Hoodwinking Churchill Tito's Great Confidence Trick

by Batty, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780856832826
• ISBN10: 0856832820
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-07-01
• Publisher: Shepheard-Walwyn

Summary

Relying on new information recently available, the book reveals how Britain's staunchly anti-communist Prime Minister was deceived into giving his full backing to the communist Tito and cutting all aid to the anti-communist forces resisting the Germans in Yugoslavia. But for that decision, the author argues, Tito would not have overcome his political opponents and emerged as the country's undisputed ruler after the war. Churchill relied on information provided by two trusted advisors, Fitzroy Maclean and William Deakin who passed on without verification what Tito told them. The deception was compounded by a communist mole at SOE headquarters in Cairo who withheld or altered information from liaison offices with Mihailovic. The author explodes the myth of Tito as the heroic Partisan leader, plucked from obscurity by Churchill, who, unlike the rest of occupied Europe, fought the Germans throughout the war, liberating his country virtually unaided. The evidence is otherwise:- Tito used the munitions received from the British and Americans, not to kill Germans as promised to Churchill, but mostly to eliminate his political rivals. - He accused his political opponents of accepting weapons from the Italians while he was proposing joint action to the Germans to resist an Allied landing in the Balkans. - The Partisans' pestering of the Germans did little to hinder Hitler's utilisation of the local abundance in oil and minerals, so vital to the German war machine.- The German retreat from Yugoslavia was largely undisturbed by Tito's Partisans, to Churchill's intense chagrin. - It was the Red Army which really freed Yugoslavia, not Tito's Partisans.- At the end of the War's end he massacred in cold blood countless thousands of anti-communist Yugoslavs handed over to him by the British in good faith- Within weeks of his much-vaunted 'difference of opinion' with Stalin in June 1948 Tito was keenly trying to rejoin the Soviet camp.That it has taken so long for the full story to emerge, the author suggests, is due to a con-certed cover-up by a generation who had a vested interest in sustaining the myths surrounding Tito whom they had helped to beget. In this the BBC played a part.

Author Biography

Peter Batty is a television writer, director, and producer specializing in historical programs. He is a former feature writer for the Financial Times in London and the author of The Divided Union: A Concise History of the American Civil War and The House of Krupp: The Steel Dynasty that Armed the Nazis. He also made a five-part documentary series based on Divided Union.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. vii
Map: Yugoslavia with pre-1941 frontiers	p. x
Illustrations	p. 145/6 and 163/4
Josip Broz, alias Tito	p. 1
Germany Occupies Yugoslavia	p. 26
Early Resistance	p. 59
The London Yugoslavs	p. 71
A Decisive Year	p. 84
Enter Fitzroy Maclean	p. 123
The Fateful Decision	p. 153
Churchill has Doubts	p. 177
Game to Tito	p. 199
Exasperation over Trieste	p. 235
Post-war Butchery	p. 253
Breaking with Stalin	p. 279
Life after Stalin	p. 297
Economic Mayhem	p. 316
The Ethnic Powder Keg	p. 325
Tito's Cult of Personality	p. 334
No Tito Two	p. 340
Notes	p. 349
Bibliography	p. 359
Acknowledgements	p. 365
Index	p. 366
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