Although cast by myth in a heroic role which he came to believe in himself, he had none of the qualities for successful military or political leadership. Milazzo's final conclusion is that even if Mihailovic had been able to exploit the Chetnik's initial advantages, and with Allied support restore a Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia, "the restoration of the monarchy would surely have been ac- companied by violent political purges and a reign of Serb vengeance." This, of course, is historical speculation, but it is based on what is in general an unbiased examination of facts. There are a number of errors that should be corrected, e.g., the first British officer to Mihailovic was Captain D. T. Hudson (described throughout as W. Hudson) and the British Ambas- sador to the Yugoslav emigre government was Sir George Rendall (not Randall). Unfortunately, the index is so etiolated as to be of limited use. This does not detract from the fact that this is a valuable book of unpolemical history. It has a good bibliography and will be most useful to general readers and students. It will no doubt provide some new starting points for doctoral theses on a subject which never fails to intrigue historians in a number of varied fields.

Phyllis Auty Simon Fraser University

Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945; The Chetniks. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975. vii, 508 pp. $20.00.

The first of three projected volumes dealing with war and revolution in Yugoslavia 1941-45, Professor Tomasevich's volume on the Chetniks is a massive and impressive work of scholarship which will remain the definitive authority on the subject for some considerable time. It embodies the fruits of research begun in 1963, when the author was contemplating a single volume covering all aspects of the Yugoslav wartime experience. However, Professor Tomasevich has chosen instead to write three separate studies, one each on the main wartime internal forces. The subsequent two volumes will be on the Croatian Ustashi and the Partisans, and if they are of the standard of this volume, then together they will represent a major and indispensable source to historians both of the Balkans and of World War II. In addition to his impressive mastery of published sources, Professor Tomasevich has used the captured German and Italian archives, has had access to Yugoslav documentary collections in Belgrade, has interviewed extensively, and has used declassified OSS and Foreign Office papers. Even where he has not worked himself on certain sources, such as seems the case with the British Foreign Office papers, he has kept in close touch with scholars who have, and has used their findings with skill. He knows what questions to ask, and, above all, has rigorously organized his work so that rarely does the massive amount of information threaten to overwhelm the reader. The footnotes themselves are mines of information, and the reader must thank the publishers for placing them at the foot of each page, a necessity which is unfortunately rapidly becoming a luxury. The book is a sustained and massive rebuttal of the myth of Mihailovic and the Chetniks, a myth created during the war, heightened by Mihailovic's execution at the hands of the Communists on 17 July 1946, and subsequently fostered by former Chetniks in exile and their friends. The myth represents the Chetniks as the first and only "genuine" resistance force in Yugoslavia, denies the widespread claims that they collaborated with the Italians and Germans (or, alternatively, explains instances of collaboration as being no more than local and temporary expedients which in sum did not amount to a policy, no more than did occasional Partisan contacts with the Germans), and argues that the Allies, the British in particular, betray- ed Mihailovic by transferring their support in 1943 to Tito and the Partisans, thus delivering Yugoslavia into the hands of the Communists. The myth had already become somewhat tar- nished, but Professor Tomasevich must surely lay it to rest once and for all. He makes it clear that from the very beginning the objectives of the Chetniks were threefold; (a) to rebuild Yugoslavia around a Great Serbia and to re-establish the Serbian Karadjordjevic dynasty; (b) to avoid fighting the Axis forces as much as possible until an Allied landing was effected in the Balkans, or until the eve of Allied liberation; (c) to defeat the Partisans who were defined as the main short and long term threat. From the beginning, therefore, the Chetniks were fighting a civil war against the Partisans, and if it suited their purposes they were quite prepared to collaborate with the Italian and German occupying forces. For their failure to achieve these objectives Professor Tomasevich suggests eight main causes: (i) the leadership consisted of pro- fessional army officers who proved incapable of adjusting to the strategic, tactical, political, and ideological demands of modern guerrilla warfare; (ii) the failure, at least before January, 1944, when it was too late, to create any political organization which would embrace the civilian population (it is clear that even as late as the�fall of 1944 they enjoyed possibly as much as 90 percent support of the Serbian population); (iii) the traditionalist, conservative, and anti- intellectual nature of the movement and, one might add, its exclusively male ethos and orienta- tion; (iv) the overestimation of their abilities to conduct successfully a highly complex and often duplicitous policy towards the occupying forces; (v) their inability to realize the strength of the Partisans from 1942 onwards; (vi) strategic and tactical incompetence; (vii) their failure to appeal to non-Serb groups, and, finally; (viii) the illusion that they were indispensable to the West, which would never allow the Communists to take power. All these failings, indeed, were embodied in the personality of Mihailovic himself, a man who for all his courage was circum- scribed by a Great Serb view of Yugoslavia, limited in his vision and organizational capacities, old-fashioned in his military approach, provincial-minded, incapable of growth to meet the challenges set by his own complex strategies, and distrustful of politicians and of political matters. Professor Tomasevich provides extensive and conclusive documentation of Chetnik collab- oration with the Italians, Ustashi, and Germans, and shows clearly that this was a conscious and deliberate strategy seen by the Chetniks as the means to a greater end-the destruction of the Partisans; it did not preclude them fighting the Germans from time to time, and they were certainly going to fight them when the Allies landed, but neither were they going to let pass opportunities to finish off their rivals in the struggle for post-war power. This is clear from such documents as the armistice with the Germans signed by Colonel Simi6, the Inspector of all Chetnik forces, on 17 January 1944 (pp. 326-327), from which it is also clear that while Mihailovich was not directly involved, he knew and approved of such arrangements. The height of Chetnik-German collaboration against the Partisans came during the battle of the Neretva River, early in 1943. Perhaps appropriately, however, it was also the beginning of the end for Mihailovic. Not only was the battle lost, but shortly thereafter British policy began to shift, the Partisans strengthened their hold throughout the country, and the composition of the Royal Yugoslav Government in exile changed to Mihailovic's disadvantage. From the beginning of 1944 it was downhill for the Chetniks, with Mihailovic pathetically clinging to the end to the illusion that the British would land and help him, and unrepentantly holding to his practice of collabora- tion with the German occupying forces. All this is clearly described and analyzed, down to the last days when the Communists tricked Mihailovic into capture on 12 March 1946. Professor Tomasevich is equally effective, if briefer, in analyzing British relations with the Chetniks. While he stresses the immense importance of the BBC for in the first instance creating the Mihailovic myth, and is critical of British policy in 1941, he examines the evidence carefully, and rejects some of the criticisms of British policy made by Deakin in The Embattled Mountain. Contrary to Deakin's claim, the British were fully aware of the dangers of supplying the Chetniks with materiel in the situation of incipient civil war in November, 1941 (p. 284), and, more important, had sources of information about affairs in Yugoslavia throughout 1942 which belies Deakin's claim that because SOE missions were failures there was no information about what was happening to the two main resistance forces. On the contrary, SIS appears to have dropped in several missions, while intercepts must surely have provided considerable infor- mation about Mihailovic's dealings with the Axis (p. 287). Tomasevich does not refer to intercepts directly but on the evidence of Major Boughey's denunciation of Chetnik collabora- tion to Major Zivan Knezevic on 29 December 1942, only four days after Colonel Bailey had been dropped (and presumably therefore before he could have reported via Cairo), and of the later negative reaction of the War Office to Bailey's suggestion for a territorial separation of Partisans and Chetniks (p. 295), it is clear that the British had quite accurate non-SOE sources of information. Similarly, the request to Mihailovic to attack two bridges on the Salonica railway, made on 8 December 1943, was made in the certain knowledge that he would fail to do so and thus make public what the British knew from secret sources-presumably intercepts. The vital factor in British policy which Professor Tomasevich rightly emphasizes, was that "As long as the Mediterranean theater of war was not an area of major Allied operations, what went on in Yugoslavia did not matter much, and the Chetniks' collaboration with the Axis was allowed to pass" (p. 231). The British, in other words, did not stop helping Mihailovic and ignoring Tito prior to this time because they lacked accurate information or because there was an anti-Communist bankers' ramp, but because resistance in Yugoslavia was a peripheral concern to them; there is no great mystery about British policy, as many would like to believe.