Raiding Support Regiment by G. H. Bennet Walter Jones Peter Lovstrom

Author:G. H. Bennet, Walter Jones, Peter Lovstrom [G. H. Bennet, Walter Jones, Peter Lovstrom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Military, Biography & Memoir
ISBN: 9781841023366
Publisher: University of Plymouth Press
Published: 2013-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

“Perhaps we had not influenced the outcome of the war very much in Yugoslavia, but we had done something out of the ordinary.”

Chapter XVII

Return to Ravnik

That the personal diary I kept for those years (which just happened to bridge a war’s duration) should become a ‘war diary’ never ceases to surprise me. Consequently, I derive rather smug satisfaction when apparently innocuous entries (and weren’t they all such, at the time?) find themselves linked with moments of some historical importance. Tuesday 15 August 1944 is one such day. As a rarity, allow me to quote the whole entry appearing on that day’s page, which measures but 3¼ inches x 2½ inches. The very trivia of its miscellanea may, perversely, prove to be of some interest:

“Today I receive yet another AL [Air letter] from Anne – and a letter from Ed’s brother. Reply by AL to Anne, send one also to home, hoping they arrive before her holiday.16 AB 64 turns up.17 The weather is still super-hot and no signs of a crack-up. Archie goes to Vis for 4 days. It looks as if some important guy arrived this evening... 2 DCs and escort?”

The last two lines of the day’s entries, posing unanswered questions as they do, are the ones whose historical significance I only discovered decades later in a book borrowed by chance from a public library. The ‘important guy’, it transpires, was Tito – returning with his retinue from his historic first meeting (on 12 August) with Prime Minister Churchill, in Italy at Caserta. The ‘DCs’ mentioned refer to two specimens of that wonderful transport plane of the era, the American Douglas Dakota, numbered in gradually modified sequence as DC3s, DC4s, etc. I had probably been watching DC3s. Undoubtedly the meeting was momentous, since it led to the tenuous acceptance of some delicate compromise proposals for the immediate post-war international recognition of a Yugoslav government, without wholly discarding a role for King Peter – at least until elections could be held.

It was not merely our exile on Ravnik which had denied us the news that Tito was in Italy. Certainly, secrecy of such an important movement was necessary and to be commended, and it is comforting to know that it worked, but frankly I don’t imagine that we even cared then – and surely, barely understood – the significance of such an encounter. Whatever else it achieved, it certainly confirmed the admiration each statesman had for the other.

Another epoch-making happening of 15 August, about which we were then ignorant, was the commencement of operation ‘Anvil’ – the substantial British and American landings in the south of France. Ah! Yes: that accounts for the shortage of suitable landing craft for Korcula and the inventive enterprise needed to produce a do-it-yourself ‘destroyer’. How heartening it was that almost all the war news was then about Allied offensives; on every front the enemy was being gradually pushed back.

It was strange that I would hear from Eddie’s brother James that day too. Since Eddie

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