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Tuesday 2 December 2008

The Wildest Province: SOE in the Land of the Eagle

A tough assignment

Alan Judd on Roderick Bailey's new book

Albania is small and little known, its history sufficiently confusing and its names sufficiently unpronounceable for us to be funny about it or, worse, to romanticise it. But humour and romance were in short supply for Albanians during the second world war (and after), and there wasn’t much left over for those sent to help them. There was, however, no shortage of intensity.

The Special Operations Executive (SOE) first deployed there in 1941. Albania had been occupied by the Italians in 1939, an annexation recognised by the Chamberlain government. A place of factions, fiefdoms, squalor, privation and harshness, as this comprehensive and understanding account shows, it had the added misfortune to become a footnote to the wider war; important enough to be worth bothering about — if only as another thorn in the Axis underbelly — but not so important as to justify full-scale intervention. Contrast with Greece at the end of the war, into whose bloody civil strife Britain sent 75,000 troops to prevent a communist takeover.

That first tentative SOE mission ended in failure and the capture of its leader. By 1943, however, the endemic brigandage of the country was judged to have grown into a guerrilla opposition worth supporting and more missions were sent. But then Italy surrendered and the Italian occupation was swiftly replaced by a more brutally effective German regime. (An SOE major, who had penetrated the Italian HQ in Tirana, found himself negotiating with the Italians to resist the Germans in one room while other Italians were negotiating their surrender in another.) A principal justification for continued Albanian operations thus became that they tied down significant numbers of German troops at relatively little cost.

However ‘relatively little’ such costs may be in war, they are always lethal and absolute for the few, or — in the event of German reprisals and internecine Albanian feuds — the many. In his touching and surprising prologue, Roderick Bailey describes the post-war work of the Army’s Graves Registration Units in locating and identifying the corpses of the 50-plus British and Dominion personnel (mostly SOE and aircrew) killed in Albania. Much of it was gruesome detective work, beginning in one instance with a café owner’s recollection of the burnt shirt and severed hand of an English pilot displayed in the town square. Habits had evidently changed little since Byron’s visit in 1809, when he rode past a severed arm hanging from a tree. Enver Hoxha’s communist government later destroyed the British war cemetery.

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