The Exploitable Bosnia

Mostar 1985 

Poor Bosnia and Herzegovina! I cannot name another country that has been so exploited. 

The first culprits were the Hungarians followed by the Ottomans. Then along came the Austrians, Hitler and his Croatian protegees, the Ustasha. In the same war, the Jew-hating Amin Al Husseini from Jerusalem paid a special visit to Bosnia. From 1981 it was the Franciscans at Međugorje, then Franjo Tudjman and Slobodan Milosović during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Latterly radical Islam has joined the sad succession.

It breaks my heart.

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that Bosnia's poverty and divisions are the direct result of centuries of exploitation. Bosnia is a country rich in natural resources: bauxite, coal, iron ore, zinc, lead and timber. It has a small access to the Adriatic within the larger Croatian coast, a seventeenth concession by Dubrovnik to the Ottomans to keep the Venetians off their backs.

Here is an extract from my travel diary to show you what the region was like in May 1985.

We left the hotel at 9am and headed south west from Belgrade to Sarajevo where the 1984 Winter Olympics were held. Initially the fields were flat, cultivated by hand and horse-drawn ploughs, or occasionally primitive tractors. During the last half of the journey, we passed through hilly country, and the road and the railway through the mountains near Sarajevo pass through tunnels cut into the rocks. The land is, apart from anything, very green, so different to Australia. Everything looks fertile. Among the hills nestle little towns with one, two or three storey houses and sloping rooves, very much like Austria. The difference is, again, that the people are poor and their houses are not terribly well kept. Notice how hay is stacked in tall, peaked domes, maybe six or seven feet high. Also note the many farm animals inside the rickety hand-made yards: cows, pigs, big black boars, chickens, dogs, ducks. Without the highways, these little towns and farms with their hand-made buildings and fences, and especially the hand-drawn ploughs, could be taken straight out of the seventeenth century. The whole landscape is terribly pretty and scenic. Villages are set into the greenery of deep gullies and the caps of the distant mountains are snow-covered. In fact, there was still snow by the side of the road, although it had turned to ice.

On the same trip, I saw a woman in long trousers pulled in at the ankles, ploughing a field by dragging a wooden plough through the earth. No horse, no husband. I can't remember whether she wore a headscarf but in the 1980's in Australia (for example) a headscarf didn't automatically identify a Muslim woman. In the hospital where I worked in 1982, older non-Muslim women from the Balkans often wore their headscarves even in bed. So I don't know who she was, I only remember being shocked when I saw her with the plough, and I remember the trousers. 

Mediaeval Bosnia. Malcolm Booker, the late Australian Ambassador to Yugoslavia wrote, In the twelfth and thirteen centuries Hungarian rule was also extended to Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was in this period following the absorption of Croatia by Hungary that the seeds of the bitter enmity between the Croats and the Serbs were sown. The Magyar dynasty in Hungary sought to control the whole of the Balkan peninsula and in particular to gain access to Dalmatia and the Adriatic Sea. Since the Serbs were the main obstacle to this, they were the principle target of the Hungarian onslaughts in which Croat troops were extensively employed. (1). 

The Ottomans. Bosnia fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1463 and anyone who has read Ivo Andrić's Nobel prize-winning novel The Bridge on the Drina (2) will recall the odd phenomenon of Bosnians with Slavic surnames who are nevertheless referred to as Turks. They might also recall the almost unreadable account of the staking execution of a local man for interfering with the construction of the bridge. As my Greek relatives will tell you 'the ordeal of the Turk' was not a happy four hundred years and it has left divisions and hatred in a country where people have long memories.

After Austria-Hungary acquired Bosnia from the Ottomans in 1878, the Austrians constructed an extensive network of narrow-gauge railways to supply its troops and to transport natural resources. Unfortunately, Austria was also the enemy of Serbia and when, after 1908, Austria stamped its control over Bosnia more aggressively, it aroused great resentment among Bosnia's large Serbian minority. Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand then made the critical error of parading Austrian imperialism through the street of Sarajevo on 28th June 1914, St Vitus Day, the most sacred day in the Serbian calendar.

We all know what happened next.

In World War 2, Hitler gave Bosnia to Croatia. Bosnia became part of The Independent State of Croatia (NDH), and a mass slaughter of Serbs, Jews and Roma commenced under the Croatian government, the fascist Ustasha. In his book Croatia, British author Marcus Tanner opines that the figure of 600,000 dead Serbs was probably too high, but there is no doubt that the NDH intended to exterminate the Serb population and failed only because it lacked the means (3). A significant Croatian massacre of Serbs took place near Međugorje, which we will come to shortly. 

Hitler helped himself to the bauxite mines near Mostar for aeroplane manufacture, as well as Bosnian coal and extensive quantities of food and timber.

Of Ante Pavelić the leader of the Ustasha, Hubert Butler in his Balkan Essays writes, 'He was extremely devout, attending Mass every morning...[This] man who organized the murder of King Alexander and was later responsible for the attempted extermination of the Serbs as well as the Jews in Croatia, was received with rapture in convents and monasteries and ecclesiastical seminaries, as well as being idolized in the Catholic press (4). Butler also notes that Pavelić was well-disposed towards Muslims but Slavko Goldstein writes that his hatred of Serbs had deranged him (5). In his work 1941 the Year that Keeps Returning Goldstein acknowledges the abuse of Croats by the Serbian government of Yugoslavia between the wars, but says that it cannot be compared to the Croatian revenge. 

Palestine Haj Amin Al Husseini is a little known figure today but Yasser Arafat is not. The two men were related through their mothers and pursued almost identical careers. Al-Husseini was an inciter of violence against Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine. To calm him down, the British made him Grand Mufti, which only made him worse. Since 1941, he had been comfortably provided for in Berlin by Hitler in order to assist with the Holocaust. In the spring of 1943, the Nazis flew him to Yugoslavia to help with the organizing and recruiting of Bosnian Muslims into Himmler's SS Divisions. Many photographs exist of al-Husseini at this time. After initial training in France, the units were sent to Germany, where al-Husseini met them again, inspected them and blessed them. Swelled by German soldiers, their numbers approached 22,000. In December 1943, the Germans returned the divisions to Yugoslavia for active service in Bosnia, and in October 1944 they were disbanded. Their purpose was to kill Jews, but they were noted for their brutality towards the Serbian population.  

Međugorje. Why is there is a Catholic community in Bosnia Herzegovina, particularly the Franciscans at Međugorje? The Yugoslav census of 1971 records 21% of Bosnia's population declared themselves Croats, 40% Muslim and 37% Serb (6). The reference work Good People in an Evil Time Svetlana Broz's account of the Bosnian war, records that the Franciscans had been in Bosnia since Mediaeval times. 'Bosnian Franciscans...actively maintained the link with native literacy and promoted knowledge of the Bosnian language through both spiritual and literary education' (6).

During World War 2, the Franciscans were closely associated with the Ustasha. In his Balkan Essays Hubert Butler, who taught English in Zagreb before the war and returned immediately afterwards to research the crimes of the Ustasha, pulls no punches when referring to the brooding Croatian nationalism of these same Franciscans, ignited by the hatred of the Ustasha for the Serbs. The focal centre for the forced conversions [of Serbs in 1941] and the massacres had been the Franciscan monastery of Shiroki Brijeg [30 kilometres from Međugorje]. Cardinal Tisserant, a French member of the Curia, wrote in 1942, I know for sure that even the Franciscans of Bosnia Herzegovina behaved atrociously. Father Shimitch, with a revolver in his hand, led an armed gang and destroyed Orthodox Churches. No civilized and cultured man, let alone a priest, can behave like that (4). 

In August 1941, the village of Prebilovci 2o kilometres from Međugorje ... was attacked by nearly 3,000 Ustasha from the so-called NDH...237 children and 233 young girls, women and old women were led to the place of execution at Surmanci [8 kilometres from  Međugorje] where all of them were killed... Moreover, in the village and its surrounding area there were also 48 places of execution where people were tormented and killed.... primarily men (7).

Any Catholic visitor to the Franciscan church at Međugorje must take this history into account. To date, the Croatian Catholic Church has neither repented of their war crimes nor asked forgiveness of the Serbs. Jesus said, Make peace with your brothers.    

The Bosnian War. The most human book I can recommend on this conflict is Good People in an Evil Time (6). In it Svetlana Broz demonstrates how people of all backgrounds cared for each other. Before political activists stirred up trouble as far as Istria where my mother was born, these families in the old Yugoslavia had been living together decently. The claim about this war, on which I'm not going to comment, is that Franjo Tuđman of Croatia and Slobodan Milosević of Serbia planned to divide Bosnia between them.

The last time I was in Sarajevo in 2023, it seemed a peaceful place, but a young man we met in a local bakery told us that he thought another war was brewing. Let's hope not.  

Radical Islam. Bosnia seemed tolerantly Islamic to me, and people dwelt peacefully. I was last there during Ramadan when families flacked to the restaurants in the evening. I have read, however, that fighters from the Arab states helped during the Bosnian War and that today there exist pockets of more radical political Islam. 

It is my hope and prayer that they will leave this lovely country in peace. Bosnia has suffered enough.

Sources

1. Booker, Malcolm Conflict in the Balkans Catalyst Press Sydney 1994

2. Andrić, Ivo The Bridge on the Drina Prosveta 1945

3. Tanner, Marcus Yale Croatia University Press 1997

4. Butler, Hubert Balkan Essays Irish Pages Press 2016

5. Goldstein, Slavko 1941: the Year That Keeps Returning New York Review Books 2013

6. Broz, Svetlana Good People  in an Evil Time Other Press New York 2004

7. https://prebilovci.net/stari/english/tales/letter.htm

The Improvised Navy of the Yugoslav Partisans

 

Tito with sailors from the Partisan Navy
(used with permission of the publisher)

Freivogel and Rastelli's Adriatic Naval War is a treasury of superb naval images drawn from private collections, alongside the best-informed text I have ever read on the topic. The sheer amount of small but important details suggests to me that much of the book was put together from local knowledge and oral history. The gathering together of this information is a credit to its authors, but it was not the first time I had heard about the improvised navy of those Extemporisers Extraordinaire, the Yugoslav Partisans.

 

That honour goes to Eastern Approaches (2), the travelogue and war diary of the intrepid British adventurer and friend of Josip Broz Tito, Fitzroy Maclean. Yet not even his gripping chronicle records the very beginnings of the maritime struggle against Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany for Istria, Dalmatia and its coast of a thousand islands. That story began as the wartime innovation of Croatian sailors.

Partisan ships and seamen were continuously at sea in spite of adverse weather and were taking every risk in the face of the Italian and German revenge. At first they were weakly armed and badly equipped, and their results in sinking and capturing enemy vessels were never as high as the numbers 'bagged' by 'inefficient' Allies. But when the war ended the Partisans remained on the scene as the only victors, getting rid of their enemies, allies and political rivals as well. (1)

The old Yugoslavia was a land of mountains, ideal for the guerrilla warfare at which its people had had centuries of practice. The Adriatic with its twisting coastline, headlands, bays and islands offered the same type of warfare on the sea. Much of the reason for Tito's success as a leader in World War 2 came from his ability to unite these various fighting groups, and there are several images in the Adriatic Naval War of him bestowing a communist blessing on the sailors.

Italy had long coveted the beautiful Croatian coast and, when the Croatian Ustasha dictator Ante Pavelić did as he was told and handed it over to Mussolini in May 1941, local men formed the beginnings of the resistance later that same year.

Small rowing, sailing or motor boats were used to maintain communication lines between various groups in coastal and island camps. Italians were always trying to stop these movements with new orders and regulations, but the boats were often 'stolen' by their owners, being returned to the harbour in the morning after a specific action was performed.(1)

Actual attacks against the Italians began in January 1942 and became such a nuisance that Italian ships had to be armed or escorted and sometimes travelled in convoys for protection.

Italy had naval dockyards around the Adriatic at Monfalcone, Trieste and nearby Taranto, so it might reasonably be asked what type of vessels the Croatians could possibly have used against such technology. Fishing villages run the length of the coast and the first boats used were nothing more than their everyday vessels like those below in the Mandracio of Novigrad, which I visited in 2018.

The Partisan's aim was to capture from the enemy as much as they could: stores, food, arms and the vessels themselves. The navy was given official recognition in the coastal town of Podgora around September 1942, a year before the Italian collapse - the Partisan NOVJ Navy, Narodno Oslobodilačka Vojska Jugoslavija, the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia.

From early 1945 this became the Yugoslav Navy. (Not to be confused with the Royal Yugoslav Navy and merchant fleet 1918-1941 or the Navy of the Independent State of Croatia, untimely born and ineffective.) Ninety percent of the Navy of the Yugoslav Partisans was Croatian, but members also came from the other areas of Yugoslavia and even Italy and countries in Eastern Europe.

There were two classifications of vessels, PČ and NB, reflecting the Croatian words for boat, čamac (pronounced chamats), and brod, ship. PČ means Patrolni Čamac or patrol boat and NB means Naoružani Brod or ‘armed ship’. The Adriatic Naval War describes them initially as having ‘at least one 40mm gun’ and they may have had in addition ‘older British 40mm Vickers anti-guns with 20mm Breda and Scotti machine guns.’ However, photos from the book show them having many more. The old fishing boats of the pre-war villages were also reinforced with planks and stone filling. They were slow but nevertheless had impressive success rates against the Italians and later the Germans.

The Adriatic Naval War lists 17 armed Partisan ships (four German and several Italian), and 70 patrol boats (four German). 

For two years from the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, the Partisans received no help from either Russia or Britain and stole arms, ammunition, food, stores and even uniforms from the enemy. They became adept at improvisation. They took the machine guns from crashed aircraft and attached them to the bows of their boats, they stole bombs from under the nose of Italians and dismantled them to reuse the parts. Fitzroy Maclean writes how the Yugoslav Partisans remade railway carriages and engines. (One always feels that they’d have a go at anything.) On Vis they enthusiastically learned how to handle heavy weapons and fly aeroplanes and at the very end of the war, they even stole a miniature submarine from Pula Harbour.

After the Italians abandoned Dalmatia, the Nazis invaded until eventually the only unoccupied island was Vis, the furthest from the coast of Split. It is about an hour and a half by modern fast ferry.

The idea of creating an Allied/Partisan air and naval base on Vis was first floated by Fitzroy Maclean. A small airstrip was constructed where damaged bombers frequently crash-landed from both directions at once. The strip can just be seen at the beginning of this short video. Also visible is Tito’s war cave in which he lived from June to September 1944.

The island of Vis has a noble history dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Officially, it was the only island along the coast that was not invaded by Germany after Italy capitulated to General Eisenhower in September 1943. Practically, however, the Germans had spread themselves too thinly this late in the war, and once Tito declared the fight to retain Vis imperative and the Allies established a base there, many of the islands changed hands frequently.

I  was relieved to discover that the charming port of Komiža where the British and Partisan navies docked during the war is inaccessible to large cruise ships. We caught the ferry from Split to the town of Vis and, once there, hired a car, drove across the island to Komiža, parked outside the town and walked. Alternatively, you can put your own car on the ferry.

Komiža Harbour 2023

Komiža Harbour World War 2
(Used with permission of the Croatian History Museum, Zagreb.)

An excellent book to read about the Allies and Partisans on Vis is ‘Island of Terrible Friends’ by Bill Strutton. Happily, it was not hard to access and I got my copy on an interlibrary loan.

Commando Lieutenant Barton ‘dressed as a peasant and with two Partisans to show him the way, loaded his Sten gun on a mule under a burden of firewood and walked passed a number of German sentries right into the village of Nerežiše on the island of Brać, garrisoned with 200 Germans. One of the Partisans stood guard outside while he knocked on the Commandant’s billet, was admitted, thrust past a screeching woman to a bedroom upstairs, and there, in the faint light of a candle, fired a burst at the German Commandant who, half risen and gaping wordlessly, leaned over and fell. Barton calmly helped himself to the dead commandant’s automatic, his compass, an excellent pair of binoculars and a rifle. [Then] he beat it with his two Jugoslav comrades through a thicket of sentries. (3)

One story I loved occurred when a British doctor expressed his need for an X-ray machine. Upon hearing this, a group of Partisans sailed into Split, held up a local clinic at gun point and demanded the required machine. They then dismantled it and walked out with the pieces under their clothes, got back on board, returned to Vis and reassembled it for the doctor.  

Sources

(1) Freivogel, Z and Rastelli, R Adriatic Naval War 1940-1945 DESPORT INFINITUS 2015

(2) Maclean, Fitzroy Eastern Approaches Jonathon Cape 1949

(3) Strutton, Bill Island of Terrible Friends Hodder and Stroughton 1961.

The Invasion of Yugoslavia 1941 - THROUGH FORESTS AND MOUNTAINS, Chapter One

 

https://www.mwalkeristra.com

                                                             
At the hour of national crisis he was brought down like a bull by a terrier, and his memories returned to him only slowly, the good and the bad, but mostly the bad. There was shouting in which he had joined, then a weakness outside his experience and the confusion of not understanding why the slipway was rising to meet him. As is usual with accidents that occur in public places, there was also a crowd that gathered from nowhere to watch in horrified silence. He remembered the woman who stepped from it to bully him kindly, ‘Put your head between your knees, Captain, before you knock yourself out,’ and he remembered his reply, ‘I’m not going to faint,’ just before he did.

So he couldn’t recall Miloš Lompar, aged seventeen and frantic with remorse, attempting to staunch his desperately bleeding shoulder with a rag stained with lubricating oil, nor Commander Filip Kolarov (whom everyone expected to be the hero) recruiting five sailors to transport him from beneath the blood-stained propellers of the torpedo boat and into the waiting ambulance without dropping him. Upon his arrival at the hospital, the rural surgical ward, which dealt mostly with tonsils, appendixes and adenoids, at once increased in self-importance thanks to all the excitement, and he was hurried inside with as little delay as a starting pistol. From a morning that had threatened mundane routine, his shattered shoulder had given the ward meaning and purpose and, by the time of the afternoon ward-round, it was all back together again and reposing below its soft white pillow as contentedly as if it belonged to the hospital and not to him.

This general sense of achievement originated in a surgeon, white-coated and elegantly balding, surrounded by a retinue of medical students who beamed in unison every time he opened his mouth. Arranged around them stood a scrub nurse and a ward sister who looked like she had ironed her scowl on that morning. Before their eyes, Dr Rastoder had performed veritable miracles of surgery, keenly assisted by at least two of those present – possibly more – and had only had to consult the textbook once.

'Awake at last!' he chirped. He smiled. His audience smiled. 'Eighty stitches! - and that's not counting the two severed tendons I repaired, some puréed muscle and a skin graft. You have a great deal to be thankful for, Captain Marković. You’re lucky you didn't lose your arm. Damned lucky!’ he stressed with a very personal determination.

Marković sensed a conspiracy and, in confirmation, one of the students twirled his moustache.

'How long...?' he began.

He pushed himself into a sitting position with his left hand and was at once overcome by a wave of dizziness. On a wheeled table to one side he saw the hazy remains of a blood transfusion, a throbbing jug, the ghost of his dead mother, and a glass that replenished itself with water. At the very end in proud isolation a urine bottle grinned at him, half-full.

'You've been unconscious for five hours,' returned the doctor. Acknowledging the urine bottle, he added, 'More or less.’

Marković grimaced. His mother eased him back onto his pillow then floated away, and the mountain of snowy bandages on his right side settled comfortably down beside him. He watched the crowd observe it with pride.

‘Wiggle your fingers,’ ordered the angry ward sister.

He wiggled his fingers and a shudder ran through the shoulder.

The scrub nurse glanced apprehensively at the surgeon.

‘Perfectly normal,’ he purred. ‘Touch your toes.’

The medical students tittered.

‘Just my little joke.’

‘Can I go home?’ asked Marković. As they seemed so cheerful, he allowed himself hope. ‘I need to get back to the apprentices.’

‘Those two who landed you in here?’ Dr Rastoder inverted his eyebrows and proceeded in a voice of doom. ‘There are more immediate things that you need to know. An infection from any wound that extensive is inescapable. We expect one quite soon, don’t we, sister?’

The ward sister nodded grimly.

‘You’re not serious?’ exclaimed Marković.

‘I’m afraid I am, Captain.’

‘But I’ve heard about trials of…’

‘Penicillin? Rumours, at this point. Your one stroke of luck is that Yugoslavia’s not at war with Germany yet. In that case there would be the possibility of catching an infection from someone fresh from the battlefield.’

Marković levered himself up cautiously. He stopped. He checked both sides. Reaching one arm beneath the injured shoulder, he hauled it up beside the other one and searched around for the exit.

The surgeon cut him off shrewdly.

‘Don’t even think about it.’

'I can’t stay here.'

'You're no good to anyone dead.'

‘It’s only a shoulder!’

‘You wait,’ declared the surgeon.

‘Next patient,’ said the sister.

The team moved on, and the medical students beamed back like a round of applause.

The frustration of his predicament and the pain made him grumpy, of course, and, by the close of that first day, as dinner was served with regimental efficiency from the other end of the long ward, there was no one in it who wasn’t heartily sick of his clenched teeth and thunderous face. When, at lights out, the same sister who had stood by his bed during the ward-round pinned on her veil like a helmet and marched towards him with his night's morphine flashing from her syringe, he glared at her with such indignation that she declared in a tight-lipped tirade that she'd met a lot of patients like him. Oh yes, she had.

‘Take a good look around you, Captain. The worst tonsils, appendixes and adenoids of my acquaintance are models of virtue compared with you – God give me strength! And you needn't think you can expect pain relief to order later on when you can’t sleep, so you’ll have the injection when I tell you and do something about your manners while you’re at it.’

As bad luck would have it, the instant he had accepted the shot and she was massaging it in, he fell asleep in full view of the whole ward, and everyone said they hoped he stayed that way.

The next day was visiting day. Its hours were from two o’clock until five on Wednesdays and Sundays. No illicit visiting was permitted except when compassionate grounds intruded upon the mental health of the ward sister to whom the disruption of her routine occasioned great anxiety. Before the double doors could be flung open to gift-bearing relatives the beds must be made to perfection, the floor must be swept clean of every cowering microbe and the surgeon must complete his rounds. Pills, elixirs, injections, and enemas must be distributed and their associated smells dispersed through the open windows.

At the very end of the day’s queue, as if the act of waiting might atone for their guilt, slunk two gangly boys. Accompanying them was a commander with a sharp eye and a resolute bearing that invited trust. Indeed, a head or two had already turned at the click of his boots on the floor, though he had cloaked his agreeable features with a severity appropriate to the occasion. Marković could see that he regretted doing it, but the boys were completely fooled. They had been very careful to dress in full uniform, to comb their hair and shine their boots, but the perfect presentation could not obscure the terror on their faces nor their quaking knees.

As the trio approached the bed, the officer came to a halt, removed his hat and placed it beneath his arm.

'Lompar!' he commanded.

At once one of the boys handed forward a small bunch of flowers, relieved of half its petals by his quivering hands. At the sight of his commanding officer sprawled down the bed undressed and unshaven, he mumbled an apology only distinguishable as such by the flush of shame that preceded it.

'Ilić!'

The second youth now produced a package of waxed brown paper that he unwrapped to reveal a small nut cake. He saluted feebly and stammered as he stepped back, 'Miloš and I are very sorry, sir.'

Marković smiled wanly and acknowledged them without criticism, for he could see how miserable they were, and he was only grumpy.

The commander waved the youths away.

'All right, dismissed!'

The boys fled. At once the atmosphere lightened and the officer sprung upon the crisp white sheets and positioned himself comfortably on the bed, flipping up the back of his jacket where it subsided too far into the springs.

‘I knew you’d want to see them, Anton,’ he began - bounce, bounce.

‘Oh, don’t sit on the bed, Filip, for God’s sake!’

‘Why?’ Now that he didn’t have to put on an act, he slung one leg across the other, and the bed chortled a little creak in response.

‘Because that old nursing sister will kill me. You’re not allowed to sit on her beds.’

‘Really?’ Filip released his long limbs and extracted a chair from beside the bed of the elderly man next to him. ‘May I?’ he enquired, engaging the fellow in such a charming smile that the man looked suddenly shy, as if few people had ever taken the time to acknowledge him. ‘Thank you.’

He settled himself comfortably on the chair and tapped a rhythm upon his hat.

‘Which old nursing sister? They all looked nice to me.’

‘Boadicea. The one wearing the armour. She hates me.’

‘Nonsense.’ He flourished a cavalier hand into the depths of a canvas satchel and announced, ‘Housekeeping!’

‘What a pleasant fellow you are!’ grumbled Marković.

‘I am on your side, Anton,’ returned Filip genially. ‘Even if you have already made an enemy, though, personally, I doubt it. Now, the Chief, out of the generosity of his heart, has packed you two shirts, your most threadbare trousers he could find – he believes old clothes are suitable for convalescence - your toothbrush, some odds and ends, and a razor to cut the cake.'

‘To shave.’

‘To cut the cake. Poor Petar’s mother insisted he bring it. You won’t be able to use the razor to shave, so beguile one of those nice nurses to do the honours. Girls love that sort of thing. Makes them feel like mothers. Let them bring out your legendary charm.'

'What legendary charm?'

‘Intimacy, Anton, that female equator you haven’t crossed yet. Now observe! You need a shave and that was a good looking nurse who just slipped behind those curtains across the aisle. She’d be an ace with a razor, I bet.’

‘I can shave myself.’

‘Then here’s a shirt. Get her to help you dress.’

‘Can you leave if you’re going to provoke me, please?’ said Anton, attempting to make himself comfortable with his single arm.

Filip grinned at him, poised like a barge pole above the mattress.

‘It’s true, then, what they say about hospital beds being the delusion of a Spartan mindset?’ he asked.

‘My shoulder hurts,’ said Anton in reply.

‘It’s your own fault.’

‘It was not my fault.’

‘It wasn’t your boat.’

‘In that particular case, Filip, it didn’t need to be.’

‘You still haven’t told me what you think of the bed.’

It did no good arguing with Commander Kolarov. While he breathed he would pursue his theme of sympathy being detrimental to recovery and the ward, which had tensed for a clash of opinions, settled back down, pleased that no one had ruffled its professional façade by arguing about whether sympathy might be helpful or not.

‘The wonder is,’ conceded Anton at length, ‘that you're expected to get better sleeping in one.'

This answer relieved Filip of a social burden, and even the elderly man in the next bed expressed his mottled pleasure with lips crinkled by the absence of teeth. But Anton was disappointed because he would have liked some sympathy from Filip and it looked like he wasn’t going to get any. He lay on his bed between the convivial commander and the sensitive old man and thought about the pleasure of his own company, as he often did.

He had regular features similar to the vast majority of his compatriots who agreed, to a man, that he looked good in the right light and the right mood, but could appear fractious when the sun disappeared behind a cloud. Anton said his feelings were none of their business, and this was generally true except for the present circumstances. Yet he had made no attempt to adjust to the hospital, claiming in his defense that he didn’t care what people thought of him. By contrast with the two rows of men and boys all washed, dried and thoroughly institutionalized, he stood out by his refusal to acquiesce peacefully, which no amount of soap and water could remedy.

From behind the curtains floated a faecal odour. The pretty nurse withdrew with a bedpan and hurried from the ward. Filip frowned.

'I hate to see you like this, Anton. Smile. Be grateful. Tell them a joke. You can look like the grim reaper but, if you make them laugh, they’ll love you.’

‘I would appreciate some sympathy, Filip.’

‘You won all hearts yesterday when you fainted on the slipway.’

‘Go to hell.’

Kolarov laughed.

‘Not today, my friend. Got the incident report to write.’ He pulled out a pencil and paper from the same modest satchel, crossed his legs and began scribbling. ‘What happened?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Then you’d better think of something quickly for the sake of bureaucracy. I put the boys through this this morning.’

'You weren't too hard on them, I hope?'

'Me?’ replied Filip, his head still sunk in the paper.

‘I thought they looked pretty scared.’

‘Well, one look at you would be enough to scare anyone.’ He tapped the pencil on his teeth and continued writing. ‘If you must know, there were safety procedures that everyone overlooked, including you.’ The commander was not given to reprimand, but the blistering white bandages reflected the sun into his eyes and circumstances wrung it from him. He paused in his writing and placed his hands open in front of him. ‘What were you even doing there, Anton?'

'The boys were curious.'

‘Petar, who hadn’t removed the fuse before you started lecturing him on engines and Miloš, who insisted afterwards that he heard you shout “turn it off”?'

‘Well, why did he start it in the first place?’

'Because he’s seventeen and he’s wondering to himself what might happen if he flicks that switch. That’s what seventeen year old boys do. You shouldn’t have left him and gone off with Petar to explain how propellers work. Miloš panicked when your sleeve got caught, Petar said that he forgot about the fuse, and so did you.’ Kolarov shook his head, most particularly at Anton. ‘Disregard for protocol, Anton. This is when these things happen. Now that we've lost a man we can't afford to lose, I realize the advice is a bit long in the tooth, but you always have to learn the hard way.’

‘You really think I’m that bad?’ Anton muttered.

‘You know I don’t,’ replied Filip, 'You’re one of the most capable men I’ve got but, right now, you look like a bear with a sore tooth and I’m sorry about the boys, but you picked a bad time to be their friend instead of their leader.’

‘Why? You’ve had some more news from Belgrade? '

Filip tossed aside his pencil and drew his brows together.

'Well, you heard about the prince, that he capitulated to Hitler?'

'Yes. And?'

'And the alliance with Germany has not gone down well in the capital. Prince Paul’s gone. General Simović saw to that and now they’re ranging the streets singing “better war than the pact.” The fellow on the wireless said he’d never seen such jubilation.’

‘We’re at war?'

'Not yet, but the staff at the German and British embassies have left Belgrade, so it’s coming. Hitler knows the strategic value of the country and after the capitulation of Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary he expected us to agree easily. Our show of defiance will have let that famous rage of his off its leash.'

'But are we ready?'

‘No, we’re not ready! We’ve been treading on egg shells to keep their eyes off us. Now the Nazis will wipe Yugoslavia from the map.'

He spoke calmly but the underlying tension in his voice conveyed its own urgency and through the window to the west the grey limestone peaks trembled at his words from the water to the sky. What a desperate place was a hospital when the enemy would come over the mountains.

Anton pushed himself up until their eyes were level.

'Listen, Filip, I’ve got to get out of here.'

But Filip only rose and replaced his hat.

‘The minute I hear anything further, I'll tell you.' He patted the bed affectionately. 'You just sit tight and get better.'

He headed towards the exit. On his way out he met the pretty nurse who was struggling to load the cleansed bedpan into the top level of a cupboard. With a gracious smile, he took it from her, slipping it in easily and, out of the corner of one eye, Anton caught him wink at her.

****

By the third day, he was managing a rumble around the ward without dizziness, to the distress of the other patients who wished he'd push his throttle in and not appear so menacing: one hundred and ninety centimetres of bone and muscle, as dense and dark as the trunk of a black poplar and just as communicative. Since regaining consciousness, he’d scarcely exchanged two words with anyone except the old man beside him whom he’d found hiding beneath the bedclothes in anticipation of a visit from his wife.

However, early on his fourth morning, while watching out the window for Germans, his wolf-like reflection in the glass so alarmed him that he composed himself in a secluded cubicle in the bathroom and, with Kolarov’s threats of female intimacy ringing in his ears, attempted to shave with his left hand. In order to avoid cutting himself he was forced to proceed so carefully that an hour wore away in utter concentration until a white veil swished into his cubicle and he glanced up to see the senior sister frowning down at him. She watched without speaking as he scraped cautiously around his neck, all the while exhibiting that female exasperation for his sex that assumed he would make a mistake merely because he was male.

Finally, she slanted her head to one side and remarked, 'All you had to do was ask, Captain.'

'You are disturbing me,' he informed her.

They had supported his injured shoulder in a sling and he had put the trousers on that Filip brought. One arm he managed to ease into a shirt and he had draped the sleeve of the other over the bandages and fastened three buttons up his chest. Thus attired, he fancied that he looked on the road to recovery. The nurse and her caustic quip had soured that achievement. He was all lather and inexperience.

'You are going to cut yourself,' she said.

'I am not going to cut myself, sister,' he replied coolly, wiping his face with a towel. 'And now, if you please, I'm certain you have better things to do with your time.'

'I do, as a matter of fact. But it took me a while to find you. Your commander is waiting by your bed.'

So certain was Anton that Kolarov could only be there to inform him of catastrophe, and that the nurse had deliberately delayed the announcement because she was a ball-busting man-hater, that he pushed passed her before he broke his own rule and swore at a woman in public.

Sure enough he found the commander pacing around the bed, unable even to sit.

'What?' demanded Anton. ‘What?’

'Thank God!' Filip motioned him aside, brushing a ribbon of sweat from his forehead. 'Where can we talk privately?'

They returned to the cubicle. At the sight of the commander, the sister departed politely.

‘The Luftwaffe has bombed Belgrade,’ Kolarov reported. Punctuated. ‘Yesterday. Easter Sunday. With civilian casualties in the thousands. For our jubilation, Hitler has sworn to teach the Slavs a brutal lesson.’ He paused and Anton heard the suffering in his voice. ‘Four waves and they didn’t even target the military.’

‘Where then?’ asked Anton in a taut whisper.

‘Homes and businesses. The whole city’s ablaze.’

‘Do we mean that little to him?’

Disbelief was in his voice, yes, but a growing recognition of something that was merciless as well.

‘It’s intimidation, Anton. Don’t credit Hitler with any sophistication.’

‘And how did we respond?’

‘Not well. A few dog fights. I told you we weren’t ready, and there is the sense also that some of our positions were betrayed.’

‘What about the naval base? I haven’t heard any planes. How soon will we be attacked? What about my boat?’

‘The Nebojša’s dived at Tivat but nothing’s happened yet. She’s sitting on the bottom of the bay.’ Kolarov checked his watch. ‘It’s half past eight. She’s been there for an hour and a half. Late last night Naval Command was warned by the British about a possible attack this morning and all craft have been ordered to change their positions daily, as long as they have the fuel to do so. Other than that we wait to see if and when the army surrenders. When, I think, sooner than if.’

****

After Kolarov had left the ward, Anton felt bereft. He stared at the two long rows of beds, some empty, a few occupied, and experienced a loneliness he had not felt since he was a child at the end of a long summer's outing. Something had delayed his family – the bank, the tram, he couldn't remember now - and, by the time they arrived, everyone else had gone home except him. Distressing for a man to recall the small hurts of boyhood.

The German attack on Belgrade had profoundly shocked him. As a member of the military there should have been some action to take, yet he could do nothing.

‘Destroy Paris,’ he thought bitterly. ‘Slaughter French civilians without provocation and see how the world reacts.’

Once, as a student, he had been to Paris: a new city then, only seventy or eighty years old, but already the darling of the Western world, as dedicated to style and indulgence as London was to finance. Paris was not to know that to Serbs Belgrade had had the same reputation for pleasure, and he doubted whether it would have cared. Paris was a teenager and just as self-involved. The Nazis would not ravage a city younger than the age of consent, but their ideology justified the destruction of a Slavic population.

The morning sun flooded the long ward and Anton sat on his bed with his head in his hands contemplating with increasing despair the fate of his boat. Since nine o’clock he had heard the drone of bombers and, in reply, the sharp report of anti-aircraft fire. He knew the planes would have to have come from Italy. The Italians had long coveted the Yugoslav coast and were undoubtedly taking advantage of the German invasion to launch their own. The bombers would be targeting ships anchored in the bay and he doubted whether a civilian hospital would be evacuated.

Lunchtime came and went. The sun began its swift descent upon the crags around the water. Three o'clock struck and Anton watched the minutes glide on until a quarter past when the day-nurses, anxious but professional, would gather in their small glassed-in office for the handover to the evening staff. As his case arrived, they would discuss its particular features, his treatment and his progress. Quickly they would move onto the next patient, one or two men after him, then the last one; close their books, smooth their veils, and seal his doom for another night.

His shoulder would not heal while it was condemned here, for healing is holistic and his heart was broken. Briskly he seized the satchel from beneath his bed, sat with it on the sheets and thrust the flap open with his foot. He shoved in his few belongings, ignoring the insistence of the evening nurse who came bustling up, that he wait for the doctor.

On observing that he had no intention of waiting for anyone, she repacked his satchel with hydrogen peroxide, iodine and bandages and begged him to return tomorrow. But he had made up his mind and her plea fell on deaf ears. As she chased him down the ward, he threw the strap over his shoulder and left without a backward glance. He could imagine her expressing his medical sacrilege in outrageous adjectives.

 

 

WHY HITLER (AND CHURCHILL) NEEDED BELGRADE

 

‘”On the morning of Palm Sunday, while children slept their innocent sleep and the church bells were ringing for prayer to God, the German aeroplanes without warning let fall a rain of bombs on this historic town”’.

So wrote King Peter of Yugoslavia after the bombing of Belgrade 6^th April 1941. ‘The King went on to describe the terror of the women and children who were machine-gunned as they fled from their homes by low-flying planes.’ (1)

Hitler termed this invasion Operation Strafgericht, a word that in English means Retribution or Punishment. To understand why Hitler labelled it like this, it is necessary first to know something of Belgrade's geography and then something of its history. 

Belgrade lies at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, and the modern visitor taking a stroll down its Sava shoreline passed the boats to the left and the restaurants to the right, can see without difficulty the strategic importance of the city. Anyone who controls Belgrade controls the river traffic from the far east of Europe to its west. In the days before air freight and autobahns this was of vital importance, as the Celts, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Huns, the Slavs, the Bulgars, the Hungarians, the Turks, the Austrians, the Serbs and the Nazis will tell you. 

To the left in this image is the Sava River flowing westwards to Zagreb and Ljubljana. In the distance, the trees run along the shore of the mighty Danube that flows all the way from Romania to Germany. 

 

  

 

The Fort built for the defence of Belgrade sits directly on this confluence, at Stari Grad, the old town, and some sort of military fortress has existed here since Roman times.

An army cannot function without supplies and communication. Belgrade, in its position on the rivers and the railways was nec-essary to Hitler for both. This image from my 1915 World Atlas shows the route of the Danube from Romania through Belgrade to Germany. The oil fields of Romania were the largest in Europe and ess-ential to the Nazi war machine. (4) Later on in the war, the Allies attempted to derail the industry by bombing the oil fields and disrupting the transport system that took it by river to Germany. 

Next, let us take a look at the railways from my 2007 Heinemann Atlas. I took the 24 hour train trip from Athens to Belgrade in 1985, and it is an easy connection from there all the way to Germany. The Germans needed control of the railways to supply their troops in North Africa. Every day 48 trains ran through Belgrade to Athens, there to load their supplies onto ships that crossed the Mediterranean to where Rommel and his army awaited them. (2)

Between the convenient rivers and the convenient railway, it doesn't take much imagination to understand why Hitler wished to punish the Yugoslavs for not rolling out the red carpet. 

Enter the British. 

The British had had connections in Yugoslavia for years before the war, particularly in Belgrade. Significantly, their Intelligence Service had been active during Germany's march towards war in order to monitor and assess the response it was provoking in the Balkans. The Yugoslav regent Prince Paul was something of an Anglophile. Like his nephew, the seventeen-year-old King Peter who was a descendent of Queen Victoria through his mother, Paul had been to school in England. Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia were rich in bauxite, coal, iron ore, lead and zinc, and British mining engineers and businessmen had been working in Yugoslavia before the war. At least one of them, Captain Bill Hudson, fluent in Serbo Croat and allegedly one of Ian Flemming's inspirations for James Bond, was later used as part of Special Operations (7). 

Britain wanted Yugoslavia as an ally.

Although the reasons would change as the war continued, in 1941 Yugoslavia was also the gateway to Greece and of great significance to the British defence of Greece which was to occur that April. 'The important thing, Eden [the British Foreign Secretary] said, was that the Yugoslavs should deny the passage of German troops, especially through the Monastir Gap, which would threaten the Greek flank.' (8)

Under the regency of Prince Paul from 1934, Yugoslavia had maintained a semi-peaceful relationship with Nazi Germany with the aim of not getting involved in war, but in February 1941, Hitler suddenly called upon the Yugoslav Prime Minister and Foreign Minister to throw their lot in with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Japan, and on 25th March Prince Paul signed the Tripartite Pact (5). Two days later on a wave of public indignation, a military coup disposed him, made his nephew Peter the King, and General Dušan Simović of the Yugoslav Air Force the leader of a National Government.

Churchill, needless to say, watched all this with interest. Yugoslavia had "found its soul", he remarked. But 'The Fűhrer had at first refused to believe the news – "I thought," he said later, "that it was a joke."' (5)

We all know what happened next. Hitler lost his famous temper and ordered that Yugoslavia be wiped from the map 'with unmerciful harshness and the military destruction done in lightning-like fashion' (5). Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Italy invaded the country from all sides and dismantled it between them. Naturally, Germany claimed first rights to its natural resources, particularly the bauxite mines in Herzegovina, to the south east of Bosnia, because it needed aluminium for the construction of aeroplanes. 

Nor was this the end. Christie Lawrence in Irregular Adventure recalls later in 1941 seeing half the sky in flames in the rural areas south of Belgrade. It was German terror tactics, the systematic destruction of Serbian villages in response to any show of resistance by the Yugoslavs to the Nazi occupation. ‘The total result of our revolution was that we killed about seven or eight thousand Germans and lost 125,000 men and women shot by them. Three towns and fifty-three villages ...were burned out, and our organization was virtually destroyed.’ (6) 

The question is, what part had Britain played in the Belgrade coup d'etat that had precipitated this disaster and why? (8) 

Britain, of course, had been kept well-informed of the political jostling in Belgrade prior to Prince Paul putting his pen to the poisoned Pact. 'In the six months prior to the coup, the British attitude toward Yugoslavia had changed from accepting Yugoslav benevolent neutrality, to that of pressing the Yugoslavs for more active support in the war against Germany.' (8) Romania with its all-important oil fields had already signed the Pact on 23rd November 1940 after Hungary on 20th November, Slovakia followed on 24th November and lastly Bulgaria on 1st March 1941. Aside from Ustasha-controlled Croatia, already loyal to the Nazis, only Yugoslavia remained. To the British, two things were clear, one, that Prince Paul should not sign the Tripartite Pact with Germany and two, if he did, 'subversive political action' should be placed that ultimately supported the military coup of March 27th.' The British planned to persuade the Yugoslav people and its political parties to exert pressure on Prince Paul and, failing that, to get rid of him. They succeeded only in the latter. They first persuaded several cabinet members to resign in order to destabilize the government, and the final step was to get the Yugoslav military involved in a coup. 

As I read this article (8) I wondered, as I often do with British war history, how much British self-glorification was involved. In any event, whatever they might have been planning bore no fruit. It is true that the Yugoslav military was not prepared for war and collapsed in only eleven days. I have read that Ustasha fifth columnists also had a hand in it (3). Prince Paul, King Peter, General Simović and what would become the Yugoslav Government-in-Exile in Claridge's Hotel London fled the country. The Commando Captain Christie Lawrence who had been captured in Crete, jumped into Serbia from a German train in June 1941. During the twelve months he spent in the country, it seemed to him preindustrial, its remaining leaders confused and bewildered, wanting to help but not knowing what to do. Draža Mihailović, whom everyone had just run off and left, sounded forlorn and Lawrence had not even heard of Tito (6). It wasn't until May 1943 that Churchill parachuted a military party into the country to investigate the Yugoslav Partisans about whom he was beginning to receive rumours. During the Allied Invasion of Sicily in July 1943, the Partisans kept dozens of German Battalions occupied and out of Italy, which pleased Churchill. Of course. 

OR read my Substack article that explains why I love Yugoslavia so much.

NOTES

1 - Balkan Essays Hubert Butler, the Irish Pages Press 2016
2 - Glenny, Misha: The Balkans 1804 - 2012 Penguin books 1999
3 - 1941 the Year That Keeps Returning, Slavko Goldstein New York Review BooksNov 05, 2013
4 - Romania's Age Of Oil (rferl.org)
5 - Maclean, Fitzroy: The Heretic: the life and times of Josip Broz-Tito. Harley and Brothers NY, 1957
6 - Christie Laurence Lawrence, Christie Irregular Adventure Faber and Faber 1947
7 - Deakin, FWD: The Embattled Mountain Oxford University Press 1971
8. soe-and-british-involvement-in-the-belgrade-coup-detat-of-march-1941.pdf (cambridge.org) From this article comes the notable quote from Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, "All these Balkan peoples are trash."

 

THE POPE AT WAR by David Kertzer - book review

You don’t meet men like Pope Pius XII anymore. Erudite and aristocratic, he was far removed from his proletarian people yet he confessed a quiet ambition to one day be their Pope. Readers of David Kertzer’s book about him are lucky. They have the benefit of knowing that Hitler was evil. For Pius XII, it was as if the truth crept up on him only slowly while he battled the demons that bound him, his fear of communism and his belief that the Roman Catholic Church in Europe must survive.

Elected on the eve of World War 2, Pius XII had previously served as Papal nuncio to Germany. Mussolini’s ambassador to the Vatican wrote that he was ‘the Cardinal preferred by the Germans’ and ‘prone to bend to pressure.’ These two observations create the framework for Kertzer’s book. Between the opening of the Vatican Archives in March 2020 and his publication in 2022, Kertzer completed a vast amount of research, but it is the pace and clarity of his writing that has made the work accessible to a broad audience. For Christians, a distinction must be made between the Roman Catholic Church, which was an ornate, Italian institution, and Jesus Christ who brought the kingdom of heaven to ordinary people. Pius XII wanted to preserve the Italian institution, and I’m not convinced that his scruples and sensitivities made him a Christian I could ever relate to. His was an Italian story with all the drama of Hamlet. So many questions about what was nobler in the mind! So many clerical Polonius’s hiding behind curtains! So many Maglioni’s, Tardini’s, Ciano’s, Montini’s and Pirelli’s. All it lacked was Ophelia, unless you count Clara Petacci, Mussolini’s mistress.

To begin: Pope Pius XII was an experienced diplomat and had frequent opportunities to demonstrate his skills. ‘In August 1939, as he was finalizing plans for invading Poland, Hitler was also engaged in negotiations with Pius XII so secret that not even the German ambassador to the Holy See knew about them.’ (1)  The middle-man was Prince Philipp von Hessen, son-in-law of the King of Italy, and on 11th March 1940 the Pope also met with Hitler’s foreign minister Von Ribbentrop. Pius complained politely about the Nazi suppression of the Catholic Church in Germany and Poland while his Secretary of State, Maglione, was less accommodating. Ribbentrop was not pleased and labelled Maglione an enemy of the Nazis.

The chapters recording the Pope’s failure to react to the German invasion of the Low Countries, the continuing brutality in Poland and the appeals of ordinary Italians to prevent Italy from entering the war, make poignant reading. Kertzer repeats two points, firstly that Pius XII believed the war would be over in a few months following an Axis victory, and secondly that he was intimidated by Mussolini. Indeed, his subservience to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany did not impress the British and the French. ‘The moral prestige of the Papacy began to decline,’ wrote Osborne, Churchill’s envoy to the Vatican. ‘The Holy Father will say nothing for the moment,’ wrote D’Ormesson, his French counterpart, 'and will only…speak publicly to emit some pious and expertly balanced moans. One gets the impression that, for [the Pope], communism is Public Enemy Number One. [He] seems to me above all to be a conservative of a monarchical stamp….[who] seizes every opportunity to show his loyalty to the Fascist government.’ (1)

From the beginning of the Holocaust the Pope received reports of German atrocities against Europe’s Jews, initially from members of his clergy who had witnessed them. Though deeply distressed, he did not respond.

Why not?

‘[Because] it was best not to alienate either Mussolini or the Fűhrer,’ concludes Kertzer. Osborne added, ‘The Pope’s policy of silence and neutrality at all costs is destroying the moral authority of the Vatican.’ A Swiss newspaper reported that, ‘the moral leadership of the Papacy is conditioned by considerations of opportunism and expediency.’ The French, the Americans, ambassadors from Britain, Brazil, Belgium, Poland, the Netherlands, Norway, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and churchmen from the Ukraine, all sent appeals to the Pope to protest about the horrors committed against Jews unfolding in their own countries. ‘It is widely believed,’ begged Roosevelt’s envoy Myron Taylor of the Pope in September 1942, ‘that Your word of condemnation would hearten all others who are working to save these thousands from suffering and death…I should like to know whether the Holy Father has any suggestions as to any practical manner in which the forces of civilized public opinion could be utilized in order to prevent a continuation of these barbarities.’ (1)

A month later the Vatican replied, ‘Up to the present time it has not been possible to verify the accuracy of the…severe measures taken against non-Aryans’ (1). It also expressed its fear that ‘any papal criticism risked provoking a backlash against the church in German occupied Europe’. (1) In September 1943, as Italy was capitulating to the Allies, German troops were pouring over its northern borders to occupy the country as far south as Rome. This invasion marked the end for Italy’s Jews. Separated from their Italian compatriots by the Racial Laws of 1938, to which the Pope had made no protest, their deportation to the Nazi death camps was likewise accomplished in silence.

The Third Reich made a point of reminding all its churches, Protestant and Catholic, that it supported them financially, and the soldiers responsible for the wartime atrocities considered themselves good Christians. After all, in the 1939 census only 1% of Germans declared themselves unbelievers.

What was a Pope to do?

What he did do was to continue to liaise with Germany in order to mitigate suppression of the church and, as Allied bombers commenced pounding Italy’s industrial north, he wrote to Britain and America in an endeavour to spare Italy further suffering. Osborne reported to London, ‘Owing to the fact that His Holiness never made any specific condemnation of the deliberate [German] slaughter of thousands of civilians, he is precluded …from condemning our recent raids on Milan, Genoa and Turin.’ (1) Pius received a similar retort from Roosevelt.

Care should be taken by the reader to differentiate between propaganda and fact. A notable instance was the German and Italian proclamations that the war was rescuing Christian Europe from Bolshevist Russia, the ally of Britain and France. The Allied bombing of Rome did a lot to promote this. The Pope’s fear of communism runs as a thread throughout the book and was richly exploited by the men who intimidated him.

Like The Force of Destiny by Christopher Duggan, another long book about Italy’s depressing modern history, The Pope at War ultimately says to me that Italians should stick to food and culture. To say that they’re good at anything else is to believe their own propaganda. It’s little wonder that so many novels feature Vatican intrigues. Occupying Germans scheming to get the Pope’s approval, Jews hiding in convents, priests who drive them into the arms of the Nazis, a pontiff who says nothing, Allies arguing about who was responsible for bombing Italian heritage while Europe lay in ruins. The Vatican is an opera in itself.

‘Why should we quarrel? [The church] will swallow anything provided they can keep their advantages’                                                                      – Adolf Hitler. (2)

1 – The Pope at War, David Kertzer. Random House New York, 2022.

2 – Balkan Essays, Hubert Butler. The Irish Pages Press 2016.

JASENOVAC CONCENTRATION CAMP AND ISTRIA

Here is my photograph of the Partisan cenotaph in Tar, Istria, the village my mother was born in. Her family name was Mikatović. They had come up from the south coast in the sixteenth century and lived only in this area.

From the cenotaph and JASENOVAC RESEARCH INSTITUTE – Let the Truth Be Known!, I researched the men from Tar and the surrounding Istrian villages who had died at the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp run by the Ustasha during World War 2 on the northern border of Bosnia and Croatia .

In the table below are their names and places of birth:

Tar today has a population of about 900. Aside from Poreć, the other villages mentioned are smaller. If so many men from such small villages so far away, who were neither Serbian, nor Jewish, nor Gypsies, could be slaughtered at Jasenovac, then how much more would the numbers have been swelled by the real targets of the Ustasha: the Serbs, the Jews and the Roma? The extermination rate must have been enormous.

(I think there were probably more names than this because the search engine turned up names that weren’t on the cenotaph.)

I can’t tell you how very sad this knowledge has made me. Istria during World War 2 was a German operational zone. My mother often mentioned riding their bikes and having to get off the road quickly in order to avoid German tanks. Before this, Istria had a history of poverty and famine, yet here were these farmers (and farmer is the most common profession written in their church books) turning into patriots and fighting for their freedom. There was little food during the war. My mother said that all the food went to feeding the Italian army. Often, all they had to eat was potatoes, she said, and the Germans were very cruel.

The cenotaph in the photograph was established in 1953 to honour the anti-fascist Partisans, both Italian and Croatian, and is inscribed in both languages. The historian at nearby Novigrad told me that Mussolini’s dictatorship polarized the village. One side of the street would consider themselves Italian and the other Croatian. Yet after the collapse of Fascist Italy, they fought the Germans together, only for some to perish in a Croatian death camp.