Product Description

At midnight on May 14, 1944, the blinking of a flashlight in mountainous, German-occupied Yugoslavia signalled the parachute drop of four American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) officers who were met by a group of Tito's Partisans. One of the OSS officers was Franklin Lindsay. Only with the declassification in the 1980s of wartime American and British archives could he undertake to reconstruct his day-to-day experiences in a war area of constantly changing conditions and ever-present danger. In the closing months of the war, Lindsay became the commander of the American Military Mission to Tito's new Communist government, and he describes the consolidation of Tito's power over the civil population, the final defeat of the Chetniks, and the elimination of all other political opposition. Directly pertinent to contemporary developments in the former Yugoslavia are Lindsay's observations of the savage ethnic and religious hatreds. Though the seeds of the present violent breakup of Yugoslavia were sown in earlier centuries, they were given powerful reinforcement by wartime atrocities.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1679827 in Books
• Published on: 1996-02-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
'This is a marvellous book, a gripping adventure story that is also an important historical memoir of direct relevance to today's Yugoslavia ... Promising to become a classic, it is a brilliantly intelligent account of the nature of subversive operations and of the politics of the Yugoslav campaign ... Lindsay is a real-life Indiana Jones who was daunted by nothing, never downcast, and who would go through fire for a fellow-warrior. What a wonderful man to have had on one's side.'The Daily Telegraph

Customer Reviews

There is gratitude for you
Well worth the read. Little often written about facet of WW2. The Brits heavily supported the partisans fighting in Yugoslavia to help remove the Germans. It articulates the differing partisan sides - Tito's communist band (before he fell out with Moscow) and the nationalist band, as well as interesting stories on fighting Germans - when they captured them they sometimes used to strip them naked and let them go! The Soviets eventually gained control of Tito's partisans towards the end of the War and the Brit advisors eventually were virtually prisoners of Tito kept away from any intellegence gathered by the partisans. The Germans eventually worked out that it was better to covertly arm the nationalist partisan enemies who were also engaged in fighting Tito's partisan band. Tito's partisan efforts towards the end were less focused on the Germans and more on the nationalists to ensure that Tito came to power unchallenged.