tempting immediacy. There was enough untold truth about Pétain, Stalin, Mihailović, and Tito to have set many untried strategies spinning. But the visible reward for being undiplomatic was not big enough to launch political warfare into high orbit. As the war unfolded between Dunkirk and Torch, there were too many defeats. Various degrees of military under-performance in Norway, Crete, Africa, and Malaya reduced the belief in British power which PWE needed, and so eroded opportunities. In summer  the important choices were still open. A year later they had been made, although admitting it took a little longer. The Fighting French

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version of the Resistance was approved, and de Gaulle had been helped into Algiers and Allied recognition; Poland had lost British support for the foreseeable future; the Danes had done their bit and their Freedom Council would decide what resistance should mean; Mihailović had done more, but not enough to efface the blunders of Chetniks outside Serbia, and he was about to be judged severely. The pattern was clear. Events in  followed a pattern established in summer . The Danes developed a resistance based on extensive national consent and with a place in it for communists and anticommunists alike; Tito’s Partisans, with military and political support from Britain, marched to Belgrade through Chetnik Serbia; Warsaw was destroyed as the Red Army watched; and de Gaulle reached Paris on terms he agreed with the Resistance not the Anglo-Americans. It remained entirely possible that, as Germany weakened, British political warfare would bite deeper, that Germany’s allies, or her generals, would try to escape the Nazi stranglehold, and that the guerrilla potential of the Balkans and the resistance manpower of western Europe could be integrated with Allied strategy. Italy, above all, was open to Allied attack and offered a most promising target for intrigue. It was also possible that the clumsiness of coalition strategy, the limits of British strength, and genuine uncertainty about the fighting value of resistance, would see one potential advantage after another passed over until the war was decided without the assistance of major events that could be attributed to political warfare. Whether political warfare secured military advantages or not, the very attempt penetrated deeply into the life of every country it touched.

Sources A RC H I V E C O L L E C T I O N S

Public Record Office, Kew CAB 

Ministry of Information Committee, pre-war CAB  Cabinet Office CAB  Cabinet Office memoranda, pre-war CAB  War Cabinet Minutes CAB  War Cabinet memoranda CAB  Ministerial Committee on military co-ordination, – CAB  Historical Section, official war histories, military CAB  Various ministers and officials CAB  Ministry of Defence: secretariat files – FO  Foreign Office, general correspondance political FO  FO News Department FO  FO private collections, ministers and officials FO  British Mission to French National Committee FO  Political Warfare Executive FO  Minister of State, Cairo FO  Ministry of Information, overseas FO  Avon (Eden) papers HS  SOE: Scandinavia, – HS  SOE: Middle East, – HS  SOE: Eastern Europe, – HS  SOE: Balkans, – HS  SOE: Western Europe, – INF  Ministry of Information

PREM  Chamberlain’s private office papers PREM  Operational papers, – PREM  Confidential papers, – WO  Military HQ papers, AFHQ WO  Military HQ papers, AFHQ WO  Directorate of Military Intelligence BBC Written Archive Centre BBC E Individual country services BBC E Foreign general BBC R MOI/PWE committees and directives Private Collections Baldwin Papers, Cambridge University Library Beaverbrook Papers, House of Lords Library Dalton Papers, British Library of Political and Economic Science Harvey diary, British Library, Add. MS  Lockhart diary, House of Lords Library Monckton Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford Newsome Papers, Churchill College Library, Cambridge Nicolson diary, Balliol College Library, Oxford Ritchie Papers, Churchill College Library, Cambridge Selborne Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford Stuart Papers, Imperial War Museum

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Templewood Papers, Cambridge University Library Germany (MA) Militärarchiv, Freiburg im Breisgau RW Wehrmachtsführungsstab/ Abteilung für Propaganda France (AN) Archives Nationales, Paris f/a Commissariat National de l’Intérieur, Londres CONTEMPORARY MEDIA

BBC, Daily Digest of World Broadcasts Daily Herald Frit Danmark (clandestine) Polish Fortnightly Review The Times SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

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BELL, P. M. H., John Bull and the Bear (London: Edward Arnold, ). BENNETT, JEREMY, British Broadcasting and the Danish Resistance Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). BOELCKE, WILLI A., Die Macht des Radios: Weltpolitik und Auslandsrundfunk (Frankfurt am Main, ). BOURDET, CLAUDE, L’Aventure incertaine (Paris: Stock, ). BRIGGS, ASA, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, iii, The War of Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). BROWN, ANTHONY CAVE, The Secret Servant: the Life of Sir Stewart Menzies, Churchill’s Spymaster (London: Michael Joseph, ). CIECHANOWSKI, J. M., The Warsaw Rising of  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). COINTET, JEAN-PAUL, La France Libre (Paris: PUF, ). COINTET, MICHÈLE, Le Conseil National de Vichy (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, ). COLVILLE, JOHN, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries – (London: Hodder and Stoughton, ). COURTOIS, STÉPHANE, La PCF dans la Guerre: de Gaulle, la Résistance, Staline (Paris: Éditions Ramsay, ). COUTOUVIDIS, JOHN, and REYNOLDS, J. Poland – (Leicester: Leicester University Press, ). CRÉMIEUX-BRILHAC, J.-L. (ed.), Les Voix de la Liberté: Ici Londres –,  vols. (Paris: Documentation française, –). DAVIDSON, BASIL, Special Operations Europe (London: Gollancz, ). DAVIES, NORMAN, Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). DEAKIN, F. W. D., Embattled Mountain

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Index Abetz, Otto, German ambassador to France –  Abyssinia  active resistance ,  Admiralty ,  Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ) , , , ,  Air Ministry , , , ,  air power, and words ,  bombing ,  Luftwaffe , ,  PWE and France  RAF , , , , , , , ,  SOE , , : and Yugoslavia , , , , ,  strategic bombing of Germany  AK (Poland) , , , , , , , , ,  offer to Stalin  Soviet wishes  Alexander, A.V., First Sea Lord –  Alexander, General Sir Harold (–), C-in-C, Middle East – ,  alliance strategy, Denmark  allied governments in London , , , ,  Amery, Leo S. (–), Secretary of State for India ‒ ,  Anders, General Władysław  Anders army, see Polish Army, in Russia Andersen, Alsing (–), Danish Social Democrat  Anderson, Sir John (–), War Cabinet – –, , ,  Anderson Award –,  Anderson Committee  Anglo-French unity , , , ,  Anglo-Soviet co-operation ,  Anglo-Soviet relations , , , , –, ,  goals of  and Yugoslavia –, ,  Anti-Comintern Pact ,  anti-communism , , , ,  in Denmark , 

Polish  anti-fascism , , , , –, , , , ,  in France  appeasment, pre-war  Arab Revolt  Aron, Raymond (–) –,  AS, see secret army assassination ,  in France –, , , ,  in Poland  Ashton, A. Leigh B. (–), director MOl Neutrals div. –  Astier de la Vigerie, Emmanuel d’ (–), Leader of Libération – –,  Astor, J.J. (–), The Times  Atlantic Charter ,  attentisme  Attlee, Clement R. (–), War Cabinet – , , , , , , , ,  and France , , ,  n.  Auchinleck, Sir Claude J.E. (–), C-in-C, Middle East –  Augenot, Colonel  Auschwitz ,  Bailey, Colonel S. William, SOE Yugoslav specialist , , , , , , ,  n. ,  and BBC ,  and Chetniks , , , ,  and SOE , , ,  on SOE Cairo  n.  and Partisans : Chetniks  Baker Street (SOE HQ)  Baldwin, Sir Stanley, st Earl (–) ,  Balkan propaganda bureau (Jerusalem)  Balkan region, see PWE, Yugoslavia Balfour, Michael L.G., MOI/PWE Secretary of Policy Committee , PWE APWI(SP) March   n.  Bamford, Eric St.J. (–), MOI DDG –  n.  Banjanin, Djuro, Chetnik local leader 



INDEX

Barker, A.E., BBC Overseas News Editor –  Barker, Elisabeth M., BBC/PWE deputy RD of Balkan Region –, RD, Yugoslavia   n. , ,  n. ,  n. , ,  n. ,  n. , ,  n. ,  n. ,  Barman, Thomas G., EH/SO/PWE RD of Northern Region –, DDG of PWE Country summer , PWB in Algiers spring , First Secretary to Moscow embassy September  ,  n. , , , , ,  n. , , , ,  and BBC war news  and Denmark  n. , ,  on Kirkpatrick  and Norway  and political warfare  Baudouin, Paul, Vichy foreign minister  ,  n. , ,  BBC: and allied governments  audience ,  Broadcasting House  Bush House vi, , , , , ,  central control of – and Denmark ,  n.; Danish section , ; election advice () –; Freedom Council ; news reports , , , , ; political criticism , , ; resistance ; restraint , , , ; subversion , ,  European Service , ,  and Foreign Office  and France , , ; audience ; broadcasts ; de Gaulle , ; demonstrations , , ; Free French , , , ; free time , , ; French region ; French section , , , ; French service ; Honneur et Patrie ; Labour talks , , ; Les Français Parlent aux Français , , , , , ; news policy ; Pétain , , , ; propaganda , , , , ; propaganda policy ; staff , , , , , ; Trois Amis , , , ; Vichy , , ,  free time , , , ,  free time, Poland  and Germany , –, , ,  and Greece –: Greek section 55 legal position  news policy , , ,  and Norway , , 

organization  and Poland: the Anders Army ; policy , , , , ; Polish editor ; Polish section ; Polish service and Moscow ; pro-Soviet arguments ; sabotage reports ; Soviet demands  policy censorship  post-war  pre-war , ,  propaganda , , , , , , , ; and editorial control  Russians news  staff , , ,  and state control , , , , , , ,  and V campaign , –, , , ,  and Yugoslavia: action premature, warning ; atrocities , ; Chetniks , –, , , , ; collaboration , , ;  coup ; Croatian criticism ; free time ; government ; Mihailovi ć , , , , , , , , , ; news , , , , , ; Partisans , , –, , , ; political censorship ; political warfare , , , ; resistance reconciliation –;  rising ; Serbo-Croat and Slovene section , , , , , ; SOE , –, , , –, ; Ustaše  see also MOI; PWE BCRA (Free French) , , , , , –, , ,  Beaverbrook, Sir W. Maxwell Aitken, st Baron (–), War Cabinet – , , , ,  on Beneš  and MOI , ,  and Poland – and Russia , , , , , , , , – Beck, Leslie J., PWE French Intelligence Officer, deputy RD for France  and RD – , ,  Belgium , ,  government –, ,  V campaign  Belin, René, (–), Vichy Minister of Labour  Beneš, Edouard (–), President of Czechoslovak committee/government – ,  and Poland –, , , 

INDEX

Benghazi  Bennett, John, SOE Yugoslav specialist –  Beria, Laurenty (–), head of NKVD   Best, Dr. K.R. Werner (–), Reich plenipotentiary for Denmark Oct. – , , , , , – Beveridge, Sir William (–) , , ,  Bevin, Ernest (–), Minister of Labour – , , , , ,  Black, Ian E., BBC/PWE French Talks Organiser March  ,  black propaganda, see propaganda, black Blum, Léon (–), French socialist leader , , , , ,  Bodington, Nicholas R., SOE F Section , ,  Bogomolov, Alexander Y. (–), Soviet ambassador to allied governments in London –  n.  and Allied spheres of influence n. bombing, see air power Bonnet, Georges (–), French Minister of Foreign Affairs – ,  Borel (nom de guerre of Jacques Brunius)  Boris, Georges, FFL Broadcaster , director of publicity  , , ,  Boris III, King of Bulgaria (d. )  Bosnia –, –, , , , –, , , , , ,  Boughey, Peter, SOE Yugoslav liaison  Bourdan, Pierre (nom de guerre of Pierre Maillaud) , , , , , , ,  Bourdet, Claude, Combat  n. , , , , , ,  n. , ,  Bowes-Lyon, Hon. David (–), SO/PWE deputy director at Woburn , PW Washington Mission  ,  Bracken, Brendan (–), MOI Minister – ,  and BBC , ,  and Cairo ,  and Churchill ,  as Churchill’s PPS , , , ,  and France , , ,  and MOI , , , , ,  and Poland  and political warfare  and propaganda , , , , ,  and PWE ; creation of –,  and Yugoslavia , ,  Brazzaville , ,  Brazzaville Manifesto 



Bressy, Pierre  Brinon, Fernand de, Vichy delegate for Paris  British Commonwealth , , ,  British Council 3 Brogan, Denis W. (–), SO RD for France – , , , ,  Brooks, Brigadier R. A. Dallas (–), SO/PWE DDG – , , –, ,  n. , , , , – on Russia ()  in SO , , , ,  Brossolette, Pierre (d.) , ,  Brunius, Jacques, see Borel Buchan, John (–)  Buckmaster, Maurice J., SOE Head of F Section November  , , , ,  Buhl, Vilhelm (–), Danish PM ‒ , –, , , , , – Bulgaria , , ,  Bulgarian Army , , , ,  Bush House, see BBC Butler, Ewan, DSP SOE Cairo – , ,  Butler, R.A. (–), FO Parliamentary under-secretary – ,  n. , ,  C, see Menzies, Sir Stewart and SIS Cabinet Office  Cabinet, War , , , , , , ,  and BBC  and Poland  Cadogan, Sir Alexander (–) , ,  and France , , , , ,  Cairo , , , – and political warfare  see also SOE, Cairo; GHQ , Cairo Calder, Peter R. Ritchie (–), PWE planning official , director of Plans August – , , ,  n. ,  and France  n. and Lucas  n.  and Poland  n.  Cambon, Roger, Minister at the French embassy – , , , , ,  camps, concentration: German , , , , , ,  Soviet  camps, extermination  camps, Soviet POW ,  n. , ,  Carr, Edward H. (–), MOI director of Foreign Division –, The Times assistant editor – , ,  n.  Cassin, Professor René, FFL ,  Catholic opinion ,  Caucasus 



INDEX

Cavendish-Bentinck, Victor F.W. (–), Secretary to JIC –  n.  censorship , , , , , , ,  political  see also news policy central directives, see PWE Central department, see Foreign Office CFTC ,  CGT , ,  n. , , , , , , ,  n. ,  CH or CHQ , see Woburn and SO Chamberlain, Neville (–), Prime Minister –, Lord President  , , –, , , , , , ,  Chastenet, Jacques  Chatfield, Admiral Sir Ernle, st Baron (–)  Chetniks, see Yugoslavia, Chetniks Chiefs of Staff (COS) , , , , , , , ,  and Denmark , ,  and Yugoslavia ,  Chievitz, Ole (–) ,  Christian X, King of Denmark (–) ,  Christianity, defence of  Churchill, Winston S. (–), Prime Minister – , ,  and   and America  and Anglo-Soviet treaty  asks for resistance  and BBC ,  and Bracken  and Darlan ,  n. ,  and deference to US ,  and de Gaulle , , , , , ,  and exiled governments – and Fighting France  and France, propaganda ; and resistance ,  and Katyn , , , ,  and MOI , ,  and North Africa , , , ,  and Norway  and Poland ,  and political warfare , , , , , , , , , ,  popularity of  and press criticism  and propaganda , , , , ,  and PWE  and Roosevelt  and Russia –, –, , , , , , ; discretion but not negotation ,  and second front , 

and Sikorski  and SOE , , , , , , ,  and Stalin ,  and strategy ,  and Tehran  and US influence  and Vichy , , , , , , , ,  and war aims ,  and Yugoslavia , , ,  Churchill Club (Denmark)  Clark, J. Beresford (–), BBC Assistant Controller Overseas – ,  n.  Clark-Kerr, Sir Archibald J.K. (–), Ambassador in Moscow Aug. –  Clausen, Fritz (–), leader of Danish Nazi party  CNF, see French National Committee collaboration, industrial  ‘Colonel Britton’, see Ritchie, D Combat and Combat (movement and journal) , , , –, , , , , –,  Combined Operations , , ,  Comités d’Action Socialiste (CAS) ,  Collier, Laurence (–), Minister/ Ambassador to Norwegian Government –  Comert, Pierre (–), Editor of France  –, , , ,  Comité d’Action Socialiste (CAS) ,  Comintern , , , ,  and Poland  and Yugoslavia , ,  Committee on Foreign (Allied) Resistance  Communism , , , , , , , , , ,  sentimental  concentration camps, see camps, concentration Conservative Party , , ,  conscription, see labour conscription Cooper, Alfred Duff (–) , –, ,  n.  and BBC , ,  and Belgium  and Cairo  and control of foreign propaganda , , –, –, ,  and France , , , , , , , , ,  and MOI ,  and propaganda , , ,  and resistance  and war aims , ,  Cot, Pierre (–) , , , ,  Cranborne, Robert G.-C. Viscount (–), Dominions Secretary – , , , 

INDEX

Cripps, Anders army  Cripps, Sir Stafford (–), Ambassador to Russia – , , , , , ,  Croat Peasant Party  Croatia , , , , –, , , , , , ,  NDH ,  and n. , , , ,  Partisans  n. , , ,  Crossman, Richard H.S. (–), SO/PWE RD for Germany, DPW(E&S) –, deputy director PWB (AFHQ) May  , , , , , , , ,  and BBC ,  and Dalton ,  in PWE ,  Crown Film Unit  Cunningham, Admiral Andrew B. ,  Czechoslovakia , , , , , , ,  resistance  Daily Herald , , ,  Daily Mirror  Daily Telegraph ,  Dakar expedition , ,  Dalmatia , , , , , – Serb-Italian contacts  Dalton, Hugh (–), SOE Minister – , , ,  n. ,  as anti-fascist  and Bracken ,  and Foreign Office ,  and France , , , ,  and leaflets  and MOI , ,  and propaganda , , ,  and PWE –,  and SO –, , , –, ,  Dangić, Jezdimir  Danish Committee , –, , ,  Danish section (BBC), see BBC Dansey, Sir Claude E.M. (–), SIS Assistant Chief 15 Darlan, J. François Admiral (–) , , , –, –, ,  and the ‘deal’ –, ,  in NA , , –,  Dassonville, Colonel  Davidson, Basil, Section D/SOE Cairo Yugoslav section , ,  n.  Davidson, John C.C., st Viscount (–), MOI Controller of Functional Publicity, March-July  , ,  Deakin, F. William (b.) , , , , , ,  Dejean, Maurice (b.), FFL director of Service Politique May , French



ambassador to Allied governments in London –, ,  n. , , ,  Delegatura (Poland), see Polish government Delavenay, Émile, BBC Assistant director for European Intelligence ,  Delestraint, General  Delmer, D. Sefton (–), SO/PWE German black specialist , DPW (Enemy and Satellite)   Deloncle, Eugéne (–) ,  Denmark: collaboration , , , , –, –, , –,  government –, – military intelligence – Navy , , , ,  resistance, value of ,  and sabotage  sabotage ‘pause’  Department EH vi, , , –, , , , , ,  see also SO Deutsche Freiheitssender  Dewavrin, André, see Passy Diethelm, André (–), FFL Commissioner, Interior September , Finance July  ,  Director (SOE circuit)  Director of Military Intelligence (DMI)  Djilas, Milovan (–) , ,  n. ,  Djonovi ć, Jovan  Djuji ć, Momčilo (–) ,  Djukanovi ć, General Bažo (d. ) ,  Djuri ši ć, Captain Pavle , ,  Dobrzanski, Major  Donovan, Colonel William J. (–), USA Director of OSS –  Duchesne, Jacques (nom de guerre of Michel Saint Denis) , , , ,  broadcasts , , , , , , ,  on Pétain , ,  Duclos, Jacques (–)  Eccles, David, MEW adviser to Lisbon and Madrid Embassies –  Eden, R. Anthony (–), FO Secretary of State Dec. – , , , , ,  and armed action  and Churchill  and France ‒, , , , , ,  and Katyn  and H. Lucas  n.  political understanding , , 



INDEX

Eden, R. Anthony (cont.): and political warfare  and PWE –,  n. ,  as a radical  and Russia , , , ,  and second front  and SOE  and V campaign ,  and Yugoslavia , , , , , , , ,  EH, see Department EH Eisenhower, General Dwight D., (–), C-in-C AFHQ – –, , , ,  ELAS – Eliáš, General Alois, Czech minister president March –Sept.   Empire Marketing Board  Esteva, Admiral Jean-Pierre, (–), Resident-General in Tunisia – ,  Estienne d’Orves d’, Honoré (d.)  European goals , , , , , , , , , , ,  Evening Standard , , ,  extermination camps, see camps, extermination Falkenhausen, General Alexander von, Military governor of Belgium  Feast of St. Joan, demonstration (May )  Finland  Flandin, Pierre-Étienne (–), Vichy Minister of Foreign Affairs Dec. – Feb. ,  Fontaine, [Antoine] ,  Force , see SOE, Cairo Foreign Office  and appeasement  and Cairo  Central department , , , , ; Poland  and de Gaulle –, , , –, , , ,  and Denmark, restraint  and Dutch government  and exiled governments  and Free France ,  French department , , , , , , , ,  and Germany  and Lockhart ,  MOI , , , , , ,  News department  Northern department , , , , , , , , ,  and Norway 

and Pétain ,  PID  and Poland , , , , ,  and political warfare , ,  and popular front  propaganda  PWE  qualities ,  and Russian news  and SOE ; see also Sargent and SOE and SOE, Cairo , – Southern department , , , , , , ; becomes marginal ; concerned by BBC ; doubts about massacres ; reject supporting both sides ; Slovenia ; support for Yugoslav government –, ; on Yugoslav appeasement  and V campaign  and Vichy , , , , , ,  and Yugoslav Partisans  see also Eden; Sargent; Strang Fourcaud, Pierre (–), Free France SR July , head of counter-intelligence – , ,  Franc-Tireur (movement and journal)  France (London journal) , , ,  France ,  active resistance , , , ,  Anglo-French unity , , , ,  anglophobia  anti-fascist , , ,  armed resistance , , , , , , , ,  armed resistance movements  armistice ,  and BBC  Catholic , , , , , , ,  CNL  collaboration , , , , –, –, , , , , , ,  commitments  Communist party: – , , , , –; ‒ , , , , , , , ; areas of strength ; arrests ; BBC disapproval ; first German executions , ; Moulins’s views ; recognition of Free France ; reconciled with Albion ; Remy ; resentment at London ; try to ignore Free French ; violent resistance  conscription  Darlan deal  deportation , , ,  double game , , 

INDEX

fascist , , , , ,  fifth column  Fighting France , , ,  Free France (FFL) , , , , , ; dissidents , ; empire ; left and right ; the left-wing ; MOI ; political character ; propaganda , ; security  industrial workers , , , , ,  morale  occupied zone , , –, , , , , –, , , , ,  opinion ,  operational propaganda ,  and political warfare , , , , , , , , , ,  and propaganda: advice from France ; advice from patriots at Vichy ; BBC ascendancy ; Christian ; dissension feared ; Foreign Office unease ; French Policy friendly advice ; from MOI to PWE ; left-wing case ; the modus vivendi ; need for British success ; nothing fancy ; on industrial collaboration ; patriotism ; Pétain endures German support ; Popular Front () ; questioned by Black ; R.A. Butler’s tenderness ; risk of dissension ; socialist ; support for Free French ; timing ; Toulon fleet scuttled ; Vichy ; Vichy complaints  Propaganda-abteilung (Paris) , , , , ,  n.  reprisals , , , , ,  resistance: Allied betrayal ; BCRA , ; the bottle-neck ; early call for sabotage ; excitement about landings () ; exclusive leftism ; fighting still premature ; foundations ; the future of France ; incompetence ; labour leaders ; MOI request action ; Morandat contacts syndicalists ; nominal leadership ; non-gaullist ; North Africa ; and Pétain ; political timing ; political tone ; PWE intelligence ; Radio France (F) ; remaking a consensus ; the search for ‘cells’ ; social solidarity ; summons to London ; unification  resistance movements , , , , , , , , ; London contact  royalist , , , , 



socialist –, , , , , , , , ,  unoccupied zone , , , , , , , –, ,  Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) , , , ,  free time, see BBC, free time ‘Free Russia’ committee  Frenay, Henri (b.), Combat , , –, , , , , – n. ,  French Communist Party (PCF), see France, Communist party French department, see Foreign Office French division/section, see BBC; MOI French National Commitee (CNF) , , , , , , , ,  French North Africa, see North Africa (French) French region (SO/PWE), see PWE; SO French section, see BBC; MOI Front National , , , ,  Funk, Walther (–), Reich minister of economics – , ,  Gaitskell, Hugh T.N. (–), Dalton’s PS – , , , , ,  Garnett, David (–), PWE directorate of Plans   n. ,  Gates, Sylvester G. (–), MOI Controller for Home Affairs – ,  Gaulle, General Charles de (–), FFL ‘chief ’ , , ,  British support for  censorship of ,  first broadcasts – and Free France ,  and future of France ,  ideas of , ,  on killing Germans  manner of  and MOI  and Pétain , ,  and politicians  and propaganda , ,  and rebellion ,  and resistance  and the Right , ,  style of , ,  support for , , , ,  and Vichy , , ,  gaullism, doctrine  gaullists, BBC ,  confused with communists  their rhetoric  Gerbrandy, Professor P.S. (–), Dutch PM –  Gemelli, Agostino 



INDEX

German Army ,  and eastern front ,  and Mihailovi ć , ,  and Partisans –, , –,  reprisals –, , , , , ,  target for black propaganda  in Tunisia  and Yugoslav intelligence ,  in Yugoslavia , , , , ,  German atrocities, Ukraine  German propaganda ,  black propaganda  n. , ,  fear of Russian victory  and Katyn ,  and Poland , , , ,  and Yugoslavia , , , ,  see also France, Propaganda–abteilung Germany, strategy: British political warfare and , , , , , – British propaganda and , , , , , , ,  grand strategy  Nazi impermanence  North Africa  resistance  Gestapo , , , ,  in Denmark –, , in France , , , , , , , , , , in Poland , , ,  GHQ , Cairo ,  ambitions in Caucasus  communiqués , , ,  SOE and , , ,  Gielgud, Lionel E., SO French section , PWE deputy RD.. , RD Mar.–Aug.  , , ,  Gillie, Darsie R., BBC French editor , , , , , , , ,  Girard, André , , , ,  n. ,  Giraud, General Henri H. (–), High Commissioner French North Africa – , , , , ,  Glenconner, Christopher, nd Baron (–), SOE Balkans official , director of Cairo mission August  , , ,  in Cairo , , –, , , ,  in London  n. ,  n. , , ,  Goebbels, P. Joseph (–), German Minister of Propaganda , , , , ,  and Poland , , , , , ,  Goertz, General, Danish Chief of Staff  Gombault, Georges 

Gomułka, Władysław (–) ,  Gouin, Félix (–), FFC SFIO representative ,  governments-in-exile ,  see also PWE ‘Grand Remonstrance’ (MOI, )  Great Game, the  Greece , , , , , , ,  n.  political warfare and , ,  resistance  SOE and ,  Greene, Hugh C. (–), BBC editor for German service   Grenier, Fernand (b.), FFC PCF representative  , , , –,  n. ,  n.  Grisewood, Harman J.G. (–), BBC A.C(Eur.S)  ,  Grol, Milan  groupes francs (Combat) , , , , ,  Groussard, Colonel Georges, Vichy Security  Grubb, Kenneth G. (–), MOI Controller Overseas August   Gubbins, Major General Colin McV. (– ), S November , deputy director for operations (DCD/O) May , director (CD) September  , , ,  n.  and France  and Poland  Guélis, Jacques de ,  Gutt, Camille (–), Belgian Finance Minister ,  Hackin, Joseph (d.), FFL  Halifax, Edward, rd Viscount (–), FO Secretary of State –, ambassador to Washington – , , , , ,  and France , , , , ,  Hambro, Sir Charles J. (–), SOE director of Scandinavian section , CD’s deputy November , CD – , , ,  and C, Denmark , , , and Yugoslavia , , , , , , ,  Hamilton, F.W.G., MOI French section –  Hankey, Sir Maurice P.A. (–), Chancellor Duchy of Lancaster –  Hanneken, General Hermann von, (–), Military commander in Denmark Sept. –Jan.  , ,  Harman, Terence G.M., SO/PWE RD Low Countries , deputy DPW(O)  

INDEX

Harrison, Hubert D., BBC editor for SerboCroat and Slovene services – , , , , , , ,  n. ,  talks by , , ,  Harvey, Oliver C. (–), MOI director French/Enemy and enemy-occupied territories div., –; Eden’s PS July  , , , , ,  and BBC , ,  and Belgian government  n.  and Cooper  n.  and Darlan  defends French Republic ,  and Eden  favours syndicalist idiom  and the FO , , ,  and France , ,  and de Gaulle ,  and Halifax  and MOI  and Morton  and Norwegians in BBC  and Poland ,  and propaganda  and Russian treaty  and war aims ,  n.  and Woburn , ,  Hauck, Henri (–), FFL counsellor for social affairs , , , , , , , , , ,  Herzegovina   civil war in  Neretva battle  Partisan executions  Partisans  Serb-Italian contacts  suspect Chetniks  Hess, Rudolph, deputy Führer – – Himmler, Heinrich (–), Reichsführer SS  Hitler, Adolph  and Denmark , , , , ,  and Europe  as fascist ideologue  and France , , , , , , , ,  German consent  as a Habsburg  master of fools  and Poland , ,  political warfare ,  and propaganda ,  and Russia , , , ,  totalitarian  and Yugoslavia ,  Hoare, Sir Samuel (–), Lord Privy Seal



, ambassador to Madrid – , , , ,  Hoare, R.H.  n.  Hood, Samuel, th Viscount (–), MOI Minister’s PS –  Hope, Richard, Hon., MOI Religions division  Howard, Douglas F. (–), Head of Southern Department – ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  Hudson, Duane T. , –, –, , , , ,  reports , ,  n. , , –, , ,  Hull, Cordell (–), US Secretary of State – ,  Hungary ,  Huntziger, General Charles, Vichy Minister of War   Ilić, General Bogoljub  India , ,  industrial sabotage  see also sabotage industrial planning ,  industrial weakness  Italian Army , , ,  in Yugoslavia , , , , , , , , ,  Italy , , , , , , , ,  and political warfare  Jakobsen, Frode (b.) , ,  n.  Jasenovac camp (Croatia)  Jebb, H.M. Gladwyn (–?), SOE Chief Executive Officer – , , , , , , , , , ,  Jevdjevi ć, Dobrosav , ,  Jews  in Denmark  extermination of ,  in France ,  Polish , , , ,  prospects of Allied help  Warsaw rising () – Johnstone, Kenneth R. (–), Leeper’s PA , attached to ‘Torch’ operation , , ,  n. ,  n.  Joint Planning Staff ,  Jouhaux, Léon , , , ,  n.  journalists , , , , , ,  Jovanovi ć, Slobodan, Yugoslav Prime Minister – , , , , ,  Karadjordjevi ć dynasty, popular in Serbia  Katyn , –,  appeal to Red Cross 



INDEX

Katyn (cont.): British press and  British response to  Italian commentary on  Newsome’s comments  political warfare and , ,  as Soviet expedient  Soviet relief at British tact  Underground report  Keates, R.H. Basil, PWE French Region  n.  Keble, Brigadier C.M., SOE Cairo chief of staff – n., , , ,  Keserović, Major Dragutin  Keswick, David G., SOE specialist in French colonies  Keynes, J.M. (–) ,  Kirkpatrick, Ivone A. (–), director of MOI Foreign div. April-September  ,  and allied governments , , , ,  and BBC –, , , , , , ,  BBC ‘free time’  and France , ,  n. , , ,  and Germany  and Greece  and MOI , , , ,  and Poland , ,  pre-war  and PWE , , , ,  and regional directors ,  and V campaign ,  and Yugoslavia , , , ,  Klemenčić, Slavko  Klugmann, James  Koch, Professor Hal (–) ,  n. , ,  n. , ,  Koestler, Arthur  Komorowski, General T.  Kościuszko division , , ,  Kot, Stanisław  Kraft, Ole Bjørn (–), Danish Conservative leader ,  Krajina (Military Border) , ,  Krek, Miho, in Yugoslav Government Slovene Minister  Krnjević, Juraj – Labarthe, André (–) , , , , ,  n. , , ,  labour conscription: in Denmark  in France , , , –,  in Poland , , ,  Labour Party , , , , , , , ,  labour recruitment within France  la Laurencie, de, General 

Langevin, Paul (–)  Lapie, Pierre-Olivier (b.)  Larminat, Colonel René de, (–), FFL ,  Larsen, Aksel (–), DKP leader  Larsen, Eigil (–)  Laval, Pierre (–), Vichy first minister July-December , PM April – , , –, , , , , , , , ,  Laveleye, Victor de, BBC Belgian editor – Law, Nigel W., MOI deputy director for French/enemy territories div. – , , ,  n. ,  n. , , , , ,  Lawrence, J.W., BBC planning assistant for European Service   n.  Lawrence, T.E. (–) , , ,  leaflets , ,  and Abyssinia  for France ,  in France , ,  n.  German  MOI and  Woburn and – Leahy, William D. Admiral (–), US ambassador to Vichy – , , , ,  Leeper, Reginald (Rex) W.A. (–), director of SO –, PWE committee – , , , ,  Ambassador to Greeks (Cairo) ,  and Balkans ,  and Cairo , , ,  and Dalton , ,  and France , , ,  and North Africa  Norwegians  opinions of  and Poland  and political warfare , ,  and propaganda , ,  and PWE , , , , ,  and V campaign , ,  and Vichy – and Woburn , , , ,  Léger, Alexis St. L. (–), Sec-Gen. of French Foreign Ministry – , ,  Leopold III, King of the Belgians  Libération (northern movement and journal) ,  Libération (southern movement and journal) , , , , , , , ,  Lie, Trygve (–) , ,  Ljotić, Dimitrije , ,  Lockhart, Sir Robert H. Bruce (–),

INDEX

Chairman of PWE August , DG March  , , ,  absence during Katyn crisis ,  and Anglo-Soviet relations  and Beaverbrook  and campaigns  and Churchill  and Comintern  and Croatia  and Czechoslovakia  and Dalton  and Denmark  and Eden  and Foreign Office  and France , , , ,  and Germany  and Greece  and Namier  n.  and Norway  and PID ,  and Poland , , , , ,  and political warfare  and PWE –, , ,  and Russia , , , , , , , , ,  and Russian alliance –, ,  and Russian treaty ,  and second front ,  and SOE ,  and SOE, Cairo ,  on Soviet ambition  and Torch  and V campaign  and Yugoslavia , , , ,  Lofoten islands  Lucas, Henry O. (d.), MEW/PWE deputy director of Plans – , , , ,  n.  Lyall, Archie, director of Balkan broadcasts from Jerusalem –  Lyttleton, Oliver (–), Minister of State in Cairo – ,  MacDonald, Gregory, BBC Polish editor  , , ,  Maček, Vladko (–), leader of the Croat Peasant Party , ,  Mack, Sir W. Henry B. (–), Head of FO French Department –, Political Adviser AFHQ –  n. , ,  n. , , ,  n. ,  McLaren, Moray (–), PWE RD for Poland and Czechoslovakia Feb.  , –, ,  n.  Maclean, Fitzroy H. (–?), head of Military Mission to Tito  , 



Macmillan, Maurice Harold (–), Minister-Resident at AFHQ Dec.  , ,  Macmillan, Hugh, st Baron (–), MOI Minister Sept.-Dec.  ,  Madagascar  Maillaud, Pierre, see Bourdan Maisky, Ivan M. (–), Soviet ambassador to UK – , , , , , ,  Makins, Roger M. (–), FO Head of Central Department –, staff of Minister Resident at AFHQ – ,  n.  Man, Henri de (–)  Manchester Guardian ,  Mandel, Georges (–), Reynaud’s Minister of Interior   Mangeot, Sylvain E. (d.), PWE French Region  n. ,  n. ,  n.  maquis –,  Marin, Jean (nom de guerre of Yves Morvan) ,  Marković, Miloš , DM Chetnik  Martin, B. Kingsley (–) ,  Maurras, Charles (–) ,  Maxwell, H.W.A., MOI Home div., Campaigns section  n.  Maxwell, Colonel Terence (b.), SOE head of Cairo mission – ,  Menzies, Sir Stewart G. (–), SIS ‘C’ – , , , , , , ,  n. , , ,  Merkulov, Vselov, deputy head (internal) of NKVD  ,  Metaxas, General Ioannis (–)  MEW , , , , , ,  MI ,  Mihailović, General Dragoljub (Draža), (– ) , , ,  and BBC –, , , –, , –, , –,  British assessments of , , –, –, , –, , , , ,  British rejection of , , , , , ,  British support at issue , , , , , – Chetnik associates , , , ,  n.  criticism of , , , ,  n. , ,  and Croatia ,  and n. ,  and the Germans , ,  and the Italians , , ,  and Nedić , , , , , 



INDEX

Mihailović, General Dragoljub (cont.): opinions , , , , , , –,  and Partisans –, , , , , , ,  and resistance , ,  role in  rising –,  and Russia –, , , , ,  SOE liaison , , –, ,  strategy of , , , , ,  and Yugoslav government , , ,  Mikołajczyk, Stanisław (–)  military intelligence , , , , , ,  in Denmark  Milorg (Norway) , ,  Ministry of Defence  Mirković, General Bora, Yugoslav C-in-C   Mouvement de Libération Nationale (MLN) , ,  Møller, J. Christmas (–), Danish Conservative –, , –, , , , , , ,  n.  Ministry of Information (MOI) , , , , , , , ,  and armed services , , , ,  and BBC , , , , , , , , , ,  and Beveridge Report  and Bracken , ,  n.  and Cairo  and communism  and Cooper, Duff  documentary films  Duty Room  and Europe  and France, French section , , –, , , , , , ; blockade leak via Marseille ; Britain guarantees democracy ; and Comert ; on communism , ; confidence in resistance ; on democracy , , ; demonstrations , ; Duff Cooper’s slogan ; France (journal) ; and de Gaulle’s BBC scripts ; ‘go slow’ week ; La France Libre (journal) ; left-wing ; main emphasis ; the modus vivendi dies ; and North Africa ; political scope ; responses ; support for de Gaulle ; unhelpful to FO , ; working-class resistance  and German Army, predictions for  ideology of  and intelligence , ,  Italian broadcasts  Italian propaganda 

news policy –, ,  and occupied countries division  and Poland ,  and political warfare , ,  and propaganda , , , ,  propaganda policy , , ,  and PWE  and Reith  and Russia , , , ,  and Senate House  and SO, see MOI, Woburn and SOE ,  staff of , , , , , , , , , ,  and USSR  and V campaign  and Woburn , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  and Yugoslavia  Molotov, Vyacheslav M. (b.), Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs – , ,  and Poland ,  Monckton, Sir Walter T. (–), MOI DDG , DG Dec , director of Propaganda in Cairo – , , , , , , ,  and Beaverbrook  and German broadcasts ,  n.  and MOI , , , ,  and PWE  and Russia  and war aims , , ,  Monnet, Jean (–), Allied/British Supply Council in Washington – , , , , ,  Montenegro  Montenegro, Chetnik tradition  Djurišić  Partisan executions  Partisan target in  ,  suspect Chetniks  Morandat, Yves, FFL , , ,  Morrison, Herbert S. (–), Home Secretary – ,  Mortimer, Raymond (–), MOI French section  ,  Morton, Desmond J.F. (–), PM’s Private Office, PA for intelligence and political warfare –  n. , ,  n,  n.  and Comintern  and communism ,  and France , , , –, , ,  and French propaganda  n. , , , , 

INDEX

and MOI  Morton Committee ,  n. ,  n. ,  and PWE ,  and Russia  and war aims  Morvan, Yves, see Marin Moulin, Jean (–), FFL Delegate in France – , –, , , , ,  in London , , , , ,  Mountbatten, Louis (–), Combined Operations Commodore , Chief – , ,  Münzenberg, Willi (d. ) , ,  Munck, Ebbe (–), SOE Stockholm mission ,  MUR ,  Murphy, Robert (–), US Consul–General in Algiers –  in Algiers , , , , ,  British suspicion of ,  and Darlan , , –,  Murray, F. Ralph H. (–), CHQ Committee –, PWE RD for Balkans – , ,  and brotherhood not unity  and BBC , ,  n. ,  in Cairo , , , –,  and Greece  masking commitments  n.  mentioning Partisans  ‘no real basis’ for Mihailović policy  n.  and political censorship  n. and propaganda  as regional director , , ,  resistance attributions  and Serbian resistance  and SOE ,  and V campaign ,  wants federal policy  Muselier, Vice-Admiral Emile H. (–), FFL navy C-in-C, – , –, ,  Muus, Flemming B. (–), SOE ,  Namier, Professor Lewis B. (–) ,  National Democrats (Polish)  National Liberation Party (French)  naval power , , ,  Belgian ships  German  Royal Navy , , ,  Neame, Major Lionel G., PWE/SOE liaison ,  n.  Neate, F.W,. PWE Yugoslav Intelligence Officer – ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. 



Nedić, General Milan, minister president of occupied Serbia August – , , –, , , , , –, ,  Nelson, Sir Frank (–), SOE CD – , , , ,  Netherlands , , , ,  New Statesman , ,  News department, see Foreign Office news policy, see BBC; MOI Newsome, Noel F. (–), BBC European news editor , D.Eur.B. – , ,  and allied governments  and BBC German  and Bracken  and central control of BBC , , , ,  and Crossman  on ‘disturbing events’  and Empire  and Eur. N. E.  and ‘fascist states’  and Foreign Office  and France ,  and the Grand Alliance  and Germany  and Greece  and Katyn , ,  and ‘Man in the Street’  and MOI ,  and Poland , –, , –, ,  and political warfare  and propaganda , , , , , , , , , , ,  and PWE , ; central directives  qualities – radicalism , , , , , , ,  and Russia , ,  and Stalin  and V campaign , ,  on the voice of Britain  and Yugoslavia ,  Nicolson, Hon. Harold G. (–), MOI Parliamentary Secretary , BBC Governor  ,  n. ,  n. , , , ,  and France , , ,  and MOI ,  and war aims , ,  Nikolieff, Colonel, Soviet intelligence in Istanbul  Ninčić, Momčilo (–), Yugoslav Minister for Foreign Affairs –(?) – NKVD , , , , , ,  Noel-Baker, Philip (–), Labour MP for Derby –  Noel-Paton, D.E., BBC Greek editor March  



INDEX

Noguès, General C.A.P. (–), ResidentGeneral for Morocco –  North Africa (French) , , , ,  Allied promises after Torch  British ambition (March )  Churchill’s hopes  conservative atmosphere  considered untenable  demoting de Gaulle  speculation prohibited  and political warfare ,  threat of German seizure  see also PWE, Torch; Torch Northcliffe, Alfred Harmsworth, st Viscount (–)  Norway , , , , ,  BBC –, , ,  government  NRK  resistance  O’Neill, Con  Øksnevad, Toralv (–), BBC Norwegian service ,  occupied Europe , , , , , , , , ,  Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM)  Ogilvie, Frederick W. (–), BBC DG – , , , , ,  OGPU (Unified State Political Administration)  operational propaganda, see propaganda operational research  Oran (Mers-el-Kebir) , , ,  Osborne, Harold O., PWE deputy RD and CIO for Poland –, ,  n. ,  n. ,  Office of War Information (OWI) , ,  Page, M. Russell (–), BBC French Service Organiser , PWE Washington (?) , , ,  n. , , , ,  n. ,  Palewski, Gaston (–), FFL Propaganda liaison work February , de Gaulle’s PA – , ,  pan-Serbism , –, ,  Paniguian, H.A. (–), PWE French specialist (black)  ,  n. ,  n. , ,  n. , ,  Parker, Ralph H., MOI director of Home Publicity div. March   Partisans, see Yugoslavia, Partisans Pašić, Nikola (–)  Passy, Colonel [Dewavrin] –,  n. , , , , ,  n. , , –

Paul of Yugoslavia, Prince (–), Regent – , , ,  Pavelić, Ante, Croation (NDH) head of state – , , ,  PCF, see France, Communist party Peake, Charles B.P. (–), British Representative on Free French National Council –  Pearson, J.S.A., SOE Head of Balkan section early   n. , , , ,  n. ,  n. , ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  Pećanac, Kosta ,  Pelt, J., Dutch government  Perth, Sir Eric Drummond, th Earl, (–), MOI Adviser/Controller of Foreign Publicity – , , ,  Pétain, Marshal Philippe (–), Vichy head of state – , , , , , , , ,  appeal in   and Armistice  blocks collaborationists  broadcasts , , , , , ,  double game ,  and de Gaulle  opinion of  pressure from London, risk of  and propaganda ,  as propaganda target –, , , , , , , , , , –, , ,  resistance like Franco’s  threats  and Vichy , , , ,  Peter II, King of Yugoslavia (–) , , , ,  Peterson, Sir Maurice D. (–), ambassador to Madrid ‒, MOI Controller of Overseas Publicity –, ambassador to Ankara  , , , , , , , , ,  Philby, Kim (–), SOE training, SIS  Philip, André (–), FFL Comissioner for Interior July  , , , , ,  Pick, Frank (–), MOI DG August to December  ,  Piłsudski, Marshal Józef (–) , ,  Pleven, René (b.)  Poland , , , , , , , , , ,  Anglo-Soviet courtesy  British support , , , , ,  counter-factual  eastern territories , , , , 

INDEX

‘General Government’ , , , ,  German terror – government propaganda ,  next regime  no collaboration  Peasant militias  political warfare and , ,  radios  resistance ,  Soviet allegations of collaboration  Soviet complaints  Soviet partisans ,  Soviet propaganda , ,  Soviet terror ,  survival of  truculence  Zionism  Polish Army, in Russia –, , , , ,  Polish government , , , , , , , , ‒, , ‒, ‒ authority  Delegatura  eastern borders  Polish support for  Polish intelligence ,  Polish National Committee (Moscow)  Polish Underground , , , , , –, , , , – all-party support  and BBC ,  and eastern territories  intelligence department (PID) , ,  and resistance  and Russia , ,  Soviet commentary  political warfare v–vi, , , , , ,  the  acceleration  Allied  and the Balkans  a better and earlier ‘Yalta’  British – British timing  a Chetnik-Partisan competition  and Germany  new contest for occupied Europe  success as buried treasure  with too few goals –,  and Yugoslavia ,  Pollock, George, Head of SOE Cairo – – Ponsonby, Arthur  Popović, Colonel Žarko, Yugoslav DMI  popular front (French) , –, , ,  Powell, Sir G. Allan (–), BBC Chairman of Governors – , , , 



PPR (Polish Workers Party)  Pravda ,  Priestley, J.B. (–) ,  Princes, the , , , , ,  n. ,  ‘progressisme’  propaganda , , , , –,  against appeasment  and BBC ,  black , , , , , ; allocation of , –, , ; in German , ; purposes , , , ,  British distrust of – British government and –, –, , , , , , , , , , ,  Comintern  democratic  as doctrine – ideology –,  and Nazis  operational , , –, – in Poland, British black  Russian black  and socialists  Propaganda-abteilung, see France PWE , , , ,  and Allied governments  and Anglo-Soviet alliance  and BBC  and Belgium  bosses ,  and Bush House  and Cairo – and censorship  central directive , ,  n. ,  and n. ,  central directives , , ; Poland , – and Churchill  creation of –,  and Denmark , ; directives ; goals ; policy , , , , , , , ; sabotage  and Europe  and European alliance  and Fighting France , ,  and France , , , , , , ; operational propaganda , , , , , ; Research Units , , , , , , , ,  and Free France , , , , ,  and French region , , , , ,  and French resistance , ,  and Greece – intelligence , , 



INDEX

PWE (cont.): news policy  and Northern region , , , , ,  and Norway , – and Plans, directorate of ,  and Poland , , ; the audience ; Katyn –, , ; Russo-Polish agreement  Polish, from BBC  and Polish and Czechoslovak region , , , –, ,  and political warfare , , ,  propaganda , , , ; black , , ,  pro-Soviet mood  regional directors ,  and resistance policy  and Russia , , ,  and Russian needs ()  and second front , , , ,  and Torch – and undectable sabotage  and V campaign –, , ,  and war aims  and Woburn , ,  PWE, Yugoslavia  Anglo-Yugoslav meetings  anti-government trend  and Balkan region , , , , , , – and Chetniks , ; denunciations suggested  n.  commitment to government  Eden-Bracken directive ()  federal formula  influence and ignorance  initial assessments  and Mihailovi ć ,  and Partisans , , ; the Partisan tilt ; rank and file of  policy  political invention   rising, vacillation  and Russia , ,  Sargent’s new course  silence on Chetniks  sympathies not declared  tributes to Partisans  ‘united front’  use of terms  Pucheu, Pierre (–), Vichy Minister of Interior – , ,  Radcliffe, Cyril J. (– ), MOI director of Censorship div. –, Controller of Press and Censorship –, deputy DG

August  and DG – , , , , , ‒, , , , , ,  and communism  radio jamming ,  n.  Radio Algiers , ,  Radio Belgique (BBC) , ,  Radio Catholique (Woburn) ,  Radio Danmark (Woburn) ,  Radio France (Woburn, F) , , , , ,  Radio Free Yugoslavia (USSR) , , , ,  Radio Gaulle, see Radio France Radio Inconnu (Woburn) ,  Radio Karageorge (Jerusalem, SOE) , ,  Radio Kościuszko (Moscow)  Radio London (BBC in foreign langauges)  Radio Moscow (USSR) , ,  Radio Orange (BBC)  Radio Paris , , , , ,  Radio Patrie (Woburn) ,  n. ,  Radio Polskie (BBC)  Radio Šumadija (Woburn) , , , ,  Radio Świt (Woburn) , , , , , ,  Radio Travail (Woburn) , , , ,  Radio Zrinski (Woburn)  Reith, Sir John (–), MOI Minister Dec. –May  , , , ,  Rémy [Renault-Roulier, G] , , , , ,  Rendel, Sir George W. (–), Ambassador to Yugoslav Government – , , , , , , ,  n. , ,  Research Units , ,  n. , , , ,  Polish  resistance: sabotage in   strikes in   Reuter’s , ,  Reynaud, Paul (–), French PM , interned, – , , ,  Riom, trial ,  risings, armed ,  risings, feared  Ritchie, Douglas E. (–), BBC deputy editor for European news , A.D.Eur.B  , , ,  n. , , –, , , ,  ‘Colonel Britton’ , , , , ,  Roatta, General Mario  Romania , , , ,  Roosevelt, Franklin D., President US (– ) , , , , , , , , , 

INDEX

Rothermere, Harold S. Harmsworth, st Viscount (–)  Rottbøl, Christian Michael (–)  Rougier, Professor Louis , ,  Rowecki, General Stefan Grot (–) , , , , ,  n.  Royal Air Force (RAF), see air power Royal Navy, see sea power Rucker, Arthur  Russia  American policy towards  Anti-Comintern Pact  British political warfare and  descriptions of  and Europe ,  expansion of , ,  expertise on  and Germany ,  the grand alliance ,  Lockhart  military potential ()  Poland , – political warfare – propaganda  as propaganda problem –,  second front  and Yugoslavia , , ,  Ryan, A. Patrick (–), EH liaison for BBC, BBC Controller (Home) May , MOI Adviser (home) March , BBC Controller (News) –  sabotage , , , ,  British planning ,  broadcasts and  COS and  delayed advocacy  in France , , , , , , , ,  industrial , , , , ,  news of ,  in Norway – in Poland , , ; of railways  propaganda for , ,  resistance and  SOE reticence  targets of  of transport ,  undetectable ,  and Yugoslavia , , , , , , , ,  see also France; V campaign Saint Denis, Michel, see ‘Duchesne’ Salt, J.S.A. (–), BBC director of European Broadcasts –   n. ,  Sanacja , , 



Sandford, John, MOI French/Enemies and Occupied Territories div.  , , , , , , ,  Sargent, Sir Orme G. (–), FO deputy under-secretary –  and Denmark  and France  and Eden  and Foreign Office  and Greece  and Leeper  on the pre-war mentality  and Russia ,  and SOE , , ,  and Tehran  and Poland ,  n.  and Russia  and Yugoslavia , , , , , , , –,  Sauckel, Fritz, Reich plenipotentiary for labour – ,  Scarlett, Peter W.S.Y. (–), Brussels embassy , Lockhart’s PA , AFHQ   n.  Scavenius, Erik (–), Danish foreign minister July , PM Nov. –Aug.   Danish prime minister , , , , – foreign minister , ,  Schumann, Maurice (–), FFL spokesman , ,  and BBC , , , , , , , , ,  style of  unpolitical  warnings ,  Scorgie, Norman G. (–), MOI deputy secretary , DDG until August   n.  second front , , , , , , , ,  political effect of  secret army ,  and Denmark ,  theory of , ,  and Yugoslavia  Section D , –, ,  Selborne, Roundell Palmer, rd Viscount (– ), MEW/SOE Minister – , , ,  and Beveridge report  and Cairo  and France ,  and Yugoslavia , , , ,  Serbia  Churchill’s popularity 



INDEX

Serbia (cont.):  coup  distrust of Croatia ()  DM’s authority , , , – fading confidence in Britain  fighting tradition  first resistance  future value  German executions  n.  German intelligence  Nedić  occupation ,  problem for Anglo-Partisan alliance  RAF range  Ravna Gora movement  resistance environment   rising  the Serbian question  Yugoslavia and  Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) , , , , ,  Seton-Watson, G. Hugh N. (–), SOE Yugoslav specialist at Cairo mission ,  Seton-Watson, Professor Robert W. (– ), SO RD for Balkans –, Balkan specialist for PID thereafter , , , , , , ,  SHAEF  Sikorski, General Władysław E. (–), Polish PM – , , , , , –, ,  and Katyn , , ,  and Russia , , , ,  Simović, General T. Dušan (–), Yugoslav PM – , , , , , , ,  Sinclair, Sir Archibald (–), Air Ministry Secretary of State – , ,  SIS , ,  allied help  and Cairo  failures of ,  and France , , , , , , , ,  and Poland , , , ,  n.  and PWE  on resistance  and SOE , , – W/T sets  and Yugoslavia , , ,  Slovenia , , , , ,  Sosnkowski, General Kasimierz (–) , ,  Southern department, see Foreign Office Soustelle, Jacques E.Y. (–) CNF Commissioner for Information , 

Spaak, Paul-Henri (–), Belgian Foreign Minister  Spain , , ,  Speaight, Richard L. (–), FO French Department   n. , ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n. ,  n.  Spears, Sir Edward L. (–), FO attached to FFL – , , ,  n. , , , , , ,  Special Operations  (SO) , , , , , , ,  and BBC  and France , , , , , , , ,  and German propaganda  and German region  and MOI , , ,  Special Operations  (SO) SO , , , ,  on S  Special Operations Executive (SOE) , ,  allied governments  and armed resistance  and BBC  Belgium  Cairo –, , ; contact with Tito ; estimate Serb losses ; intelligence ; lame ducks ; and London HQ ; Mihailović , ; Mihailović as burden ; Partisans ; political mood , ; PWE , , , ; Radio Karageorge ; resistance politics  construction of , , ,  Dalton’s influence  and Dansey  and Darlan  and Denmark , –, , , , –, –; Danish, BBC  and Foreign Office  France, and SIS ; Carte , ; competing sections ; contrast with US policy ; control of printed material ; estimates of resistance ; Free French ; PWE , , ; RAF , ; socialists ; STO , ; Torch  F Section , , , ; Carte ; contact with Combat ; difficulties , ; Fighting French disapproval ; Haute Savoie ; help for PWE ; intentions , ; Resistance clients ; in summer   and Free France  and Greece  and Italian morale  and Jerusalem 

INDEX

and Joint Planning Staff  and NKVD  and Norway ,  operational propaganda ,  Poland ; Polish diaspora, value of  political warfare ,  propaganda  PWE ,  radicalism  and resistance ,  RF Section , , ,  and Soviet co-operation  and sabotage ,  and Stockholm , , ,  and V campaign ,  and Yugoslavia , , , , , , , ; and BBC , , ; broadcasting , , –, ; Chetnik activity () ; Chetniks, and BBC irritants –; complaints to PWE , ; contact with Mihailović ; contact with Partisans ; judgments  n. , , , –, , , ; policy , , , , , ; political warfare ; PWE use of telegrams ; resistance strategy ; role in the coup ; separation policy evaporates  Sporborg, Henry N. (–), SOE director for Western Europe , Selborne’s PS for SOE –,vice-chief,  (V/CD)  n.  Stalin, Joseph V. (–), Gen.-Sec. CPSU , , , , ,  British assurances about resistance  call for resistance  and Churchill ,  demands of  and France  n.  and Germany  and Istanbul  as military leader ,  and Poland , , , , , ,  and political warfare –, – reputation , , ,  and second front  and Yugoslavia , , , , , , , ,  Stańczyk, Jan  Stani ši ć, Bajo  State Department , ,  Stauning, Thorvald (–) , , , ,  Steed, H. Wickham (–) ,  n. , , , n. Stirling, Charles N. (–), FO Head French department September  



Stockholm  Strang, William (–), FO Assistant Under-Secretary , supervised French and Central departments , , , ,  and BBC  and collaboration  on French labour leaders  on labour leaders  objections to left-wing propaganda  and Rougier  versus MOI  and Vichy  Stroński, Stanisław (–), Polish minister ,  Stuart, Sir Campbell (–), EH director – , , , , , ,  Stülpnagel, General Otto von, head of military government in France Oct. –Feb.  ,  Subotić, Ivan, Minister at Yugoslav Legation in London  subversion , , ,  black propaganda ,  and Bulgaria  disorder  and/or political warfare  SOE and –, ,  Sunday Pictorial  Sutton, Colonel Nigel E.P., PWE RD for France , DPW(O) Jan.  , , , , , , , , , , ,  n. ,  Sweet-Escott, Bickham, SOE Balkan section , Nelson’s PA –, temporary RD for Balkans spring , inspection tours of Cairo and Algiers – and Syria  , , ,  Tallents, Sir Stephen G. (–), BBC Controller for Public Relations , Controller for Overseas – , , ,  n.  Tamplin, Colonel Guy, SOE Cairo Yugoslav section – ,  Taylor, George F. (–), Section D/SOE Balkan specialist, –, SO chief of staff , special mission Belgrade , responsible for overseas missions  , , , , ,  Telavaag  Terboven, Josef (Reichskommissar)  Third Republic (France) , , , , ,  Thomas, Brinley (–), PWE deputy RD for Northern Region , RD June  , , , ,  n. , , , 



INDEX

Thorez, Maurice (–) , ,  Thornhill, Colonel C.J.M. (–), director of EH/SO Cairo May  to  – Tillon, Charles (b.), FTPF ,  Times, The , ,  n. , , , ,  Tito, Josip Broz (–), leader of KPJ , , , , , , ,  and the British  and Comintern ,  qualities of ,  strategy , , , ,  Tixier, Adrien (–), FFL ,  Tobruk , ,  Torch, announced as American  SOE concerns about US  Toynbee, Arnold J. (–), RIIA – ,  Transport campaign ,  Treblinka camp ,  Trifunovi ć–Birčanin, Iliya  USA vii food aid for France  and French resistance  funds for French resistance  and de Gaulle  industrial strength  intelligence on France  political warfare in NA ,  understanding of France  Ustaša , ‒, , , , , , ,  massacres , , , ,  and Partisans  V campaign –, , , , ,  Vaagsø  Valette d’Osia, Colonel  Vansittart, Sir Robert G. (–), FO chief diplomatic adviser –, Adviser SOE – , –, , , ,  and France ,  n. , , , ,  n. , ,  n. ,  and Poland  Vautrin, Colonel ,  Vellacott, Paul C. (–), PWE director of Political Warfare in Cairo November – , , ,  n. , –, n. Verités  Vichy regime , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  authority of  British policy towards , , , , , 

and collaboration , , , , ,  destruction of ,  in London propaganda , , , , , , ,  and national revolution ,  and North Africa  propaganda , ; responses , , , ,  USA , , ,  Voigt, Frederick (–), SO German specialist – , , , , ,  Vomécourt, Pierre de  Vychinsky, Andrei Y. (–), Soviet deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs –  war aims , , , ,  and Chamberlain  Warner, Christopher F.A. (–), deputy dir. of PID September , deputy dir. of SO August , head of FO Northern Department April  , , , , , , , , , , ,  and socialism  War Office  Wavell, General Archibald (–), C.-in-C. in Middle East – , , , , , , ,  Wellington, R.E. Lindsay (–), BBC Assistant Controller (Programmes) , director of MOI broadcasting div. – ,  n.  Wells, H. G. (–)  Weygand, General Maxime (–) , , , , , , , , , , ,  Wheeler–Bennet, John W. (–), British Information Service –, head of PW mission Washington –, Lockhart’s PA , assistant DG   n.  Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands  Willert, Paul (–), EH/SO French specialist,Paris office –  n. , ,  Williams, E. Francis (b.), MOI Press Relations Officer March , director of Press div. August , Controller of Press January   Williams, Valentine (–), EH/SO German specialist , assistant director of EH and SO –, Washington embassy –  Wilson, A. Duncan (–), MEW –, PWE , CIO Germany , RD for Germany   n.  Wilson, Sir Horace J. (–), Treasury PUS , , 

INDEX

Winant, J. G. (–), US ambassador to London –  Winch, Michael, BBC Polish Editor, PWE CIO Poland  Woburn  Abbey  leaflets  political warfare  research units  see also PWE, Woburn; SO Yugoslavia: Anglo-Soviet collaboration  Chetniks , , ; accusations , ,  n. ; assessments ; British advice ; British support , , , , , , , , ; British disapproval , , –, , , ; collaboration , , , , , ,  n. , ; DM , , , , ; and Germans ; goals ; Italian political warfare ; and Italians , , ; and Italians, betrayal , , ; and Italians, criticism of , ; and Italians, German views ; and Italians, interpretation , , , ; and Italians, open alliance ; and Italians, opportunities ; and Italians, timing ; and Italians, weapons , ; organization , , ; Partisans , –, –, , , , , , , ; and political warfare ; resistance, active , , , ; Serbia, beyond , , , –, , , , , , ; Serbia, inside , , , , ; terrorism ; see also Mihailović civil war: among Serbs ; Bailey’s suggestion ; balance changes ; BBC and ; British detachment , ; British second thoughts ; geography ; Germans and ; Italian use for ; little Allied discussion ; news of ; or collaboration ; Partisans , ; PWE and –, , , , , ; semi-secret ; the Soviet choice ; value of Partisan success 



 coup  coup  the Danube and SOE  early resistance , ,  German zone ,  government , , ; authority in BBC ; BBC drifts away ; calls for lenience ; factionalism ; fear of casualties ; Foreign Office support ; Harrison’s dislike ; instructions ; intelligence on Partisans ; military cabinet ; military posts ; news of massacres ; orders ‘united front’ ; politicians resign () ; poor prospects ; SOE ; trapped by past ; unwelcome propaganda  Italian Army and –, –, , –, , –, , –, , , – Partisans , , , , , , ; armed resistance , , ; British support , , , , , , , ; Chetniks as allies ; Chetniks as enemies , , ; civil war , , ; collaboration, Germans –; criticism of, not considered ; Croatia  n. , ; fighting quality –, , ; main force , , , ; political methods ; proletarian brigades ; propaganda , , , ; risk of destruction ; Russia and –, ; Serb ; support for , ; terrorism  and political warfare ,  Russian propaganda  Serb casualties  n.  SOE and ,  Soviet propaganda  as state and idea –, , , , , –,  Yugoslav section (BBC), see BBC, Serbo-Croat section Yugoslav region (PWE), see PWE, Yugoslavia Zaleski, August (–)  Zamość region (Poland) – Zbor  Zinoviev, Grigori (–) 