[Sulla morte di W. Deakin, che fu tra l'altro biografo di Tito ed uno
dei maggiori testimoni "dall'interno" dei principali eventi della
Seconda Guerra Mondiale]
http://news.serbianunity.net/bydate/2005/January_26/15.html?w=p
Sir William Deakin - decisive role in Cetniks vs Partisans battle for
British help
Telegraph
January 26, 2005
Sir William Deakin, the historian and founding Warden of St Antony's
College, Oxford, who died on Saturday aged 91, led the first British
military mission to Tito's headquarters - thereby playing a salient, if
enduringly controversial, role in Churchill's decision to abandon the
Royalist Cetniks in favour of the Communist Partisans.
The then Captain Deakin was serving in the Yugoslav section at SOE
Cairo when, in May 1943, he was parachuted on to Tito's mobile alpine
headquarters. As the representative of GHQ Middle East, he was to
ascertain Communist strength, before the dispatch of a full mission
under a brigadier.
Hitherto, the Cetniks, commanded by Drazha Mihailovic, who had been
appointed minister of war by the government-in-exile, had been the sole
recipient of British aid and recognition.
In his campaign memoir The Embattled Mountain (1971), Deakin claimed to
have embarked upon this exploratory sally with "unsuspecting
innocence". Yet he had already participated in a discussion at SOE
Cairo headed by the Chief of Staff, Brigadier Keble. These proceedings
were heavily influenced by the Left-winger Basil Davidson, and a
Communist, "James" Klugmann - neither of whom were well disposed
towards Mihailovic.
Keble granted Davidson and Klugmann unauthorised access to decrypts of
German ciphers. There was nothing to suggest that Mihailovic had
collaborated with the Nazis: indeed, the decrypts showed that the
Germans were determined to eliminate him. But the material suggested he
commanded the less effective of the two resistance movements.
The enthusiastic patronage which Mihailovic enjoyed from the Foreign
Office and SOE headquarters in London appeared to preclude any attempt
to shift policy. But Deakin, as Davidson observed, was "like Churchill
himself, among those Conservatives who thought that an alliance with
the devil far preferable to allowing the Nazis the least advantage".
Before the war, Deakin had served as Churchill's research assistant on
Marlborough: His Life And Times; and he was able to use his personal
access to the Prime Minister to circumvent the chain of command. When
Churchill visited Cairo in January 1943, Deakin helped to prepare a
memorandum based on the decrypts for the Prime Minister. Shrewdly, this
did not counsel a complete break with the Cetniks, but urged support
for all resistance groups, regardless of ideological leaning.
In consequence, Churchill authorised an independent mission to the
Partisans without reference to SOE London. Deakin was chosen to head
"Operation Typical" - a six-man joint SOE-Military Intelligence mission
to Partisan headquarters.
He was dropped near Mount Durmitor at the nadir of Partisan fortunes
during the German "Fifth Offensive"; Tito's 20,000-strong band were
surrounded by 120,000 Axis troops. They were forced to cross the
Durmitor range, into the relative safety of Eastern Bosnia; Deakin
underwent what Lord Birkenhead described as "a hideous experience".
Even grizzled veterans of this most brutal of conflicts were favourably
impressed with Deakin's personal courage.
Despite Tito's initial suspicion that the British mission's reports
might eventually be passed on to its counterpart attached to
Mihailovic, a bond was rapidly forged between the two men, who
addressed each other in German. When Tito's band was caught on an
exposed mountainside during a low-level German air raid, Deakin managed
to push Tito into a foxhole, so saving his life. Both were wounded, and
Tito's Alsatian, Tiger, and Capt Bill Stuart (who commanded the
Military Intelligence component of the mission) were killed.
Deakin - who was neither aware that Tito was the secretary-general of
the Communist Party, nor of high-level contacts between the Partisans
and the Germans - was favourably impressed by the Yugoslav's
"pragmatism".
"The Partisan leadership has no plan or intention of immediate social
revolution," he reported. "The prime object is the construction of the
country after the war and it is realised that revolutionary action will
cause internal struggles which will fatally weaken the country." Above
all, his radio reports claimed that Mihailovic's collaboration with the
Germans had been "close, constant and increasing" over the past two
years.
Deakin extolled the fighting capacities of the Partisans, requesting
urgent re-supply, and admitted taking on "a binding and absolute
identity with those around me". Nor were the Partisans unsparing in
their efforts to convince him. "My system of indoctrinating Deakin was
to take him to a stream nearby, where we used to bathe,'' remembered
Vlatko Velebit, later Tito's ambassador to Britain. "I took captured
documents with me to translate for his use. Deakin got more and more
convinced that the Mihailovic movement was really no good."
Such was the message which Deakin conveyed to Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean
who, as doubts mounted about Mihailovic, had been dispatched in
September 1943 as Churchill's personal liaison officer (and into whose
mission Deakin's was subsumed ).
"We had expected a forbidding academic figure," said Maclean of Deakin,
"and were relieved to find a very young and rather untidy undergraduate
who combined an outstanding intellect with a gift for getting on with
everyone."
Maclean not only accepted Deakin's estimate of Partisan strength -
itself twice the Germans' own - but trebled it. After Maclean had been
secreted out, he returned in November 1943 to collect Deakin by
aircraft, so that he could report in person to Churchill (who was again
in Cairo ).
For nearly two hours, Churchill interrogated Deakin. "It was a
miserable task," Deakin recalled. "As I talked I knew that I was
compiling the elements of a hostile brief which would play a decisive
part in any future break between Britain and Mihailovic."
Churchill instructed Deakin personally to convey to King Peter - then
also in Cairo - the evidence of his war minister's collaboration. The
King was mortified.
In February 1944, Churchill was able to report to the House of Commons
that "a young friend of mine" had completed his mission. Deakin - who
by then had become head of SOE Cairo - received the DSO, and upon the
transfer of GHQ to Italy was attached to the staff of Harold Macmillan
( Minister Resident in the Mediterranean) as adviser to the Balkan Air
Force.
Whilst he was stationed at Bari, the final decision was taken to
withdraw the military missions from Mihailovic's forces. Following the
Partisan victory, Deakin moved to the re-established embassy in
Belgrade as first secretary and chargé d'affaires, where he witnessed
Tito's disregard for his earlier promises.
Such was the atmosphere that when Deakin received the news of the
Conservative defeat in 1945, one old woman commented to him: "Poor Mr
Churchill. I suppose that now he will be shot" - as was Mihailovic in
the following year, after his eyes had been gouged out.
Frederick William Dampier Deakin was born on July 3 1913 and educated
at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a First in
Modern History. He was elected a Fellow of Wadham College in 1936; when
Keith Feiling resigned as Churchill's literary assistant later that
year, he suggested Deakin as his replacement.
Deakin adapted swiftly to Churchill's unorthodox working methods and
was soon attending meetings of Churchill's "wilderness years" coteries.
Such was his esteem for Deakin that in 1938 Churchill dispatched him to
President Benes of Czechoslovakia to gauge the embattled Republic's
intentions.
When war broke out, Deakin joined the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars
(Churchill's old regiment). Nothwithstanding Churchill's simultaneous
return to the Admiralty, the research on A History of the
English-Speaking Peoples continued apace; even during the Norway
campaign of April 1940, Deakin was obliged to present himself at 11pm
to Admiralty House to discuss the chapters on the Norman Conquest.
In 1941 Deakin transferred to SOE, and was initially deployed
recruiting young Communists of Croatian origin in Canada.
After the war he resigned from the Foreign Office, and resumed his
Wadham Fellowship and his position as Churchill's director of
historical researches. When Churchill began work on his history of The
Second World War, Deakin sifted through the mass of papers then held in
the Cabinet War Rooms, and drafted much of the text.
Deakin then accepted the challenge of becoming the founding Warden of
St Antony's, established as a postgraduate foundation in 1949. He was
obliged to devote much time to fund-raising, and despite his evident
distaste for the task, was notably successful with such trusts as the
Ford Foundation.
In part, his achievement derived from his "expand to survive"
philosophy; he helped to pioneer "regional studies" as part of the
International Relations syllabus and Russian, Latin American and Far
Eastern Centres were all established under St Antony's aegis.
Notwithstanding the delight he took in writing about conspiracy, Deakin
took umbrage at the wide-spread suggestion that St Antony's was a
training-ground for spies. In 1961 he was a member of the Radcliffe
Committee on security procedures.
Deakin's books included The Brutal Friendship (1962), which analysed
the Hitler-Mussolini alliance, and The Case of Richard Sorge (with G R
Storry, 1965), which recounted the life of the Tokyo-based German
Communist who gave Stalin forewarning of Operation Barbarossa. But
despite the critical acclaim which greeted these works, Deakin remained
irrevocably associated with the Yugoslav controversy.
In 1954, Evelyn Waugh - for whom Deakin had tried to obtain a temporary
consular appointment, to monitor the persecution of his Croatian
co-religionists - wrote to Ann Fleming: "Bill Deakin is a very lovable
and complicated man. He can't decide whether to be proud or ashamed of
his collaboration with Tito."
Deakin's public and personal pronouncements belied such inner turmoil.
After Tito's break with Stalin in 1948, Deakin was an influential
exponent of the orthodoxy, best expressed by Ernest Bevin, that "Tito
is a scoundrel, but he is our scoundrel".
Some observers adjudged that the memory of the wartime friendship with
Deakin emboldened Tito to breach the Iron Curtain. Moreover, by his
teaching gifts, Deakin ensured that future generations of historians
would continue to verify his version of events.
In 1967 he was invited to form the British section of the International
Committee for the History of the Second World War. Anglo-Yugoslav
colloquia, chaired by Deakin, met privately and by invitation only,
with the Yugoslav view represented by official historians.
After his retirement as Warden in 1968, Deakin was elected an honorary
Fellow of St Antony's and moved to France. He continued to visit Tito
on his palatial island retreat at Brioni, and in 1980 he was part of
the official British delegation at his funeral.
When faced with a string of "revisionist" histories and the break-up of
the Titoise federation, Deakin opted for a dignified silence.
He was knighted in 1975 and elected an honorary Fellow of the British
Academy in 1980. He held the Russian Order of Valour (1944), the
Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur (1953) and the Yugoslav Partisan Star,
1st Class (1969).
He married first, in 1935, Margaret, daughter of Sir Nicholas Beatson
Bell; they had two sons. He married secondly, in 1943, Livia Stela
("Pussy") Nasta of Bucharest.
dei maggiori testimoni "dall'interno" dei principali eventi della
Seconda Guerra Mondiale]
http://news.serbianunity.net/bydate/2005/January_26/15.html?w=p
Sir William Deakin - decisive role in Cetniks vs Partisans battle for
British help
Telegraph
January 26, 2005
Sir William Deakin, the historian and founding Warden of St Antony's
College, Oxford, who died on Saturday aged 91, led the first British
military mission to Tito's headquarters - thereby playing a salient, if
enduringly controversial, role in Churchill's decision to abandon the
Royalist Cetniks in favour of the Communist Partisans.
The then Captain Deakin was serving in the Yugoslav section at SOE
Cairo when, in May 1943, he was parachuted on to Tito's mobile alpine
headquarters. As the representative of GHQ Middle East, he was to
ascertain Communist strength, before the dispatch of a full mission
under a brigadier.
Hitherto, the Cetniks, commanded by Drazha Mihailovic, who had been
appointed minister of war by the government-in-exile, had been the sole
recipient of British aid and recognition.
In his campaign memoir The Embattled Mountain (1971), Deakin claimed to
have embarked upon this exploratory sally with "unsuspecting
innocence". Yet he had already participated in a discussion at SOE
Cairo headed by the Chief of Staff, Brigadier Keble. These proceedings
were heavily influenced by the Left-winger Basil Davidson, and a
Communist, "James" Klugmann - neither of whom were well disposed
towards Mihailovic.
Keble granted Davidson and Klugmann unauthorised access to decrypts of
German ciphers. There was nothing to suggest that Mihailovic had
collaborated with the Nazis: indeed, the decrypts showed that the
Germans were determined to eliminate him. But the material suggested he
commanded the less effective of the two resistance movements.
The enthusiastic patronage which Mihailovic enjoyed from the Foreign
Office and SOE headquarters in London appeared to preclude any attempt
to shift policy. But Deakin, as Davidson observed, was "like Churchill
himself, among those Conservatives who thought that an alliance with
the devil far preferable to allowing the Nazis the least advantage".
Before the war, Deakin had served as Churchill's research assistant on
Marlborough: His Life And Times; and he was able to use his personal
access to the Prime Minister to circumvent the chain of command. When
Churchill visited Cairo in January 1943, Deakin helped to prepare a
memorandum based on the decrypts for the Prime Minister. Shrewdly, this
did not counsel a complete break with the Cetniks, but urged support
for all resistance groups, regardless of ideological leaning.
In consequence, Churchill authorised an independent mission to the
Partisans without reference to SOE London. Deakin was chosen to head
"Operation Typical" - a six-man joint SOE-Military Intelligence mission
to Partisan headquarters.
He was dropped near Mount Durmitor at the nadir of Partisan fortunes
during the German "Fifth Offensive"; Tito's 20,000-strong band were
surrounded by 120,000 Axis troops. They were forced to cross the
Durmitor range, into the relative safety of Eastern Bosnia; Deakin
underwent what Lord Birkenhead described as "a hideous experience".
Even grizzled veterans of this most brutal of conflicts were favourably
impressed with Deakin's personal courage.
Despite Tito's initial suspicion that the British mission's reports
might eventually be passed on to its counterpart attached to
Mihailovic, a bond was rapidly forged between the two men, who
addressed each other in German. When Tito's band was caught on an
exposed mountainside during a low-level German air raid, Deakin managed
to push Tito into a foxhole, so saving his life. Both were wounded, and
Tito's Alsatian, Tiger, and Capt Bill Stuart (who commanded the
Military Intelligence component of the mission) were killed.
Deakin - who was neither aware that Tito was the secretary-general of
the Communist Party, nor of high-level contacts between the Partisans
and the Germans - was favourably impressed by the Yugoslav's
"pragmatism".
"The Partisan leadership has no plan or intention of immediate social
revolution," he reported. "The prime object is the construction of the
country after the war and it is realised that revolutionary action will
cause internal struggles which will fatally weaken the country." Above
all, his radio reports claimed that Mihailovic's collaboration with the
Germans had been "close, constant and increasing" over the past two
years.
Deakin extolled the fighting capacities of the Partisans, requesting
urgent re-supply, and admitted taking on "a binding and absolute
identity with those around me". Nor were the Partisans unsparing in
their efforts to convince him. "My system of indoctrinating Deakin was
to take him to a stream nearby, where we used to bathe,'' remembered
Vlatko Velebit, later Tito's ambassador to Britain. "I took captured
documents with me to translate for his use. Deakin got more and more
convinced that the Mihailovic movement was really no good."
Such was the message which Deakin conveyed to Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean
who, as doubts mounted about Mihailovic, had been dispatched in
September 1943 as Churchill's personal liaison officer (and into whose
mission Deakin's was subsumed ).
"We had expected a forbidding academic figure," said Maclean of Deakin,
"and were relieved to find a very young and rather untidy undergraduate
who combined an outstanding intellect with a gift for getting on with
everyone."
Maclean not only accepted Deakin's estimate of Partisan strength -
itself twice the Germans' own - but trebled it. After Maclean had been
secreted out, he returned in November 1943 to collect Deakin by
aircraft, so that he could report in person to Churchill (who was again
in Cairo ).
For nearly two hours, Churchill interrogated Deakin. "It was a
miserable task," Deakin recalled. "As I talked I knew that I was
compiling the elements of a hostile brief which would play a decisive
part in any future break between Britain and Mihailovic."
Churchill instructed Deakin personally to convey to King Peter - then
also in Cairo - the evidence of his war minister's collaboration. The
King was mortified.
In February 1944, Churchill was able to report to the House of Commons
that "a young friend of mine" had completed his mission. Deakin - who
by then had become head of SOE Cairo - received the DSO, and upon the
transfer of GHQ to Italy was attached to the staff of Harold Macmillan
( Minister Resident in the Mediterranean) as adviser to the Balkan Air
Force.
Whilst he was stationed at Bari, the final decision was taken to
withdraw the military missions from Mihailovic's forces. Following the
Partisan victory, Deakin moved to the re-established embassy in
Belgrade as first secretary and chargé d'affaires, where he witnessed
Tito's disregard for his earlier promises.
Such was the atmosphere that when Deakin received the news of the
Conservative defeat in 1945, one old woman commented to him: "Poor Mr
Churchill. I suppose that now he will be shot" - as was Mihailovic in
the following year, after his eyes had been gouged out.
Frederick William Dampier Deakin was born on July 3 1913 and educated
at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a First in
Modern History. He was elected a Fellow of Wadham College in 1936; when
Keith Feiling resigned as Churchill's literary assistant later that
year, he suggested Deakin as his replacement.
Deakin adapted swiftly to Churchill's unorthodox working methods and
was soon attending meetings of Churchill's "wilderness years" coteries.
Such was his esteem for Deakin that in 1938 Churchill dispatched him to
President Benes of Czechoslovakia to gauge the embattled Republic's
intentions.
When war broke out, Deakin joined the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars
(Churchill's old regiment). Nothwithstanding Churchill's simultaneous
return to the Admiralty, the research on A History of the
English-Speaking Peoples continued apace; even during the Norway
campaign of April 1940, Deakin was obliged to present himself at 11pm
to Admiralty House to discuss the chapters on the Norman Conquest.
In 1941 Deakin transferred to SOE, and was initially deployed
recruiting young Communists of Croatian origin in Canada.
After the war he resigned from the Foreign Office, and resumed his
Wadham Fellowship and his position as Churchill's director of
historical researches. When Churchill began work on his history of The
Second World War, Deakin sifted through the mass of papers then held in
the Cabinet War Rooms, and drafted much of the text.
Deakin then accepted the challenge of becoming the founding Warden of
St Antony's, established as a postgraduate foundation in 1949. He was
obliged to devote much time to fund-raising, and despite his evident
distaste for the task, was notably successful with such trusts as the
Ford Foundation.
In part, his achievement derived from his "expand to survive"
philosophy; he helped to pioneer "regional studies" as part of the
International Relations syllabus and Russian, Latin American and Far
Eastern Centres were all established under St Antony's aegis.
Notwithstanding the delight he took in writing about conspiracy, Deakin
took umbrage at the wide-spread suggestion that St Antony's was a
training-ground for spies. In 1961 he was a member of the Radcliffe
Committee on security procedures.
Deakin's books included The Brutal Friendship (1962), which analysed
the Hitler-Mussolini alliance, and The Case of Richard Sorge (with G R
Storry, 1965), which recounted the life of the Tokyo-based German
Communist who gave Stalin forewarning of Operation Barbarossa. But
despite the critical acclaim which greeted these works, Deakin remained
irrevocably associated with the Yugoslav controversy.
In 1954, Evelyn Waugh - for whom Deakin had tried to obtain a temporary
consular appointment, to monitor the persecution of his Croatian
co-religionists - wrote to Ann Fleming: "Bill Deakin is a very lovable
and complicated man. He can't decide whether to be proud or ashamed of
his collaboration with Tito."
Deakin's public and personal pronouncements belied such inner turmoil.
After Tito's break with Stalin in 1948, Deakin was an influential
exponent of the orthodoxy, best expressed by Ernest Bevin, that "Tito
is a scoundrel, but he is our scoundrel".
Some observers adjudged that the memory of the wartime friendship with
Deakin emboldened Tito to breach the Iron Curtain. Moreover, by his
teaching gifts, Deakin ensured that future generations of historians
would continue to verify his version of events.
In 1967 he was invited to form the British section of the International
Committee for the History of the Second World War. Anglo-Yugoslav
colloquia, chaired by Deakin, met privately and by invitation only,
with the Yugoslav view represented by official historians.
After his retirement as Warden in 1968, Deakin was elected an honorary
Fellow of St Antony's and moved to France. He continued to visit Tito
on his palatial island retreat at Brioni, and in 1980 he was part of
the official British delegation at his funeral.
When faced with a string of "revisionist" histories and the break-up of
the Titoise federation, Deakin opted for a dignified silence.
He was knighted in 1975 and elected an honorary Fellow of the British
Academy in 1980. He held the Russian Order of Valour (1944), the
Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur (1953) and the Yugoslav Partisan Star,
1st Class (1969).
He married first, in 1935, Margaret, daughter of Sir Nicholas Beatson
Bell; they had two sons. He married secondly, in 1943, Livia Stela
("Pussy") Nasta of Bucharest.