10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Failure of Allies During WW!!, April 8, 2010
This review is from: Shadows on the Mountain: The Allies, the Resistance, and the Rivalries that Doomed WWII Yugoslavia (Hardcover)
This is a scholarly yet highly readable book re the failed allied policy in Serbia during WWII which ultimately affected the entire European Continent. The in-depth research, with footnotes equally fascinating, recount the tragic consequences of the OSS-SOE manipulated intelligence that set off a series of events leading to the death of the innocent and the spread of Communism into Germany.
Within this dramatic series of events is also the story of the incredible rescue of 500 American airmen shot down by the enemy and rescued in the mountains of Serbia by Mihailovic and his men alone. This is an absorbing book, especially for the WWII aficionado and is highly readable. It's tragic ending on so many levels leaves the reader wary and wiser.
The harsh review by Pitcavage is yet another attempt by die-hard Tito-ites to undermine any objective effort to write about the situation in Serbia during WWII.
This masterful book, rich in detail and research has a broader theme, however: the failure of allies to sufficiently and effectively assess their sources and make well informed decisions in the time of crisis. As is noted, even Churchill called the shift from Mihailovic to Tito "one of his biggest wartime failures."
In addition, Kurapovna's book is written with authority and objectivity and elegance. An entire chapter is devoted to Tito and the efforts of the Partisans are reinforced and substantial throughout the book. In addition the the sources and footnotes (compelling reading on their own)provide assurance that the book is a serious, successful achievement and one of the best accounts ever written about this phase of the War.
After the war the soldiers, who for years, fought to defend Mihailovic's honor, who offered (but were denied) to appear at his trial in the Soviet Union, were motivated by their knowledge of the circumstances and their belief in Mihailovic. That he was executed by a firing squad in the SV and not in Yugoslavia is also interesting. Their 20 year effort to restore his name was finally granted when the United States awarded his Legion of Merit to his daughter in 1967.
And finally, it never fails to amuse me that when an objective view is presented, that is to say, when you aren't fawning over the left or right that there is always an "ulterior motive." It is impossible for the die-hards on either side to accept any degree of objectivity ever. Pitcavage needs to re-read the book.
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19 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Oh No, Not Again, July 4, 2010
This review is from: Shadows on the Mountain: The Allies, the Resistance, and the Rivalries that Doomed WWII Yugoslavia (Hardcover)
There certainly is a need for more works in English on the guerrilla war in Yugoslavia during World War II. Though the end of the former Yugoslavia meant the chance that local, regional and formerly national archives might now be fully open to scholars, the disintegration of the country into its constituent parts (and then some) has also meant that Yugoslavia itself is a "lost subject," with many researchers tending to want to cover the era only regionally now.
Moreover, English language literature on the subject (with only a few exceptions, such as the great books by Jozo Tomasevich) has been dominated (indeed, one might even say warped) by two unfortunate factors. First, the majority of works in English are either memoirs written by former OSS/SOE agents in Yugoslavia or scholarly or popular works that are largely based on such memoirs and sometimes on archival OSS and SOE sources in the U.S. and Great Britain. While such sources have some strengths, their weaknesses unfortunately far outweigh their strengths, as even the best and most perceptive OSS/SOE agents had at best a limited understanding of what was happening on the ground (those with no language skills were even more handicapped). Both Chetniks and Partisans let "their" OSS/SOE agents see only what they wanted them to see, and relations were often chilly at best. Moreover, the agents tended to be at "headquarters," national or regional, of various movements, rather than out in the field. And, of course, many of these agents had their own particular prejudices and biases. The result is that at best they tell a very incomplete picture of what was actually happening in Yugoslavia and at worst are inaccurate and unreliable.
The second unfortunate factor that has dominated much of the writing in English on the subject of the partisan war in Yugoslavia (and Albania, too, it must be said), is a determination on the part of many to re-fight the Cold War. During the war, differences emerged between, on one side, those who actively supported the partisans and those who were not crazy about them but realized that they were the ones fighting the Axis and needed to be supported on that basis, and on the other side, people who wanted to support the chetniks rather than the partisans. Ideologies often (though not always) played a role in who came out on which side.
After the war, the pro-chetnik OSS/SOE agents, as well as a host of popular and scholarly writers who followed in their wake, launched revisionist attacks on British and American decisions during the war, claiming that the partisans were wrongly supported at the expense of the chetniks. Some even claimed that this was due to Communist infiltration of agencies like SOE. In these interpretations, the poor chetniks were abandoned by their Allies, and their leader, Draza Mihailovich, who was executed after the war by the communist government of Yugoslavia for collaboration, was in essence a martyr for the cause of freedom. The only reason the chetniks did not do more, this argument runs, was that they did not get the support of the Allies.
Over the decades, this on-going feud has receded somewhat, especially with the end of the Cold War, as well as the accumulation of mountains of evidence of widespread collaboration on the part of the chetniks with Italian and later German forces. However, it pops up now and again still, nearly 70 years after the end of the war, though more among pop historians than scholars.
I take the time to write this simplified overview of English language works on the war in Yugoslavia, because it is necessary for a reader to understand this in order to evaluate conservative writer Marcia Christoff Kurapovna's recent work, Shadows on the Mountain: The Allies, the Resisance, and the Rivalries that Doomed WWII Yugoslavia.
It is necessary because Kurapovna's work is fatally based on both of the above problematic aspects of WWII Balkan history. First, she ignores Balkan archives and documents in favor of a narrative that is based overwhelmingly on British and American sources. She makes heavy use of printed memoirs of OSS and SOE agents, and virtually her only use of archival research (which is the type of research most prized by historians) is the use of microfilmed OSS records (I say "virtually," because a couple of isolated citations refer to SOE records, but it is clear that very little research in British archives was done). There is no use of Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian, or Macedonian records (nor of German or Italian, for that matter). As a result, the book cannot help but be woefully incomplete and inaccurate when discussing, analyzing, or drawing conclusions about almost anything other than internal OSS/SOE politics. It certainly cannot accurate describe anything related to the Yugoslav partisans and chetniks themselves. Moreover, the sources she uses are all well-tread paths, and she doesn't seem to have unearthed anything new. Episodes like the role of the chetniks in savind a number of downed Allied airmen are well known and have often been told, even though they are presented as new here.
Even worse, Kurapovna dredges up the bones of the Cold War and is yet the latest in a number of failed attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of Mihailovich and the chetniks. She makes some rather odd claims, such as the notion that Tito's partisans collaborated with the Ustase, the Italians, and Nazi Germany (which does not actually appear to be the case, although at one point, at its most desperate, the partisan movement unsuccessfully attempted to negotiate a truce with the Germans).
A 2006 description of her manuscript, when sold by her agent (with original title), reads thusly: "Marcia Kurapovna's DRAZA'S MOUNTAIN, about the largest World War II rescue of Allied airmen from behind enemy lines by the Yugoslav Nazi resister Draza Mikhailovich, and his abandonment a few years later by the Americans and British to a Communist execution."
Kurapovna approaches the work from a rather unapologetically pro-Serbian perspective, and to her, Mihailovich and the chetniks seem heroic and romantic. She accepts without demur the contention of pro-chetnik advocates that the chetniks fought against the Axis in a meaningful way in 1942-44, but provides no proof. Nor does she address in any meaningful way the ever growing accumulation of evidence of active chetnik collaboration with the Italians (who armed them and even deployed them as military units against the partisans) and, rather later, the Germans. Rather than admit that the Allied decision-makers (including both those naturally sympathetic to the partisans as well as those who were not) came to support the partisans over the chetniks because the partisans irrefutably were offering large-scale resistance to the Axis all across the countries, while the chetniks were collaborating with the Axis, she dredges up the notion (originally put forward during the Cold War) that SOE had been infiltrated by Communists, who were suppressing news of all the alleged good things the chetniks were doing.
Not surprisngly, Kurapovna also describes it as a "tragedy" when, at the end of the war, the British forces in Italy turned over to the Partisans the German and collaborationist troops who had retreated into their lines in the last days of the war (per prior agreement between all the Allied powers), and suggests, with language such as "those who had 'collaborated'--by Partisan definition," that they had not actually been collaborators at all. Kurapovna even includes such genocidal forces as the Ustase in this category of allegedly falsely portrayed collaborators.
Kurapovna's leanings also show in some of her citations, such as a rather gratuitous reference to R. J. Rummel, a far right-wing academic, whom Kurapovna claims is "a frequent nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize" (something Rummel himself used to claim, though he had to retract it, as Nobel nominations are not made public for 50 years). There are other odd citations, too, such as a reference to "World War II: A Complete Photographic History." She is also very heavily reliant on certain previously published books, especially David Martin's "Patriot or Traitor: The Case of General Mihailovich," which she cites repeatedly.
Many readers, even those sympathetic to her viewpoints, may have difficulty following its arguments, as it is poorly organized (especially its second half) and jumps back and forth in time.
So although the need for more English language works on World War II in Yugoslavia are sorely needed, this is one book I cannot recommend at all. It brings little in the way of new knowledge to the table, while its viewpoint is both slanted and obsolete at the same time. We need works based on Balkan sources that can look beyond Cold War battles and prejudices. This is not such a work.
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