Beacons in the Night : With the OSS and Tito’s Partisans in Wartime Yugoslavia / Franklin Lindsay.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lindsay, Franklin, Author.

Contributor:

Galbraith, John Kenneth, Contributor.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (400 p.) : illus

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

FOREWORD

PREFACE

CONTENTS

MAPS

CHAPTER 1 To Slovenia by Parachute

CHAPTER 2 Preparing for the Mission

CHAPTER 3 First Days with the Partisans

CHAPTER 4 Crossing the Border

CHAPTER 5 Inside the Third Reich

CHAPTER 6 Blowing Up Germany's Railroads

CHAPTER 7 Night Marches and Hidden Hospitals

CHAPTER 8 The Partisans Organize a Shadow Government

CHAPTER 9 Radios, Codes, and Codebreakers

CHAPTER 10 Liberation of a Mountain Valley

CHAPTER 11 The Lure of Austria

CHAPTER 12 Failure in Austria

CHAPTER 13 Revolution Comes into the Open

CHAPTER 14 The German Winter Offensive Begins

CHAPTER 15 Ethnic and Ideological Wars in Croatia

CHAPTER 16 Tito5 Government Takes Control in Belgrade

CHAPTER 17 The Defeat of the Chetniks

CHAPTER 18 Communist Rule Becomes Absolute

CHAPTER 19 The Cold War Begins in Trieste

CHAPTER 20 In the Wake of the Hot War

CHAPTER 21 How It All Turned Out

APPENDIX Political Boundaries and Ethnic Distribution in Postwar Yugoslavia

NOTES

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 31. Jan 2022)

ISBN:

0-8047-8084-6

OCLC:

1294424167