Beacons in the Night: With the OSS and Tito's Partisans in Wartime Yugoslavia

Beacons in the Night: With the OSS and Tito's Partisans in Wartime Yugoslavia by Lindsay, Franklin. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780804721233.

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 Titos 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 Titos new Communist government, and he describes the consolidation of Titos 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 Lindsays 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.