Book Reviews and Recommendations on the Ex-Yugoslavia Part 2
By very, very popular demand, with the main focus being on the 20th century
Click Here For Part One
I was on the beautiful island of Korčula again this past weekend, and every time I go there I can’t help but think of Fitzroy Maclean, the author of “Eastern Approaches”, his re-telling of his own adventures in Central Asia and WW2 Yugoslavia.
Fitzroy Maclean was a Scottish Unionist MP later in life, but his first iteration was as a man of action! For those of you familiar with Bronze Age Pervert, this is the type of character that he has championed, a throwback to the swashbucklers of old.
Maclean regales the reader with his time spent in Central Asia at the service of His Majesty, stirring up shit for the crown’s benefit. But the book really takes off when he parachutes into WW2 Yugoslavia, where he was directed to meet up with the then-secretive “Tito”, head of the Communist Partizans who were engaged in a guerrilla war with the occupying Germans and Italians, and in a civil conflict with both Serbian Royalist Chetniks and Croatian Ustashe and Domobrans. Maclean was sent to investigate to see who was doing more damage to the Germans: the Chetniks or the Partizans?
Maclean’s escapade takes him through the mountainous central regions of Yugoslavia, where he is exposed to units of the Wehrmacht hunting down both him and Tito, as the Partizans engage in long retreats through those same impenetrable mountains. He even appears in my hometown where he explains that the communists are certainly not at all welcome!
Maclean’s dispatches from the ground back to the British SOE office in Cairo did more to switch the UK’s support from the Serbian Royalist Chetniks, already falling into collaboration with the Italians fully and then partially with the Germans, to the Communist Partizans than anyone else. This has earned him the emnity of Serbian nationalists worldwide, but it also scored him a lovely villa on the island of Korčula: Tito gifted it to him as a reward for influencing that UK policy switch, making Maclean the only foreigners in Communist Yugoslavia allowed to own property in that country.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is considered a classic in the travelogue genre of writing. Written by Dame Rebecca West, a literary critic and journalist, it details her long trip to the 1930s Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then a royalist dictatorship under the Serbian Karadjordjevich Dynasty.
This book is LONG! The Penguin paperback version comes in at something like 900+ pages, so it can be a slog at times. West has the habit of intellectual flexing when she goes off on 12 page tangents regarding art history and architecture, and so on. She was a product of her well-to-do upbringing and classic education, so there is value in it if you have the patience.
The real value in the book is her descriptions of the sights and sounds of 1930s Yugoslavia, and the characters that she meets, such as Konstantin Fotic, the royalist diplomat who had to flee to Washington DC so as to not be arrested and put on trial by Tito’s Communists. West doesn’t hide her affinities at all, and is openly pro-regime, viewing non-Serbs as either disloyal subjects or out-and-out terrorists. She protested Winston Churchill’s switch of support from the Royalists to Tito’s Partizans and wrote a satirical story about it. She remained a true liberal throughout her life, with a strong anti-communist streak but distrust of right wingers nevertheless. If she were alive today, she’d be part of the useless crowd around Dave Rubin and Bari Weiss. As for Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, it remains loved by travel writers and readers, and by Serbians as well.
Steve Sailer has coined the phrase “retconning of history” which describes how histories are twisted and changed to serve contemporary agendas. We see this right now with the spurious claims that Russia and Vladimir Putin are “fascists” and “worse than Hitler”. It’s an insult to the intelligent, but par for the course. As Orwell said “he who controls the past controls the present”.
The war in Bosnia in the 1990s was presented in western media as a conflict between the very, very bad nationalist Serbs, the less bad but still bad fascist Bosnian Croats, and the innocent and sweet multi-cultural loving liberal Bosnian Muslims. These broad strokes served their purpose rather well, and ended up being reflected during the various war crimes trials at The Hague in the Netherlands.
What most people don’t realize is that the Bosnian Muslims, who today pride themselves on anti-fascism from WW2, were to a higher percentage more supportive of the Axis than either the Serbs or the Croats. In 1941, many of them flocked to joined the Croatian fascist Ustashe, either for the sake of self-defence, or for revenge against Serbian hegemony so as to gain their lost prominent position that they had in Bosnia-Hercegovina under the Turks. Ask a Bosnian Muslim today what his grandfather or great-grandfather did during WW2 and he or she will grudgingly tell you that he was an Ustasha or will outright lie.
The interests of the Bosnian Muslims in WW2 did not perfectly overlap with those of Fascist Croatia, though. Their interest were even parochial, and they found a champion in Heinrich Himmler. The head of the dreaded SS, Himmler was fascinated by the concept of Jihad. He found a partner in the Bosnian Muslims to explore this fascination, so he set up the Handzar (Arabic short sword) Division which was staffed by German officers, local Muslim Imams, and Muslim men from Bosnia. But Himmler ran into a problem: Fascist Croatia protested the creation of this force in 1943 because it correctly saw it as an attempt to create an armed force with which to pursue the separation of Bosnia from Croatia, or at least to create a 3rd Reich protectorate there.
Thanks to intercession with Adolf Hitler, Handzar was diluted by including Catholic Croats who made up 20% of the force’s overall numbers. Many of these men were of suspicious political allegiances, suggesting intentional sabotage by the Croatian fascist government.
Lepre’s book is a dispassionate account of the Handzar, its political aspects, and especially its military performance, which he grades as passable in Bosnia, and absolutely disastrous outside of it. He accuses the unit of seeking to settle scores with Serbian Royalist Chetniks instead of obeying orders from the Wehrmacht that used both of those forces to fight Tito’s Partizans. He also discusses Handzar’s rebellion in the south of France, and how it fell apart due to desertion in Southern Hungary in the dying days of the war. The most interesting bits are the profiles he illustrates of the German officer class, complete with Turkish cap, and the Imams who staffed the units as well. A great read covering one of the many interesting side stories of WW2.