The Wildest Province: SOE in the Land of the Eagle

by Roderick Bailey

From the summer of 1943, small teams of elite British soldiers began to parachute into Axis-occupied Albania. These men belonged to Britain's Special Operations Executive, a secret organisation set up early in the Second World War to encourage resistance and carry out sabotage behind enemy lines. Their task was to find and support bands of local guerrillas and harass the Axis as best they could. None of these young Britons had been there before or knew what was waiting for them.

Trying to survive in extreme conditions and formidable terrain, SOE missions lived in constant danger of capture and death and were plagued by illness, lice and frostbite. Casualties were appalling. Most guerrillas, meanwhile, seemed keener to kill each other than fight Italians and Germans. British backing went eventually to Albania's communist-led partisans. It remains a controversial choice. Their leader, Enver Hoxha, seized power at the end of the war and was to rule with a brutal hand for forty years.

In The Wildest Province, Roderick Bailey draws on interviews with survivors, long-hidden diaries and recently declassified files to tell the full story of this remarkable corner of SOE history. Through the experiences of individual SOE officers, including Anthony Quayle, the actor, and Julian Amery, the future MP and Minister, he reveals the grim realities of life in the field. He looks, too, at the dilemmas faced and created as the British sought to decide which guerrillas to arm. And by shedding light on what was going on at SOE headquarters, Bailey settles the enduring question of whether or not British communists in SOE, perhaps even colleagues of the Cambridge spies, had conspired to lead British policy astray.

Genres: World War II, Nonfiction, History

416 pages, Hardcover

First published February 7, 2008

Reviews

[Martinxo · Rating 4 out of 5]

"On a warm June night in 1944, at a spot called Gjoles, on the main road north from Tirana, David Smiley blew up Albania's third largest bridge."

This is a thoughtful, well researched work on the role of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Albania during world war two.

Worth reading by anyone interested in behind-the-lines guerilla warfare and resistance against the Nazis. Also, good for Balkan-obsessives such as myself.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another gap filled in the complex history of SOE operations during the war. It would be easy to think of SOE as primarily about France and the operations to support the D-Day invasion and aftermath. In fact SOE had a truly global presence, and increasingly there is good, engaging history to reflect this. The operations in Albania are the focus of Roderick Bailey's book here. This account is full of the adventurism, heroism, and sacrifice that can be expects from any telling of SOE operations in the field. It is also a story of extreme frustration, and it hard for the reader not to share this frustration willing the partisan groups to support the military missions in the field. Albania emphasises that SOE was both an operational and a political body - politics was the ever present context to operations in Albania, both for the natives, and the British government.

Here is a detailed account of operations in Albania, the courage, the frustrations and the deprivations laid bare; the reader is left with the question, was it worth it? And in Albania it is hard to justify. Few German divisions were distracted to the country, operations did not support an allied invasion, and the Germans moved out as the war turned against them. My only criticism of the book is that at times it is difficult to follow the sequencing and dates, much of the story is confined to 1943-44, and covers overlapping periods where it is not always clear what is happening concurrently.

[Simon McCrum · Rating 2 out of 5]

An incredibly interesting topic full of extraordinary feats of endurance and derring-do, This book is extremely well researched but sadly the author does not do justice to such an exciting theatre of the war. I found this book quite hard going and it took me some time to finish it.

[Matthew Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who has lived in Albania and come to love it, I wanted to read about the history of the place prior to the Communist takeover. I found this book very interesting in that it showed (at least in part) how Enver Hoxha was able to rise to power. If only things could have been different!

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is about the Western Allies attempts to assist the partisans (mostly communist, but also of other political complexions) rid Albania of its Nazi German occupiers. It deals mostly with the role of the British SOE (Special Operations Executive) and its US counterpart. Because it was only the communist partisans who were willing to attack the Germans, they received most of the Allied assistance (men and military material). Thus, unwillingly the Allies paved the way for Enver Hoxha's long Stalinist dictatorship.

The book is the result of careful, in-depth scholarly research, BUT unfortunately it makes for dull reading.