Tito’s Tactics: Behind Canada’s 2 Peacekeeping Stints in Yugoslavia

Josip Broz, a.k.a. Marshall Tito (C), in Moscow with Soviet officers in April 1945 during World War II. After the war, Tito became Yugoslavia's first communist leader. -/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

The 16,000 Canadian soldiers who served in Yugoslavia during the 1990s were not the first. Canadians had deployed to the war-torn Balkans half a century earlier. Most of the latter were not conventional soldiers and had a very different (and, it may be said, more successful) mission from the peacekeepers who came later. It was their success during World War II that, ironically, led to Canadian troops being drawn back into the Balkan morass five decades later.

Deploying as part of the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia and Croatia from 1992 to 1995, the Canadians’ status as peacekeepers was a misnomer and 11 were killed. Sent to set the conditions for negotiations, they had a rough ride, including being attacked by the Croatian army in the Medak Pocket on Sept. 15, 1993. Repelling the attack, the 2nd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry earned a unit citation, although 80 percent of the rifle companies were not PPCLI but volunteer reservists from small part-time units across Canada.

Canadian soldiers with the 1st Royal Canadian Regiment, part of NATO's peacekeeping forces in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, on Feb. 19, 2000. AP Photo/Boris Grdanoski

In World War II, a select group of Canadians was parachuted into Yugoslavia as part of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to “set Europe ablaze” and undermine the sprawling Greater Germanic Reich. They were hand-picked in a typical British improvisation: Where could the SOE find Serbo-Croat-speaking recruits to drop behind enemy lines? Answer: Canada’s Yugoslav immigrant community.

SOE political officer Col. William Bailey reached out to Paul Phillips, a Ukrainian immigrant and treasurer of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC). Phillips’s clandestine task was to use party channels to track down potential recruits among immigrants.

Bailey was advised by another Canadian, Capt. William Yull Stuart, who had worked in the Canadian Pacific Railway’s immigration department in the 1930s. Born in Bosnia, Stuart worked as a farmer and miner in Manitoba in the 1920s. He then did business in Prague and other Central European cities, eventually as British vice consul in Zagreb in 1939.

America’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor of the CIA, also approached A. A. MacLeod, editor of the communist newspaper Canadian Tribune and a member of the Ontario Provincial Parliament from 1943–51, to help the Allies find CPC supporters “willing to drop behind enemy lines in the Balkans,” as reported by party leader Tim Buck.

Most Yugoslav immigrants arrived in the 1920s and 1930s, working as fishermen, miners, woodsmen, and trappers. A few had military experience, some as communist battalion members in the Spanish Civil War. Two recruits were already privates in the Canadian Army. Of many more volunteers, about 30 were chosen for the Special Training School (Camp X) near Whitby, Ontario, in the summer of 1942, of whom half were sent to Ramat David near Haifa (in the future Israel) for parachute training, then to the SOE base in Cairo.

The first Canadians to parachute into Croatia on the night of April 20, 1943, were Peter Erdeljac, a stonemason, and Paul Pavlić, a Vancouver shipyard worker, both veterans of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion that fought in the Spanish Civil War.

Their objective in Croatia was to link up with anti-German Partisans and establish radio communications with SOE, as retold by Roy Maclaren in his book “Canadians Behind Enemy Lines.” Pavlic was killed later that year in a German ambush. Erdeljac survived the war and died in Zagreb in 1976.

Another recruit was Colin Scott Dafoe, a surgeon and graduate of Queen’s University. He was born in Madoc, Ontario, and like his famous journalist cousin John Wesley Dafoe of the Winnipeg Free Press, sprang from Canada’s influential Wesleyan Methodist (United Church) middle-class “aristocracy” rooted in small-town Ontario and Manitoba that produced so many consequential leaders, such as Lester B. Pearson, prime minister from 1963 to 1968.

Working with his wife (also a doctor) in Britain when the war broke out, Dafoe joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1940 and served with the Eighth Army in North Africa. Then he too was recruited by the SOE and parachuted into eastern Bosnia to link up with a Soviet-trained partisan leader in Croatia, Vladimir Popović, for six intense months.

The SOE’s goal was to back the Yugoslav Partisans, irregular forces fighting against the Nazi German occupation.

The trouble was that there were two kinds of anti-Nazi forces: the communists led by professional communist thug Josip Broz, using the nom de guerre Tito, and the non-communists known as Chetniks, led by Gen. Draza Mihailovic.

Gen. Draza Mihailovic, commander of the non-communist Chetnik forces in Yugoslavia during World War II. Public Domain

From the outset, Great Britain supported the non-communists led by Mihailovic, an early resistance hero. That made sense because he represented the Kingdom of Yugoslavia set up at the end of World War I that survived until the German invasion, when King Paul II fled Belgrade and sought refuge in London, as had Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, among others.

The royalist Chetnicks were rightly wary of communist designs after the war.

When World War II broke out, communists worldwide had refused to fight against Hitler because of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. After Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941, they switched sides and joined the anti-Hitler forces.

International communist doctrine, reiterated at the 7th Comintern Congress (1935), said the party should take advantage of all divisions within the capitalist world. The “popular front” enjoined communists to court and manipulate left-of-centre parties such as the Social Democrats, whom they could overpower later.

Communist strategy was to turn “imperialist wars” to their advantage, hijack “national liberation” movements, and seize the upper hand, according to “The Anatomy of Communist Takeovers,” edited by Thomas Hammond. It was preferred to seize power from above (as in Russia), but Tito’s method was to “liberate” Yugoslavia first, using Allied support, then seize power.

Tito’s partisan technique was “deliberate use of terror” around Yugoslav villages “to provoke reprisals” from the Germans, and generally use totalitarian methods to “encourage misery and chaos,” forcing homeless peasants into the arms of the waiting communist forces.

To the non-communist Chetniks it did not come naturally to collaborate with communists, and they avoided provoking German reprisals against their own people. Reports that the Chetniks were less effective, disunited, even pro-Nazi, began reaching British ears, turning Winston Churchill to the side of the communist Partisans.

Tito assured the British that his goal was “real” democracy and “real” freedom, while remaining vague about the precise form the post-war government would take.

Unfortunately, Allied outreach to the communists represented a lack of long-term strategy and realism about post-war outcomes.

Tito had Mihailovic shot in 1946 after a kangaroo court that supposedly “confirmed” the general as a “collaborator.” Many refugee royalists and former allies of the British were handed back to communist authorities after the war and were shot or died in gulag camps.

Even today, the wartime propaganda trope that Tito was the more benign choice remains prevalent. One Canadian historian wrote that the communists were fighting “for a new world — or at least a new Yugoslavia.” That’s one way to put it! Another is that the Communist Party members were ruthless operators awaiting their chance to seize power and murder their enemies, as they did everywhere. Legion magazine, published by the Royal Canadian Legion, described Tito as a “Communist sympathizer,” a gross understatement.

Canada’s World War II success alongside Britain in bringing Tito to power in the long run did nothing to reconcile internal Yugoslav cultural differences. Tito’s iron grip lasted from 1945 until his death in 1980—and in turn precipitated the explosion of ethnic wars. And thus Canadians were drawn back into the Balkans, including the horrendous NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, by which time they had served pointlessly if bravely in every part of the Yugoslav mess.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.