Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy MacLean (1949)

The situation, I felt, was fraught with amusing possibilities.
(Fitzroy’s confidently aristocratic attitude in a nutshell, page 142)

Brigadier Sir Fitzroy Hew Royle Maclean, 1st Baronet (1911 to 1996) was phenomenally posh, came from a landed Scottish aristocratic family with a long history of service in the British Army, and had the very best education Britain could provide (Eton, King’s College Cambridge), before joining the Diplomatic Service in 1933.

This classic, awesomely impressive (and surprisingly long) memoir reeks of the confidence and privilege of the class and generation of British aristocrats who ruled a quarter of the world at the peak  extent of the British Empire between the wars, and then led Britain’s war against Nazi Germany.

The book covers the eight years from 1937 to 1945 and divides into three distinct periods of employment and adventure:

1. serving in the British Embassy in Moscow from 1937 until late 1939
2. as soon as the war broke out he enlisted (as a private in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, his father’s old regiment) but the adventure really kicks off when, in early 1942, he joined the newly formed Special Air Service and spent a year or so in the North African desert
3. in summer 1943 Churchill chose Maclean to lead a liaison mission (‘Macmis’) to central Yugoslavia to liaise with Josip Broz (also known as Tito) and his partisan forces, the longest, most detailed part of the book

It’s a long book at 540 pages. With a few more photos and maps, it crossed my mind that these three quite distinct adventures could possibly have been broken up into three smaller, more focused books. Combined like this, the range of the three subjects gives it an epic, almost unmanageably vast reach.

(Incidentally, the chapters in each of the three parts each start again at number 1, so there are three sets of chapters 1, 2, 3 etc.)

Part 1. Moscow and Central Asia (pages 11 to 179)

Paris politics

Maclean joined the Diplomatic Service in 1933 and in 1934 was posted to the Paris Embassy. The book kicks off with a brief summary of his experiences at the British Embassy in Paris and French politics of the mid-1930s i.e. hopelessly divided and chaotic, at times almost verging on civil war. It’s important to bear these divisions in mind when considering 1) the creation of the Vichy regime and how the Vichy French fought the British, especially in the Middle East (see A Line In The Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East by James Barrine) and 2) the nature of the French Resistance which, as numerous eye-witness accounts in Ben Macintyre’s book about the SAS explain, was tremendously fractured and often bitterly divided, including everyone from right-wing monarchists to fiery communists who often fought each other as much as the Germans.

Moscow and the show trials

Anyway, after a few years Maclean bored of Paris and in February 1937 asked to be sent to the Moscow embassy. Here he discovers the small foreign diplomatic community lives very isolated from the ordinary Russian people who, he discover, live in terror of the regime, everyone scared of any contact with foreigners, repressed, tight-lipped because of the spies and informers everywhere.

He arrives at a fascinating moment, just as Stalin’s show trials are getting into their swing. For the political analyst this is the best part of this section. He describes how Stalin’s purges swept away huge swathes of the top leadership in the Red Army and Navy – notably the charismatic Marshal Tukhachevsky – and then leading figures in the Soviet administration – notably the trial and execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev and other Old Bolsheviks in 1936.

The purges created a climate of terror in which the ordinary round of diplomatic parties and receptions became painful as all the Soviet officials stood on one side of the room, all of them terrified that the slightest contact with a foreigner would be reported and doom them, literally, to death. The centrepiece of all this is his eye-witness description of the trial of a dozen or so key figures in the Party, centring on Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin.

Bukharin was tried in what came to be known as the ‘Trial of the Twenty One’, which took place on 2 to 13 March 1938, along with ex-premier Alexei Rykov, Christian Rakovsky, Nikolai Krestinsky, Genrikh Yagoda and 16 other defendants alleged to belong to a so-called ‘Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites’. The trial was designed to be the culmination of the previous show trials, a climactic Final Act. The prosecutor alleged that Bukharin and others had been traitors from the start, had conspired to assassinate Lenin and Stalin, had murdered Maxim Gorky with poison, and planned to overthrow the regime, partition the Soviet Union and hand her territories over to their foreign collaborators in Germany, Japan and Great Britain.

All this is given in great detail in the book’s longest chapter, chapter 7, ‘Winter in Moscow’, pages 80 to 121, with vivid portraits of the state prosecutor Andrey Vyshinski and President of the Court Vasiliy Ulrich.

The purpose of the show trials

To many in the West the grotesque aspect of the show trials – the ridiculously lurid accusations and the grovelling obeisance of the accused – confirmed that Stalin’s rule was a dictatorship of the crudest kind. The trial was a breaking point for many western communists, the moment they were forced to concede that the dream of a communist utopia was in fact a totalitarian nightmare.

But Maclean spends a couple of pages explaining not only why the accused were reduced to grovelling self-accusation, but also the purpose the trials served within the Soviet Union. You should never forget that the majority of any population is not very well educated and not very interested in politics and this was especially true of the USSR where the majority of the population was still illiterate peasants. That’s why the accusations had to be so lurid and extreme, to create cartoon images of total iniquity – that the accused had conspired to murder Lenin, conspired with foreign powers to overthrow the regime, had kidnapped, tortured and murdered people. Their villainy had to be caricatured enough to be understood by the most illiterate peasants and workers.

The extremity of the alleged crimes was designed to scare peasants and workers into thinking there was a relentless conspiracy against the regime, even at the highest levels, and this justified the atmosphere of fear, paranoia and suspicion which characterised Soviet Russia. Everybody should be on their guard all the time because anyone – even the highest in the land such as those on trial – could turn out to be wicked traitors.

This worked in Stalin’s favour because it universalised the climate of fear in which people would barely be able to think about questioning the regime, let alone organising meetings or planning anything.

Stories about foreigners bringing their foreign plans to overthrow the Workers’ Paradise would also make the entire population suspicious not only of foreigners and foreign ideas and the whole notion of outsiders. Good. This suited Stalin, too.

And the trials also provided scapegoats for the failings of the state. If there were famines, if there were shortages, blame it on the wreckers and the saboteurs. Papa Stalin is doing everything he can to combat the traitors and it’s a hard struggle but you can help him and help your comrades by reporting anyone you see talking or behaving suspiciously.

So the very grotesqueness and extremity and absurdity which broke the allegiance of western intellectuals like Arthur Koestler were precisely the qualities Stalin was aiming at in order to spread his message to the furthest reaches of the Soviet regime and its dimmest least educated citizens (p.118).

Travels in Central Asia

But the show trial, dramatic though it is, only takes up one chapter. The Russia section is better known for MacLean’s extensive travels to legendary locations in Central Asia, namely the romantic cities of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bokhara. Only a handful of Europeans had traveled to these places during the later Victorian period and then, with the war, revolution and civil war, then Bolshevik rule, they had been completely inaccessible under Soviet rule.

The chapters describing his attempts to visit them are, therefore, as much about his convoluted machinations to evade Soviet bureaucracy and play local officials and NKVD operatives as about the places themselves, with lengthy descriptions of the difficulties of travelling by Russian train, bus, lorry, horse or just walking, in his relentless odysseys around central Asia.

He undertook these epic journeys during periods of leave from the embassy.

Trip 1 – Baku

By train to Kharkov. Rostov on Don. Kuban Steppe. Baku. By boat (the Centrosoyuz) to Lenkoran. Boat back to Baku. Train to Tiflis, capital of Georgia, where he visits the British Military Cemetery and meets old English governess, Miss Fellows. By truck along the Military Road to Ordzhonikidze. Train back to Moscow.

Trip 2 – Alma Ata-Tashkent-Samarkand (September 1937)

Trans-Siberian train from Moscow. Alights at Sverdlovsk (former Ekaterinburg, p.54). Train to Novosibirsk. Changes to Tirksib railway (only completed in 1930) south towards Turkmenistan (p.56). The three categories of Soviet railway carriage: international, soft and hard. Alights at Biisk. Takes another train, south to Altaisk then onto Barnaul. Enter the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan near Semipalatinsk. Alights and catches a lorry to Alma Mata ‘one of the pleasantest provincial towns in the Soviet Union’ (p.65), one of the first Russian towns built in Central Asia, in the 1850s, and which is ten miles from the railway. Lorry 40 miles to the village of Talgar in the foothills of the Tien Shen mountains. Dinner with locals then hitched a lorry back to Alma Ata. By dilapidated Ford motor car up into the mountains, to Lake Issik and magnificent view over the Steppe. Sleeps in a hut. Next morning bit of an explore then car back to Alma Ata.

Next day catches train the 500 miles south-west to Tashkent. It stops at Samarkand where he alights for a few hours and explores, seeing the domes of Shakh Zinda and the Gur Emir (p.73) then back onto the very crowded train. Extensive description of Samarkand pages 73 to 76. Tashkent, centre of the Soviet cotton industry (pages 76 to 78).

Having achieved his goals, by train back to Moscow, first across the Kazakh Steppe, then (in Russia proper) by way of Orenburg, Kuibyshev and Penza. But he had conceived two new goals: further south-west to Bokhara, and east across the Tien Shan mountains into the Chinese province of Sinkiang…

Trip 3 – Failing to get to Urumchi, capital of Sinkiang province (June 1938)

(Chapter 8) To Maclean’s delight he is given an official mission to travel to Urumchi, capital of Sinkiang, to ask the Chinese authorities for better treatment of Indian merchants. After comic wrangling with the Chinese embassy in Moscow he sets off on the 5-day rail journey to Alma Ata, two days across European Russia arriving at Orenburg ‘base of the imperial Russian forces in their campaign against the rulers of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bokhara during the second half of the last century’ (p.125). On past the Sea of Aral and along the course of the river Syr Darya, through Arys, Chimkent and Mankent to Alma Ata. Change rail lines to the Turksib line and head north and east 400 miles to Ayaguz, where starts the main road out of Soviet Russia and into Sinkiang.

At Ayaguz the Soviet officials and local NKVD are surprisingly helpful and lay on a bus (which quickly fills up) to take him to the border town of Bakhti. Overnight in the village of Urdjar, next morning arrive in Bakhti (p.130). Here a Sovsintorg official commandeers a lorry and they set off on the 48-hour journey to Urumchi.

However they barely get across the border with China, and arrive at the Chinese border post, when there are problems. His passport is taken off him and he is detained for hours. He discovers the passport has been sent by special messenger to the governor of the local area, Chuguchak, and they have to wait for a reply. Eventually a car returns from this mission and a sleek Chinese official informs Maclean the governor has received no information or authorisation about him and so, despite all his protestations, he must return to the Soviet Union, in fact all the way back to Alma Ata where he must contact the Chinese consul.

At the border Maclean gets the impression the Soviet officials knew all along this would happen and gently mock him. As it happens, one says with a smile, the same bus that brought him is still waiting. He can board it now and return to Bakhti. After driving all night he arrives at Ayaguz in time to catch the train back to Alma Ata.

Here there is more fol-de-rol between the Soviet authorities and the local Chinese Consul, a seedy man residing in a rundown building. The Soviet plenipotentiary instructs the Chinese to send a message to Urumchi. Next day the Chinese inform him that he is not allowed into the country, and an imposing NKVD officer tells him he must leave Alma Ata immediately, as it is a restricted area. The entire trip has been a complete failure (p.137).

It is interesting to read that Sinkiang was a rebellious troublesome province for the Chinese ever since it was incorporated into their empire and was in Maclean’s time because of course, it still is today:

• Blinken says genocide in Xinjiang is ongoing in report ahead of China visit

Trip 4 – through Soviet central Asia to the Oxus and on to Kabul (autumn 1938)

(Chapter 9) He sets his sights on visiting Bokhara, former capital of the emirs, of reaching the fabled river Oxus, and crossing into Afghanistan. Leaves Moscow on 7 October on a train bound for Askabad. Third evening arrive at Orenberg ‘which for more than one hundred years marked the furthest point of Russia’s advance against the Kirghiz and Turkomans and the Khans of Bokhara and Khiva.’ Two more days the train passes through the Kara Kum or Black Desert past the bleak mud flats of the Aral Sea. On the fifth night reached Tashkent and woke not far from Samarkand but he decides not to revisit it, but to continue on the train, west, following the river Zaravshan, to Bokhara.

He alights at Kagan. He learns that the daily train to Bokhara has left so, on impulse, seeing a lorry laden with cotton bales just starting off down the road to Bokhara, he runs and jumps in the back. Unfortunately so does one of the NKVD minders who’ve been following him, and he’s been reported so after a short stretch a car packed with officials pulls the lorry over but by this time it is packed with Uzbeks who’d followed his example so Maclean is able to sneak off and hide behind a tree. Eventually, after the lorry has been thoroughly searched and no foreigner found it is allowed to continue on its way and the NKVD car turns back to Kagan. There’s nothing for it but to walk. It’s a very long walk, into the night, until he tops a slight rise and finds himself looking at the legendary city of Bokhara by moonlight.

(Chapter 10) Story of the Reverend Joseph Wolff. He explores Bokhara, finds no inn to take him so sleeps rough in a public garden, which irks the NKVD agents who he knows are tailing him. Next day he’s up and exploring again, seeing the ‘Tower of Death’, the principal mosques, the Kalyan, or Kok Gumbaz (Blue Dome), the grim thousand-year-old Ark or Citadel of the Emirs. He gives us a characteristically pithy historical summary.

With the capture in 1868 of Samarkand and the upper reaches of the Zaravshan by the Russians, who thus gained control of his water supply, the Emir of Bokhara was obliged to accept the suzerainty of the Tsar and Russian control of his relations with the outside world; but inside his own dominions he maintained his own army and enjoyed absolute power of life and death over his unfortunate subjects. The Russian population was limited to a few officials and merchants, while the Emir excluded other Europeans from his domains with a jealousy which has been emulated by his Bolshevik successors. Bokhara thus remained a centre of Mohammedan civilization, a holy city with a hundred mosques, three hundred places of learning, and the richest bazaar in Central Asia. It was not until 1920, three years after the downfall of his imperial suzerain, that the last Emir, after vainly invoking the help of both the Turks and the British, fled headlong across the Oxus to Afghanistan, dropping favourite dancing boy after favourite dancing boy in his flight, in the hope of thus retarding the advance of the pursuing Red Army, who, however, were not to be distracted from their purpose by such stratagems. (A leading part was played in these events by the same Faisullah Khojayev, whom I had seen condemned to death in Moscow six months earlier.)

He could have stayed a month but his leave is limited, so he catches a train back to Kagan, then another one south, heading towards Stalinabad, the capital of Tajikistan. The last section follows the course of the Oxus (Amu Darya) passing through eastern Turkmenistan. The far bank of the river was Afghan territory and that’s where he wanted to head next.

(Chapter 11. Across the Oxus) He alights at Termez, which he explores then seeks out the chief of police  and presents his diplomatic laisser passer which should allow him to the exit the Soviet Union anywhere, in this case crossing the river Oxus into Afghanistan. The chief of police gives him permission but when Maclean arrives at the actual frontier post at Patta Hissa, they haven’t been notified. By gentle persistence Maclean eventually persuades the officer in charge to arrange for the repair of one of the three paddle boats kept to cross the river but which had fallen into disrepair. Soldiers and engineers get the most viable steamer, ‘which rejoiced in the name of Seventeenth Party Congress,’ working and fix it up enough to put-put him across the river, it takes half an hour because of treacherous sand banks.

On the Afghan side some locals take his bags and him under their wing. They examine his passport without understanding it and he manages to convey he wants to head to Mazar-i-Sharif. Dinner and sleep. Next morning a horse is provided and he sets off under escort. the riverside reeds give way to desert. He is detained at a saria or mud fort by fierce locals before being grudgingly allowed to continue.

Off to the west are the ruins of Balkh, the ancient Bactria. The oasis of Seyagird. Tea with the headman who provides a cart for his baggage, then a further trek across desert eventually arriving at Mazar. He discovers a Russian couple who take him in but inform him of the cholera epidemic sweeping the area which means it is quarantined. He locates the local Director of Sanitation who agrees, after some negotiation, to sign a medical certificate declaring Maclean has had cholera and recovered. Portrait of Mazar, main point being it is the capital of what he calls Afghan Turkestan, which is cut off geographically and ethnically from Kabul and the south (p.164).

A truck was scheduled to drive the 300 or so miles to Afghanistan and the authorities assign him a seat. Tashkurgan and then up into rocky mountains to a place named Hai-Bak and, at 3 in the morning, to Doaba in the Andarrab valley, where he sleeps in a government rest house. In the way of British aristocrats, especially the Scots, he discovers ‘a fellow clanswoman’ Mrs Fraser-Tytler who, it turns out, he had known during his childhood in Inverness.

He takes a detour west to the Bamyan valley to see the two immense Buddhas carved in the rock. Then across the mountain which is the watershed between the Oxus and the Indus at a height of 12,000 feet and soon arrives at Kabul.

(Chapter 12. Homeward bound) He had hoped to head west to Herat and cross back into the USSR at Kershk and join the railway at Merv but none of this was to be. the Soviet consulate in Kabul made it quite clear that, because of the cholera epidemic, nobody was being allowed back into the USSR from Afghanistan.

Instead he is forced to head south into British India and fly. The route is: Kabul. Jalalabad. The Khyber Pass. Into British India and the town of Peshawar. Train to Delhi. As a pukka diplomat he meets the most senior British officials, dinner, good beds, a world away from his recent experiences. He obtains the visa he’ll need to exit Persia into the USSR.

From Delhi by plane to Baghdad, stopping over in Basra. After staying over in Baghdad, ‘a disappointing city’, he takes a car towards Tehran. Across the border into the Persia at Khanikin. Along a road built by the Brits to Kermanshah, and then to Hamadan, ‘the Ecbatana of the ancients’ (p.170). Changes car and car shares with four bulky Iranians driving north for the border with the USSR at Djulfa. Stops at Kavin (to eat), Zenjan (to sleep), through Mianeh, arriving at Tabriz the capital of Persian Azerbaijan.

Two days hobnobbing with the British Consul and haggling with the Persian governor about the validity of his exit visa. Eventually given permission to head north to the border, Djulfa in the valley of the Araxes. Comic scene where the Persian guards happily allow him onto the bridge across the river but the Soviet guard at the other end refuses to let him enter the USSR and when he turns to re-enter Persia the Persian border guard says this is impossible. Luckily a car arrives with a Soviet official who, reluctantly, accepts his diplomatic laisser-passer and lets him enter. He cashes money at the post office and checks into an inn.

Train to Erivan, capital of Soviet Armenia, running alongside the river Araxa which forms the border. Portrait of Erivan. Train to Tiflis, capital of Soviet Georgia, and so on to Batum, the second largest city in Georgia, on the banks of the Black Sea. He observes that so many of these central Asian towns were only conquered by the advancing Russian from the 1870s and many only began to be developed in a modern way after the Russian Civil War, so many of them have the same air of being half built, of having grand central squares full of vast totalitarian Soviet buildings, quickly giving way to a few streets of bourgeois wealth, and then extensive hovels and shacks.

He had hoped to sail from Batum but storms meant departures were cancelled. So by train back to Tiflis. It was 18 months since he was last there (on his first trip) and he finds it has been noticeably Sovietised and security tightened. He is arrested by the NKVD and spends a day arguing with NKVD officers until the commander returns and releases him back to his hotel.

Next morning he takes a lorry to Ordzhonikidze by the Georgian Military Road which is covered in snow; they regularly have to stop and dig the lorry out of drifts. From Ordzhonikidze he catches the sleeper train back to Moscow, arriving two days later in time to receive an invitation to dinner from the Belgian chargé d’affaires (see below).

What an extraordinary adventure! What a mind-boggling itinerary! It is a mark of how backward we have gone that Maclean was able to travel through all those countries in complete safety whereas now, in the supposedly enlightened and progressive 2020s, I don’t think any Westerner in their right mind would want to travel through central Asia, let along Afghanistan, or contemplate a jolly car trip across Iraq and Iran.

The glamour of central Asia

For those susceptible to it, all these places – Tashkent, Samarkand, the Oxus, western outposts of the legendary Silk Road – have a tremendous glamour and attraction. Reading his account you realise it’s  1) partly because they’re so remote and inaccessible and so simply to have visited them is an achievement which gains you kudos in a certain kind of upper-middle class circle; 2) partly because of the wonders and treasures when you arrive, such as the grand Registran in Samarakand; but also 3), as so often with travelling, because it is an escape from the humdrum modern world. A number of throwaway remarks indicate this, including one which leapt out at me: ‘Uzbek houses have changed very little since the days of Tamerlane‘ (p.143). These are places where you can, for long spells, believe that you have travelled back in time to the Middle Ages and not just of banal Britain, but to the glamorous days of Tamerlane and such legendary figures, or even further back, visiting the ruins of cities founded by Alexander the Great! It is, in a way, an escape back to the Arabian Nights wonderlands of childhood.

And picking up on the previous section, reading it now, in 2024, one can only marvel at the relative peacefulness and security and scope of where you could travel freely in the 1930s – albeit the entire system was about to be plunged into a global holocaust.

The methodology of Soviet imperialism

On a political level his travels in Central Asia give him an insight into the effectiveness of the Soviet empire:

As the basis for a policy of imperialism, this system has much to recommend it. Power is vested in the hands of a group of reliable natives, who are responsible for seeing that the wishes of the central authority are carried out. If they prove unreliable, they can be replaced by others, while, if the worst comes to the worst, an emissary of the central authority can be sent to put things right. By this means, no risks are taken and an appearance of autonomy is preserved. Moreover it is a system which is capable of application to any new country which happens to fall under Soviet dominion. Thus, more recently, in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania Soviet Socialist Republics have been set up and politically reliable governments formed from members of the local Communist Parties. It is, we are now learning, a stereotyped pattern into which almost any people or country can be made to fit with a little squeezing and pushing. (p.35)

A German official predicts the course of the war

All this took place at the end of the 1930s as Europe hurtled towards war but there is surprisingly little about Hitler and the Nazis; in fact, given that MacLean was a diplomat, there’s surprisingly little about international affairs at all.

It’s only at the very end of the Asian adventures section, after he’s arrived back in Moscow exhausted, filthy and unshaven from his final trip to discover an invitation to a formal dinner being given by the Belgian chargé d’affaires that very evening, that there’s finally something about the broader international situation. And this is given as a prediction by a friend of his, his opposite number at the German embassy, Johnny Herwarth von Bittenfeld.

Herwarth (in MacLean’s account) makes a number of predictions which all were to come true. He thinks Britain backing down at Munich (September 1938) is a disaster because:

• it will embolden Hitler to make more and more outrageous demands
• it will weaken all voices within Germany calling for restraint
• it will, thus, make war inevitable
• war is only tenable if Germany can make peace with the Russians
• if not, there will be a war on two fronts which Germany will lose and be utterly ruined

Part 2. War (183 to 299)

Coming from a long line of soldiers, when war breaks out Maclean wants to fight but discovers that it is impossible for someone serving in the Diplomatic Service to join the army. He is not allowed to resign in order join up. So he studies the Foreign Office rules intensely and realises there’s a loophole. He is allowed to resign from the service in one situation – if he wants to go into politics. So he contacts the Conservative Party who say they’ll be happy to have him as a candidate for the next constituency which becomes vacant and, armed with this, marches into his boss’s office (the Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Sir Alexander Cadogan) and declares that he wants to go into politics, resignation in hand. As he predicts, his superiors are unable to stop him and so let him resign.

He promptly walks round to the recruiting office of his father’s regiment, the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, where he enlists as a private soldier. (p.184). But, when the next by-election crops up he is  legally obliged, under the terms of his resignation letter, to stand and so finds himself the Conservative candidate and then wins the election to become Conservative MP for Lancaster in 1941 (p.189). He hadn’t hidden from the electors that he was in the Army and first duty was to serve and all through his subsequent service he remains, I think, Tory MP for Lancaster.

There are some pages about basic army life and training. As you might expect of someone so over-qualified to be a simple squaddy he is soon promoted to lance-corporal. Among other things he confirms that, in the Army, almost every other word is the F word which he demonstrates by quoting conversations or orders with the offending word bleeped out (pages 184 to 186).

Desert War

After two years of training and exercises he is, as you might expect, in 1941 commissioned as an officer and receives orders to fly to Cairo (p.189). After the retreat from Dunkirk, apart from a few abortive expeditions (a failed attack on Norway or on the French coast) North Africa was the main area of British overseas military activity.

Because I myself am not too clear about this and Maclean’s book refers only to some aspects, I’m going to cheat and quote Wikipedia’s summary of the entire Desert War:

Military operations began in June 1940 with the Italian declaration of war and the Italian invasion of Egypt from Libya in September. Operation Compass, a five-day raid by the British in December 1940, was so successful that it led to the destruction of the Italian 10th Army (10ª Armata) over the following two months. Benito Mussolini sought help from Adolf Hitler, who sent a small German force to Tripoli under Directive 22 (11 January). The Afrika Korps (Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel) was formally under Italian command, as Italy was the main Axis power in the Mediterranean and North Africa.

In the spring of 1941, Rommel led Operation Sonnenblume, which pushed the Allies back to Egypt except for the siege of Tobruk at the port. At the end of 1941, Axis forces were defeated in Operation Crusader and retired again to El Agheila. In early 1942 Axis forces drove the Allies back again, then captured Tobruk after the Battle of Gazala but failed to destroy their opponents. The Axis invaded Egypt and the Allies retreated to El Alamein, where the Eighth Army fought two defensive battles, then defeated the Axis forces in the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942. The Eighth Army drove Axis forces out of Libya to Tunisia, which was invaded from the west by the Allied First Army in Operation Torch. In the Tunisian campaign the remaining Axis forces surrendered to the combined Allied forces in May 1943.

North Africa was so important because of the Suez Canal in the heart of Egypt. If the Germans captured Cairo it would have at least three results: 1) they would cut off easy communications with India (a huge source of manpower) and with the entire theatre of war in the Far East (Burma). More importantly 2) the Germans would be able to push on through Palestine to Iraq and Persia, source of much of the oil which was fuelling the British war effort. 3) This oil would be sent to support the German war effort in Russia and German troops coming up from Persia through the Caucasus would open a new front against Russia leading, perhaps, to the decisive defeat of Russia and to Germany, in effect winning the war.

Those were the ultimate stakes behind the Desert War and explains the genuine concern and even panic when the Afrika Corps, at its furthest extent, got within 80 miles of Cairo, and that explains why the (second) Battle of El Alamein was so important, signalling the definitive end of German advances, the beginning of German defeats, and the widespread sense that the tide of the war was changing.

Chapter 1. Special Air Service

Maclean had been invited to join some sort of commando but this fell through. Instead he literally bumps into David Stirling (who he knows vaguely because he’s good friends with Stirling’s brother, Peter, and they’re both from another grand, ancient, noble Scottish family) who invites him to join the SAS.

Stirling explains that the idea is to parachute small numbers of men behind enemy lines in North Africa and cause as much mayhem as possible, thus drawing vital resources away from the front line. After various experiments they’ve discovered that attacking lightly defended airfields is the most destructive thing they can do. They use the Lewis Bomb, a clump of explosive with a pencil fuse developed by SAS founder member Jock Lewis (p.194). Profile of the dedicated fighting machine, Paddy Mayne (p.195).

Maclean describes the Free French who were part of the unit almost from the start. The physical training i.e. long hikes in the desert and practice parachuting. He has to make six jumps and hates it. All a bit futile seeing as by the time he joined, the unit had settled down to being taken and collected from missions by the Long Range Desert Group (p.196).

Chapters 3 and 4. Raid on Benghazi

May 1942: Detailed description of the build up to, and execution of a ‘daring’ raid against Benghazi led by Stirling, accompanied by Randolph Churchill (compare and contrast the account of the same farcical raid given in Ben Macintyre’s SAS: Rogue Heroes).

I have always found that in dealing with foreigners whose language one does not speak, it is best to shout. (p.221)

They manage to penetrate into the highly defended city and find a safe (bomb-damaged) house to hole up in but that evening both the inflatable dinghies they’ve brought to paddle out to enemy ships and attach limpet mines to them, turn out to have leaks and simply won’t inflate. Disheartened, they spend a tense day hiding out in this damaged house, petrified of discovery, before exiting the city in the same clanking car they’d entered by, bluffing their way past the Italian guards thanks to Maclean’s fluent demotic Italian and everyone’s (Maclean, Stirling, Randolph Churchill’s) aristocratic confidence.

Chapters 5 and 6

Having extricated themselves from this failed and farcical attempt, they withdraw to Cairo. He mentions the dinner he and Stirling were invited to which was given by Winston Churchill, Chief of the General Staff General Smuts and General Alexander, the first time he meets Churchill.

The strategic situation has deteriorated and Rommel is now at El Alamein just 90 miles from Alexandria. So the SAS’s plans for a second go at Benghazi escalate into a full-blown raid by some 200 men backed by aerial bombing. Trouble is so many people are involved that security is breached and word gets around. Thus, after a very long and painful 800 mile drive of a lengthy convoy across the desert, with many mishaps, our boys finally get to the very edge of Benghazi but are greeted by a hail of machine guns and mortars, are forced to make a hasty retreat, and are pursued up into the Gebel mountains by squads of Italian warplanes who strafe and bomb them. Several trucks full of explosives and stores are blown up and it’s a miracle they weren’t all killed.

There then follows the very long account of their perilous escape across the desert, driving by night, by day being seriously bombed and strafed by Italian planes, running so low on food that eventually the entire day’s ration was one spoonful of bully beef.

A number of good men are killed on this mission. Maclean initially thought it had been a futile waste of time but GHQ assured them that it had kept a lot of enemy resources tied up, extra men to guard Benghazi and then squadrons of airplanes to search for them which were, therefore, not at the front i.e. it had been useful (p.256).

Chapter 7. Persia

Maclean explains that the British now faced the threat of an enormous pincer movement, with German forces trying to take Stalingrad up in southern Russia and pushing forward in north Africa towards Cairo and, ultimately, the Suez Canal (p.263). If you look at a large-scale map you can see how, if the Germans were victorious, they would not only take the Suez Canal, lifeline to British India, but push on through Palestine to take Iraq and Iran, meeting up with their comrades who would have pushed on south through the Caucasus. And the point of Iran was the oil. Command of Persia, and to a lesser extent Iraq, would give the Nazi empire all the oil it ever needed to maintain its war industry.

Which is why Maclean found himself posted to the Middle East and Persia service. Here, conferring with the commanding officer, General Maitland Wilson, he discovered the problems facing the British occupation of the country, most obviously that there were very few British soldiers involved. He had been summoned to discuss with Wilson the possibility of setting up an SAS-style outfit to operate behind enemy lines if the worst came to the worst and the Germans conquered Persia (p.264).

Kidnapping the general

Out of this conference comes the specific idea of kidnapping a man named General Zahidi, an unpleasant type who had sway over the tribes of south Persia, was known to be hoarding grain to inflate the price but, most importantly, was thought to be in communication with the Germans and helping them make plans to conquer Persia.

This chapter describes in great detail the preparation and execution of ‘Operation Pongo’ which, despite all the hoopla, boils down to parking a lorryload of British soldiers out the front and back of the General’s house in Isfahan, and then Maclean accompanied by a few other officers walking in, insisting to see the General, then holding him up at gunpoint, walking him out to a waiting car, and driving him off to the nearest military airport where he was flown out of the country and interned under British custody in Palestine.

On searching Zahedi’s bedroom Maclean confirms British suspicions, discovering ‘a collection of automatic weapons of German manufacture, a good deal of silk underwear, some opium, an illustrated register of the prostitutes of Isfahan and correspondence from a local German agent’ (p.274).

Incidentally, remember how I suggested part of the appeal of the mysterious cities of Central Asia was the sense of stepping back in time into the Middle Ages or beyond, well the same goes for the Persian city of Isfahan, one of the few cities Maclean has been to which lives up to its reputation, and of which he writes:

Despite the hideous modern statue of the late Shah still standing there and despite his misguided attempts, fortunately abandoned by his successor, to bludgeon Persia into giving a half-hearted and entirely superficial imitation of a modern Western industrial state, Isfahan recalls the great capital city of the Middle Ages. (p.270)

And the whole notion of kidnapping an enemy general recalls the comparable exploit, the kidnapping of General Heinrich Kreipe, the German commander of Crete, by a group of super-pukka chaps, as described in Ill Met by Moonlight by William Stanley Moss (1950), albeit it considerably more fraught and dangerous for being carried out in enemy territory.

Chapter 8

The strategic situation changes. The Germans are checked in North Africa and at Stalingrad. The immediate threat to Persia has abated. After the capture of David Stirling in January 1943 the SAS had split up into different units (including a Special Boat Service run by George Jellicoe).

Maclean is summoned back to Cairo and told that, with North Africa on the verge of being secure, the Allied focus is turning to Italy. He is ordered to plan for SAS-style raids on Sicily but the mission is called off at the last moment. He’s at a bit of a loose end when he is summoned back to London where he meets Churchill for a weekend conference at Chequers (p.280). Here he is told he is going to be dropped into Yugoslavia (spelled ‘Jugoslavia’ throughout the book) to find out more about the partisans who have been fighting against the Germans and to contact their supposed leader, ‘Tito’. Nobody’s sure, at this point, whether Tito exists, whether he’s a man (or even a woman) or maybe the name of a committee of some kind?

Churchill tells him to establish the situation on the ground, find out whichever partisan group is killing most Germans, and help them to kill more. Churchill wrote that he wanted: ‘a daring Ambassador-leader to these hardy and hunted people’ (p.294).

What we knew for sure was that the partisans were communists and so likely to be in thrall to Soviet central control so Maclean asks Churchill directly, should he be worried about the political aspects of the situation. The straight answer is No. His mission is to find out who is killing the most Germans and help them to kill more (p.281), a point reiterated when he meets Churchill in Cairo (p.403).

He gives a detailed and very useful summary of the origins of Yugoslavia, going back to the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, and the long struggle of the Balkan Christian nations to free themselves, leading into a detailed description of the region before, during and after the Great War and leading up to the Nazi invasion (pages 279 to 293). He’s especially good on the deeply embedded enmity between Serbs (Orthodox Christians who fought hard against the occupying Turks i.e. have a paranoid embattled mindset) and the Croats (Catholic Christians who were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and so considered themselves civilised and superior to their barbarian neighbours) still a good read for anyone interested in the background to the ruinous civil wars of the 1990s. Right at the end of the Yugoslavia section he comments:

In the Balkans the tradition of violence is old-established and deep-rooted. (p.524)

Part 3. Yugoslavia

Zivio Tito. Smrt Fašismu. Sloboda narodu.
(‘Long live Tito. Death to Fascism. Liberty to the People.’ Partisan slogans, page 345)

Maclean is now aged 32. He selects a team of a dozen or so men who are trained, equipped and parachuted into Yugoslavia a week after the Italian capitulation i.e. early September 1943. They are met by Partisans and efficiently taken to Tito’s headquarters in an old castle. Maclean introduces himself and his team and makes it plain he is here on an investigation into the overall situation.

His description and analysis of the situation in Yugoslavia is fascinating and spread over many pages as new facts come in and shift his understanding. It contains many insights into the situation in Yugoslavia and of partisan fighting in general.

– Occupation mentality Nobody who hasn’t lived under enemy occupation, specially Nazi occupation, can understand the bitter enmities, rivalries and retaliations it triggers.

For anyone who was not himself in German-occupied Europe during the war it is hard to imagine the savage intensity of the passions which were aroused or the extremes of bitterness which they engendered. In Jugoslavia the old racial, religious and political feuds were, as it were, magnified and revitalized by the war, the occupation and the resistance, the latent tradition of violence revived. The lesson which we were having was an object-lesson, illustrated by burnt villages, desecrated churches, massacred hostages and mutilated corpses. (p.338)

– Tito’s intelligence and independence What makes Tito so impressive is his readiness to argue any point out with a completely open mind then make a decision, which is generally the right one.

– Tito’s name derives from this quickness to make decisions. He so regularly said to his men ‘You will do this, and you will do that’ which, in Serbo-Croatian, is ‘Ti to; ti to’, hence his nickname (p.311).

– Maclean concludes that the partisans are so numerous (at least 100,000 under arms) and well organised that they will probably emerge as the major element in post-war Yugoslav politics. At which point the big question will be: Will Tito, a dedicated communist, fall into line behind Moscow as all other communist parties have? (p.339) But Maclean quotes a conversation he had with him where Tito emphasises that so many Yugoslavs have been killed or tortured that they won’t willingly throw away their hard-earned independence (p.316) and Tito himself has undergone the experience of building up and leading a national resistance movement from scratch, a position, Maclean thinks, he will be reluctant to surrender (p.340).

– The Četniks The other resistance fighting organisation is the Četniks led by Draža Mihailović. Two points: 1) they were Royalists who took their orders from the king who was in exile in Italy and so fundamentally detached from the realities on the ground. 2) They were demoralised by the Nazis brutal reprisals for their activities (p.336). This contrasted with the Partisans who ignored Nazi reprisals and won a grudging admiration for fighting on regardless of how many men, women and children were murdered, tortured or burnt alive by the blonde beasts from Germany.

– The Ustaše (also called Ustashas or Ustashi) was a Croatian racist, terrorist, and Nazi-like movement, active from before the war (1929) which during the war was allowed to implement a reign of terror. Their genocide of the Orthodox, murdering priests, locking villages in churches and burning them down (p.334). Events which shed light on or explained the brutality of the Bosnian war of the 1990s:

This kaleidoscope of heroism and treachery, rivalry and intrigue had become the background to our daily life. Bosnia, where we had our first sight of enemy-occupied Jugoslavia, was in a sense a microcosm of the country as a whole. In the past it had been fought over repeatedly by Turks, Austrians and Serbs, and most of the national trends and tendencies were represented there, all at their most violent. The population was made up of violently Catholic Croats and no less violently Orthodox Serbs, with a strong admixture of equally fanatical local Moslems. The mountainous, heavily wooded country was admirably suited to guerrilla warfare, and it had long been one of the principal Partisan strongholds, while there was also a considerable sprinkling of Cetnik bands. It had been the scene of the worst of the atrocities committed by the Ustase, of the not unnaturally drastic reprisals of the Cetniks and Partisans. (p.337)

– The power of communism In guerrilla warfare ideas matter more than material resources (p.331). This is where the devoted belief of the communists comes in and Maclean’s analysis suggests a very profound historical point that he doesn’t quite articulate: that communism flourished in countries all round the world, and particularly among guerrillas, partisans and militias all across the Third World after the war, not because it was right, but because it was the most effective ideology for binding together and motivating those kinds of liberation fighters. Communism triumphed in the Darwinian struggle of ideologies for a number of obvious reasons:

• it promises a better fairer world; if you care for humanity, you must be a communist
• it is based on scientific principles and a teleological view of history which means it is inevitable, unstoppable
• it transcends ethnic or national rivalries, purports to unite all people, races and creeds, in a transnational crusade for justice and equality
• these and other considerations bred a fanatical adherence

(Seen from this strictly utilitarian point of view, communism’s modern equivalent would be militant Islam, extreme Islamic groups across the Middle East and North Africa being shown to create not only fanatical devotees but to unite fighters from all backgrounds and races (a theme mentioned in The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson, 2013).)

He gives a good potted biography of Tito, son of a Croatian peasant (pages 310 to 313).

The epic trek to the Adriatic

The army engineer he’s brought with him supervises the flattening of a likely looking field to make a runway for the RAF to fly in much-needed supplies to the Partisans, but HQ back in Cairo make it clear the RAF aren’t keen on entrusting their pilots’ lives to amateur airfield builders. A new plan is suggested: that the Royal Navy brings supplies to a port on the coast of Dalmatia, until recently held by the Italians and not yet annexed by the Germans. In fact the Navy are wary, too, and prefer to drop supplies at an island off the coast.

Anyway, Maclean agrees a plan with Tito (impatient to get supplies anyway he can) who gives him Partisans to escort Maclean and a few of his team (Street, Henniker-Major and Sergeant Duncan) across country to the Adriatic coast, there to assess the situation and suggest the best island. Thus commences a long and arduous trek across mountains, through woods, crossing a German-patrolled road, fording a river, meeting all kinds of eccentric characters along the way and seeing for themselves the carnage meted out by the once-occupying Italians.

The itinerary is: Jajce (Tito’s base in Bosnia). Bugojno. Kupres. Livno (recently recovered from the Germans amid much fighting). Arzano (‘a few tiny white-washed houses, clinging to the side of a hill’). Zadvaije.

Then, at last, we heard the dogs barking in Baska Voda, were challenged once more, and, between high white-washed walls, found ourselves on a narrow jetty, looking out over a tiny harbour.

Then by local fishing boat out to the island of Korcula. They are treated royally, swim in the sea, taken round all the villages on the coast and greeted with acclaim. Trouble is, the bloody radio has stopped working so he can’t radio his whereabouts back to Cairo HQ. In the event a Navy motorboat turns up with, of course, an old chum of his from the navy and some tons of equipment.

Summary

An enormous amount happens in the next year and a half, described in 120 closely-written pages. Here are some highlights in note form:

The Germans consolidate their hold on the Dalmatian coast thus slowly squeezing off possible places for the Allies to land munitions for the partisans.

He is collected by Royal Navy motor boat and taken across the Adriatic to Allied HQ in southern Italy for orders. He is flown to Malta, then on across Libya to Cairo. Preparations are underway for a Big Three conference in the Middle East. Maclean submits his report, conclusion so far about the situation in Yugoslavia and the central importance of the partisans.

On return to Bari he finds the situation has deteriorated the Germans have seized more of the coastline. Repeated attempts to fly him back in are defeated by fog and snow. A captured German airplane is filled with top envoys from Tito to fly to Allied HQ but it has just loaded up when a German plane appears out of nowhere, attacking it with bombs and machine gun fire, killing some of Tito’s top lieutenants and some of Maclean’s British friends.

Finally he gets to land, drops some equipment and British officers, takes on board a new selection of Tito representatives, and flies back to Bari with a view to taking them on to Allied HQ in Egypt. Churchill and staff have returned from the Tehran conference with Stalin and Roosevelt (28 November to 1 December).

The central problem is that Britain has, up until now, been giving official support to the Royal Yugoslav Government in exile, appointed by King Peter, and sending arms to the Royalist Cetniks led by by Draža Mihailović. Now Maclean has to tell Churchill and other bigwigs that the Cetniks are not only not very effective on the ground but strongly suspected of acquiescing or even helping the Germans. Meanwhile, the real anti-German force is the partisans. So Maclean’s meetings with Churchill are designed to make him switch official British government support from the Cetniks to the partisans. But this leaves the  big problem that Maclean is reporting that Tito’s partisans will not only be the biggest force in post-war Yugoslavia but will probably form the government. Therefore British support for the King and the royal government in exile is increasingly irrelevant and backing the wrong horse. But how to switch British support without alienating the king, the Cetniks and the large proportion of the Yugoslav population which remains royalist? (Later on Maclean says that even the communists conceded that over half the population of Serbia was monarchist, p.490.)

This tricky diplomatic challenge runs throughout the rest of the Yugoslav part of the book and negotiations, between so many different parties, moving through so many different stages, are impossible to summarise. In a nutshell, young King Peter acquiesces in the decision but, as so often, it is his older advisors and other members of the royal family, who prove intractable and complicate the situation.

Maclean is flown back to Bari and then makes the dicey crossing back to an unoccupied Yugoslav port in a RN motor-torpedo boat. He reunites with his small staff and Tito’s staff and, after studying maps and latest German troop movements, they all agree the only viable island base for operations is the island of Vis. He then travels back to Bari to meet the Commander in Chief, General Alexander, to persuade him to assign the resources and troops required to convert Vis into a stronghold, for example building a large airfield and barracks for a permanent British force.

Yet another flight, from Bari to Marrakesh in Morocco where Churchill is recovering from flu, to persuade the great man to sign off on the Vis plan. they learn that Tito’s old headquarters in Jajce has fallen to the Germans and so, thinking they need some bucking up, Churchill writes a personal letter to Tito for Maclean to deliver by hand (p.413).

He is flown back to Bari and then parachuted into Bosnia to find and report the decision to Tito.

(Chapter 10) He is taken to meet Tito at temporary headquarters and discovers a Yugoslav Anti-Fascist Council has bestowed in Tito the rank of Marshall. Tito is delighted by the letter in which Churchill flatters him and readily agrees with the plan to make Vis a major support base for his partisans. They move about a lot and finally make a new HQ in caves overlooking a valley.

Chapter 11. New deal

Increasing air drops from the RAF and USAAF. Maclean is responsible for assigning officers to work with partisan units throughout the country.

Despite occasional stoppages, air-supplies were now arriving on a far larger scale. Air-support, too, was increasing by leaps and bounds….It was now possible, owing to the presence of my officers with Partisan formations throughout the country, to co-ordinate their operations with those of the Allied Armies in Italy. (p.429)

A Russian Mission arrives led by a Red Army general. This is the thin end of the wedge as East and West start to compete for the allegiance of Tito and his partisans.

A passage giving the decision, context and implications of the British government decision to stop supplying the Cetniks and diplomatic negotiations with King Peter (in exile in London) to see if he’s prepared to form a government of national unity i.e. let communist partisans enter his government in exile (pages 438 to 441). This would be best achieved if Maclean flies back to London to give advice, preferably accompanied by a representative of Tito.

Chapter 12. Change of scene

So he’s picked up by Dakota and flies to Algiers to meet with the new Supreme Allied Commander, General Wilson. Here, among many other decisions, it is decided to set up a Balkan Air Force which would train partisan volunteers and be responsible ‘for the planning, co-ordination and, to a large extent, execution of air operations in the Balkans’ (p.444). Long-distance phone call to Churchill with comedy because neither of them know how to use the newfangled scrambling equipment.

Next day he flies to London with the Tito delegate, Major Vlatko Velebit. It’s the spring of 1944 and England is overflowing with Americans and rumours of D-Day. He is summoned to a meeting with General Eisenhower, then to another one at Number 10. the military side – more supplies to the partisans – is easily agreed. The political negotiations with King Peter and the Royalists much more challenging. Peter has by now made an important public announcement telling his people to drop the Cetniks and support the partisans but this only has the effect of weakening his own support among disgruntled royalists without much increasing support for the partisans which was already strong.

Maclean receives a call from Buckingham Palace to go and brief the king who he finds to be surprisingly well-informed about the situation in Yugoslavia (p.449).

Then they get a radio message from Vivian Street, British officer with Tito HQ, that the cave hideout came under heavy attack from a co-ordinated German attack, many partisans were killed through Tito and senior officers made their escape. (Maclean gives a sustained description of the attack and gripping escape, pages 450 to 452.)

The HQ had been near the village of Drvar. In retaliation for supporting the partisans the Germans exterminate every man, woman and child in the village. That level of barbarism is what we were fighting to liberate Europe from.

The Germans pursue and harass Tito’s team who eventually radio for help. A date is made for a US Dakota to land at a cleared strip and Tito and key staff (and his dog Tigger) are loaded aboard and evacuated to Bari, the first time he’s been forced to leave Yugoslav soil since the conflict began (p.454).

Everyone agrees that, in order to continue functioning and provide a figurehead he must be returned to Yugoslav soil as soon as possible and the island of Vis, so long pondered as a new HQ, is agreed. Tito and his staff are taken there by Royal Navy destroyer, HMS Blackmore.

Chapter 13. Island base and brief encounter

Maclean drily observes that Tito likes caves. He makes his base on the island of Vis three-quarters up the side of Mount Hum. Since he was last there the island has been transformed with a huge Allied airfield built with as many as a dozen huge American bombers parked up.

The narrow roads were crammed with Army trucks and jeeps, stirring up clouds of red dust as they rushed along. Every few hundred yards dumps of stores and ammunition, surrounded by barbed wire and by brightly painted direction posts, advertised the presence of R.E.M.E., of N.A.A.F.I., of D.A.D.O.S., and of the hundred and one other services and organizations… Down by the harbour at Komisa was the Naval Headquarters, presided over by Commander Morgan Giles, R.N., who had what was practically an independent command over a considerable force of M.T.B.s and other light naval craft, with which he engaged in piratical activities against enemy shipping up and down the whole length of the Jugoslav coast… (p.458)

Also the establishment of the Balkan School of Artillery, set up on Vis as part of Maclean’s Mission under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Kup:

whose life-work it became to instruct the Partisans in the use of the American 75-mm. Pack Howitzer. This was a light mountain gun, transportable on mule-back, if there happened to be any mules, and in general ideally suited to the type of warfare in which we were engaged. (p.459)

Also a partisan tank squadron being trained up in North Africa (p.464).

The Germans undertake another offensive, called the Seventh Offensive, against the partisans which starts with fierce fighting but then, like all the others, peters out.

The tide of the war is really turning. On 5 June 1944 Rome fell to the Allies. The following day saw the D-Day landings in Normandy. The Allies need to co-ordinate attacks on the Germans with the partisans; there needs to be discussion of the parts of northern Italy Tito wants to claim for Yugoslavia; plus the ever-intractable problem of the king and royalists. So it is that Supreme Allied Command in Italy ask for him to visit and Maclean organises the trip, accompanied by senior advisers, bodyguards and the faithful dog, Tigger.

It had been kept secret from Maclean, Tito and others that Churchill himself intended to fly in and meet Tito for the first time, and so the so-called Naples Conference came about. Churchill is fulsome in his praise, Maclean thinks Tito is amazed and pleased, the one-time peasant and revolutionary now sitting at the same table as one of the big three world leaders.

The high political problem is still how to reconcile with communist partisans with the royal government in exile, which has now crystallised round its prime minister, Dr Ivan Subasic. After ten days the Naples Conference ends and Subasic flies with Tito, his staff, Maclean etc back to Vis where the two Yugoslav parties hold a series of negotiations while the Brits sunbathe and swim in the beautiful aquamarine sea.

In the end a deal of sorts is agreed and Subasic flies back to London to put it to the king and his government.

Chapter 14. Ratweek plan

June 1944. Rumours that the Germans might retreat, withdrawing to a line they could better defend to the north of Yugoslavia. To do this they will need the central railway line from Belgrade to Salonika. Therefore it is the Allied aim to blow up the line and trap German forces in Yugoslavia.

The scheme was called ‘Operation Ratweek’. My proposal was that, for the space of one week, timed to coincide as closely as possible with the estimated beginning of the German withdrawal, the Partisans on land and the Allies on the sea and in the air, should make a series of carefully planned, carefully co-ordinated attacks on enemy lines of communication throughout Jugoslavia. This would throw the retiring forces into confusion and gravely hamper further withdrawal.

In drawing up these plans, we had recourse to all available sources of information concerning the enemy’s order of battle and the disposition of his troops, while at every stage we consulted by signal the British officers and the Partisan Commanders on the spot. Thus, the whole of the German line of withdrawal would be covered and every possible target accounted for. In the light of what we guessed the enemy’s plans to be the attack was fixed for the first week of September. (p.471)

Maclean decides to go from Bosnia to see for himself the situation in Serbia. Flies in and rendezvous with John Henniker-Major who’s been with the Serb Partisans since April. The Serb Partisans the Cinderellas of the movement, with less support from the local population, fewer rough mountains to hide in (unlike Bosnia), less successful against the Germans and so seizing fewer arms and so less well supplied than elsewhere. Lucky they have a good leader in Stambolic.

In April/May had come a change. The King announced his rapprochement with Tito and that led many to switch from supporting the passive Cetniks. Tito sent some of his best commanders to shake up the Serbian operation, notably Koca Popovic. And the Allies made a decision to stop supplying the Cetniks and supply the Partisans. As a result the latter began undertaking more operations and having greater success. Those who wanted to fight the invader went over to them, more successes, more seized arms and more prestige and respect, created a snowball effect. But still the deadly civil war between Partisans and Cetniks persisted.

So Maclean has been flown in to liaise with the Serb partisans. He is introduced to Koca, they pull out maps and have a comprehensive review of the situation, with Koca explaining where his forces can attack by themselves and where they’ll need air support, and what supplies.

Chapter 15. Ratweek fulfilment

He marches with partisans to Bojnik then onto the village where the Commander of the 24th Partisan Division, the formation responsible for the attack on the railway in the Leskovac area, had set up his Headquarters and where he finds Johnny Tregida, his liaison officer with the 24th Division. He kips in a courtyard full of Bulgarian prisoners. Next day they ride horses to Leskovac, where the attack on the railway is to take place. Information has found the town packed with German armour and motor transport and so HQ back in Bari had decided to send an unusually heavy fleet of bombers, some 50 Flying Fortresses. Maclean and his partisans watch from a nearby hill as these silver planes from high in the sky unload a huge payload on Leskovac and flatten it.

That night he observes the partisan attacks on the railway line, tackling enemy pillboxes while they set charges to blow up bridges and culverts, then tear up the railway itself and burn the sleepers. The idea is to delay or even trap the German forces in Greece and Yugoslavia, to prevent them being transferred to north Italy and Austria, to make the Allies job in those places easier.

All over occupied Yugoslavia similar attacks take place to destroy communications and bottle up the German forces. They notice enemy planes flying north and suspect they are carrying senior staff officers, communicate this to HQ who undertake attacks of these little convoys which promptly cease.

Maclean rides north to reunite with Boca, and is struck by the lush fertility of the Serb countryside and its rural prosperity, compared to rockier, poorer Bosnia. It’s a long journey over many days and Maclean gives a wonderful impressionistic account of the small villages of whitewashed houses, the locals bringing food, waking up in an orchard of plum trees, and so on. What experiences he had!

News comes through that the Bulgarians are negotiating an armistice and then that they have come in on the Allied side, with the result that Bulgarian forces throughout Yugoslavia switch sides. He meets up with Boca and Partisan headquarters which is itself riding north, now making a convoy.

They enter Prokuplje as liberators and are feted and feasted. He has just rigged up a bath and is having locals boil water when news comes of a German counter-attack, they have to quickly load their belongings and ride out.

He really enjoys life on the move in Serbia, the lush countryside and friendly villagers and wonderful food and so is annoyed when he receives a direct order from General Wilson. Tito has disappeared from Vis and Maclean is to report to the nearest partisan airstrip in order to be flown out of Serbia and find him.

Chapter 16. Grand finale

Tito has disappeared from Vis and his unexplained absence causes quite a bit of resentment among the British who had been entirely funding the partisans and lost good men among their liaison officers. After confirming his absence Maclean returns to Serbia, to hook up with the troops of Peko Dapcevic at Valjevo in time to see it fall to the partisans, helped by British Beaufighters. He finally locates Tito who’s in the Vojvodina and replies equably enough to a letter he sends him.

The second half of the chapter, pages 504 to 514, is devoted to Maclean being in at the liberation of Belgrade, the notable aspects of which are: 1) that the advance and battle are dominated by the Red Army which has crossed the Danube into Serbia – there’s lots of fraternising with Russians so lucky that Maclean speaks fluent Russian and also has received a Russian military medal which he dusts off and pins prominently to his uniform; and 2) the Germans put up a fierce resistance as they retreat, some of which Maclean witnesses at close quarters.

Chapter 17. Who goes home?

A few days after the conquest of Belgrade, Tito flies in and holds a victory march where Maclean is much moved by the ramshackle, dirty, patched-up appearance of the partisans, indicative of years of struggle, living off the land, guerrilla warfare. Now the partisans set about consolidating their grip on power. Tito negotiates a power-sharing deal with Royalists but it is plain this is only a temporary agreement.

On 27 October Maclean has his first meeting with Tito and conveys British irritation at his unexplained disappearance. In fact by this time the mystery has been cleared up because Stalin, at their most recent meeting, had told Churchill that Tito was visiting him in Moscow.

Maclean’s team of officers who had each been assigned to various partisan groups, now assemble in Belgrade and quickly convert themselves to a working British embassy. The last few pages describe this transition of the partisans from wartime guerrillas to peacetime administration. There is still fighting in the north but Tito has settled into the White Palace, Prince Paul’s former residence on the outskirts of the city (p.523). Maclean is still involved in negotiations with the king and royal government in exile, featuring Dr Subasic (who flies to Moscow to get Stalin’s blessing, p.520) which are detailed and complex but ultimately futile, for the partisans are solidly in power, with the numbers, the arms and the organisation to enforce it.

There is a lot of detail about the negotiations which dragged on until early March 1945 (p.530). But for Maclean the glory days of guerrilla warfare and living in the field were over and he asks to be transferred away from Yugoslavia. In mid-March he flies out after 18 months’ very intensive engagement, before the geopolitics and diplomacy get complex and messy. The book ends with his description of getting into the plane, taking off and watching the coastline disappear behind him. He had just turned 34. What an amazing series of adventures to have had by such a young age!

It’s very striking that the book ends with no summary, no conclusions, no Final Thoughts, no analysis of the political situation, let alone a retrospective description of how the war ended, how relations with Russia deteriorated, the start of the Cold War, Yugoslavia’s evolution under Tito’s rule or any of that – nothing, nada.

Maclean restricts himself very consciously to a first-person account of the immediate, of what he saw and thought and said and experienced. He gets on the plane and flies West and it’s over. It’s a very abrupt but totally appropriate ending.

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In his father’s footsteps

Very slightly and subtly, Maclean’s father hovers in the background. Once or twice he casually mentions that some of the places he visits in Central Asia were visited by his father 30 years earlier. He enlists in the same regiment as his father. His father fought in the North African desert in the First World War and at some points MacLean passes through some of the same places e.g. Matruh (p.204). Living up to his father’s achievements.

Private school

Maclean’s aristocratic upbringing and bearing are present throughout, in his confidence and savoir vivre, in his practical skills (skiing, camping, hunting and shooting), in his urbane easiness in the company of filthy partisans or prime ministers and kings. Only once or twice does he explicitly refer to his privileged upbringing, but then in the same kind of way that all his generation and class did (the tones collected and defined by Cyril Connolly for so influencing the mindset and writing of the 1930s generations of poets and novelists):

The M.L. arrived that night and I went on board, as excited as a schoolboy going home for his first holidays.

Upper-class chums

A central characteristic of the posh, of aristocrats, of the landed gentry, reinforced by the network of private schools they attend, is that they all know each other, they are all ‘old friends’. Not only that but it only suffices to work with someone for a bit – in the Foreign Office or the Army, say – for them to be recruited into your cohort of ‘old friends’. And so these people move in a kind of gilded world filled with old friends and bonhomie.

And so, leaving them in the able and experienced hands of Jim Thomas, an old friend from Foreign Office days, I went…

In Mrs. Fraser-Tytler I found a fellow clanswoman with whom my friendship dated back to the days of my childhood in Inverness…

It was in this frame of mind that I went to see Rex Leeper, an old friend from Foreign Office days, and now His Majesty’s Ambassador to the Greek Government then in exile in Cairo… (p.278)

One of the sailors I recognized as Sandy Glenn, an old friend with a number of adventurous exploits to his credit… (p.373)

I recognized the work of my old friends Mark Chapman Walker and Hermione Ranfurly, the Commander-in-Chief’s highly efficient Military Assistant and Private Secretary… (p.401)

John Clarke and Andrew Maxwell were both old friends of mine… (p.432)

The problem which had been exercising me for some time, namely, how to get my old friend Sergeant (now Sergeant-Major) Charlie Button into Jugoslavia… (p.435)

Ralph Stevenson…British Ambassador to the Royal Jugoslav Government…was an old friend from Foreign Office days… (p.468)

The example of a partisan they worked with closely – ‘Brko, by now an old friend…’ (p.491) – indicates how it’s not length of time that makes someone an ‘old friend’, but depth of experience and closeness of companionship. Old friends need not, in fact, be old friends at all, just people you’ve gotten to know and trust, sometimes over comparably short periods of time.

This is a quality I commented on in my reviews of John Buchan, whose fabulously posh protagonists are continually bumping into ‘old friends’ whenever they need help. Not being plugged into a network of successful, well-connected ‘old friends’ in commanding positions across politics, business, the forces, the arts, I can only marvel at the ease and confidence with which these privileged creatures lived out their charmed lives. For example, take this profile of David Stirling’s Intelligence Officer, Gordon Alston:

By the time he reached the age of twenty-five Gordon had managed to have a remarkably full life. Having got off to a flying start when he left Eton at seventeen to become a racing motorist in Italy, he had later tried his hand at journalism in France and brewing beer in Germany. Since early in the war he had served in Commandos or Commando-type units. This varied experience had left him with a taste for adventure, a knowledge of foreign languages, and, most conveniently for us, an altogether remarkable flair for military intelligence.

How ripping! A big part of the pleasure of reading books like this is not only all the operational war stuff, but simply marvelling at the wonderfully varied, adventurous lives these privileged people seemed to live.

(And, as a digression, it crosses my mind that it’s the quality whose degraded, shabby, poor relation – a seedy, fake bonhomie – is satirised and ripped to shreds in William Boyd’s comic novel A Good Man in Africa.)

Upper-class manners

Being phenomenally posh, being a polished specimen of the British upper class, gives him the impeccable manners, savoir faire and confidence to meet and socialise with all ranks, from peasants to monarchs. The book invites us into this world, lends us the cloak of his manners and politesse, so that we are not as surprised as we maybe should be when Maclean calmly records being sent to meet the future leader of Yugoslavia, invited to spend the weekend with Churchill or to dine with exiled King Peter. Other countries will continue to have kings and emperors and aristocrats and leaders who reek authority and stickle for etiquette and procedure, so it makes sense that we should have a cohort of impeccably turned-out sophisticates who can match them at their game.

It is a symbol of how far Britain has fallen that the shambling liar Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary from 2016 to 2018, embarrassing Britain at international events around the globe purely because Theresa May needed to keep a potential usurper and his faction in the ever-fractious Conservative Party onside. Shaming.

Roughing it

Aristocrats aren’t all floppy haircuts and parties in Chelsea, especially the Scottish variety. Instead, Maclean really loves roughing it, and takes to life on the road in Central Asia or on the run with partisans in the forests of Bosnia with equal alacrity. He likes the simple life.

Having eaten my breakfast, I cleaned out my mess tin and used it for boiling some snow-water on the stove, to shave in. It was an agreeably compact mode of life, with no time, space or energy wasted on unnecessary frills. (p.420)

Time after time he tells us that sleeping rough, bunking down in an orchard wrapped only in his greatcoat and with his backpack for a pillow, eating primitive food in a cave in Bosnia or bully beef in the Libyan Desert, this is what he wants, this is how he likes it, pure and clean and simple.

Lols

Maclean has a dry, understated sense of humour, the true aristocratic drollness, an unflappable ability to put up with discomfort and find the amusing in every situation. The book is studded with a number of comic setpieces.

Our short train journey had an improbable, dreamlike quality, which even while it was actually in progress, made it hard to believe that it was really happening. From the inside, Tito’s special coach was even more like a hut than from the outside, with an open stove in the middle and benches round the wall. The stifling heat of the stove induced sleep. The benches on the other hand were just too narrow to sleep on with any security. On the floor lay Tigger, in a bad temper and snapping at everyone’s ankles. At last, after a great deal of fussing and settling down, he went to sleep, only to be woken again almost immediately by a Cabinet Minister falling off one of the benches on top of him, whereupon pandemonium broke loose. It was not a restful journey… (p.421)

Also the story of the British officer, living and working with the partisans who, wherever he puts his sleeping bag and goes to sleep, always fidgets and ends up rolling yards, sometimes quite a distance away, one time being found wrapped round a tree stump, another time on the edge of a precipice, each time fast asleep and snoring his head off.

An eye for the ladies

There’s no mention of a girlfriend, lovers, no romance and certainly no sex of any kind. It’s part of the book’s tact and discretion. But Maclean does have what we used to call ‘an eye for the ladies’ and permits himself regular mention of particularly toothsome young women whenever he encounters them:

[In Korcula] a small crowd had soon collected to look at us. It included, I noticed with pleasure, one extremely pretty girl., (p.366)

From now onwards [Charlie Button] took charge of the Mission’s administrative arrangements, and ‘Gospodin Charlie’, as he was known, could be seen planning moves, negotiating for pack-horses, bartering strips of parachute silk for honey or eggs with buxom peasant girls… (p.435)

The technicalities involved were explained to me by an officer of the United States Army Signal Corps, while a pretty W.A.C. Sergeant prepared to take a recording of what was said. (p.444)

The Americans furnished me, in case of need, with a stenographer, a blonde young lady of considerable personal attractions wearing a closely fitting tropical uniform… (p.466)

Most of them [the population of the little Serbian town of Dobrovo] were rosy-cheeked, stolid-looking creatures, broad in the beam, with thick arms and legs, but amongst them, I noticed, was one exceptionally pretty girl, slim and dark, with classical features and a clear, pale skin, holding a little curly-haired child by the hand. (p.492)

And many more.

Upper-class tact

A crucial aspect of good manners, as of diplomacy, is tact. As the book progressed I became increasingly aware of the narrative’s tact. What I mean is that he is very discreet and polite about the many individuals named in it. About his army colleagues, first in the SAS then on location in Yugoslavia, he is uniformly full of praise, especially praising those who won medals. He has to use tact when dealing with all manner of Soviet officials and local peasants and brigands in Central Asia. He has to be tactful in his dealings with Tito, and in Yugoslavia has to train his officers in how to interact with the partisans tactfully i.e. show them how to use equipment without insulting their manhood or achievements. (Maclean has some comic stories about illiterate partisans eating various supplies such as plastic explosive, stories echoed in Ben Macintyre’s stories about the French Resistance.)

This quality comes out into the open, as it were, in the various descriptions of Winston Churchill, where Maclean allows himself to mention Churchill’s eccentricities:

• at Chequers insisting on spending the evening with senior military staff watching Mickey Mouse cartoons in his private cinema
• meeting underlings at his Cairo villa lying in bed in a silk dressing gown smoking a cigar (p.401)

But he only goes exactly to the same point as the common myth of Churchill’s whimsical personal style and no further. He tells humorous anecdotes about people but is never indiscreet. That would be bad form.

Once this had occurred to me I realised you could regard the abrupt ending of the book as itself an act of tactfulness. If he’d gone on to describe events after his departure from Yugoslavia in March 1945 (the final months of the war, conflict with Russia, the Cold War and scores of other issues such as the election defeat of Churchill) it would have stained and muddied the purity of the kind of narrative he wants to tell. Ending his text so abruptly is an aesthetic statement – less is more – and supreme act of tactfulness.

H.G. Wells

Happening to be reading a lot about H.G. Wells at the moment, I was struck when Maclean makes a reference to him, describing the American Lightning aircraft, with their twin tails and bristling cannon, as ‘like something out of H.G. Wells’ (p.393) – presumably he’s referring to Wells’s Edwardian novels about the war in the air, although also, maybe, to his description of apocalyptic war in ‘The Shape of Things To Come’ (1933) – either way, testimony to the grip on the popular imagination, about the future and disastrous wars, that Wells continued to exert.

Penguin are pants

I’m reluctant to buy new paperback books because they’re generally such poor quality. This book is a case in point. The typeface was degraded and poor quality on every page. Random words appear in lighter typeface than their neighbours. Random letters within words are partly effaced. Entire lines have either the upper or lower part of the letters distorted. You know when you make a photocopy of a document and position the original badly so that the photocopy misses off one side of the page? Like that, the final parts of letters are cut off all down the right hand side of the text. Some pages are in a different font from the main text (pages 152 to 153).

Precisely 24 hours after it arrived I noticed that, looked at side-on, the middle pages of this brand new book had ceased to lie flat but had become wavy. When I opened to these pages I discovered they were the ones containing half a dozen or so very very very bad quality reproductions of photographs, and something about reproducing these photos in plain ink on normal paper must have somehow made them absorb moisture from the atmosphere and become wrinkled and creased. They look like they’ve been dropped in the bath.

Only occasionally did all this make it impossible to actually read, but these marks of poor quality appeared on every one of the book’s 543 pages and were a constant distraction. They made me think what a mug I was to spend £12.99 on such a shoddy production. Never buy new Penguin books. Very poor print standards.

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Credit

Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy MacLean was published by Jonathan Cape in 1949. All references are to the 2019 Penguin paperback edition – printed to a very poor standard.

Related link

• Eastern Approaches online

Related reviews

• Second World War reviews

Posted by Simon on April 29, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/eastern-approaches-fitzroy-maclean/