14. Echoes of Spain: The Recruitment of Yugoslav-Canadian Spanish Civil War Veterans and Their Comrades into the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War

Michael Petrou [1]

On May 7, 1942, Paul Phillips, a leading member of the Communist Party of Canada, wrote a letter to Colonel S. W. (Bill) Bailey, an ofcer with British Security Coordination (BSC), an arm of the British Secret Intelligence Service that had been set up at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan.[2] Bailey had earlier approached Phillips with a plan to recruit left-wing immigrants to Canada for secret work in Nazi-occupied Europe. In his letter Phillips pledged full support. “I wish to assure you that my friends and I are eager to cooperate with you in every possible way. . . . Everything we can do will be done to fnd the suitable ‘candidates’ as speedily as possible,” he wrote, ending his letter with a blue-ink signature and the closing: “Yours for Victory.”[3]

It was from the beginning an unlikely partnership. Phillips at the time believed he had an arrest warrant hanging over his head. He avoided the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and tried not to appear in public during the day. The “friends” to which he referred were, like him, Communists, members of an ofcially banned political party. Phillips, a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant to Canada, was treasurer of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC), but his more important role was as a sort of outreach ofcer to radical members of Canada’s various minority communities. Only fve years earlier, hundreds of these men had defed Canadian law to volunteer as members of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939. Others had been arrested during the 1930s for strike activity and demonstrations against unemployment. They worked as lumberjacks and miners, their muscles knotted from hard labor and their lungs scarred by silicosis. Their status in Canada was precarious and not helped by their political agitation. Some who had fought in Spain had volunteered to serve in the Canadian Army and been rejected. They were marginalized within Canadian society and distrusted by the country’s authorities.[4]

Bailey, in contrast, came from the ranks of the British establishment. Before the Second World War, he worked as a metallurgist at a Britishowned mine in Yugoslavia, where he became fuent in Serbo-Croatian. Shortly after war began, he joined the Secret Intelligence Service’s Section D, which was tasked with investigating and carrying out sabotage, propaganda, and other covert operations.[5] Bailey, along with other members of Section D, soon moved into the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a body formed in 1940 to encourage resistance among the occupied peoples of Europe—or, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill defned its task, to “set Europe ablaze.”[6]

The SOE had little tinder to work with in its early days. France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway all fell to the Germans in 1940. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had yet entered the war, so Britain, along with her Empire and allied Dominions, fought largely alone. On March 27, 1941, a British-backed coup in Yugoslavia replaced its regent, Prince Paul, whose government had just signed the Tripartite Pact allying Yugoslavia with Germany, with the pro-British King Peter II. But ten days later, Germany, Italy, and Hungary invaded and quickly overran Yugoslavia.[7] Along with their ally Bulgaria, they annexed some Yugoslav territory and established the puppet “Independent State of Croatia.” A rump Serbian state remained under German military occupation.[8] The Germans continued into Greece, where Britain, Australia, and New Zealand had deployed protective forces. Mainland Greece was conquered by the end of April. Greek and Allied forces who retreated to the island of Crete were defeated soon after. Even after Germany attacked the Soviet Union that June, bringing it into the war, Britain faced a bleak situation on the continent. But Yugoslavia, a sprawling and mountainous country well suited to guerilla warfare, at least ofered the prospect of violent resistance against Germany and its allies, which could tie down troops who might otherwise be fghting elsewhere.[9]

The British, however, were unsure how they might best confront the Germans there. They had begun their involvement with Yugoslav resistance groups soon after Germany’s invasion by backing a resistance group known as the Chetniks. Mostly Serbs, the Chetniks were supported by Yugoslavia’s exiled king and government and led by a former Royal Yugoslav Army general named Draža Mihailović.[10] The British knew little about the rival Partisans, a mostly communist outft led by a former recruiter of Yugoslav volunteers for the International Brigades named Josip Broz, more commonly known as Tito. London made feeting contact with the Partisans when British ofcer Bill Hudson slipped into Montenegro by submarine in September 1941, along with three Royal Yugoslav Army personnel. Hudson was tasked with investigating resistance groups and fostering cooperation among them.[11] He reached Tito and the Partisans, but his radio soon stopped working, so for months little was known of him or what he had learned. Another agent, Terrence Atherton, was dropped in to fnd out what was going on. He, too, reached the Partisans, but then, in April 1942, set of to fnd Hudson, who had left Tito to look for Mihailović and was murdered along the way.[12] Yugoslavia still appeared to the British as potentially rich ground for resistance, but clearly, they needed better information. And that required more men in the country.

Although there it was a creation of Britain’s ruling class, whose leading members studied at exclusive public schools and universities such as Eton, Oxford, and Cambridge, the SOE was also coolly pragmatic when selecting agents. “The SOE was ready to work with any man or any institution, Roman Catholic or masonic, Trotskyist or liberal, syndicalist or Catholic, radical or conservative, [S]talinist or anarchist, gentile or Jew, that would help it beat the Nazis down,” is how M. R. D. Foot, author of the official history of the SOE in France, described its outlook.[13] So, the SOE looked to Canada and to men like Phillips and his friends among the downtrodden and politically radicalized immigrants who lived there.

The cooperation that resulted grew out of clear-eyed recognition on the part of the SOE, the CPC, and the Yugoslav-Canadian recruits that their interests converged on the question of fghting fascism in Yugoslavia. The British would do whatever was necessary to defeat Hitler. The CPC might have sought minor ancillary benefts from their cooperation, notably relief from police harassment, but they, too, appear to have been led primarily by a desire to fght Nazism in Yugoslavia—and, not incidentally, to support the communist Partisans who were also backed by the Soviet Union. As for the recruits themselves, most believed they had been immersed in a global struggle against fascism that had begun long before German tanks rolled into Belgrade. The Spanish Civil War had galvanized many of these men as it bared the world’s deepening cleavages between fascism, communism, and democracy. But the political radicalization of the Yugoslav immigrants to Canada who would eventually join the SOE also had its roots in their immigration to and experiences in Canada during the 1920s and 1930s.

My Brothers, Great Is Our Sufering

Yugoslav immigration to Canada sharply increased during the second half of the 1920s, a result of a more restrictive immigration policy in America that began in 1923 and a gradual loosening of Canada’s approach. While only 137 Yugoslavs arrived in 1922, more than 2,000 came in 1924 and 1925, and more than 4,000 in 1926 and 1928.[14] Most were single men or men with wives and children back home.[15] They faced some discrimination in their new home. Canada’s immigration policy at the time still favored migrants from northern Europe, especially Britain, over those from southern or eastern Europe, who may have had darker skin. Yugoslavs were a particularly troublesome group to sort out for Canadian immigration ofcials and recruiters from Canada’s two transcontinental railways, the Canadian Pacifc Railway (CPR) and Canadian National Railway (CNR): some were deemed sufciently white; others were not. “The pure Slav, Serb, Croat and Slovene can fairly well be recognized as fair skinned, and by other features,” CNR ofcial and expert on central European agricultural F. W. Baumgartner wrote to his boss in 1927,

but they themselves are not uniformly blond and fair, and in addition there are all degrees of blends to which this centuries’ long mixture of races has led, and it is not always easy to decide just where to draw the line, the less as this line does by no means always correspond with agricultural ftness and other qualifcations of Canadian immigrants.

He added that since that April, “absolutely no passenger has been given a certifcate from any part of Southern Serbia or Dalmatia, or of in a slight degree of dark shade.”[16]

Baumgartner was trying to reassure Canadian government ofcials who feared an infux of dark-skinned migrants who could not assimilate. In a November 1926 memo, J. Bruce Walker, director of European Immigration, lamented that transportation companies were trying to pass of as Serbs Macedonians “who are really Turks in origin and custom,” among other instances of purported deception. “These emigrants are all of the dark type, and not by any means desirable for Canada. They are themselves willing workers, but leave the hard tasks for their wives while they sit at home and rest themselves.”[17] These attitudes might have contributed to the predominance of supposedly lighter-skinned Croatians among immigrants from Yugoslavia for a few years. But such racial barriers facing South Slavs hoping to immigrate to Canada appear to have been dismantled by 1928, and single men poured in from all over Yugoslavia.[18]

These migrants rarely penetrated the mainstream of established Canadian society. They worked in mines and lumber camps and on frontier railways, often in work gangs drawn from the same extended family or village. They lived dangerous lives among blackfies and flth. Edmund Bradwin, writing of migrant railway workers a generation earlier, noted that behind each work camp were typically crosses erected on a hill. “Some Russian is buried there,” the living would say, which “usually meant some foreign-born worker of Slav or Balkan extraction.”[19]

A Croatian miner in northern Quebec captured what life was like in a free verse poem titled “My God How the Lowly Sufer,” published in Kanadski glas, a Canadian Croatian-language newspaper:

My brothers, great is our sufering When we have fallen into foreigners’ hands! Heavy work, we cannot speak the language, And you should see how we sufer! . . .

And they were lonely. The miner’s poem continued:

He sends money to his faithful wife So that she could take care of home.

There are good wives, but by God and bad ones too For which even a factory could not supply enough cash Many women have lovers at home While their husbands here sufer in the stench.[20]

And yet, these migrants had left behind worse in Yugoslavia. The country was formed in 1918 out of territory previously in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was merged with the formerly independent kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro. It was initially called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, a name that encompassed some of its major constituent ethnic groups while leaving out others, such as Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, and Macedonians. Renamed Yugoslavia, meaning Land of the Southern Slavs, by King Alexander I in 1929, its population was divided along ethnic and religious lines. Its parliament, refecting these divisions, did not function well. In January 1929, Alexander abolished the constitution, prorogued parliament, and established a personal dictatorship, which lasted until 1931, when a new constitution was decreed. Most Yugoslavs were subsistence peasants on land that lacked basic infrastructure and could not provide work for the number of people living on it.[21] Migration was an escape. For all its hardships, Canada ofered a reason to be hopeful about the future. Then Canada’s economy collapsed, and those who had gambled on starting a new life in it were cast adrift.

The Great Depression devastated Canadians from all walks of life. But it was particularly punishing to new immigrants with little capital and few established connections or support networks outside their own ethnic communities. During the 1930s, thousands of itinerant laborers rode back and forth across the country in or on railway boxcars, sleeping in hobo jungles outside rail yards or grudgingly gathering in so-called relief camps that were established to house and provide work for single unemployed men paid 20 cents per day. Available work outside the camps was dangerous. In June 1930, a barge on the St. Lawrence River exploded and killed twelve men from a single village in Croatia. Eight more Croats were among the forty dead in a mine explosion later that summer near Princeton, British Columbia.[22]

The CPC and afliated unions seized the opportunity to agitate and spread their message among miners and in relief camps. The camps were especially fertile ground for political radicalization. Party activists did not have to work hard to convince camp workers that capitalism crushed and exploited the poor. That much was self-evident. And while in the 1920s, it might have seemed as though things would soon get better, there was little optimism a few years later. “They see their useful years passing, and are impatient, thinking that radical change ofers them more chance of betterment than patient waiting,” A. E. Graham, member of a Liberal-government-appointed committee to investigate the camps, wrote in 1935: “Considering them as despairing human beings, can you blame them for their attitudes?”[23]

Immigrants in Canada continued to face discrimination on top of poverty. After a violent and bitter strike in Rouyn-Noranda in 1935, scores of Croatian miners were deported or fred. The local press noted with approval that their jobs were now held by English and French Canadians.[24] These expulsions were part of a broader pattern involving the deportation of radical immigrants during the 1930s. Because Canadian authorities, and many citizens, saw communism as a foreign ideology that threatened Canadian identity and culture, immigrant supporters of the party were particularly vulnerable.[25] Section 98 of the Criminal Code, introduced in 1919 in response to widespread labor revolts and repealed in 1936, was aimed at “unlawful associations” that sought to bring about “any government, industrial or economic change” through the threat or use of force. But as Dennis Molinaro has written, what constituted a threat or force was “ambiguous at best.”[26] Section 98 existed in addition to other legislation in the Immigration Act that allowed for deportation for reasons such as “immoral behaviour” and taking unemployment relief. Combined, these laws gave Canadian authorities wide remit to get rid of unwanted migrants. And because deportation was an administrative rather than a judicial matter, those afected had limited legal recourse.[27]

On its surface, the Spanish Civil War had little to do with migrants in Canada facing expulsion, or with the struggles of other poor workers and unemployed young men during the Great Depression. But many of them saw in the cause of the Spanish Republic a refection of their own fght against camp bosses and strike breakers in Canada. For Yugoslav immigrants, particularly Croatians, the war had added relevance. Italy’s Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was backing the Spanish rebels led by Francisco Franco. And it was Mussolini’s forced Italianization policies in Istria, territory awarded to Italy after the Great War, that led to the emigration of tens of thousands of Croats and Slovenes.[28] This fueled resentment of fascism and an attraction to the Communists who seemed its strongest opponents. Fighting in Spain was a chance to act on these convictions. Božo Prpić, who later parachuted into Yugoslavia with the SOE, writes in his memoir of a 1938 meeting in Toronto at which Juraj Krnjević, a leading member of the Croatian Peasant Party, chastised progressive Croatian emigrants for their preoccupation with the civil war in Spain. He was shouted down by audience members who told him: “Croatian workers in Spain are fghting for the freedom of the Croatian people!”[29]

More than one hundred Yugoslav Canadians fought in Spain, of whom at least sixty were Croatians.[30] That so many volunteered refects the radicalization that had already taken place within a segment of the Yugoslav immigrant community because of the Great Depression and the strikes, hunger, and discrimination they had endured. But Spain also hardened the political convictions of those who fought there and survived, and of those who supported them in Canada. Communists were a minority among Yugoslav Canadians. But, after Spain, they were a minority that included those committed to fghting fascism abroad. It was to these men that British and Canadian intelligence ofcers now turned.

Strange Bedfellows

William Yull Stewart, a Canadian working for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, pulled his frst Yugoslav recruit out of a Quebec City prison in late 1941. Branislav Radojević, a French-Serbian seaman and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, had been detained that September for inciting a strike among the crew of a ship that had sailed from New York. Radojević joined Hudson’s mission with Mihailović the following summer. He reportedly made himself unpopular there because of his “complete inability to refrain from political activity,” as a postwar note in his personnel fle put it.[31] Sent to a British sub-mission with the Chetniks elsewhere, Radojević tried to bribe two soldiers to defect to the Partisans with him. He then undertook a mission with two British ofcers to negotiate peace between the Chetniks and a nearby Partisan unit. The Britons were captured by Serbian collaborationists and handed over to the Gestapo. Radojević escaped. He eventually managed to join another Partisan group and then disappeared. Although he is identifed as a Communist in his SOE personnel fle, historian Heather Williams says Radojević had fought with the anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and was likely executed by Partisans, because they thought he was a Trotskyist.[32]

Meanwhile, the SOE was already looking for potential recruits in America. By the summer of 1941, William Donovan, a recipient of the Medal of Honor because of his actions during the First World War, was building what would become the Ofce of Strategic Services (OSS) intelligence agency. That work put him in touch with Milton Wolf, the tall and wellliked commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. Donovan connected Wolf with William Stephenson, the Canadian head of BSC in New York, who was looking to recruit Balkan immigrants to America. Wolf, with the help of Spanish Civil War comrades Mirko Marković and Tomas Babin, assembled a party of eleven Yugoslavs and three Greeks who were met by Bailey at the end of the year. Logistical and bureaucratic red tape prevented the quick transfer of these men to STS 103, a training school established in farm country east of Toronto. They would eventually be trained at an OSS facility in Maryland and would not reach Cairo until February 1943. The experience soured Bailey on further recruitment in America, and so the British shifted their attention north.[33]

“I request your authority to extend the work of my section to Canada” reads a note from April 9, 1942, to London from BSC in New York, written by Alexander Halpern (Aleksandr Yakovelich Galpern). Galpern was a former Russian revolutionary who had joined British intelligence and, in New York, worked on issues pertaining to ethnic minorities.

Canada now has a large number of representative leaders of various nationalities. It has branches of the so-called Free Movements. They should be watched, nursed, and contacted. S.O. [Special Operations] and S.I.S. recruits could be found there if we approach the various racial groups through their recognized leaders. Any recruit we fnd and train there will have the advantage that we shall not be dependent on the Americans either as regards the training or as regards the incorporation and management of the recruits.[34]

Two weeks later, on April 23, 1942, Bailey was informed that SOE in Cairo had requested he fnd one or two Bulgarians and one or two Croats to be infltrated into Croatia and Bulgaria that summer. The telegram said the recruits would be trained in the Middle East and should be sent there as soon as possible.[35]

Bailey was in Toronto by May 2 and returned for another meeting on the seventh. His frst contact was with Kosta Todorof, a Bulgarian Communist and longtime SOE contact who put him in touch with Philipps; Joseph Yardas, a Croatian Communist; and Marko Šikić, a Montenegrin who had illegally entered Canada in 1937 and whose real name was Nikola Kovačević. These three would be Bailey’s primary partners in his recruitment eforts over the subsequent months. “From the conversations held it is clear that these three people represent an important section of the progressive movement in Canada—the name under which the communist party is forced to exist there,” wrote Bailey in a report of his meetings. “I formed the highest opinion of their political integrity, and of their sincerity. Their desire to help is unquestionable and they, having been engaged in subversive activities for many years, have a very clear impression of our needs.”[36]

In a letter that June, Bailey explained to Phillips what he was looking for in recruits. “I know that you realize that they must be greatly superior to those recruited by you a few years ago, both in respect of political and moral integrity, intelligence, courage, and physical condition,” he wrote, referring to Phillips’s earlier recruitment of Canadians to fght in the Spanish Civil War. Recruits, he added, should be single or at least have no dependents in Canada. Men with organizing experience, “particularly in progressive circles,” should take precedence over all others. Family still in the recruits’ country of origin might be advantageous. “Previous experience in Spain would be valuable but not essential,” he said.[37]

Bailey’s new communist colleagues were surely aware of the Soviet Union’s needs as well. Historian Mark Wheeler says it is “virtually inconceivable” that the American and Canadian Communist parties would have cooperated with SOE without Moscow’s approval.[38] Kovačević, according to Williams, was in fact a Soviet agent.[39] And Babin allegedly reported to Soviet military intelligence about his recruitment activities.[40] And yet there is also circumstantial evidence suggesting the Soviets were not fully informed about what the British and their American and Canadian recruits were up to. When Canadians Pavle Pavlić and Petar Erdeljac, along with British Alexander Simić-Stevens, parachuted into western Croatia in April 1943, they were met by local peasants and eventually taken to Partisan headquarters for Croatia. There, Tito was cabled and asked what should be done with them. Tito, apparently surprised to get the news, contacted the Communist International (Comintern), a Soviet organization that ran the international communist movement, and asked them to investigate the identity of his guests through the CPC. It took the Comintern a while to reply. When it did, it denied all knowledge of the CPC’s involvement in the recruitment of agents and advised Tito to be cautious while establishing the true identity of the parachutists.[41]

Regardless of any instructions they might have received from Moscow, it was likely obvious to CPC recruiters that cooperating with the British in Yugoslavia could also help the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands of German troops were needed to occupy Yugoslavia, and the more deployed there and elsewhere in the Balkans to battle local resistance groups, the fewer would be available to throw at the Russians on the Eastern Front. Todorof said as much in a letter of introduction he provided to Bailey for a Bulgarian immigrant and Spanish Civil War veteran named Bojan Nikolof:

Dear Boris [sic]

I received your letter. And now I am recommending you for something which I think you will like, which is exceedingly dangerous but of the very greatest importance for Bulgaria. Your wife will be well looked after, so that there is no need for you to worry about her. The person who will present this letter to you will explain the whole business, and inform you with whom you will be working. Anyway, you have always been a fghter for liberty, and I know you will always fght wherever it may be necessary. The work is exceedingly [one word illegible] but glorious. You will be working for Bulgaria, for the Allies, and for Soviet Russia. I hope and believe that wherever you may be ofered work, you will accept the ofer and that you will carry out all the tasks allotted to you in the same way that you behaved over there in Spain. With warm greetings, [Signed] Kosta Todorof[42]

Despite their eagerness to help, Phillips and Kovačević did not ofer unconditional support. At their frst meeting with Bailey, they asked for a number of assurances. It was necessary, they said, that their work be carried out with the knowledge and tacit approval of the Canadian authorities. They asked that SOE not try to infuence the political convictions of any of the recruits and that a recruit’s communist convictions would not militate against him during or after his service. They wanted confrmation that recruits who were Canadian citizens would not jeopardize that status through their work with SOE and that recruits would be free to return to Canada at the conclusion of their service. For recruits not yet qualifed for naturalization, Phillips and Kovačević asked that service with SOE would count as time spent in Canada. They also wanted assurance that compensation would be paid to dependents if a recruit were killed or disabled. Bailey, in a summary he prepared of the meeting, said he considered all these demands justifable.[43]

Beyond such requirements, Phillips had other goals he hoped to advance through his involvement in the recruitment process. Party members at the time were continually harassed by the police, he said. Phillips told Bailey the situation was especially bad in Toronto because of someone he identifed as a local Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) assistant commissioner by the name of Draper. This was Brigadier-General Dennis Draper, who was not a member of the RCMP but was chief constable of the Toronto Police Department. Draper was a decorated First World War veteran of United Empire Loyalist stock. His eforts to stamp out communism in Toronto a decade earlier included employing a “Red Squad” of ofcers who physically abused prisoners and the prohibition of public meetings in any language other than English.[44] Phillips told Bailey that Draper had recently attempted to persuade the manager of a hotel to deny “radical elements” accommodation for one of their conventions. “The request was turned down because it was made unoffcially and was unfounded in law; but it indicates Draper’s attitude towards the people with whom we are now in close contact,” Bailey noted in a May 21 report to Halpern.[45]

By cooperating with the SOE, Phillips hoped to win the party some breathing room. “Also, should their collaboration with us yield results of value, they wish to receive due credit at such time as this can be done without jeopardising the secrecy of our operations and the safety of our operators,” Bailey continued in the same report, adding: “This seems a natural and reasonable demand.”[46]

Phillips had other suggestions regarding additional areas of cooperation, although he did not require that these be met as a prerequisite for his support in the recruiting process. He said he wanted to pass on information about “internal afairs” in Canada, presumably a reference to fascist-supporting groups in the country. He proposed using immigrant “language groups” in Canada to make propaganda directed at those in occupied Europe. And he suggested that propaganda and recruiting activities could be conducted among immigrants in South America.[47]

Phillips made no demands for himself, although he told Bailey he feared getting arrested and limited his travel accordingly. That Phillips was so restricted irritated Bailey for practical and moral reasons. “Another argument for allowing Phillips freedom of movement . . . is that it is paradoxical for him to endeavour to recruit personnel for our particularly dangerous work ‘in the name of democracy’ if he himself is being hounded by the authorities for his political views” he wrote in June. “The propaganda value of this situation (adverse to us) is too important to be ignored.”[48]

Bailey and his colleagues tried to intervene with Canadian authorities on Phillips’s behalf, securing assurances from Norman Robertson, undersecretary of state for the Department of External Afairs, that Phillips could safely travel without fear of arrest. Robertson told them there was in fact no outstanding arrest warrant for Phillips. Herbert Sichel, a colleague of Bailey’s at BSC, thanked Robertson, promised Robertson he would not tell Phillips about the lack of a warrant for his arrest, but said he would confdentially let Phillips know he could travel freely.[49] British intelligence appears to have had a less cooperative and transparent relationship with the RCMP. “I made no contacts at all in my hotel, and the interviews were carried out in four different houses, in diferent parts of Vancouver,” Bailey wrote of a recruiting trip in July 1942.

I do not therefore think that my activities or my connection with Phillips can possibly have come to the attention of authorities there. I mention this point, since it appears . . . that our relations with the R.C.M.P. in British Columbia are far from satisfactory. It would therefore do us no good at all if it came to the notice of ofcials there that we were dealing with the radicals.[50]

It seems unlikely, then, that Bailey was able to do much to ease RCMP pressure on his communist partners.

Kovačević likewise asked for little in return for his help and despite being over ffty years old seemed primarily concerned with joining those recruits training for infltration into Yugoslavia. He had not been there since 1928 and since then had lived illegally in various parts of Europe, the United States, and Canada, supporting himself through radical foreign-language journalism. “There is nothing to add to the life history, which speaks for itself of unswerving loyalty to a political ideal, at great personal risk and sacrifce,” reads a note in his personnel fle, compiled before he left Canada for SOE’s Middle East headquarters in Cairo.[51]

Kovačević wanted to conduct his work for SOE using his real name rather than the Marko Šikić alias he had been using in Canada. This presented Bailey with a dilemma that highlights BSC’s lack of candor with its Canadian partners. “To allow this, it would be necessary for us to tell the Canadians frankly that he has been in Canada illegally, and ask them to overlook this fact in view of his impending departure,” Bailey wrote:

They may of course in this event object to guaranteeing re-entry, but I think that Shikitch himself would not mind this, as all his ties and

connections are in Montenegro. If the war comes to a successful conclusion, he will undoubtedly want to stay there. If the war comes to an unsuccessful conclusion, it is extremely unlikely that he will ever be able to leave the country alive. In either case, his eventual return to Canada is most improbable.[52]

Kovačević, it seems, was willing to run that risk because, whatever loyalty he might have felt to the party and the Soviet Union, he also believed in the anti-fascist fght and in the liberation of Yugoslavia from Nazi occupation. Events would prove how dangerous acting on such convictions could be. In November 1942, an enemy submarine torpedoed and sunk the Greek freighter Andreas, on which Kovačević was sailing for Egypt, and machinegunned the survivors. Shot in the leg, Kovačević was too injured to continue with his mission and returned to Canada.[53] When they learned of his injury, Kovačević’s friends in British intelligence decided to present him with a portable typewriter so that he might make a living in journalism—almost certainly by publishing in the same radical publications for whom he had worked prior to his recruitment.[54]

To Help the Fatherland and Fight Fascism

And what of the other recruits, the miners and factory workers recommended by Kovačević and his colleagues? What motivated them to join a British secret organization? The explanation Prpić gives in his memoir is straightforward. He and his fellow recruits, the frst batch to leave Canada, had one aim: “to help the fatherland and their nations to fght against German and Italian fascist occupiers and domestic traitors—Ustashas and Chetniks.” If military authorities had allowed more volunteers, he adds, there would have been tens of thousands more.[55]

Prpić’s professed patriotism was likely genuine, but it is also true that most of the Yugoslav-Canadian recruits to the SOE were already politically engaged and, in some cases, had demonstrated a willingness to risk their lives fghting fascism. Their experiences as immigrants in Canada during the Great Depression nurtured a commitment to the Communist Party and to the broader anti-fascist movement. The uprising in Yugoslavia—like the war in Spain a few years earlier—seemed part of that larger struggle.

British and Canadian recruiters were aware of this perceived connection between Spain and the anti-fascist resistance in Yugoslavia and hoped to proft from it. In August 1943, the BSC tried to locate Edward Cecil-Smith, who had been commander of the Mackenize-Papineau Battalion of the International Brigades, in which many Canadians served during the Spanish Civil War. Alfred Gardyne de Chastelain, a former British oil executive and SOE member then looking for recruits in Canada, wanted to meet him. Tommy Drew-Brook, a Canadian working for BSC in Toronto, wrote de Chastelain on August 27 to say he would ask Phillips about Cecil-Smith. Cecil-Smith, he said, had a good record in Spain, barring a report that he had intentionally wounded himself to avoid action. A telegram the next day said Cecil-Smith had “lost touch and favour with his former pals of the Spanish war although he himself may still be a good man.” There is no evidence that SOE recruiters pursued the matter after this.[56]

What motivated the Yugoslav-Canadian recruits might also be discerned, albeit in fltered form, through observations of their SOE examiners and trainers who recorded their observations in the recruits’ personnel fles. They saw evidence of patriotism, anti-fascism, loyalty to the Communist Party— and, on occasion, baser and more personal aspirations. One of Stevan Serdar’s examiners concluded that regardless of the instructions he was given, Serdar would try to make contact with Russian agents in whatever country he was sent.[57] Peter Erdeljac’s examiner worried Erdeljac might try to avenge himself on his wife in Yugoslavia for her alleged infdelity. She had reported him to the police and broke of contact because of his habit of sending their children communist literature. Erdeljac’s examiner noted with alarm that one of the children was only ten at the time.[58] The SOE sent both men to Yugoslavia anyway.

However, it is an elemental desire to fght the Germans and their allies and collaborators that emerges most prominently among the Yugoslav Canadians’ motivations. “A frst class type,” reads an examiner’s note about Pavle Pavlić. “Intelligent, steady, feels very strongly about the Fascist invasion of his country and keen as mustard to get at the Germans. Deplores misunderstanding between partisans and Mihailovic but only anxious to fght Fascists—let the rest wait.”[59]

One examiner wrote of Erdeljac, another veteran of the Spanish Civil War:

There is no doubt about his melancholy courage and political integrity; he is fully aware of the possible consequences of an excursion, in view of the police records which doubtless still exist in his country of origin, but is nevertheless more than eager to return whatever the consequences.

The same report also drips with class prejudice and stereotypical tropes about stolid and wily Slavs. “Is undoubtedly intelligent beyond his station,” it reads. “Is probably crafty rather than clever, with well-developed, native, peasant, shrewdness.”[60] Similar references to peasant cunning are scattered throughout SOE reports about North American Yugoslav recruits. Examiners seemed incapable of concluding that these communist migrants, men from frontier bunkhouses and northern gold mines who would be assigned delicate and difcult work, might have been as smart as those who would dispatch them.

If the Yugoslav-Canadian recruits were underestimated during war, they were also overlooked when it was fnished. “No one in British authority was ever going to thank them for doing it, of course,” wrote SOE Yugoslav section head Basil Davidson in his 1980 memoir, referring to the contact the Canadian Yugoslavs made with Tito’s Partisans, “for they were unimportant persons and were only going, after all, where they had wished to go.”[61] Davidson returned to the topic years later after attending the unveiling of a plaque in Westminster Abbey dedicated to SOE casualties. “I do not know if anyone ever thanked those Canadians,” he wrote in a 1996 London Review of Books article.[62] Clearly, it bothered him.

A Fight They Chose

It’s unlikely, however, that the SOE’s Yugoslav-Canadian recruits were looking for thanks. They wanted to join a fght against fascism in their homeland, and, as Davidson pointed out, they got what they wanted. He remembered them smoldering with impatience in Cairo while awaiting transport to Yugoslavia. They lived on the outskirts of the city near the Mena House Hotel in a villa he said had once been a high-end brothel that serviced discerning pashas. It still housed pink lamps, now covered in dust. They were “craggy men with huge shoulders,” he said, “hard of face, their hands clawed with toil, and as stubbornly powerful in their convictions.”[63]

They would almost all leave, eventually. Pavlić describes in his memoir the nighttime fight over the Mediterranean, the plunge through the foor of a lone bomber, his parachute catching him in a tree well of the ground, a dawn encounter with the frightened peasant men who fnd him. He gives cigarettes to the men and his scarf to a young girl who arrives soon after. They bring him to a house that had been burned, possibly during a reprisal attack, roughly repaired with new boards of wood. They feed Pavlić hot milk and ham. Then they take him to a nearby Partisan detachment, where he sees Erdeljac and Simić-Stevens.[64] Others would follow. More than twenty Yugoslav Canadians infltrated the Balkans as agents of the SOE. Five were veterans of Spain, including Branko Gruić, who was recruited by the SOE but served with the American OSS. At least fve died. Two more, Luka Biljan and Emil Vrkljan, perished in the South Atlantic submarine attack before they could get to Europe.[65]

In William Mackenzie’s ofcial history of the SOE, written immediately after the war at the invitation of SOE’s last chief, Colin Gubbins, but declassifed only in 2000, Mackenzie says resistance groups in Yugoslavia contained an “impressive” number of Axis divisions and prevented their deployment elsewhere. He also notes that Britain’s contribution to armed resistance in the country was mostly symbolic until the spring of 1944 when it began supplying Tito’s Partisans on a large scale, allowing them to dominate their Chetnik rivals and more forcefully confront the Germans.[66] The SOE facilitated this process by “pushing liaison ofcers to strange places, establishing communication, and following it with supplies.”[67] The Yugoslav Canadians who were part of such liaison missions, and often the only members able to communicate with their hosts, therefore contributed signifcantly to Britain’s tactical success in Yugoslavia.

As for Britain’s strategic choice to end support for Mihailović and back Tito exclusively, it is unlikely the Canadian SOE agents on the ground had much of an impact. That decision was mainly infuenced by the reports and arguments of Britons William Deakin and Fitzroy Maclean, who led missions to Tito, combined with signals intelligence decryption.[68] Some Yugoslav Canadians on the ground certainly tried to push the British toward Tito, however, as is demonstrated in a May 24, 1943, memo from the SOE in Cairo based on telegrams received from Pavlić, Erdeljac, and Simić-Stevens, then members of an SOE sub-mission with the Partisans in Croatia. The memo reads: “Almost the frst comment by this sub-mission was ‘we think you are badly informed of the whole situation.’”[69] The British were still supporting Mihailović at that time. Jimmy Pearson, head of the Balkan and Middle East section at SOE’s headquarters on Baker Street in London, forwarded the memo to a colleague with a dismissive disclaimer:

When reading this memo you will no doubt bear in mind that the mission consists of three Canadian Yugoslavs who, though intelligent, are biased toward the Left. . . . The telegrams, however, are interesting, and on receipt of further telegrams, we shall be in a better position to judge the relative strength of the forces opposing the Axis in Yugoslavia.[70]

Biased or not, the Canadians’ views on Tito and the Partisans and whom the British should support would eventually carry the day in London. For a while, the British sent weapons and liaison ofcers to both the Chetniks and the Partisans and tried to get them to cooperate with each other. In December 1943, however, after meeting with Maclean and Deakin in Cairo, Churchill declared he wanted Mihailović removed by the end of the year.[71]

Britain’s abandonment of Mihailović for Tito remains controversial. Put simply, London concluded that the Partisans were far more active and efective fghters and the Chetniks were at best passive and at worst actively collaborating with the enemy. It might be said in their defense that the Chetniks were motivated in large part by self-preservation. Yugoslavia’s Serbs had suffered tremendous atrocities at the hands of the Nazis and Croatian fascists early in the war. Mihailović’s Chetniks wanted to avoid triggering further reprisal attacks on Serb villages. They were also conserving their forces for a showdown with the Partisans over who would rule Yugoslavia after the Axis was defeated.[72] The Partisans, for their part, had a revolutionary current to their politics. They were not fghting to defeat those occupying their country and return to the situation that had existed before the war, but for a new world—or at least a new Yugoslavia. They, too, knew a confrontation with Mihailović, who represented that old order, was inevitable. In the meantime, they were enthusiastic killers of Nazis, which was what mattered most to London.

Several Canadian recruits joined the Partisans during the war. A November 23, 1944, memo from Sichel to Drew-Brook quotes a telegram from the “Mediterranean Area,” saying that they are “Endeavouring to liquidate [end relations with] soonest Canadian Croats originally recruited in 1942.” The telegram located thirteen of those Canadians in Italy, “and at present unemployed,” seven in the feld with the 37th Military Mission in Yugoslavia, four believed to be dead or captured, and ten “in feld with Partisans having joined Partisan Army but not then unfortunately signed of by SOE.”[73] A note the following July, attempting to track the locations of various recruits “about whom we have no defnite information,” cites unconfrmed reports that Marko Pavičić had been killed after joining the Partisans. Pavičić was dead by then. A note on the same page about Josip Sarić indicates he had joined the “JANL” (Jugoslav Army of National Liberation), adding: “Present whereabouts unknown.”[74] Sarić, too, was dead.[75]

Pavlić’s transfer to the Partisans was more formal. His SOE personnel fle contains a letter from December 16, 1943, to a Commissar V. Bakarić at Partisan headquarters from a British ofcer who had served with Pavlić in Yugoslavia. “My Dear Commissar,” it begins, and then introduces Pavlić as someone whom Bakarić had met when Pavlić was the British ofcer’s interpreter but who now wished to join the Partisans:

He is prompted to take this step purely because of his loyal patriotism, his love for the cause of freedom for which you are fghting, and because of his own honest character. He conscientiously believes it is his duty to join his fellow country-men in their struggle for freedom. I wish to point out to you that Sgt. Pavlić has given splendid service while he has been with us and we are sorry to see him go. However, we understand Paul and know that he is not happy unless he feels that he is doing is maximum duty. In that sense we are not inclined to stand in the way of his joining the Partizans. We are consoled by the thought that he is still within the family. We have recommended Sgt. Pavlić for the military medal as a modest token for his bravery and good conduct. We wish Paul every success and happiness in his most worthy and commendable choice of joining the Partizans and trust that you may well be proud of him.[76]

This letter found its way into Pavlić’s SOE fle. Pavlić, who stayed in Yugoslavia after the war, brought it to the British consulate-general in Zagreb to complain that he had not been given his pay and allowances when he joined the Partisans three years earlier. The British military attaché at the embassy in Belgrade reported that they had no knowledge of Pavlić’s service in the British Army but asked that they be told how much to pay him, if the letter was genuine.[77]

All these lay in the future when Pavlić followed the villagers through the spring dawn toward the Partisans he had prepared so long to meet. We can imagine him with Erdeljac and Simić-Stevens, perhaps in a wooded glen, leaves on surrounding trees small and the bright shade of green that comes with April’s new growth; or packed into a villager’s hut smelling of sweat and wet wool. Gathered about them are curious men dressed in an unmatched variety of stolen and homemade uniforms, bedecked with grenades and pistols, almost certainly pressing rakia, a strong fruit brandy, into their hands. A link, tenuous and ripe with possibility, is established between the Partisans and Allied high command by migrants, whom poverty and ambition had driven from Yugoslavia to Canada when they were younger men and who have now found their way back to build something new.

Bibliography

Archives

National Archives (NA): Kew, United Kingdom

Special Operations Executive (SOE) papers

Foreign Ofce (FO) papers

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