but you are far away.”
Now came the turn of the Simovic cabal, provoked and encouraged by American promises. It ramified throughout the Yugoslav armed forces like a cancer, and in an overnight bloodless revolution the conspirators deposed the government, seized control of the state, and repudiated the pact with the Axis. Joyous street demonstrations of Serbians followed, and there was much satisfaction and praise for the “heroic Yugoslavs” in the Western newspapers.
“Operation Punishment”
But all this was short-lived. Adolf Hitler ordered the swift and merciless destruction of Yugoslavia. He could do no less. Successful defiance of the Reich by a Balkan cabal would have led to bloody revolts throughout our tranquil New Order in Europe. A fierce bombardment, “Operation Punishment,” leveled Belgrade on April 6. The Wehrmacht conquered Yugoslavia in eleven days, at the same time commencing operations in Greece. Hitler partitioned Yugoslavia up among Germany, Italy, and the Balkan allies, and the country as such ceased to exist (though a Bolshevik partisan movement in the mountains remained a nuisance). The unfortunate Yugoslav people thus paid with wholesale deaths, a surrendered army, and national destruction, for the scheming of Churchill and Roosevelt.
From a technical viewpoint, the Yugoslavia campaign was admirable. Quick victories always look easy; but the terrain is mountainous, and the Yugoslavs had an army of over a million tough men. The Wehrmacht triumphed through the decisiveness of the Fuhrer and the swiftness of the blow. The campaign had to be worked up in Wehrmacht Supreme Headquarters in a single sleepless night, for, unlike our previous land operations, no planned attack on Yugoslavia lay ready in our files. Still, it was executed to perfection; and incredibly, our casualties were less than six hundred soldiers.
Possibly the most banal cliche about the Second World War is that Hitler lost it by giving vent to personal rage against Yugoslavia, thus delaying the attack against the Soviet Union for three to five precious weeks, in order to wreak vengeance on a small harmless neighbor. In point of fact, Hitler’s decision was absolutely forced. In planning an attack on Russia, a hostile front in the Balkans on the southern flank, so close to the Rumanian oil fields, could not be tolerated. As for his anger, it was the Fuhrer’s way of making his generals exert themselves. Though it was uncomfortable to be a target of such displays, the technique worked. The argument about lost time is nugatory, since weather and ground conditions governed our timetable against Russia.
Germany would have been better off, it must be conceded, had Italy never entered the war. There are advantages in keeping one’s flanks secured by belts of neutral countries. All Mussolini did was add the two huge Italian and Balkan peninsulas to our negative front. In the end, the decision was fought out on the classical battleground of Europe, the great northern plain between the Volga and the English Channel, where we fatally missed all the vast strength we dissipated southward.
The Mediterranean Strategy
Still, since the flame of war had despite us jumped south, some of our highest leaders, including Hermann Goring and Admiral Raeder, urged the Fuhrer early in 1941 to strike at England in the Mediterranean by seizing Gibraltar, North Africa, and the Suez Canal. The British were helpless to stop such an attack in force; they were stretched too thin. In this way we could have sealed the southern flank with the impenetrable Sahara Desert. The British sea lines to Africa and Asia would have been cut. The shock to the British morale and supply system might well have brought on the fall of Churchill, and the peace that both we and the British needed.
Hitler was tempted. But when the Spanish dictator Franco treacherously refused to join us in attacking the British — after Germany had won his civil war for him — the Fuhrer lost interest. His heart lay in the invasion of Russia. He acted, however, with energy and dispatch as events confronted him in North Africa, Yugoslavia, and Greece, while the crucial assault on the Soviet Union was being marshalled. Our armed forces triumphed in short order wherever they went, and the history of the time records nothing but glorious German victories, one after the other.
Churchill’s Disastrous Folly
Winston Churchill helped our cause with a display of strategic ineptness equal to Mussolini’s. When we entered Greece, the British in Africa were sweeping through Libya, Eritrea, and Abyssinia, with the Italians everywhere fleeing or giving up. Here was England’s chance to wrap up North Africa and secure her Mediterranean lifeline before we could mount an attack. Churchill, however, writes that, though he knew that the British lacked the strength to oppose Germany for long on the Greek peninsula, he felt “honor bound” to help the Greeks. He pulled vital troops out of his triumphant African forces, killing the momentum of their drive, and threw them into Crete and Greece, whence he soon had to withdraw them, crushed and bloodied, in a “little Dunkirk,” for here they were not fighting Italians. The survivors who got back to Africa found themselves once more confronting Germans, since meantime Rommel had consolidated a landing in Tripoli with his famous Afrika Korps. That spelled the end of the merry British romping in Africa. The Americans had to bail them out there, as everywhere else.
“Honor” had nothing to do with Churchill’s maladroit move. He had an obsession about the Balkans, deriving from his fiasco at Gallipoli in World War I. Later in the war this obsession was to estrange him from Roosevelt and reduce him to a pathetic hanger-on at the war conferences, fussing vainly at the Russians and Americans about the Balkans, while they coldly went ahead with plans to finish the war on sound strategic lines in the plains of the north.
Had Churchill left the Balkans alone and allowed his generals to finish off their African campaign early in 1941, the destruction of Yugoslavia, and the subsequent Allied landings in Morocco, Sicily, and Italy, might all have been unnecessary. The war might have been shortened by two years, sparing both sides much horror and bloodshed. But it was not to be.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Roon puts an unlikely construction on Colonel Donovan’s visits to Yugoslavia. The Simovic revolution was a popular one. Most Yugoslavs were willing to risk Hitler’s anger, they paid the price, and they earned the respect of the United States and all the world. Communist Yugoslavia’s unique friendly relationship with America today stems from that gallant stand in 1941. But even if Roon’s assertions about Donovan were factual, it seems unusually obtuse to blame the destruction of Yugoslavia on Roosevelt and Churchill, while overlooking the little fact that it was the Germans who fire-bombed Belgrade to ashes, invaded the land, and killed the people.
It is true that President Roosevelt made occasional use of informal emissaries, but their importance is overrated in melodramatic films and books, as well as in some military history. These men usually performed minor donkeywork, which for reasons of speed or security could not be done as well through regular channels. To class Harry Hopkins or even Colonel Donovan with these anonymous small-bore persons is inaccurate. — V.H.
Chapter 42
Lend-Lease passed the Senate by sixty votes to thirty-one. Few Americans followed the debate more keenly than Pug Henry. In the visitor’s gallery of the Senate, hand cupped to his ear because of the bad acoustics, he absorbed a new knowledge of how his own government worked. More and more he admired Franklin Roosevelt’s
