Beacons in the Night: With the OSS and Tito's Partisans in Wartime Yugoslavia

by Franklin Lindsay, John Kenneth Galbraith

At midnight on May 14, 1944, the blinking of a flashlight in mountainous, German-occupied Yugoslavia signaled the parachute drop of four American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) officers who were met by a group of Tito's Partisans. One of the OSS officers was Franklin Lindsay. Only with the declassification in the 1980s of wartime American and British archives could he undertake to reconstruct his day-to-day experiences in a war area of constantly changing conditions and ever-present danger. In the closing months of the war, Lindsay became the commander of the American Military Mission to Tito's new Communist government, and he describes the consolidation of Tito's power over the civil population, the final defeat of the Chetniks, and the elimination of all other political opposition. Directly pertinent to contemporary developments in the former Yugoslavia are Lindsay's observations of the savage ethnic and religious hatreds. Though the seeds of the present violent breakup of Yugoslavia were sown in earlier centuries, they were given powerful reinforcement by wartime atrocities.

Genres: History, World War II

383 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1993

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

l rate this very highly. Lindsay has written the most clear sighted of all the accounts of life with the Partisans. He lived and fought with them in Slovenia and this memoir is notablee on two counts. The factual narrative is detailed, but avoids unnecessary or abstruse detail. His work with the Partisans is clearly set out. Second, he was under no illusions and describes with great skill how they blocked the Allies, played for time, put up walls of silence and generally impeded the mission. This was largely in aid of the Communist plan for this part of the world after the war. Lindsay understood this at the time - and we can't say that of all the OSS and SOE operatives.