Caroline Moorehead

Has the role of resistance in the second world war been exaggerated?

The partisans boosted morale and provided useful intelligence to the Allies, but their contribution was not crucial, according to Halik Kochanski

Women played essential parts in every resistance movement: a commander of fiercely patriotic Yugoslav partisans inspects the rifles of women guerrillas recuperating and training at Allied rest camps in Italy in February 1944. Credit: Getty Images 
issue 26 February 2022

When in 1941 Winston Churchill famously declared that the newly formed Special Operations Executive, set up to encourage resistance movements, would ‘set Europe ablaze’, neither he nor anyone else could have known the extent of the help the partisans would provide to the liberation of the continent. Nor, indeed, did anyone envisage the fact that not all of them would prove as biddable to Allied wishes as they hoped.

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