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.

Table of Contents

1. To Slovenia by parachute; 2. Preparing for the mission; 3. First days with the partisans; 4. Crossing the border; 5. Inside the Third Reich; 6. Blowing up Germany's railroads; 7. Night marches and hidden hospitals; 8. The partisans organise a shadow government; 9. Radios, codes and codebreakers; 10. Liberation of a mountain valley; 11. The lure of Austria; 12. Failure in Austria; 13. Revolution comes into the open; 14. The German winter offensive begins; 15. Ethnic and ideological wars in Croatia; 16. Tito's government takes control in Belgrade; 17. The defeat of the Chetniks; 18. Communist rule becomes absolute; 19. The Cold War begins in Trieste; 20. In the wake of the hot war; 21. How it all turned out; Appendix; Notes; Index.

Reviews

Lindsay's memoir of his experiences as an American OSS officer with Tito's Partisans stands as a classic work of Resistance literature, but the book's overriding importance lies in its clarification of the ethnic/religious tensions that led to the present Balkan tragedy. Lindsay describes the two competing WW II resistance movements in Yugoslavia, both dedicated to engaging German forces needed elsewhere but with different postwar goals. Tito planned to turn the country into a Moscow-directed communist state; his rival, Chetnik leader Draza Mikhailovic, was determined to restore the monarchy and to continue the prewar dominance by the Serbs. On this basis, a civil war raged throughout the land even as the rivals fought against the German occupation. ``The ethnic hatred that fueled the communal violence,'' writes the author, ``seemed deeply embedded in the souls of the inhabitants.'' The book combines a rousing personal adventure story with new information on the Partisan contribution to the Allied war effort, and at the same time provides a useful lesson in Balkan history that is directly pertinent to the current bloodshed. Lindsay, retired chairman of the Itek Corporation, is an Associate of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard. Photos. (Sept.)

'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