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SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE, 1940-1946:
SUBVERSION AND SABOTAGE DURING WORLD WAR II
Series Two: SOE Operations in the Balkans
Part 1: Yugoslavia, 1939-1945 (HS 5/868-969)
Introduction
Recent events in the former Yugoslavia have brought much greater attention to this troubled region. The SOE files contain extensive material on the problems of different nationalities, ethnic and political affiliations.
Yugoslavian terrain was particularly suitable for resistance activity and various partisan armies harried the German forces of occupation mercilessly from April 1941 onwards. SOE efforts to support partisan forces in Yugoslavia are documented throughout HS 5/868-969.
Initially SOE support was given to Colonel Draza Mihailvoic who led one of the largest groups of resisters. The SOE mission (MACMIS) determined that support should be switched to Josip Broz, the Croat Labour leader better known as Tito, who was the other major resistance organiser, leading over 10,000 partisans by 1942.
The files are full of local reports compiled by SOE officers, political and strategic assessments, details of operations, propaganda, details of couriers and supply drops. The following topics are well covered:
Dealings with the exiled Yugoslav government.
Initial contacts with Mihailovic and the early encouragement of Yugoslav opposition groups, 1941-1942.
Reorganisation of the Yugoslav section of SOE in 1942.
The debate between SOE and the Foreign Office on spheres of authority in Yugoslavia.
The brief to Fitzroy Maclean for the MACMIS mission, August 1943.
Reports and interrogations on the problems of the HENNA and HYDRA missions.
Details of the HAVERSTOCK mission, attached to Mihailovic, 1943-1944.
Papers on resistance groups and partisan forces, especially relations with Mihailovic and Tito, including correspondence on military and political activities.
The policy debate on switching support from Mihailovic to Tito’s Partisans.
Partisan operations in 1944.
Air supplies.
Planning and Policy Reviews.
Interrogations of alleged enemy collaborators amongst Mihailovic and Chetnik supporters.
By the spring of 1944 the Allies aimed to attack enemy communications, undertake economic sabotage, and cripple industries and sources of raw materials of importance to the enemy. Researchers can assess how successful the Allies were in this policy and examine the post-war repercussions of SOE activity in the region.
Early Policy
British policy towards Yugoslavia was defined by the British Foreign Secretary in April 1941 two days prior to the Axis invasion of the country. Essentially, it was based upon assurances given by the Yugoslav President of the Council that the government of Yugoslavia would stand by the Allies until victory had been achieved. Thereafter, British policy aimed to restore Yugoslav independence, to maintain the unity of Yugoslavia among Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and to sustain this unity or illusion of unity by means of propaganda. For their part, the Yugoslav government, in exile from April 1941 in Athens, then Jerusalem, and finally in London, accepted these aims, but doubts persisted about its willingness or ability to do so, especially, perhaps, in view of the serious internal nationality problems. The most burning of these was the issue of the Croats, and the British government tried to get the Yugoslav government to provide a statement disclaiming any intention to create a Serb dominance and an assurance that all Yugoslavs would, on the cessation of war, be treated equally.
The files contain a good deal of material on SOE attempts to establish effective relations with the exiled Yugoslav government, and the names of the key figures in that government appear repeatedly. To some extent it was successful in this aim, establishing communications via Jovan Djonovic, delegate of the Royal Government of Yugoslavia for propaganda and communications with Yugoslavia. As regards exiled politicians, many were clearly out for their own ends, and at least one of them, Radovic (code name BROTHER), was rumoured to be collaborating with the Germans.
This was a problematic time for SOE, as by August 1941 it had been unable to find a means by which a courier working from Istanbul might be successfully infiltrated and exfiltrated, and efforts to maintain regular contacts with Yugoslav bands themselves proved to be impossible. Prior to the enemy occupation of Yugoslavia and the departure of the Yugoslav government, there was widespread subversive activity in the country undertaken by SOE or by its predecessor, Section D of SIS. Officers were entering the country on a weekly basis with large consignments of explosives both by land and sea, initially building up a strong underground network and, on the enemy occupation of the country, encouraging every form of active opposition. They also supported the Serb Peasant Party and the Slovene underground organizations. The arrival of the German Gestapo forced the immediate departure of the SOE officer in Belgrade, but he was replaced in November 1940. In March 1941 the pro-Axis regime of Prince Paul was overthrown and a month later the Germans invaded.
By August 1941 SOE aimed to organize Partisan forces in order to maintain a certain degree of active resistance to the occupying forces sufficient to cause them real inconvenience. It was also vital to maintain a widespread underground resistance which might raise a general revolt in the future. For this purpose it was necessary to re-establish radio communications with the Partisans and any other opposition movements. In order to maintain the morale of these forces in Yugoslavia, it was recommended that there should be active propaganda including radio broadcasts, distribution of leaflets and oral dissemination through couriers.
Mihailovic and organized resistance
On the enemy occupation of Yugoslavia, Mihailovic, a regular army officer, refused to submit and escaped to the mountains, and it was primarily to his forces that Britain directed her support for several years. An initial contact with him was formed when a submarine carrying a Yugoslav mission, together with an SOE officer, landed on the Dalmatian Coast with a view to gathering information about internal conditions. The officer met up with the forces of Tito – who was not then known – and was instructed to break with him and proceed to Mihailovic where the mission remained until February 1944.
General Mihailovic’s support was chiefly military, but he also had followers among the Serb Agrarian Party, industrialists in Belgrade and elements from the former Patriotic Society based in Montenegro. He was Minister of War in the Yugoslav government and the leader of resistance in Serbia, Montenegro, Hercegovina and the southern part of Bosnia. Besides him there were two other main groups of organized resistance in Yugoslavia. The most important was the Partisans (National Liberation Partisan Detachments) under Tito or Josip Broz, the Croat labour leader who had organized communist cells in Yugoslavia from 1937. By April 1942 there were 10,000 Partisans and this had doubled by April 1943. The other opposition group was an amorphous body of so-called Independent Chetniks, some of them loosely associated with Mihailovic, but not under his control.
By the autumn of 1941 evidence suggested that British aid was being used by Mihailovic to fight the Partisans. By April 1942 the two camps were involved in civil war. Relations with Mihailovic were never particularly easy partly because of his dissatisfaction with the level of supplies dropped to him; partly because of the unsatisfactory nature of Allied propaganda in Yugoslavia; and partly because of constant allegations and counter-allegations about collaboration with the enemy. In Bosnia the Partisans had allied themselves with the Ustashi, the Croat police who were loyal to the puppet government. British efforts to bring pressure to bear on the Partisans by means of their contacts with the Soviet government were undermined by allegations from the Partisans that Mihailovic was himself cooperating with General Nedic and with the occupying forces against the Partisans. By October 1942 it was clear that Mihailovic was abstaining from any action against the enemy which would impair his ability to fight the Partisans. The British Liaison Officer attached to his headquarters stated that while Mihailovic would undertake action against the Ustashi and the Moslems he would not oppose the Axis until a new Allied front was formed in the Balkans. However, Britain continued to support him and planned to increase its representation to his headquarters. On the other hand, as the files reveal, there was from the spring of 1943 an increasing interest in the possibility of diverting support to the Partisans. The strongest proponents of this were senior SOE figures in Cairo who, with their constant access to detailed information on internal Yugoslav affairs, believed that Mihailovic would never devote his efforts wholeheartedly to the defeat of the enemy and that in fact there was strong evidence that he was collaborating with the enemy. The files contain a good deal of material on the policy debates of this time and on assessments of the resources and capabilities of both Mihailovic and the Partisans.
In spite of the misgivings about Mihailovic, it was decided to continue supplies to him on certain conditions. Above all he was to cease cooperation with the Italians and to refrain from fighting the Partisans in Serbian lands except in self-defence. Further, he was to resist influence of near-collaborationists and vested interests; accept directives of GHQ Middle East directed through the SOE staff attached to his forces, and conform to Allied and United Nations strategy. The files record in detail the debates between various SOE officers and between SOE and the Foreign Office about the means by which Mihailovic and his followers might best be brought into line. At the front of HS 5/934 is a 21 page report on the history of SOE in Yugoslavia from early 1941 to June 1944, based on the experiences of Lt Col David Thomas Hudson. On page 8 he states: “Mihailovic emerged as more fanatically anti-Croat, anti-Moslem, anti-Catholic and anti-Communist than he was anti-Axis…”
Tito, the Partisans and MACMIS
The decision to switch resources to the Partisan forces as the main element of resistance to the Axis was occasioned by the routing of Mihailovic’s forces by the Partisans in the aftermath of a German offensive. It was decided to infiltrate a relatively senior officer to Tito’s headquarters, and by September 1943 Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean had arrived there. In December 1943 the Partisans were publicly recognized as an Allied force by Eden, and their recognition by Churchill in February 1944 meant an increase in supplies. At the same point it was decided to withdraw the mission to Mihailovic amidst further recriminations and evidence of collaboration with enemy forces. The change in British strategy occasioned by Maclean’s mission (MACMIS) was of some significance and there is a considerable amount of material on every aspect of it, including preparations, conduct, execution of its functions, and policy papers which analyse in depth the nature of SOE involvement in the country. HS 5/870 and HS 5/879 include various Briefs and Directives setting out instructions to Maclean. There is also material in the files on other missions to Tito’s headquarters, including the infiltration of Bill Deakin, Bill Stuart and of Basil Davidson earlier in 1943.
For his part, Maclean argued in December 1943 that the Partisans would control Yugoslavia after the war irrespective of Allied intentions and that, in view of continuing support for Mihailovic in some quarters, it was pointless to try to split the Partisan movement. To the argument that the Partisans were communists and that they would establish a pro-Soviet regime after the war, Maclean failed to see in the Partisan movement any of the objectionable features of communism elsewhere and the movement had, in any case, provided a unity between Serbs, Croats and Slovenes which had not come from any other source. According to Maclean the future attitude of Yugoslavia depended upon the attitude taken by the Allies during the war and, in his judgement, it would be unwise to alienate the Partisans by supporting Mihailovic and the exiled government. Furthermore, Maclean felt that it was wrong to regard the king as a unifying force, and he recommended the Allies should abstain from any intervention on his behalf.
Some SOE officers considered it possible to wean Tito from communism and direct his loyalties to the king. On the other hand, even if the Partisans could contribute substantially to the war effort at a later stage, the prospect remained of Yugoslavia being united after the war but under the influence or control of the Soviet communists. In view of this possibility it seemed wise to continue some support for Mihailovic, thereby averting a purely communist state, to save at least Old Serbia from communism and restore King Peter there. The difficulty with this strategy, as the files make clear, was that it had proved impossible to mobilize Mihailovic against the Germans.
Initial plans for MACMIS decreed that Maclean was to be seconded to SOE, that he was to command the SOE mission attached to the GOC commanding the Partisan forces, and that he was in the first instance to report to the Head of SOE Cairo. The latter in turn would forward Maclean’s reports to the Middle East Defence Committee. Policy still aimed to support all anti-Axis elements provided they did not attack each other, that collaboration with the Axis stopped, and that this policy accorded with the operational needs of the C-in-C Middle East. Maclean was also to keep HM Ambassador Yugoslavia or the Minister of State informed of his progress.
The principal aim of MACMIS was overtly political rather than military or connected purely with subversion, and as the files reveal this led to serious disagreements and prolonged debate about the proper lines of authority and the means by which Maclean should report. The anxieties of SOE were not helped by Maclean’s alleged disdain for SOE and his apparent preference for reporting direct to the Foreign Office.
His mission was, simply stated, to unite and reconcile the Partisans, Mihailovic and other opposition elements so that Yugoslav unity might be preserved. It was also hoped that the exiled King Peter would return, and he was to be the key figure in any propaganda exercise aimed to create unity. Maclean was also to gather information on the political aspirations and affiliations of the non-Mihailovic groups, to discover the extent of Tito’s authority in the various parts of Yugoslavia and the opinions held by the various nationalities towards King Peter, Mihailovic and the existing Yugoslav government. In the early stages of his mission it was important to establish if Mihailovic was obstructing coordination of military activities and the Allies’ aim of uniting Yugoslavia. Maclean was also to investigate bands who did not follow Mihailovic or the Partisans, and to try and discover the extent of Moscow’s influence.
In terms of military functions Maclean was to train, organize and arrange for the equipment of all resistance movements other than those of Mihailovic and to plan short-term and long-term operations to fit in with Allied invasion plans or for a general rising. The military activities of these resistance movements were to be coordinated by SOE Cairo on behalf of the C-in-C Middle East (or AFHQ) with those of Mihailovic’s forces.
Debate persisted about whether or not Yugoslavia and Maclean’s mission were legitimate concerns of SOE. Some senior SOE officers felt that their only interest in Yugoslavia was that it bordered with Austria, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, and was therefore a suitable springboard for operations behind enemy lines in those countries. However, it was an essential aim of the mission to re-establish forward bases for penetration into those countries, and SOE regarded Maclean’s mission as vital in boosting relations with Tito. Furthermore, if this was not done, the Russian mission at Tito’s headquarters would capitalize on the situation and assert their ascendancy.
Hudson’s report in HS 5/934 provides the following analysis of events: “No fewer than six major offensives were launched at various times against the Partisans by the combined might of the Axis. These reached a bloody climax in the Montenegrin campaign of summer 1943, when the main body of Tito’s forces came near to being encircled and wiped out by a force including, besides seven German and four Italian divisions, Bulgarian, Ustasi and Domobran troops together with Mihailovic’s Chetniks, backed by strong artillery and air support. The attack failed; and the Partisans emerged from the battle stronger and more confident than ever. The collapse of Italy swung the balance further against Germany. The joint Axis strength fell: the Partisans, with masses of Italian booty, rose to a greater height of power.”
Due to the conditions under which Tito conducted operations in Yugoslavia, early in 1944 it was agreed that he was to be in overall charge of them, and the Allies were to confine themselves to operations connected with the delivery of supplies by sea and air, to Naval operations in the Adriatic and supporting air operations, to the provision of light ground forces for small amphibious operations and to assisting in the defence of key bases. Debate about Maclean’s status continued well into 1944. His mission was renamed the Allied Military Mission’ (AMM) and became an official political military mission to Tito’s forces, and was therefore no longer an SOE Field Operational Unit. While, therefore, SOE was to continue sending supplies to Tito and might still have a small Yugoslav section for clandestine operations and an officer attached to AMM, it would not control the mission itself. This took account of the fact that the Royal Yugoslav Government had reached an agreement with Tito whereby the former recognized Tito’s position as the head of Internal Affairs in Yugoslavia and would endeavour to support Tito outside the country and with the UN. Maclean, as the representative of the Prime Minister and Supreme Allied Commander with Tito, was to provide liaison between Tito and SAC, the OC Balkan Air Force and all other British military or civil authorities. He was also to make recommendations to the AOC Balkan Air Force after consultation with Tito for Allied support of all kinds to the Partisans.
The files also contain detailed information on the nature of general strategic and military objectives in Yugoslavia, including specific attacks on enemy communications, sabotage and operations directed against industries and sources of raw materials of importance to the Germans. The most immediate tasks in the spring of 1944 were to build up the Partisans by dropping further supplies, the establishment of a mission to cover lines of communications, and attacking vital enemy lines of communications. These efforts successfully pinned down numerous German units which otherwise could have been deployed elsewhere.
By mid 1944 a British policy directive stated that: “every encouragement will be given to the Partisans to build up their forces in Serbia... to do all possible to build up Partisan forces behind the line of the Sava so that, in the event of a German withdrawal behind that line, the Partisans will be in a position to carry out extensive guerrilla activity in the rear of the enemy….” Maclean now commanded twenty-nine separate missions to Tito. By this time Allied commitments to Tito had outstripped the resources of SOE. This was finally acknowledged on 15 June 1944 when SOE’s commitments in Yugoslavia were formally transferred to AFHQ, Middle East.
ublisher's Note - Part 2
Part 2 provides the general files on the Balkans (with much on Anglo-American and Anglo-Soviet relations in the region); together with the files for Bulgaria (where SOE concentrated on the trying to win over the Bulgarian army); and the Danube (a busy operational area with much action against Axis shipping).
There is much work for scholars to do in this area. SOE activities in the Balkans remain under-researched and many questions still need to be properly assessed. How much did SOE assist the Partisans? How much did they hinder the German war effort? How difficult were the choices between the rival groups? Were SOE and the Allies right to step aside at the end of the war? Did they have a choice? How did these war-time alliances affect the post-war situation?
Policy, planning and the organisation of SOE activities is covered in the files on Cairo HQ, Istanbul HQ and Bari HQ, along with material on OSS/SOE co-ordination in the Balkans. Daily situation and progress reports for SOE in the Balkans, July 1943-October 1944, are provided in HS 5/157-159. There is also good material on propaganda, discussions with the Foreign Office, SOE/Soviet NKVD relations, operational orders and assessments of the efficiency of various resistance movements and partisan forces.
Bulgaria was regarded by the Allies as of considerable strategic importance in their efforts to contain German expansion towards the Middle East. It was perceived that the Bulgarian people did not support the Axis power wholeheartedly. However, economic conditions were less severe than in other parts of Europe and the Bulgarian police were experienced in dealing with disorder. This led the Foreign Office to argue that it would be extremely difficult for SOE to inspire a general revolt of the people and army against the pro-Axis regime of King Boris. A better policy would be to try to win over elements within the Bulgarian army. This process is documented in HS 5/173-194.
Initial operations to contact the main political opposition groups, such as the Left Agrarians, the Protogerovists and the Military League, failed to bear fruit. The files contain much information on Todoroff, a Bulgarian exile and de facto leader of the Agrarian Party between 1923 and 1938, and Dimitrov (agent JOHN). SOE found that these agents and other Bulgarians attempted to exploit perceived differences between the United States and Britain and between these powers and the Soviet Union over Bulgaria. The files also give details on the fate of the MULLIGATAWNY and CLARIDGES mission. The death of King Boris, the growth of partisan forces and the development of the OF militia revitalised SOE operations in Bulgaria in the final two years of the war. The files reveal the difficulties and complexities faced in co-ordinating missions in this region.
British military activities in the Danube commenced in 1939. The main aim was to obtain control of vessels in order to deprive the Axis of river tonnage and the ability to transport Romanian oil, grain, minerals and other vital commodities to and from Germany. The few surviving SOE files for this theatre (HS 5/195-212) provide important details on SOE work. Danube sabotage, the pilot enticement scheme, liaison with Soviet forces, subversion of river pilots and the use of propaganda are all well covered.
SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE, 1940-1946:
SUBVERSION AND SABOTAGE DURING WORLD WAR II
Series Two: SOE Operations in the Balkans
Part 1: Yugoslavia, 1939-19445
Part 2: The Balkans, 1940-1946, Bulgaria, 1940-1958 and the Danube, 1940-1957
Contents of Reels - Part 1
Part 1: Yugoslavia, 1939-1945 (HS 5/868-969)
REEL 1
HS 5/868 Conferences: Alexandria, 1943-1944
HS 5/869 Conferences: Caserta; Supreme Allied Commander (SAC)’s Meeting with Marshal Tito, 1944
HS 5/870 Directives: AFHQ, GHQ, MEF, HQ SOE, Force 133, 1943-1945
HS 5/871 Finance: sanctions and compensations, 1940-1945
HS 5/872 Subsidy to Serbian peasant party, 1940
HS 5/873 Finance: compensation for widow of Petar Gjordjevic, 1945-1946
HS 5/874 Encouragement of resistance Part 1, 1941
REEL 2
HS 5/875 Encouragement of resistance Part 2, 1941-1942
HS 5/876 Enemy agents, collaborators and suspects, 1942-1943
HS 5/877 Personnel: appointments; reorganisation, 1942-1943
MACMIS mission (HS 5/878-884)
HS 5/878 Fitzroy Maclean's mission to Tito: determination of responsibilities of Brigadier Maclean; directives, 1943-1944
HS 5/879 Brief for Brigadier Maclean, 1943-1944
HS 5/880 ROWENA signals, 1943-1944
HS 5/881 Evacuation of Tito's headquarter to Viz; Yugoslav Prime Minister's visit to Bari (operation TRIUMPH), 1944
REEL 3
HS 5/882 Correspondence with Brigadier Maclean, 1943-1944
HS 5/883 Dummy signals station in Croatia; enemy attack Drvar, 1944
HS 5/884 Functions and responsibilities, 1944
HS 5/885 CRAYON mission (formerly LIVINGSTONE); Italian Slovenia, 1943-1944
HS 5/886 NERONIAN and KIDMORE missions; instructions, 1943
HS 5/887 HACKTHORPE mission (formerly COUNTERFEIT); Macedonia, 1942-1943
HS 5/888 COLLABORATE mission: instructions and reports, 1942
HS 5/889 EXCERPT mission (formerly ALLEGORY): Harbourne Polish party, 1943
HS 5/890 SEIZURE mission: Brigadier Armstrong's mission to Mihailovic, 1943-1944
HS 5/891 DESIRABLE and DISCLAIM missions, 1942
HS 5/892 DISCLAIM: capture of party, 1941-1943
HS 5/893 DISCLAIM: reports, 1941-1945
HS 5/894 HENNA and HYDRA missions: Split and Montenegro; reports, 1941-1943
HS 5/895 HENNA and HYDRA: disappearance of Major Atherton, 1942-1945
REEL 4
HS 5/896 HENNA and HYDRA: agents reports, 1941-1943
HS 5/897 HENNA and HYDRA: interrogations, operational post mortem, 1942-1944
HS 5/898 KNOCKHOLT mission: establishment of bridgehead on Dalmatian coast, 1944
HAVERSACK mission (HS 5/899-903)
HS 5/899 Withdrawal of mission to Mihailovic and situation reports, 1944
HS 5/900 Personnel, periodical summaries and location statements, 1943-1944
HS 5/901 Correspondence and signals, 1943-1944
HS 5/902 Operational withdrawal of missions with Mihailovic, 1944
HS 5/903 Cipher messages Force 133 and 266, 1944
REEL 5
HS 5/904 Operations general: aircraft, communications, broadcasts, infiltration, summaries, 1941-1943
HS 5/905 Operations general: air operations in support of General Mihailovic; broadcasts, 1942
HS 5/906 Operations general: air supplies; BBC broadcasts, teams sent in, 1942
HS 5/907 Operations; air supplies; sorties; BBC broadcasts, 1942-1943
HS 5/908 Operations: air supplies; personnel, 1943
REEL 6
HS 5/909 Operations: air supplies; personnel, 1943
HS 5/910 Air supplies, 1943
HS 5/911 Air supplies, 1943
HS 5/912 Intelligence; policy and activities; reports, 1941 with foreign newspaper cuttings
REEL 7
HS 5/913 Intelligence: general policy and reports, 1942
HS 5/914 Intelligence: policy and activities, 1942-1943 with Yugoslavian newspaper
HS 5/915 Intelligence activities and reports, 1943-1944
HS 5/916 Personnel: recruitment of foreign nationals, 1941-1943
HS 5/917 Wireless operators record sheets, 1941-1942
REEL 8
HS 5/918 Personnel: Canadian Yugoslavs; employment; nominal rolls, 1944-1945
HS 5/919 Planning: reviews and appreciations, 1942-1943
HS 5/920 Planning: reviews and appreciations, 1943-1944
HS 5/921 Planning: reviews and appreciations - March, 1944
REEL 9
HS 5/922 Planning: reviews and appreciations - March - Oct, 1944
HS 5/923 Policy: relations with Mihailovic; directives; reports, 1942-1943
HS 5/924 Policy: relations with Mihailovic; directives; reports, 1943
HS 5/925 Yugoslav policy and planning, 1943
REEL 10
HS 5/926 Policy: reports, 1942-1944
HS 5/927 Policy and planning, 1942-1943
HS 5/928 Politics: military and intelligence activities, 1940-1942
HS 5/929 Military and para-military intelligence and political activities: correspondence and reports, 1942-1943
REEL 11
HS 5/930 Military and para-military intelligence and political activities: correspondence and reports, 1943
HS 5/931
Military intelligence and political activities: reports and correspondence, 1943
HS 5/932
Military intelligence and political activities: reports and correspondence, 1943
HS 5/933
Military, para-military intelligence and political activities: reports and correspondence, 1943-1944
REEL 12
HS 5/934
Military, para-military intelligence and political activities: reports and correspondence, 1944
HS 5/935 Aid to insurgents in Yugoslav rebellion, 1941
HS 5/936 Para-military and political activity, 1942-1943
REEL 13
HS 5/937
Military and para-military intelligence and political activities: correspondence and reports, 1944-1945
HS 5/938
Politics: reports and appreciations including coup d'etat of 24 March 1941, 1938-1944
HS 5/939 Rebellion: reports and problems, 1941-1942
HS 5/940 Politics: reports and appreciations, 1942-1943
HS 5/941
Politics: relations with Yugoslav governing authorities: reports; intercepts, 1942-1943
REEL 14
HS 5/942
Politics: correspondence and reports on various military and political activities, 1942-1943
HS 5/943
Politics: correspondence and reports on various military and political activities, 1943
HS 5/944
Politics: correspondence and reports on various military and political activities, 1943
HS 5/945
Politics: correspondence and reports on various military and political activities, 1943
REEL 15
HS 5/946
Politics: correspondence and reports on various military and political activities, 1943
HS 5/947
Politics: correspondence and reports on various military and political activities, 1944
HS 5/948
Politics: correspondence and reports on various military and political activities, 1944
HS 5/949
Prisoners of war and internees; British officials interned by German authorities, 1941-1945
HS 5/950 Retained by Department under Section 3 (4), 1945
HS 5/951
Propaganda: broadcasting stations; Free Yugoslavia transmissions monitored in Istanbul, 1943
REEL 16
HS 5/952
Propaganda: broadcasting stations; Free Yugoslavia transmissions by Political Warfare Committee, Middle East (PICME), 1943
HS 5/953
Propaganda: broadcasting stations; Free Yugoslavia transmissions by Political Warfare Committee, Middle East (PICME), 1943
HS 5/954
Propaganda: broadcasting stations; texts of Karageorge transmissions, 1943
REEL 17
Resistance groups and partisan forces; relations with Mihailovic (HS 5/955-959)
HS 5/955 Resistance groups and partisan forces; relations with Mihailovic, 1943-1944
HS 5/956 Situation reports, 1943-1944
HS 5/957 Cairo signals log, 1943-1944
HS 5/958 Station reports, 1944-1945
REEL 18
HS 5/959 Interrogations, reports and memoranda, 1943-1944
Resistance groups and partisan forces;
Relations with Mihailovic and Tito (HS 5/960-969)
HS 5/960 Yugoslav resistance groups: Mihailovic/Tito relations, 1943-1944
HS 5/961 Resistance groups and partisan forces: Tito's partisans, 1943-1944
HS 5/962 Resistance groups and partisan forces: FO telegrams and printed papers, 1944-1945
HS 5/963
Resistance groups and partisan forces: Yugoslav army of National Liberation (JANL) intelligence, 1944-1945
HS 5/964
Resistance groups: periodical summaries of partisan and Mihailovic activities, 1943-1944
REEL 19
HS 5/965
SOE reports: death of Frodsham; NERO report of SO2 archives in North West Yugoslavia, 1940-1944
HS 5/966
Establishment of communications with Tito and Mihailovic; reports, minutes and appreciations, 1941-1944
HS 5/967
Communication with Tito and Mihailovic; reports, minutes and appreciations, 1941-1944
HS 5/968 Statistics: exfiltrations, infiltrations and supply, 1943-1947
HS 5/969 Maclean mission: first mission to Tito; copies of telegrams, 1942-1961
http://www.ampltd.co.uk/collections_az/S...ption.aspx
How a Soviet mole united Tito and Churchill
Colin Brown and John Crossland Friday 27 June 19970 comments
Secret reports on one of the most controversial British undercover operations of the Second World War are to be released on Monday, showing that a Soviet spy may have been responsible for the British switching support to Tito's forces in the former Yugoslavia.
The documents, including transcripts of secret wartime signals to London, are being released by the Public Records Office. They will show evidence of the role played by James Klugmann - the Soviet mole who converted the British spy, Donald Maclean, to Communism - in switching British allegiance from a Yugoslav royalist resistance leader called Mihailovich to Tito, at a critical point in the Second World War.
By switching support to Tito's forces, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) helped to force the German retreat, but it cost Mihailovich his life - he was executed after the war as a collaborator - and ensured that the former Yugoslavia remained a Communist state under Tito's control.
SOE spies who fought in the Balkans included the former Tory MP Julian Amery. Other famous names who flit in and out of the tales of SOE derring- do and duplicity in the region included Paddy Leigh Fermor and Major Anthony Quayle, the screen actor.
Rupert Allason, author of spy books under the pen name Nigel West, and a former Tory MP, said the real issue raised by the papers was the reason for the British Government's backing of Tito. Nothing had been known about Tito - Fitzroy Maclean, a British agent, thought he was a woman - and the Government became convinced that Mihailovich was a collaborator with the Germans - something the "Ultra" code intercepts showed to be untrue.
The signals sent by Klugmann, who was an intimate of the traitors Blunt, Philby and Burgess at Cambridge, will for the first time confirm the claim of an agent, quoted by Andrew Boyle in The Climate Of Treason, that Klugmann was principally responsible for the massive wartime sabotage of the Mihailovich supply operation and for keeping from London information about the impressive activities of the Mihailovich forces in the fight against the Germans.
They will be of particular interest to a decoder at Bletchley Park, nerve centre of the government's radio intelligence war, who, while preserving the anonymity of her wartime role, gave additional weight to the theory of Klugmann's secret agenda. "I was in section 3L at GCHQ Bletchley Park with the job of preparing a weekly summary of the Yugoslav situation for Churchill. At the time I wasn't particularly suspicious that our information didn't seem to be acted upon, but have become so since. I now wonder if many of our reports were sent to the section where people like Philby were working," she said.
"Certainly Klugmann seems to have played a more important role than was thought. Two former Communist wartime agents assured me that he did, but they didn't elaborate," she added.
The files, 969 in all, cover the operations of the SOE in Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania; which, with the exception of France, was the most controversial theatre of the sabotage operation launched by Churchill "to set [occupied] Europe ablaze".
Unfortunately the blaze all too frequently singed SOE operatives themselves as they were caught up in internal politics - particularly in Greece and Yugoslavia. While fighting the German and Italian invaders, the Yugoslavs were simultaneously locked in combat with each other. Special Operations Executive (Balkans) operated from Cairo, and was ordered to carry out the policies of Churchill's government, which initially supported Mihailovich's royalist Chetnik forces.
The signals sent to SOE HQ in Baker Street, London, and to Churchill's Cabinet, were based in part on intelligence gleaned from German Ultra code traffic, filtered through Bletchley Park and passed to the only person in SOE Cairo authorised to receive it, Colonel C M (Bolo) Keble.
A further opportunity for slanting the information from Yugoslavia was provided by the influence exerted by John Cairncross, subsequently also unmasked as a Russian agent and named as the Fifth Man, recruited from the same Cambridge background, who in 1943,was working with the Yugoslav section of GCHQ at Bletchley Park.
The concerted efforts of the Cairo office eventually bore fruit when the British government dropped its support for Mihailovich. The Kew files are redolent of the suspicion and duplicity which blighted relations between SOE Cairo and its Foreign Office masters and which threatened to tear the intelligence community in the Balkans apart.
There is evidence of a power struggle which developed over the role of Brigadier Sir Fitzroy Maclean, who was parachuted in as Churchill's personal representative and came to exercise a powerful influence with Tito.
Two months later, Bill Deakin, later Colonel Sir William Deakin, Senior Intelligence Officer in Yugoslavia, rated Klugmann "indispensable ... and giving invaluable service." The file reveals that it was known that Klugmann had used his position to advance Tito's cause.
Овде на крају лепо каже да знали да је клугман унапређибао КОМУНИСТЕ твз партизани.
Ствар што је Клугман био на МИ5 радар још док је живио у Енглеској чак су га пратили кад је био у иностранство.
Чак су МИ6 послали поруку у Кајру да прате клугман, а кад су му дали посао у СОЕ он је морао да имати зазор од безбедности, и оних су слали поруку да му недајте тајне.
У Кајро клугман је почео да ради на Зугословенској сексији Април 1941 године.
То ми све јако смешно за службу ко има корене у болшевичку револуцију.....а у Краљевине Југославији су имали Секција Д ко је пре другог светског рата имла везу са КОМУНИСТЕ, диседентске групе, и генералне 5 колонаша. Чак је учестовала у дивизантске акције.
http://www.marx-memorial-library.org/abo...9-klugmann
Како су га Максисти описалих!
James Klugmann: historian, wartime SOE operative, antifascist, writer, theoretician, founding editor of Marxism Today, avid book collector and communist.
Klugmann was one of the key contributors to the postwar consolidation of Marx Memorial Library as an archive of the working class and communist movement in Britain.
On Thursday 10 December the MML held a panel discussion on Klugmann's legacy with contributions from a number of people who worked with him, both at the MML and elsewhere. Contributions are transcribed below.
MICK COSTELLO
Thank you for inviting me to this gathering, which I look on as a celebration of James Klugmann's outstanding life.
I knew him before I met him, which was in the 1950s, as he was the subject of table talk between my parents, who knew him from his Cambridge days and remembered him, among other things for sharp repartee in conversation with a reactionary tutor at Trinity College, and, something my mother never really forgave him, his absent-minded eating every single one of the biscuits she had bought out of a tight budget and put on the table, hoping they might last. There was not much money in the house.
I came to know him personally when I was a student at Manchester university in the 1950s and then, more thoroughly when I became a full-time worker for the Communist Party from the 1960s onwards, in party schools, at committee meetings at Party headquarters, often staying overnight in is house.
JK was a professional revolutionary, always conscious of the role of imperialism, the labour movement and the socialist camp and the part played in the struggle for socialism in Britain and its Empire. I remember when I went to work full-time for the Party he stressed: “Remember that this is for life.” And that was his own commitment.
His strength lay in his enormous experience, on which he drew as an educator and organiser, very much a leader in the “battle of ideas”, at all times seeking to broaden support for Marx's ideas so as to turn those who might be intellectually attracted into militants and, especially, into revolutionaries.
If I had to write a book on JK that would be the theme and everything else about him, his presence, not excluding his jovial love of schoolboy pranks would be within that context, as I experienced it over the years I had the privilege of knowing him.
He directed his considerable personal qualities to the end of securing revolutionary change and he could convey the ideas of Marx and the policies of the Communist movement equally to students, not least in the pre-war international student anti-fascist movement, to Communist Party members, shop stewards, Christians of all denominations, including their clerics, to Kwame Nkrumah's college students in Ghana, on a Commintern tour to China, in Yugoslavia and beyond. One of the outstanding qualities of his lectures and the discussion he engendered was ever to link his presentation of theory to the burning issues of the times. He was no dogmatist nor was he didactic.
His opening words at a fortnight's school for Communist students near Eastbourne were: “I hope that you will derive greater clarity about a number of issues [PAUSE] and come to question some of the certainties you brought here with you.”
He introduced anecdotes and colourful illustrations, such as telling Ghanaian students that Marxist theory “covered everything “from an erection to the revolution”; his analogy of the bourgeois state not being like a bicycle that could be ridden by just anyone as it existed to defend the capitalist system, and many others that time does not allow to develop today.
He encouraged study and had me go into anarchism when one of the the leaders of the student radicals in Paris in 1968, Daniel Cohn-Bend, proclaimed his belief in the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno. I mentioned I had seen a Soviet film on Makhno and James encouraged me to to study for the Party, who the hell Makhno was, making me something of an expert on his movement. Shortly afterwards he encouraged me to write on Soviet trade unions. Cohn-Bendit, by the way, is now a German Green MEP who supported the Western military bombings and invasions of Bosnia and Afghanistan.
Most people joined and still join the Communist Party attracted more than else by seeing Communists at work, often around an issue that is of particular concern to the new member, be it gender discrimination, pay, pensions, housing, benefit or child entitlements, war and peace, national liberation and what have you, including on intellectual grounds. In James' time, at school and university it was the fight against unemployment and fascism and the attraction of the Soviet Union as it was building socialism and was the only state standing in the way of the fascists. It was not uncommon for members to part from the Party when they found they did not agree with Party policy on a particular issue – such have been the Soviet-German non-aggression pact that came after Munich, the break with Tito's Yugoslavia at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet interventions in Hungary and then in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic... you know the issues, and most writings on the Party continue to single out such moments and projecting the views of those who dropped out preference to recounting the exceptional achievements of the Party since its birth. James had not come to the Party on a single or small number of issues and nothing in his experience, as he saw it, ever led him to question his membership or the foundations of Marx's and Lenin's scientific theory on social development and the attraction of socialism. He was a professional revolutionary and, as such, like a good footballer, kept his eye on the ball.
He was a man who thrived on free debate and when presented with new approaches, such as surfaced widely in the youth and other cultures, and within the Communist movement that arose in the 1960s he was interested in them – the ferment of ideas had always thrilled him. He was, however, never a dilettante and suggestions that have been made and printed that it was intellectual cowardice that drove him not to espouse the ideas loosely referred to as Euro-Communist are false. My experience with James would at best suggest that was a misjudgement although, to be honest, the sources for that allegation are disreputable, coming from people who have long abandoned the fundamental premises and findings on which Marx based his theories. He did not go along with the revisions of Marx as seen, on the one hand in the studies of Roger Garaudy or, on the other, the structuralism of such as Louis Althusser. Indeed it was in Marxism Today that he, as editor, published John Lewis' resounding challenge to the latter's thoughts, the first in the world Communist movement.
He wrote extraordinarily interesting articles, a book on the Marxist-Christian Dialogue and a pamphlet that could do with being read today: The Future of Man and much else.
His volume: From Trotsky to Tito , written to order of the Party leadership after Tito's expulsion from the Cominform, reflected an uncritical acceptance of the Soviet version of the political trials of a number of prominent East European Communist leaders and was later withdrawn by the Party when Khrushchev made it up to Tito in the 1950s.
I'll end as I began, James was a professional revolutionary and a soldier of the Communist Party. I never saw him as a tortured soul.
IRENE BRENNAN
I have been asked to speak on the Christian-Marxist dialogue and James contribution to it.
I have been asked, I expect, because I am a Christian, and an unorthodox Marxist. More importantly, I was also, for several years during the 1970s a member of Marxism Today’s editorial board and a member of the Party from 1970 until the expulsion of the London comrades when I resigned in solidarity.
In the time given, I am not going to speak of the dialogue as such, but of James’ world view and how this might have resonated with Christians.
So I won’t be speaking of how Bloch’s Marxism influenced the theology of hope of Rahner, Metz and Moltman; or of liberation theology, martyred Jesuits and Francis, bishop of Rome; or of Togliatti, Thorez and the ‘open hand’ strategy; of dissident Marxists in Eastern Europe and Marxist Dominicans in Britain and so forth.
Rather I shall be talking primarily of James’ Marxist humanism which led him to help develop the C/M dialogue in this country, a humanism which shone in everything that he did, especially in his work for Marxist education and the development of a Marxist worldview.
This world view is encapsulated in the little booklet that he wrote called The Future of Man later amended for inclusion in the SPCK publication The Christian Hope as The Marxist Hope which is a small miracle of lucidity, brevity and profundity.
James, in the late sixties, looking at what Christians would call ‘the signs of the times’ pointed out that we live in ‘stormy weather’ and that ‘Never has the great contradiction been so clear between what is and what could be’.
That is even more true today. There is growing inequality in wealth, opportunity, living standards etc; humanity is threatened by wars promoted and maintained to increase imperialist domination. In developed Capitalism, we are threatened by the loss of those civil liberties gained by past struggle. Scientific knowledge is prostituted for profit and access to higher education is the pathway to lifelong debt for the majority.
James resolutely called for the application of scientific thinking to human society, to transform social relations and to end the many forms of alienation that hinder human development both social and individual.
In this he made common cause with Marxist Christians, such as the Dominicans Laurence Bright and Herbert McCabe, leaders of the Slant Group, and friends of mine, who also saw the need for a scientific analysis of human society and who had come to an assessment that Marx and Engels had been responsible for the development of such an analysis – but they didn’t think that the last word had been said.
James view, in line with the founders of Marxism, was that the laws of history are laws of trend, of direction, not inevitabilities. In order to bring about change people have to make their own history by working with the potential in given social, cultural and economic conditions. As he put it, Socialism is possible and necessary, but the need for it has to be consciously understood.
In such thinking he was committed then to more than dry scientific analysis; he was living a life which expressed a profound HOPE; a hope which sustains us through darkness, conflicting demands and social ostracism. A hope he shared with left and Marxist Christians. A hope founded on a belief that the unlocking of human potential will lead, eventually, to transformed human beings living in a society where each will be treated according to their needs.
Marx, when he first used this phrase was quoting directly from an account in the Acts of the Apostles of the first Christian community; one consciously communist, practising common ownership, solidarity and commitment to human transformation. A community led by James, founded on the teachings of Jesus of Galilee whose brother James was.
Did the teenage Norman John Klugmann , while at Gresham’s (his boarding school) change his name to James and called himself a communist in order to dialogue with his fellow students who were nominally Christian ? In his gentle but formidable way saying, I am James, the Jew, the Communist, and perhaps I understand the teachings of Jesus of Galilee rather better than you do?
James knew how to ground his thought in the actualities of living but also knew how to release the hope in human beings. He also knew how to bring the mind down from a dry heights of theoretical circling into the living strength of the HEART linking with others in outgoing purposeful and courageous activity to bring about a new society.
He had absolutely no truck with that kind of instrumental thinking which owes more to Machiavelli than Marx. So, towards the end of his life he resolutely opposed the anti-humanist, vulgar materialist, structuralism of Louis Althusser which held many British so-called euro-communists in thrall by its showy jargonizing. He tried to expose its weaknesses through OPEN DEBATE in Marxism Today because James was deeply committed to democratic methods.
He had learnt this commitment during the long struggle against fascism which led to the strategy of the POPULAR FRONT. Unlike some, James really understood the term BROAD DEMOCRATIC ALLIANCE. This shaped his dialogue with groups within and outside of the Party. In this work he was outstandingly courageous from his work in the International Student Movement onwards.
However, no one could drag him into any sort of Party factionalism as opposed to democratic debate; his gentle silence always defeated them (I felt sick when reading Jacques comment that James was timid; what a travesty of the truth!).
But James always recognized a real ally when he met one – that was one of his great strengths. He didn’t have a sectarian bone in his body nor any narrowness in his spirit. So when Christians, following Vatican II started to talk about the option for the poor and the need for solidarity he knew he could dialogue with them. They were looking and sounding more like James his namesake!
Challenging certain misconceptions among Christians, James quoting Marx, Engels and Lenin (Socialism cannot be decreed from above) to do so, argued that democracy was central to socialist transformation. As he said, for this (socialist transformation) to become a reality men and women must be more and more involved in building their society.
He was a notable and admired intellectual but above all he was loved and respected because of his commitment to the movement; he knew that such work must be developed in solidarity with the struggles of ordinary working men and women. James felt that in the struggle to change society, human beings, especially working people, learnt a wisdom that transformed them and released their human potential; that Marxist intellectuals must always learn from such wisdom which had been acquired through suffering, solidarity in struggle, the deepening of hope and of revolutionary experience.
James, like all Marxists, believed that all things develop and change, and cannot be understood except in the context of their change and development, human nature being no exception. James rejected the view, held by some, mostly Protestant Christians that this struggle starts with the individual, acting alone, which he thought a slogan to keep things as they are.
But he also thought crass the view that simply changing social structures changes human beings inevitably. As he put it: men make themselves Marx and Engels saw this very early and very quickly. ….the educator must be educated. ( By the way this view is close to that of progressive Jesuits).
We might say of James that he was a first class educator of himself and others. And, one might add, made us more and more aware of the processes that form both social and individual consciousness. In his emphasis on the education that raises consciousness James completely rejected any sort of vulgar materialism and also found himself close to progressive Christians.
James rigorously opposed all elitism: he was very deeply committed to the view that socialist and communist leaders must always see themselves as part of the movement and not as dominating it (a welcome example – Jeremy Corbyn.) The only time I heard him make a personal criticism of someone in the Party was when he expressed a fear that this person, in a leading position, was seeing himself as above working people a bit of a snob.
Individuality, James held, was not best expressed in Capitalism but in Socialism because in Capitalism the lives of individuals are narrowed, limited, confined. People are reduced, very often, to the status of commodities; this is combatted best by solidarity in struggle; not by powerless individuals standing alone, but through trade union and other forms of progressive group struggle. (These insights are now expressed by regularly by Christians, for example in papal encyclicals…partly as a result of dialogue with socialists and communists.)
James believed that if people live and work for communist ideals and the release of human potential, then they can then learn to accept death because they have learnt that life exists through and beyond their individual existence and that life is given meaning by the long, difficult and multi-faceted struggle for human liberation.
As Christian I believe in the hope of Resurrection and that it shows itself throughout life and not just at death. And Communists experience that hope deeply although most give it another name: Marxist hope. I tell my Christian friends that Communist funerals are deeply hopeful in character because in them the continuity of life and community are affirmed and the contribution of each person to human liberation is recognized and celebrated.
Speaking as someone who owes so much to James’ Marxist humanism, I think he would be glad to join with us with us in the old Yiddisher toast to Life: Lockheim!
GEOFF ANDREWS
I am very pleased to be able to speak here in Marx Memorial Library, a place where I have spent many hours researching and, of course, the Library was very important for James who was himself a phenomenal book collector as well as being great Marxist scholar, intellectual and party tutor. There is fittingly a room dedicated to James himself here. Michael did not tell the story of his collapsing book shelves in North London and of how, when he moved to Clapham, ‘Juggernaughts’, (according to his lodger Pete Carter), arrived with his books.
I have only limited time and I want to focus on James in the 1930s, a crucial decade for understanding James’s politics, his life and his status as an intellectual and, as Mick called him, as a professional revolutionary, a very good description. James was part of a unique generation of Communists defined by their internationalism, by their political commitment and in James’s case with his middle class background the breaking down of barriers with the working class. I should mention here the new book Radiant Illusion by Nicholas Deacon* which was the story of middle class recruits to communism and of course James was one of these.
James came from a well-off Jewish background in Hampstead. His father was a Liberal-voting businessman; his mother’s people were prosperous wine and tea merchants. He went to the Hall Prep School and then on to Gresham’s School. We have not mentioned his sister Kitty who was a great influence on James and who went to a very special independent girls school at the bottom of their street, the Kingsley School, which had been established to teach the daughters of gentlemen and doctors but which had at that time been taken over by a group of women including the first English female professor of philosophy, Susan Stebbing, who introduced Kitty to the ideas of the suffragettes and radical politics. Kitty was always an important influence on her brother. I don’t think many of the women of this generation of Communists have received the attention they deserve. Kitty was four years older than James, preceded him to Cambridge and introduced him to radical politics. His first poem, which can still be found in the school archives, was on the General Strike, written while he was still at the Hall School and published in its magazine in 1926. It seems to mark James’s first step into politics. He edited the school magazine along with his cousin Charles Rosenheim. The school records show him to have been academically always at the top of his class, one of the best students the school ever had.
He went on to Gresham’s School which was recognised at the time by the children of middle classes as very progressive, not permitting caning and with a broad range of subjects. James was at the school at the same time as Roger and Brian Simon, life-long friends, Bernard and Peter Floud and Benjamin Britten. There’s a James Klugmann character in Tony Britten's wonderful docu-drama ‘Peace and Conflict’ about Britten and his journey towards pacifism in the 1930s, a generation with the menace of war always hanging over it.
A key influence at Gresham was this extraordinary tutor, Frank McEachran, very eccentric, nominally teaching French but in practice an understanding of the humanist tradition in European civilisation covering the enlightenment, the revolutions of the nineteenth century and of course Marx – something virtually unknown in schools at that time. McEachran was later the model for Hector in Alan Bennett's The History Boys – and later taught a generation of boys at Shrewsbury, including some later Private Eye contributors For James, McEachran was very influential and especially for his humanism. It was at this point that James developed his commitment to a humanist perspective later exemplified by his pamphlet The Future of Man. He contributed to a debate in 1929-30 at Gresham when he was 17 or 18 where he talks of similar things and is very critical of the way the capitalist economy corrodes culture and the soul of man. It’s already there at that stage. He saw himself as in revolt against the system, calling himself a Communist, though he had not read much of Marx and was not a member of the party. From the debating society minutes it is clear that he was a dominant presence. He was not particularly good at games, was not a prefect, not popular with the school authorities but was intellectually ahead of the game. Other pupils looked up to him and he was already developing his political ideas – and excited by ideas.
He went up to Cambridge the same month that his sister was marrying Maurice Cornforth, the Communist philosopher, and straight into this remarkable student generation. There had been no previous mass student movement and now James played a very significant role in creating one. He was co-leader first with David Haden-Guest and then with John Cornford, both of whom died in Spain. Cornford was three or four years younger and they were a perfect combination in recruiting communists and in organising the student movement. Cornford was impetuous, impatient, intense, an orator, always wanting to combine with the working class groups in the town. James was quieter, a persuasive type who spent hours and hours talking to people winning people for Communism. It was a great team.
1933, the date this Library was founded, was the year James joined the Communist Party, somewhat later than one might think. But we should remember how important parental relations were at that time and the arguments that James was having with his family. This year saw the Communists in Cambridge hold two major peace demonstrations. One was at the armistice parade and the other was to disrupt a military film – and James seems to have impressed both King Street and also the Comintern with his organising abilities. In 1935 he went to work for the World Student Association in Paris, a remarkable time to be in Paris - of the Popular Front in France and the onset of the civil war in Spain.
Previously Willie Gallacher had paid a visit to Cambridge in 1934 which in hindsight was a very important meeting for James. Gallacher was shocked to find students posing as ‘honorary proletarians’, dressing as workers and not taking their studies seriously. Gallacher said No. It was the duty of Communist students to be first rate as students, to become first rate intellectuals. This influenced James a lot. It meant for him he could be both a professional revolutionary and also an intellectual. Indeed when he went to Paris he was nominally on a research degree, partially funded by a Cambridge research grant and partly by funds from his grandmother’s family.
A lot of his contemporaries went on to become academic historians: Victor Kiernan, Christopher Hill and A somewhat later contemporary Eric Hobsbawm. James wanted to become a teacher. But his choice, his dedication, was to the Communist Party
He was of course a remarkable tutor and it is evident throughout his life. It is evident in the boat university he set up on his way to Egypt when he was supposed to be delivering language classes but he was in fact teaching politics to clerks and fitters at the time when the Soviet Union was entering the war. It was evident again in Cairo when he was in SOE and lecturing to exiled Croatian communists and briefing them on their dangerous assignments. He was indispensable to SOE. He was the only one who had met Tito previously and the only one who could communicate with the Communist partisans. He was crucial in persuading the allies to make common cause with them and his rapid rise in SOE was, incidentally, to the horror of MI5. There are fascinating records of correspondence between SOE and MI5, who wanted Klugmann brought back, and SOE who were having none of it.
Basil Davidson in his book on this period SPECIAL OPERATIONS EUROPE talks about James’s lecturing style. You can also hear James lecturing in the sound archive in British Library: James talking to south London communists in 1973. When he died the Morning Star described him as a teacher of genius and this indeed was his great legacy. When I was doing research for the book in this Library I remember listening to a tape of James, I think it only exists here, made by the BBC in 1974 for a programme called ‘It takes all sorts’ in which he is interviewed about his love of books. James was an obsessive book collector but he WAS very insistent that he is not simply a collector of books but a collector of books for a purpose: because book-collecting was part of his commitment to preserve the history of the working class movement. It was part of his wider commitment to the cause. He makes this point again in his contribution to the Lawrence and Wishart book Culture and Crisis in the 1930s in which he describes the 1930s as a ‘decade of commitment’.
SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE, 1940-1946:
SUBVERSION AND SABOTAGE DURING WORLD WAR II
Series Two: SOE Operations in the Balkans
Part 1: Yugoslavia, 1939-1945 (HS 5/868-969)
Introduction
Recent events in the former Yugoslavia have brought much greater attention to this troubled region. The SOE files contain extensive material on the problems of different nationalities, ethnic and political affiliations.
Yugoslavian terrain was particularly suitable for resistance activity and various partisan armies harried the German forces of occupation mercilessly from April 1941 onwards. SOE efforts to support partisan forces in Yugoslavia are documented throughout HS 5/868-969.
Initially SOE support was given to Colonel Draza Mihailvoic who led one of the largest groups of resisters. The SOE mission (MACMIS) determined that support should be switched to Josip Broz, the Croat Labour leader better known as Tito, who was the other major resistance organiser, leading over 10,000 partisans by 1942.
The files are full of local reports compiled by SOE officers, political and strategic assessments, details of operations, propaganda, details of couriers and supply drops. The following topics are well covered:
Dealings with the exiled Yugoslav government.
Initial contacts with Mihailovic and the early encouragement of Yugoslav opposition groups, 1941-1942.
Reorganisation of the Yugoslav section of SOE in 1942.
The debate between SOE and the Foreign Office on spheres of authority in Yugoslavia.
The brief to Fitzroy Maclean for the MACMIS mission, August 1943.
Reports and interrogations on the problems of the HENNA and HYDRA missions.
Details of the HAVERSTOCK mission, attached to Mihailovic, 1943-1944.
Papers on resistance groups and partisan forces, especially relations with Mihailovic and Tito, including correspondence on military and political activities.
The policy debate on switching support from Mihailovic to Tito’s Partisans.
Partisan operations in 1944.
Air supplies.
Planning and Policy Reviews.
Interrogations of alleged enemy collaborators amongst Mihailovic and Chetnik supporters.
By the spring of 1944 the Allies aimed to attack enemy communications, undertake economic sabotage, and cripple industries and sources of raw materials of importance to the enemy. Researchers can assess how successful the Allies were in this policy and examine the post-war repercussions of SOE activity in the region.
Early Policy
British policy towards Yugoslavia was defined by the British Foreign Secretary in April 1941 two days prior to the Axis invasion of the country. Essentially, it was based upon assurances given by the Yugoslav President of the Council that the government of Yugoslavia would stand by the Allies until victory had been achieved. Thereafter, British policy aimed to restore Yugoslav independence, to maintain the unity of Yugoslavia among Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and to sustain this unity or illusion of unity by means of propaganda. For their part, the Yugoslav government, in exile from April 1941 in Athens, then Jerusalem, and finally in London, accepted these aims, but doubts persisted about its willingness or ability to do so, especially, perhaps, in view of the serious internal nationality problems. The most burning of these was the issue of the Croats, and the British government tried to get the Yugoslav government to provide a statement disclaiming any intention to create a Serb dominance and an assurance that all Yugoslavs would, on the cessation of war, be treated equally.
The files contain a good deal of material on SOE attempts to establish effective relations with the exiled Yugoslav government, and the names of the key figures in that government appear repeatedly. To some extent it was successful in this aim, establishing communications via Jovan Djonovic, delegate of the Royal Government of Yugoslavia for propaganda and communications with Yugoslavia. As regards exiled politicians, many were clearly out for their own ends, and at least one of them, Radovic (code name BROTHER), was rumoured to be collaborating with the Germans.
This was a problematic time for SOE, as by August 1941 it had been unable to find a means by which a courier working from Istanbul might be successfully infiltrated and exfiltrated, and efforts to maintain regular contacts with Yugoslav bands themselves proved to be impossible. Prior to the enemy occupation of Yugoslavia and the departure of the Yugoslav government, there was widespread subversive activity in the country undertaken by SOE or by its predecessor, Section D of SIS. Officers were entering the country on a weekly basis with large consignments of explosives both by land and sea, initially building up a strong underground network and, on the enemy occupation of the country, encouraging every form of active opposition. They also supported the Serb Peasant Party and the Slovene underground organizations. The arrival of the German Gestapo forced the immediate departure of the SOE officer in Belgrade, but he was replaced in November 1940. In March 1941 the pro-Axis regime of Prince Paul was overthrown and a month later the Germans invaded.
By August 1941 SOE aimed to organize Partisan forces in order to maintain a certain degree of active resistance to the occupying forces sufficient to cause them real inconvenience. It was also vital to maintain a widespread underground resistance which might raise a general revolt in the future. For this purpose it was necessary to re-establish radio communications with the Partisans and any other opposition movements. In order to maintain the morale of these forces in Yugoslavia, it was recommended that there should be active propaganda including radio broadcasts, distribution of leaflets and oral dissemination through couriers.
Mihailovic and organized resistance
On the enemy occupation of Yugoslavia, Mihailovic, a regular army officer, refused to submit and escaped to the mountains, and it was primarily to his forces that Britain directed her support for several years. An initial contact with him was formed when a submarine carrying a Yugoslav mission, together with an SOE officer, landed on the Dalmatian Coast with a view to gathering information about internal conditions. The officer met up with the forces of Tito – who was not then known – and was instructed to break with him and proceed to Mihailovic where the mission remained until February 1944.
General Mihailovic’s support was chiefly military, but he also had followers among the Serb Agrarian Party, industrialists in Belgrade and elements from the former Patriotic Society based in Montenegro. He was Minister of War in the Yugoslav government and the leader of resistance in Serbia, Montenegro, Hercegovina and the southern part of Bosnia. Besides him there were two other main groups of organized resistance in Yugoslavia. The most important was the Partisans (National Liberation Partisan Detachments) under Tito or Josip Broz, the Croat labour leader who had organized communist cells in Yugoslavia from 1937. By April 1942 there were 10,000 Partisans and this had doubled by April 1943. The other opposition group was an amorphous body of so-called Independent Chetniks, some of them loosely associated with Mihailovic, but not under his control.
By the autumn of 1941 evidence suggested that British aid was being used by Mihailovic to fight the Partisans. By April 1942 the two camps were involved in civil war. Relations with Mihailovic were never particularly easy partly because of his dissatisfaction with the level of supplies dropped to him; partly because of the unsatisfactory nature of Allied propaganda in Yugoslavia; and partly because of constant allegations and counter-allegations about collaboration with the enemy. In Bosnia the Partisans had allied themselves with the Ustashi, the Croat police who were loyal to the puppet government. British efforts to bring pressure to bear on the Partisans by means of their contacts with the Soviet government were undermined by allegations from the Partisans that Mihailovic was himself cooperating with General Nedic and with the occupying forces against the Partisans. By October 1942 it was clear that Mihailovic was abstaining from any action against the enemy which would impair his ability to fight the Partisans. The British Liaison Officer attached to his headquarters stated that while Mihailovic would undertake action against the Ustashi and the Moslems he would not oppose the Axis until a new Allied front was formed in the Balkans. However, Britain continued to support him and planned to increase its representation to his headquarters. On the other hand, as the files reveal, there was from the spring of 1943 an increasing interest in the possibility of diverting support to the Partisans. The strongest proponents of this were senior SOE figures in Cairo who, with their constant access to detailed information on internal Yugoslav affairs, believed that Mihailovic would never devote his efforts wholeheartedly to the defeat of the enemy and that in fact there was strong evidence that he was collaborating with the enemy. The files contain a good deal of material on the policy debates of this time and on assessments of the resources and capabilities of both Mihailovic and the Partisans.
In spite of the misgivings about Mihailovic, it was decided to continue supplies to him on certain conditions. Above all he was to cease cooperation with the Italians and to refrain from fighting the Partisans in Serbian lands except in self-defence. Further, he was to resist influence of near-collaborationists and vested interests; accept directives of GHQ Middle East directed through the SOE staff attached to his forces, and conform to Allied and United Nations strategy. The files record in detail the debates between various SOE officers and between SOE and the Foreign Office about the means by which Mihailovic and his followers might best be brought into line. At the front of HS 5/934 is a 21 page report on the history of SOE in Yugoslavia from early 1941 to June 1944, based on the experiences of Lt Col David Thomas Hudson. On page 8 he states: “Mihailovic emerged as more fanatically anti-Croat, anti-Moslem, anti-Catholic and anti-Communist than he was anti-Axis…”
Tito, the Partisans and MACMIS
The decision to switch resources to the Partisan forces as the main element of resistance to the Axis was occasioned by the routing of Mihailovic’s forces by the Partisans in the aftermath of a German offensive. It was decided to infiltrate a relatively senior officer to Tito’s headquarters, and by September 1943 Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean had arrived there. In December 1943 the Partisans were publicly recognized as an Allied force by Eden, and their recognition by Churchill in February 1944 meant an increase in supplies. At the same point it was decided to withdraw the mission to Mihailovic amidst further recriminations and evidence of collaboration with enemy forces. The change in British strategy occasioned by Maclean’s mission (MACMIS) was of some significance and there is a considerable amount of material on every aspect of it, including preparations, conduct, execution of its functions, and policy papers which analyse in depth the nature of SOE involvement in the country. HS 5/870 and HS 5/879 include various Briefs and Directives setting out instructions to Maclean. There is also material in the files on other missions to Tito’s headquarters, including the infiltration of Bill Deakin, Bill Stuart and of Basil Davidson earlier in 1943.
For his part, Maclean argued in December 1943 that the Partisans would control Yugoslavia after the war irrespective of Allied intentions and that, in view of continuing support for Mihailovic in some quarters, it was pointless to try to split the Partisan movement. To the argument that the Partisans were communists and that they would establish a pro-Soviet regime after the war, Maclean failed to see in the Partisan movement any of the objectionable features of communism elsewhere and the movement had, in any case, provided a unity between Serbs, Croats and Slovenes which had not come from any other source. According to Maclean the future attitude of Yugoslavia depended upon the attitude taken by the Allies during the war and, in his judgement, it would be unwise to alienate the Partisans by supporting Mihailovic and the exiled government. Furthermore, Maclean felt that it was wrong to regard the king as a unifying force, and he recommended the Allies should abstain from any intervention on his behalf.
Some SOE officers considered it possible to wean Tito from communism and direct his loyalties to the king. On the other hand, even if the Partisans could contribute substantially to the war effort at a later stage, the prospect remained of Yugoslavia being united after the war but under the influence or control of the Soviet communists. In view of this possibility it seemed wise to continue some support for Mihailovic, thereby averting a purely communist state, to save at least Old Serbia from communism and restore King Peter there. The difficulty with this strategy, as the files make clear, was that it had proved impossible to mobilize Mihailovic against the Germans.
Initial plans for MACMIS decreed that Maclean was to be seconded to SOE, that he was to command the SOE mission attached to the GOC commanding the Partisan forces, and that he was in the first instance to report to the Head of SOE Cairo. The latter in turn would forward Maclean’s reports to the Middle East Defence Committee. Policy still aimed to support all anti-Axis elements provided they did not attack each other, that collaboration with the Axis stopped, and that this policy accorded with the operational needs of the C-in-C Middle East. Maclean was also to keep HM Ambassador Yugoslavia or the Minister of State informed of his progress.
The principal aim of MACMIS was overtly political rather than military or connected purely with subversion, and as the files reveal this led to serious disagreements and prolonged debate about the proper lines of authority and the means by which Maclean should report. The anxieties of SOE were not helped by Maclean’s alleged disdain for SOE and his apparent preference for reporting direct to the Foreign Office.
His mission was, simply stated, to unite and reconcile the Partisans, Mihailovic and other opposition elements so that Yugoslav unity might be preserved. It was also hoped that the exiled King Peter would return, and he was to be the key figure in any propaganda exercise aimed to create unity. Maclean was also to gather information on the political aspirations and affiliations of the non-Mihailovic groups, to discover the extent of Tito’s authority in the various parts of Yugoslavia and the opinions held by the various nationalities towards King Peter, Mihailovic and the existing Yugoslav government. In the early stages of his mission it was important to establish if Mihailovic was obstructing coordination of military activities and the Allies’ aim of uniting Yugoslavia. Maclean was also to investigate bands who did not follow Mihailovic or the Partisans, and to try and discover the extent of Moscow’s influence.
In terms of military functions Maclean was to train, organize and arrange for the equipment of all resistance movements other than those of Mihailovic and to plan short-term and long-term operations to fit in with Allied invasion plans or for a general rising. The military activities of these resistance movements were to be coordinated by SOE Cairo on behalf of the C-in-C Middle East (or AFHQ) with those of Mihailovic’s forces.
Debate persisted about whether or not Yugoslavia and Maclean’s mission were legitimate concerns of SOE. Some senior SOE officers felt that their only interest in Yugoslavia was that it bordered with Austria, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, and was therefore a suitable springboard for operations behind enemy lines in those countries. However, it was an essential aim of the mission to re-establish forward bases for penetration into those countries, and SOE regarded Maclean’s mission as vital in boosting relations with Tito. Furthermore, if this was not done, the Russian mission at Tito’s headquarters would capitalize on the situation and assert their ascendancy.
Hudson’s report in HS 5/934 provides the following analysis of events: “No fewer than six major offensives were launched at various times against the Partisans by the combined might of the Axis. These reached a bloody climax in the Montenegrin campaign of summer 1943, when the main body of Tito’s forces came near to being encircled and wiped out by a force including, besides seven German and four Italian divisions, Bulgarian, Ustasi and Domobran troops together with Mihailovic’s Chetniks, backed by strong artillery and air support. The attack failed; and the Partisans emerged from the battle stronger and more confident than ever. The collapse of Italy swung the balance further against Germany. The joint Axis strength fell: the Partisans, with masses of Italian booty, rose to a greater height of power.”
Due to the conditions under which Tito conducted operations in Yugoslavia, early in 1944 it was agreed that he was to be in overall charge of them, and the Allies were to confine themselves to operations connected with the delivery of supplies by sea and air, to Naval operations in the Adriatic and supporting air operations, to the provision of light ground forces for small amphibious operations and to assisting in the defence of key bases. Debate about Maclean’s status continued well into 1944. His mission was renamed the Allied Military Mission’ (AMM) and became an official political military mission to Tito’s forces, and was therefore no longer an SOE Field Operational Unit. While, therefore, SOE was to continue sending supplies to Tito and might still have a small Yugoslav section for clandestine operations and an officer attached to AMM, it would not control the mission itself. This took account of the fact that the Royal Yugoslav Government had reached an agreement with Tito whereby the former recognized Tito’s position as the head of Internal Affairs in Yugoslavia and would endeavour to support Tito outside the country and with the UN. Maclean, as the representative of the Prime Minister and Supreme Allied Commander with Tito, was to provide liaison between Tito and SAC, the OC Balkan Air Force and all other British military or civil authorities. He was also to make recommendations to the AOC Balkan Air Force after consultation with Tito for Allied support of all kinds to the Partisans.
The files also contain detailed information on the nature of general strategic and military objectives in Yugoslavia, including specific attacks on enemy communications, sabotage and operations directed against industries and sources of raw materials of importance to the Germans. The most immediate tasks in the spring of 1944 were to build up the Partisans by dropping further supplies, the establishment of a mission to cover lines of communications, and attacking vital enemy lines of communications. These efforts successfully pinned down numerous German units which otherwise could have been deployed elsewhere.
By mid 1944 a British policy directive stated that: “every encouragement will be given to the Partisans to build up their forces in Serbia... to do all possible to build up Partisan forces behind the line of the Sava so that, in the event of a German withdrawal behind that line, the Partisans will be in a position to carry out extensive guerrilla activity in the rear of the enemy….” Maclean now commanded twenty-nine separate missions to Tito. By this time Allied commitments to Tito had outstripped the resources of SOE. This was finally acknowledged on 15 June 1944 when SOE’s commitments in Yugoslavia were formally transferred to AFHQ, Middle East.
ublisher's Note - Part 2
Part 2 provides the general files on the Balkans (with much on Anglo-American and Anglo-Soviet relations in the region); together with the files for Bulgaria (where SOE concentrated on the trying to win over the Bulgarian army); and the Danube (a busy operational area with much action against Axis shipping).
There is much work for scholars to do in this area. SOE activities in the Balkans remain under-researched and many questions still need to be properly assessed. How much did SOE assist the Partisans? How much did they hinder the German war effort? How difficult were the choices between the rival groups? Were SOE and the Allies right to step aside at the end of the war? Did they have a choice? How did these war-time alliances affect the post-war situation?
Policy, planning and the organisation of SOE activities is covered in the files on Cairo HQ, Istanbul HQ and Bari HQ, along with material on OSS/SOE co-ordination in the Balkans. Daily situation and progress reports for SOE in the Balkans, July 1943-October 1944, are provided in HS 5/157-159. There is also good material on propaganda, discussions with the Foreign Office, SOE/Soviet NKVD relations, operational orders and assessments of the efficiency of various resistance movements and partisan forces.
Bulgaria was regarded by the Allies as of considerable strategic importance in their efforts to contain German expansion towards the Middle East. It was perceived that the Bulgarian people did not support the Axis power wholeheartedly. However, economic conditions were less severe than in other parts of Europe and the Bulgarian police were experienced in dealing with disorder. This led the Foreign Office to argue that it would be extremely difficult for SOE to inspire a general revolt of the people and army against the pro-Axis regime of King Boris. A better policy would be to try to win over elements within the Bulgarian army. This process is documented in HS 5/173-194.
Initial operations to contact the main political opposition groups, such as the Left Agrarians, the Protogerovists and the Military League, failed to bear fruit. The files contain much information on Todoroff, a Bulgarian exile and de facto leader of the Agrarian Party between 1923 and 1938, and Dimitrov (agent JOHN). SOE found that these agents and other Bulgarians attempted to exploit perceived differences between the United States and Britain and between these powers and the Soviet Union over Bulgaria. The files also give details on the fate of the MULLIGATAWNY and CLARIDGES mission. The death of King Boris, the growth of partisan forces and the development of the OF militia revitalised SOE operations in Bulgaria in the final two years of the war. The files reveal the difficulties and complexities faced in co-ordinating missions in this region.
British military activities in the Danube commenced in 1939. The main aim was to obtain control of vessels in order to deprive the Axis of river tonnage and the ability to transport Romanian oil, grain, minerals and other vital commodities to and from Germany. The few surviving SOE files for this theatre (HS 5/195-212) provide important details on SOE work. Danube sabotage, the pilot enticement scheme, liaison with Soviet forces, subversion of river pilots and the use of propaganda are all well covered.
SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXECUTIVE, 1940-1946:
SUBVERSION AND SABOTAGE DURING WORLD WAR II
Series Two: SOE Operations in the Balkans
Part 1: Yugoslavia, 1939-19445
Part 2: The Balkans, 1940-1946, Bulgaria, 1940-1958 and the Danube, 1940-1957
Contents of Reels - Part 1
Part 1: Yugoslavia, 1939-1945 (HS 5/868-969)
REEL 1
HS 5/868 Conferences: Alexandria, 1943-1944
HS 5/869 Conferences: Caserta; Supreme Allied Commander (SAC)’s Meeting with Marshal Tito, 1944
HS 5/870 Directives: AFHQ, GHQ, MEF, HQ SOE, Force 133, 1943-1945
HS 5/871 Finance: sanctions and compensations, 1940-1945
HS 5/872 Subsidy to Serbian peasant party, 1940
HS 5/873 Finance: compensation for widow of Petar Gjordjevic, 1945-1946
HS 5/874 Encouragement of resistance Part 1, 1941
REEL 2
HS 5/875 Encouragement of resistance Part 2, 1941-1942
HS 5/876 Enemy agents, collaborators and suspects, 1942-1943
HS 5/877 Personnel: appointments; reorganisation, 1942-1943
MACMIS mission (HS 5/878-884)
HS 5/878 Fitzroy Maclean's mission to Tito: determination of responsibilities of Brigadier Maclean; directives, 1943-1944
HS 5/879 Brief for Brigadier Maclean, 1943-1944
HS 5/880 ROWENA signals, 1943-1944
HS 5/881 Evacuation of Tito's headquarter to Viz; Yugoslav Prime Minister's visit to Bari (operation TRIUMPH), 1944
REEL 3
HS 5/882 Correspondence with Brigadier Maclean, 1943-1944
HS 5/883 Dummy signals station in Croatia; enemy attack Drvar, 1944
HS 5/884 Functions and responsibilities, 1944
HS 5/885 CRAYON mission (formerly LIVINGSTONE); Italian Slovenia, 1943-1944
HS 5/886 NERONIAN and KIDMORE missions; instructions, 1943
HS 5/887 HACKTHORPE mission (formerly COUNTERFEIT); Macedonia, 1942-1943
HS 5/888 COLLABORATE mission: instructions and reports, 1942
HS 5/889 EXCERPT mission (formerly ALLEGORY): Harbourne Polish party, 1943
HS 5/890 SEIZURE mission: Brigadier Armstrong's mission to Mihailovic, 1943-1944
HS 5/891 DESIRABLE and DISCLAIM missions, 1942
HS 5/892 DISCLAIM: capture of party, 1941-1943
HS 5/893 DISCLAIM: reports, 1941-1945
HS 5/894 HENNA and HYDRA missions: Split and Montenegro; reports, 1941-1943
HS 5/895 HENNA and HYDRA: disappearance of Major Atherton, 1942-1945
REEL 4
HS 5/896 HENNA and HYDRA: agents reports, 1941-1943
HS 5/897 HENNA and HYDRA: interrogations, operational post mortem, 1942-1944
HS 5/898 KNOCKHOLT mission: establishment of bridgehead on Dalmatian coast, 1944
HAVERSACK mission (HS 5/899-903)
HS 5/899 Withdrawal of mission to Mihailovic and situation reports, 1944
HS 5/900 Personnel, periodical summaries and location statements, 1943-1944
HS 5/901 Correspondence and signals, 1943-1944
HS 5/902 Operational withdrawal of missions with Mihailovic, 1944
HS 5/903 Cipher messages Force 133 and 266, 1944
REEL 5
HS 5/904 Operations general: aircraft, communications, broadcasts, infiltration, summaries, 1941-1943
HS 5/905 Operations general: air operations in support of General Mihailovic; broadcasts, 1942
HS 5/906 Operations general: air supplies; BBC broadcasts, teams sent in, 1942
HS 5/907 Operations; air supplies; sorties; BBC broadcasts, 1942-1943
HS 5/908 Operations: air supplies; personnel, 1943
REEL 6
HS 5/909 Operations: air supplies; personnel, 1943
HS 5/910 Air supplies, 1943
HS 5/911 Air supplies, 1943
HS 5/912 Intelligence; policy and activities; reports, 1941 with foreign newspaper cuttings
REEL 7
HS 5/913 Intelligence: general policy and reports, 1942
HS 5/914 Intelligence: policy and activities, 1942-1943 with Yugoslavian newspaper
HS 5/915 Intelligence activities and reports, 1943-1944
HS 5/916 Personnel: recruitment of foreign nationals, 1941-1943
HS 5/917 Wireless operators record sheets, 1941-1942
REEL 8
HS 5/918 Personnel: Canadian Yugoslavs; employment; nominal rolls, 1944-1945
HS 5/919 Planning: reviews and appreciations, 1942-1943
HS 5/920 Planning: reviews and appreciations, 1943-1944
HS 5/921 Planning: reviews and appreciations - March, 1944
REEL 9
HS 5/922 Planning: reviews and appreciations - March - Oct, 1944
HS 5/923 Policy: relations with Mihailovic; directives; reports, 1942-1943
HS 5/924 Policy: relations with Mihailovic; directives; reports, 1943
HS 5/925 Yugoslav policy and planning, 1943
REEL 10
HS 5/926 Policy: reports, 1942-1944
HS 5/927 Policy and planning, 1942-1943
HS 5/928 Politics: military and intelligence activities, 1940-1942
HS 5/929 Military and para-military intelligence and political activities: correspondence and reports, 1942-1943
REEL 11
HS 5/930 Military and para-military intelligence and political activities: correspondence and reports, 1943
HS 5/931
Military intelligence and political activities: reports and correspondence, 1943
HS 5/932
Military intelligence and political activities: reports and correspondence, 1943
HS 5/933
Military, para-military intelligence and political activities: reports and correspondence, 1943-1944
REEL 12
HS 5/934
Military, para-military intelligence and political activities: reports and correspondence, 1944
HS 5/935 Aid to insurgents in Yugoslav rebellion, 1941
HS 5/936 Para-military and political activity, 1942-1943
REEL 13
HS 5/937
Military and para-military intelligence and political activities: correspondence and reports, 1944-1945
HS 5/938
Politics: reports and appreciations including coup d'etat of 24 March 1941, 1938-1944
HS 5/939 Rebellion: reports and problems, 1941-1942
HS 5/940 Politics: reports and appreciations, 1942-1943
HS 5/941
Politics: relations with Yugoslav governing authorities: reports; intercepts, 1942-1943
REEL 14
HS 5/942
Politics: correspondence and reports on various military and political activities, 1942-1943
HS 5/943
Politics: correspondence and reports on various military and political activities, 1943
HS 5/944
Politics: correspondence and reports on various military and political activities, 1943
HS 5/945
Politics: correspondence and reports on various military and political activities, 1943
REEL 15
HS 5/946
Politics: correspondence and reports on various military and political activities, 1943
HS 5/947
Politics: correspondence and reports on various military and political activities, 1944
HS 5/948
Politics: correspondence and reports on various military and political activities, 1944
HS 5/949
Prisoners of war and internees; British officials interned by German authorities, 1941-1945
HS 5/950 Retained by Department under Section 3 (4), 1945
HS 5/951
Propaganda: broadcasting stations; Free Yugoslavia transmissions monitored in Istanbul, 1943
REEL 16
HS 5/952
Propaganda: broadcasting stations; Free Yugoslavia transmissions by Political Warfare Committee, Middle East (PICME), 1943
HS 5/953
Propaganda: broadcasting stations; Free Yugoslavia transmissions by Political Warfare Committee, Middle East (PICME), 1943
HS 5/954
Propaganda: broadcasting stations; texts of Karageorge transmissions, 1943
REEL 17
Resistance groups and partisan forces; relations with Mihailovic (HS 5/955-959)
HS 5/955 Resistance groups and partisan forces; relations with Mihailovic, 1943-1944
HS 5/956 Situation reports, 1943-1944
HS 5/957 Cairo signals log, 1943-1944
HS 5/958 Station reports, 1944-1945
REEL 18
HS 5/959 Interrogations, reports and memoranda, 1943-1944
Resistance groups and partisan forces;
Relations with Mihailovic and Tito (HS 5/960-969)
HS 5/960 Yugoslav resistance groups: Mihailovic/Tito relations, 1943-1944
HS 5/961 Resistance groups and partisan forces: Tito's partisans, 1943-1944
HS 5/962 Resistance groups and partisan forces: FO telegrams and printed papers, 1944-1945
HS 5/963
Resistance groups and partisan forces: Yugoslav army of National Liberation (JANL) intelligence, 1944-1945
HS 5/964
Resistance groups: periodical summaries of partisan and Mihailovic activities, 1943-1944
REEL 19
HS 5/965
SOE reports: death of Frodsham; NERO report of SO2 archives in North West Yugoslavia, 1940-1944
HS 5/966
Establishment of communications with Tito and Mihailovic; reports, minutes and appreciations, 1941-1944
HS 5/967
Communication with Tito and Mihailovic; reports, minutes and appreciations, 1941-1944
HS 5/968 Statistics: exfiltrations, infiltrations and supply, 1943-1947
HS 5/969 Maclean mission: first mission to Tito; copies of telegrams, 1942-1961
http://www.ampltd.co.uk/collections_az/S...ption.aspx
How a Soviet mole united Tito and Churchill
Colin Brown and John Crossland Friday 27 June 19970 comments
Secret reports on one of the most controversial British undercover operations of the Second World War are to be released on Monday, showing that a Soviet spy may have been responsible for the British switching support to Tito's forces in the former Yugoslavia.
The documents, including transcripts of secret wartime signals to London, are being released by the Public Records Office. They will show evidence of the role played by James Klugmann - the Soviet mole who converted the British spy, Donald Maclean, to Communism - in switching British allegiance from a Yugoslav royalist resistance leader called Mihailovich to Tito, at a critical point in the Second World War.
By switching support to Tito's forces, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) helped to force the German retreat, but it cost Mihailovich his life - he was executed after the war as a collaborator - and ensured that the former Yugoslavia remained a Communist state under Tito's control.
SOE spies who fought in the Balkans included the former Tory MP Julian Amery. Other famous names who flit in and out of the tales of SOE derring- do and duplicity in the region included Paddy Leigh Fermor and Major Anthony Quayle, the screen actor.
Rupert Allason, author of spy books under the pen name Nigel West, and a former Tory MP, said the real issue raised by the papers was the reason for the British Government's backing of Tito. Nothing had been known about Tito - Fitzroy Maclean, a British agent, thought he was a woman - and the Government became convinced that Mihailovich was a collaborator with the Germans - something the "Ultra" code intercepts showed to be untrue.
The signals sent by Klugmann, who was an intimate of the traitors Blunt, Philby and Burgess at Cambridge, will for the first time confirm the claim of an agent, quoted by Andrew Boyle in The Climate Of Treason, that Klugmann was principally responsible for the massive wartime sabotage of the Mihailovich supply operation and for keeping from London information about the impressive activities of the Mihailovich forces in the fight against the Germans.
They will be of particular interest to a decoder at Bletchley Park, nerve centre of the government's radio intelligence war, who, while preserving the anonymity of her wartime role, gave additional weight to the theory of Klugmann's secret agenda. "I was in section 3L at GCHQ Bletchley Park with the job of preparing a weekly summary of the Yugoslav situation for Churchill. At the time I wasn't particularly suspicious that our information didn't seem to be acted upon, but have become so since. I now wonder if many of our reports were sent to the section where people like Philby were working," she said.
"Certainly Klugmann seems to have played a more important role than was thought. Two former Communist wartime agents assured me that he did, but they didn't elaborate," she added.
The files, 969 in all, cover the operations of the SOE in Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania; which, with the exception of France, was the most controversial theatre of the sabotage operation launched by Churchill "to set [occupied] Europe ablaze".
Unfortunately the blaze all too frequently singed SOE operatives themselves as they were caught up in internal politics - particularly in Greece and Yugoslavia. While fighting the German and Italian invaders, the Yugoslavs were simultaneously locked in combat with each other. Special Operations Executive (Balkans) operated from Cairo, and was ordered to carry out the policies of Churchill's government, which initially supported Mihailovich's royalist Chetnik forces.
The signals sent to SOE HQ in Baker Street, London, and to Churchill's Cabinet, were based in part on intelligence gleaned from German Ultra code traffic, filtered through Bletchley Park and passed to the only person in SOE Cairo authorised to receive it, Colonel C M (Bolo) Keble.
A further opportunity for slanting the information from Yugoslavia was provided by the influence exerted by John Cairncross, subsequently also unmasked as a Russian agent and named as the Fifth Man, recruited from the same Cambridge background, who in 1943,was working with the Yugoslav section of GCHQ at Bletchley Park.
The concerted efforts of the Cairo office eventually bore fruit when the British government dropped its support for Mihailovich. The Kew files are redolent of the suspicion and duplicity which blighted relations between SOE Cairo and its Foreign Office masters and which threatened to tear the intelligence community in the Balkans apart.
There is evidence of a power struggle which developed over the role of Brigadier Sir Fitzroy Maclean, who was parachuted in as Churchill's personal representative and came to exercise a powerful influence with Tito.
Two months later, Bill Deakin, later Colonel Sir William Deakin, Senior Intelligence Officer in Yugoslavia, rated Klugmann "indispensable ... and giving invaluable service." The file reveals that it was known that Klugmann had used his position to advance Tito's cause.
Овде на крају лепо каже да знали да је клугман унапређибао КОМУНИСТЕ твз партизани.
Ствар што је Клугман био на МИ5 радар још док је живио у Енглеској чак су га пратили кад је био у иностранство.
Чак су МИ6 послали поруку у Кајру да прате клугман, а кад су му дали посао у СОЕ он је морао да имати зазор од безбедности, и оних су слали поруку да му недајте тајне.
У Кајро клугман је почео да ради на Зугословенској сексији Април 1941 године.
То ми све јако смешно за службу ко има корене у болшевичку револуцију.....а у Краљевине Југославији су имали Секција Д ко је пре другог светског рата имла везу са КОМУНИСТЕ, диседентске групе, и генералне 5 колонаша. Чак је учестовала у дивизантске акције.
http://www.marx-memorial-library.org/abo...9-klugmann
Како су га Максисти описалих!
James Klugmann: historian, wartime SOE operative, antifascist, writer, theoretician, founding editor of Marxism Today, avid book collector and communist.
Klugmann was one of the key contributors to the postwar consolidation of Marx Memorial Library as an archive of the working class and communist movement in Britain.
On Thursday 10 December the MML held a panel discussion on Klugmann's legacy with contributions from a number of people who worked with him, both at the MML and elsewhere. Contributions are transcribed below.
MICK COSTELLO
Thank you for inviting me to this gathering, which I look on as a celebration of James Klugmann's outstanding life.
I knew him before I met him, which was in the 1950s, as he was the subject of table talk between my parents, who knew him from his Cambridge days and remembered him, among other things for sharp repartee in conversation with a reactionary tutor at Trinity College, and, something my mother never really forgave him, his absent-minded eating every single one of the biscuits she had bought out of a tight budget and put on the table, hoping they might last. There was not much money in the house.
I came to know him personally when I was a student at Manchester university in the 1950s and then, more thoroughly when I became a full-time worker for the Communist Party from the 1960s onwards, in party schools, at committee meetings at Party headquarters, often staying overnight in is house.
JK was a professional revolutionary, always conscious of the role of imperialism, the labour movement and the socialist camp and the part played in the struggle for socialism in Britain and its Empire. I remember when I went to work full-time for the Party he stressed: “Remember that this is for life.” And that was his own commitment.
His strength lay in his enormous experience, on which he drew as an educator and organiser, very much a leader in the “battle of ideas”, at all times seeking to broaden support for Marx's ideas so as to turn those who might be intellectually attracted into militants and, especially, into revolutionaries.
If I had to write a book on JK that would be the theme and everything else about him, his presence, not excluding his jovial love of schoolboy pranks would be within that context, as I experienced it over the years I had the privilege of knowing him.
He directed his considerable personal qualities to the end of securing revolutionary change and he could convey the ideas of Marx and the policies of the Communist movement equally to students, not least in the pre-war international student anti-fascist movement, to Communist Party members, shop stewards, Christians of all denominations, including their clerics, to Kwame Nkrumah's college students in Ghana, on a Commintern tour to China, in Yugoslavia and beyond. One of the outstanding qualities of his lectures and the discussion he engendered was ever to link his presentation of theory to the burning issues of the times. He was no dogmatist nor was he didactic.
His opening words at a fortnight's school for Communist students near Eastbourne were: “I hope that you will derive greater clarity about a number of issues [PAUSE] and come to question some of the certainties you brought here with you.”
He introduced anecdotes and colourful illustrations, such as telling Ghanaian students that Marxist theory “covered everything “from an erection to the revolution”; his analogy of the bourgeois state not being like a bicycle that could be ridden by just anyone as it existed to defend the capitalist system, and many others that time does not allow to develop today.
He encouraged study and had me go into anarchism when one of the the leaders of the student radicals in Paris in 1968, Daniel Cohn-Bend, proclaimed his belief in the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno. I mentioned I had seen a Soviet film on Makhno and James encouraged me to to study for the Party, who the hell Makhno was, making me something of an expert on his movement. Shortly afterwards he encouraged me to write on Soviet trade unions. Cohn-Bendit, by the way, is now a German Green MEP who supported the Western military bombings and invasions of Bosnia and Afghanistan.
Most people joined and still join the Communist Party attracted more than else by seeing Communists at work, often around an issue that is of particular concern to the new member, be it gender discrimination, pay, pensions, housing, benefit or child entitlements, war and peace, national liberation and what have you, including on intellectual grounds. In James' time, at school and university it was the fight against unemployment and fascism and the attraction of the Soviet Union as it was building socialism and was the only state standing in the way of the fascists. It was not uncommon for members to part from the Party when they found they did not agree with Party policy on a particular issue – such have been the Soviet-German non-aggression pact that came after Munich, the break with Tito's Yugoslavia at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet interventions in Hungary and then in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic... you know the issues, and most writings on the Party continue to single out such moments and projecting the views of those who dropped out preference to recounting the exceptional achievements of the Party since its birth. James had not come to the Party on a single or small number of issues and nothing in his experience, as he saw it, ever led him to question his membership or the foundations of Marx's and Lenin's scientific theory on social development and the attraction of socialism. He was a professional revolutionary and, as such, like a good footballer, kept his eye on the ball.
He was a man who thrived on free debate and when presented with new approaches, such as surfaced widely in the youth and other cultures, and within the Communist movement that arose in the 1960s he was interested in them – the ferment of ideas had always thrilled him. He was, however, never a dilettante and suggestions that have been made and printed that it was intellectual cowardice that drove him not to espouse the ideas loosely referred to as Euro-Communist are false. My experience with James would at best suggest that was a misjudgement although, to be honest, the sources for that allegation are disreputable, coming from people who have long abandoned the fundamental premises and findings on which Marx based his theories. He did not go along with the revisions of Marx as seen, on the one hand in the studies of Roger Garaudy or, on the other, the structuralism of such as Louis Althusser. Indeed it was in Marxism Today that he, as editor, published John Lewis' resounding challenge to the latter's thoughts, the first in the world Communist movement.
He wrote extraordinarily interesting articles, a book on the Marxist-Christian Dialogue and a pamphlet that could do with being read today: The Future of Man and much else.
His volume: From Trotsky to Tito , written to order of the Party leadership after Tito's expulsion from the Cominform, reflected an uncritical acceptance of the Soviet version of the political trials of a number of prominent East European Communist leaders and was later withdrawn by the Party when Khrushchev made it up to Tito in the 1950s.
I'll end as I began, James was a professional revolutionary and a soldier of the Communist Party. I never saw him as a tortured soul.
IRENE BRENNAN
I have been asked to speak on the Christian-Marxist dialogue and James contribution to it.
I have been asked, I expect, because I am a Christian, and an unorthodox Marxist. More importantly, I was also, for several years during the 1970s a member of Marxism Today’s editorial board and a member of the Party from 1970 until the expulsion of the London comrades when I resigned in solidarity.
In the time given, I am not going to speak of the dialogue as such, but of James’ world view and how this might have resonated with Christians.
So I won’t be speaking of how Bloch’s Marxism influenced the theology of hope of Rahner, Metz and Moltman; or of liberation theology, martyred Jesuits and Francis, bishop of Rome; or of Togliatti, Thorez and the ‘open hand’ strategy; of dissident Marxists in Eastern Europe and Marxist Dominicans in Britain and so forth.
Rather I shall be talking primarily of James’ Marxist humanism which led him to help develop the C/M dialogue in this country, a humanism which shone in everything that he did, especially in his work for Marxist education and the development of a Marxist worldview.
This world view is encapsulated in the little booklet that he wrote called The Future of Man later amended for inclusion in the SPCK publication The Christian Hope as The Marxist Hope which is a small miracle of lucidity, brevity and profundity.
James, in the late sixties, looking at what Christians would call ‘the signs of the times’ pointed out that we live in ‘stormy weather’ and that ‘Never has the great contradiction been so clear between what is and what could be’.
That is even more true today. There is growing inequality in wealth, opportunity, living standards etc; humanity is threatened by wars promoted and maintained to increase imperialist domination. In developed Capitalism, we are threatened by the loss of those civil liberties gained by past struggle. Scientific knowledge is prostituted for profit and access to higher education is the pathway to lifelong debt for the majority.
James resolutely called for the application of scientific thinking to human society, to transform social relations and to end the many forms of alienation that hinder human development both social and individual.
In this he made common cause with Marxist Christians, such as the Dominicans Laurence Bright and Herbert McCabe, leaders of the Slant Group, and friends of mine, who also saw the need for a scientific analysis of human society and who had come to an assessment that Marx and Engels had been responsible for the development of such an analysis – but they didn’t think that the last word had been said.
James view, in line with the founders of Marxism, was that the laws of history are laws of trend, of direction, not inevitabilities. In order to bring about change people have to make their own history by working with the potential in given social, cultural and economic conditions. As he put it, Socialism is possible and necessary, but the need for it has to be consciously understood.
In such thinking he was committed then to more than dry scientific analysis; he was living a life which expressed a profound HOPE; a hope which sustains us through darkness, conflicting demands and social ostracism. A hope he shared with left and Marxist Christians. A hope founded on a belief that the unlocking of human potential will lead, eventually, to transformed human beings living in a society where each will be treated according to their needs.
Marx, when he first used this phrase was quoting directly from an account in the Acts of the Apostles of the first Christian community; one consciously communist, practising common ownership, solidarity and commitment to human transformation. A community led by James, founded on the teachings of Jesus of Galilee whose brother James was.
Did the teenage Norman John Klugmann , while at Gresham’s (his boarding school) change his name to James and called himself a communist in order to dialogue with his fellow students who were nominally Christian ? In his gentle but formidable way saying, I am James, the Jew, the Communist, and perhaps I understand the teachings of Jesus of Galilee rather better than you do?
James knew how to ground his thought in the actualities of living but also knew how to release the hope in human beings. He also knew how to bring the mind down from a dry heights of theoretical circling into the living strength of the HEART linking with others in outgoing purposeful and courageous activity to bring about a new society.
He had absolutely no truck with that kind of instrumental thinking which owes more to Machiavelli than Marx. So, towards the end of his life he resolutely opposed the anti-humanist, vulgar materialist, structuralism of Louis Althusser which held many British so-called euro-communists in thrall by its showy jargonizing. He tried to expose its weaknesses through OPEN DEBATE in Marxism Today because James was deeply committed to democratic methods.
He had learnt this commitment during the long struggle against fascism which led to the strategy of the POPULAR FRONT. Unlike some, James really understood the term BROAD DEMOCRATIC ALLIANCE. This shaped his dialogue with groups within and outside of the Party. In this work he was outstandingly courageous from his work in the International Student Movement onwards.
However, no one could drag him into any sort of Party factionalism as opposed to democratic debate; his gentle silence always defeated them (I felt sick when reading Jacques comment that James was timid; what a travesty of the truth!).
But James always recognized a real ally when he met one – that was one of his great strengths. He didn’t have a sectarian bone in his body nor any narrowness in his spirit. So when Christians, following Vatican II started to talk about the option for the poor and the need for solidarity he knew he could dialogue with them. They were looking and sounding more like James his namesake!
Challenging certain misconceptions among Christians, James quoting Marx, Engels and Lenin (Socialism cannot be decreed from above) to do so, argued that democracy was central to socialist transformation. As he said, for this (socialist transformation) to become a reality men and women must be more and more involved in building their society.
He was a notable and admired intellectual but above all he was loved and respected because of his commitment to the movement; he knew that such work must be developed in solidarity with the struggles of ordinary working men and women. James felt that in the struggle to change society, human beings, especially working people, learnt a wisdom that transformed them and released their human potential; that Marxist intellectuals must always learn from such wisdom which had been acquired through suffering, solidarity in struggle, the deepening of hope and of revolutionary experience.
James, like all Marxists, believed that all things develop and change, and cannot be understood except in the context of their change and development, human nature being no exception. James rejected the view, held by some, mostly Protestant Christians that this struggle starts with the individual, acting alone, which he thought a slogan to keep things as they are.
But he also thought crass the view that simply changing social structures changes human beings inevitably. As he put it: men make themselves Marx and Engels saw this very early and very quickly. ….the educator must be educated. ( By the way this view is close to that of progressive Jesuits).
We might say of James that he was a first class educator of himself and others. And, one might add, made us more and more aware of the processes that form both social and individual consciousness. In his emphasis on the education that raises consciousness James completely rejected any sort of vulgar materialism and also found himself close to progressive Christians.
James rigorously opposed all elitism: he was very deeply committed to the view that socialist and communist leaders must always see themselves as part of the movement and not as dominating it (a welcome example – Jeremy Corbyn.) The only time I heard him make a personal criticism of someone in the Party was when he expressed a fear that this person, in a leading position, was seeing himself as above working people a bit of a snob.
Individuality, James held, was not best expressed in Capitalism but in Socialism because in Capitalism the lives of individuals are narrowed, limited, confined. People are reduced, very often, to the status of commodities; this is combatted best by solidarity in struggle; not by powerless individuals standing alone, but through trade union and other forms of progressive group struggle. (These insights are now expressed by regularly by Christians, for example in papal encyclicals…partly as a result of dialogue with socialists and communists.)
James believed that if people live and work for communist ideals and the release of human potential, then they can then learn to accept death because they have learnt that life exists through and beyond their individual existence and that life is given meaning by the long, difficult and multi-faceted struggle for human liberation.
As Christian I believe in the hope of Resurrection and that it shows itself throughout life and not just at death. And Communists experience that hope deeply although most give it another name: Marxist hope. I tell my Christian friends that Communist funerals are deeply hopeful in character because in them the continuity of life and community are affirmed and the contribution of each person to human liberation is recognized and celebrated.
Speaking as someone who owes so much to James’ Marxist humanism, I think he would be glad to join with us with us in the old Yiddisher toast to Life: Lockheim!
GEOFF ANDREWS
I am very pleased to be able to speak here in Marx Memorial Library, a place where I have spent many hours researching and, of course, the Library was very important for James who was himself a phenomenal book collector as well as being great Marxist scholar, intellectual and party tutor. There is fittingly a room dedicated to James himself here. Michael did not tell the story of his collapsing book shelves in North London and of how, when he moved to Clapham, ‘Juggernaughts’, (according to his lodger Pete Carter), arrived with his books.
I have only limited time and I want to focus on James in the 1930s, a crucial decade for understanding James’s politics, his life and his status as an intellectual and, as Mick called him, as a professional revolutionary, a very good description. James was part of a unique generation of Communists defined by their internationalism, by their political commitment and in James’s case with his middle class background the breaking down of barriers with the working class. I should mention here the new book Radiant Illusion by Nicholas Deacon* which was the story of middle class recruits to communism and of course James was one of these.
James came from a well-off Jewish background in Hampstead. His father was a Liberal-voting businessman; his mother’s people were prosperous wine and tea merchants. He went to the Hall Prep School and then on to Gresham’s School. We have not mentioned his sister Kitty who was a great influence on James and who went to a very special independent girls school at the bottom of their street, the Kingsley School, which had been established to teach the daughters of gentlemen and doctors but which had at that time been taken over by a group of women including the first English female professor of philosophy, Susan Stebbing, who introduced Kitty to the ideas of the suffragettes and radical politics. Kitty was always an important influence on her brother. I don’t think many of the women of this generation of Communists have received the attention they deserve. Kitty was four years older than James, preceded him to Cambridge and introduced him to radical politics. His first poem, which can still be found in the school archives, was on the General Strike, written while he was still at the Hall School and published in its magazine in 1926. It seems to mark James’s first step into politics. He edited the school magazine along with his cousin Charles Rosenheim. The school records show him to have been academically always at the top of his class, one of the best students the school ever had.
He went on to Gresham’s School which was recognised at the time by the children of middle classes as very progressive, not permitting caning and with a broad range of subjects. James was at the school at the same time as Roger and Brian Simon, life-long friends, Bernard and Peter Floud and Benjamin Britten. There’s a James Klugmann character in Tony Britten's wonderful docu-drama ‘Peace and Conflict’ about Britten and his journey towards pacifism in the 1930s, a generation with the menace of war always hanging over it.
A key influence at Gresham was this extraordinary tutor, Frank McEachran, very eccentric, nominally teaching French but in practice an understanding of the humanist tradition in European civilisation covering the enlightenment, the revolutions of the nineteenth century and of course Marx – something virtually unknown in schools at that time. McEachran was later the model for Hector in Alan Bennett's The History Boys – and later taught a generation of boys at Shrewsbury, including some later Private Eye contributors For James, McEachran was very influential and especially for his humanism. It was at this point that James developed his commitment to a humanist perspective later exemplified by his pamphlet The Future of Man. He contributed to a debate in 1929-30 at Gresham when he was 17 or 18 where he talks of similar things and is very critical of the way the capitalist economy corrodes culture and the soul of man. It’s already there at that stage. He saw himself as in revolt against the system, calling himself a Communist, though he had not read much of Marx and was not a member of the party. From the debating society minutes it is clear that he was a dominant presence. He was not particularly good at games, was not a prefect, not popular with the school authorities but was intellectually ahead of the game. Other pupils looked up to him and he was already developing his political ideas – and excited by ideas.
He went up to Cambridge the same month that his sister was marrying Maurice Cornforth, the Communist philosopher, and straight into this remarkable student generation. There had been no previous mass student movement and now James played a very significant role in creating one. He was co-leader first with David Haden-Guest and then with John Cornford, both of whom died in Spain. Cornford was three or four years younger and they were a perfect combination in recruiting communists and in organising the student movement. Cornford was impetuous, impatient, intense, an orator, always wanting to combine with the working class groups in the town. James was quieter, a persuasive type who spent hours and hours talking to people winning people for Communism. It was a great team.
1933, the date this Library was founded, was the year James joined the Communist Party, somewhat later than one might think. But we should remember how important parental relations were at that time and the arguments that James was having with his family. This year saw the Communists in Cambridge hold two major peace demonstrations. One was at the armistice parade and the other was to disrupt a military film – and James seems to have impressed both King Street and also the Comintern with his organising abilities. In 1935 he went to work for the World Student Association in Paris, a remarkable time to be in Paris - of the Popular Front in France and the onset of the civil war in Spain.
Previously Willie Gallacher had paid a visit to Cambridge in 1934 which in hindsight was a very important meeting for James. Gallacher was shocked to find students posing as ‘honorary proletarians’, dressing as workers and not taking their studies seriously. Gallacher said No. It was the duty of Communist students to be first rate as students, to become first rate intellectuals. This influenced James a lot. It meant for him he could be both a professional revolutionary and also an intellectual. Indeed when he went to Paris he was nominally on a research degree, partially funded by a Cambridge research grant and partly by funds from his grandmother’s family.
A lot of his contemporaries went on to become academic historians: Victor Kiernan, Christopher Hill and A somewhat later contemporary Eric Hobsbawm. James wanted to become a teacher. But his choice, his dedication, was to the Communist Party
He was of course a remarkable tutor and it is evident throughout his life. It is evident in the boat university he set up on his way to Egypt when he was supposed to be delivering language classes but he was in fact teaching politics to clerks and fitters at the time when the Soviet Union was entering the war. It was evident again in Cairo when he was in SOE and lecturing to exiled Croatian communists and briefing them on their dangerous assignments. He was indispensable to SOE. He was the only one who had met Tito previously and the only one who could communicate with the Communist partisans. He was crucial in persuading the allies to make common cause with them and his rapid rise in SOE was, incidentally, to the horror of MI5. There are fascinating records of correspondence between SOE and MI5, who wanted Klugmann brought back, and SOE who were having none of it.
Basil Davidson in his book on this period SPECIAL OPERATIONS EUROPE talks about James’s lecturing style. You can also hear James lecturing in the sound archive in British Library: James talking to south London communists in 1973. When he died the Morning Star described him as a teacher of genius and this indeed was his great legacy. When I was doing research for the book in this Library I remember listening to a tape of James, I think it only exists here, made by the BBC in 1974 for a programme called ‘It takes all sorts’ in which he is interviewed about his love of books. James was an obsessive book collector but he WAS very insistent that he is not simply a collector of books but a collector of books for a purpose: because book-collecting was part of his commitment to preserve the history of the working class movement. It was part of his wider commitment to the cause. He makes this point again in his contribution to the Lawrence and Wishart book Culture and Crisis in the 1930s in which he describes the 1930s as a ‘decade of commitment’.