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 charge 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.
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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.
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