Escape from the Balkans

FOREWORD "In the summer of 1941, some weeks after Germany's attack on Russia, several hundred parachutists were dropped in the Balkans by Red Army planes to combat the occupying forces in all the Balkan countries and to assist in the organization of underground anti-Axis activities. Later in the year I myself saw some of these parachutists at work. I saw them fight and I saw them die. Their heroism inspired me to write their story and that story forms part of this book. But they had something more and rarer than courage: they were animated by a clear and steadfast ideal and for that ideal they fought and died. These parachutists were not Russians — they were Bulgarians, Croats, Greeks, Rumanians, Serbs and Slovenes. They fought — and some of them still fight — together, and their example has laid the foundations of Balkan underground unity on revolutionary bases. This underground unity, in my opinion, is the most significant political phenomenon of the war as far as the Balkans and Southeastern Europe are concerned. It is bound to have — as indeed present conditions (Spring 1943) in Yugoslavia show — great repercussions throughout the Balkans and will be one of the most important factors to be reckoned with when peace comes. Unfortunately this unity is hardly realized or taken into account in Britain and in the United States, in spite of the great interest that is in evidence in both countries toward the peace problems of Europe."