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Albania in the second world war

The Wildest Province, by Roderick Bailey

Book review by Sir Patrick Fairweather

IN 1993, shortly after diplomatic relations were re-established between Britain and Albania, an exhibition of photographs taken in Albania during the second world war opened in Tirana. The photographer was David Smiley, an officer with Special Operations Executive (SOE), the agency Winston Churchill set up in 1940 with a mandate “to set Europe ablaze” by supporting anti-German partisans throughout the continent. Mr Smiley, then a captain, had been the first officer SOE sent to Albania. His exhibition in the mausoleum of Enver Hoxha, the partisan leader who became Albania's lifelong dictator, was designed to counter the huge efforts Hoxha had made to efface every trace of Britain's wartime involvement in Albania.

Roderick Bailey tells the story of SOE's work in Albania in admirably balanced fashion. SOE promised arms and gold to any group that was able and willing to fight the occupiers. But the Albanians were more focused on the post-war struggle for power. By the autumn of 1943 the three main resistance groups were attacking each other. Mr Bailey explains how the balance tipped increasingly towards the Communist-backed partisans, who by the spring of 1944 had become the strongest and most effective force in the country.

The Wildest Province - cover
Mr Bailey also shows how the British liaison officers gradually became the advocates of the groups to which they were attached, even taking on the same bitterness felt by the Albanians towards each other. For example, Reginald Hibbert, who was with the partisans and who later enjoyed a reputation for toughness in the British Foreign Office, could scarcely bring himself to speak to Julian Amery, later a Conservative cabinet minister, and Mr Smiley (both of whom had been stationed with the monarchists), when they all attended the reopening of the British military cemetery in Tirana in 1994.

Should SOE have tried to prevent the Communist takeover of Albania? Amery and Billy McLean, another senior SOE officer, both thought so, which caused some strain with SOE headquarters in Bari, Italy. Some even went as far as to accuse SOE of having been infiltrated by the Soviets. Mr Bailey has examined the evidence carefully and rejects the theory of a Communist conspiracy. The fact was that Hoxha's takeover of Albania in November 1944 could have been prevented only by a British military intervention along the lines of that in Greece the previous month. Intervention was never on the cards. But the horrors Hoxha inflicted on Albania for the next 40 years were such that the question of whether Britain might have done more to prevent his seizure of power is unlikely to go away.

Was the blood expended by SOE in Albania justified by the results achieved? This question too will go on being debated. So far as the military account is concerned, Mr Bailey quotes from the unpublished Cabinet Office history of SOE written in 1948: “This (Albania) was clearly a case in which a small but useful military diversion had been earned by limited investment in the guerrilla movement.” This sums up the situation well, even if it does less than justice to the efforts of a remarkable group of British irregulars who fought for many months in unusually grim and difficult conditions.

 

First published in The Economist, 19 March 2008. Reprinted by kind permission of The Economist Group.

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