Tito on the threshold

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32803, 31 December 1971, Page 8

Tito on the threshold

The Embattled Mountain. By F. W. D. Deakin. Oxford University Press. 268 pp. Notes. Index.

The embattled mountain is snowcapped Durmitor in Jugoslavia, scene of one of the most critical encounters between Axis and Partisan forces of World War 11, and origin of a wealth of personal memories for the author—“a fragment of history seen in the mirror of the moment." Captain Deakin was one of two officers parachuted into the Montenegro area near Mt Durmitor at dawn on May 28, 1943, to command the > first British military mission to Tito s headquarters. They were welcorned by a patrol of youthful soldiers and taken to a stone hut for bread and plum brandy, meeting Tito and his staff the same day in their forest encampment, and presenting their credentials—brief memorised sentences. Several further British personnel were seconded to the mission and for all the position was initially complicated by the Allied support of Mihailovic and his Cetniks. Captain Deakin took a firm stand, refusing to b e involved in the escalating civil war between the two partisan forces, and with Mihailovic’s collaboration with Axis forces the way was clear for Allied support solely for Tito. We are afforded an intimate and fascinating view of the forceful leader on the threshold of power. Originally intended as a set historical piece, an objective appraisal of the full-scale operations in the Montenegro area, Deakin’s book, almost without his help, became in the writing, a much warmer thing. He found it impossible to preserve what he calls “the detached

reconstruction of the scholar” and wrote with perspicuity of the men and women who lived with him through the epic of Durmitor—and of the luckless ones who died. Black and white photographs show a little of the severity of conditions, of the useless heartbreak of war and of the beauty of the countryside. For the title-page Deakin (now Colonel) has chosen this Jugoslav quotation, “Blood is my daylight, and my darkness too.”