Eastern Approaches

Edit: 29/12/16 - Best Military Biography read of 2016.

This really is an epic book. Split into three parts, it covers the early career of Fitzroy MacLean.
Spoilers below, so read it yourself first it you don't know about this book already!

The first part tells of his 1937-38 diplomatic posting in Moscow, where he volunteered to be sent after learning his trade in Paris the three years prior. As well as covering the great purge trials, where much of the communist leadership was executed, he tells of his unauthorised journeys into Soviet Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan) over several journeys, evading and somewhat mocking the NKVD's undercover officers who tailed him as best they could.
A mixture of brazenly pretending he had every right to be there, and the extracting of the goodwill of some unusual characters meant MacLean got a lot further afield than any others would have in his place. The ambitions of youth - when posted to Moscow he was only twenty six years old.

Oh his return to London, MacLean was very keen to join the war, but the Foreign Office refused to release him. Finding an obscure ruling that if elected as an MP, a foreign office man must resign, he had himself adopted as a Conservative candidate at the 1941 by-election in Lancaster.

The second part of the book tells of MacLeans exploits in the Middle East. Immediately on leaving the foreign office, he enlisted as a private in the Cameron Highlanders. He passed his basic training, and was commissioned as a lieutenant and seconded to a new elite commando unit being trained in Cairo. The project was soon shelved, so Maclean accepted an invitation from David Stirling to join the newly formed Special Air Service.

Numerous SAS tasks were undertaken - the SAS being a newly formed group, they operated below the radar, and as such were unorthodox in their approach. His work included multiple undercover entries into Benghazi, and the arrest & extraction of a (theoretically allied) Iranian General from his Isfahan palace. Libya, Egypt, Iran and Iraq were the setting for his SAS works.

So on to the third part of the book - Yugoslavia.

It was at this point of his career that he was picked to play a crucial role in Yugoslavia, where the British were concerned at a lack of progress being made by the Cetniks, who they had been providing with weapons and equipment. The British has begun to suspect that they backed the wrong guerilla army, and MacLean was sent in to evaluate the partisans, led by the shadowy figure known as Tito. MacLeans task: “simply to find out who was killing the most Germans and suggest means by which we could help them to kill more.”

MacLean earned the trust of Tito, and formed a friendship of sorts, and soon was able to confirm that indeed the Cetniks were concentrating their efforts not on the Nazi's but on the partisans, and in many locations were coordinating and cooperating with the Nazis. The partisans however were desperate to engage the Nazis in a more meaningful way - having for the previous two years to rely on taking weapons and equipment from their enemy.

A part of the intrigue was that Tito, and the partisans were communist, so there was a concern that making them too strong would lead to a communist Yugoslavia in the future. Churchill disregarded this: “Mr. Churchill's reply left me in no doubt as to the answer to my problem. So long, he said, as the whole of Western civilization was threatened by the Nazi menace, we could not afford to let our attention be diverted from the immediate issue by considerations of long-term policy. We were as loyal to our Soviet Allies as we hoped they were to us. My task was simply to find out who was killing the most Germans and suggest means by which we could help them to kill more. Politics must be a secondary consideration.”

Soon the British stopped all support to the Cetniks and immediately provided weapons and equipment to the partisans. Eventually,as circumstances allowed, this was followed by air support and eventually troops on the ground. The Germans, struggling with the guerilla tactics were suffering losses, and continued to commit troops to Yugoslavia - the main benefit for the Allies - better results on the other fronts.

As it became clear that the Nazis were losing, and that Yugoslavia would soon require new rulers, MacLean's diplomatic background again become useful, where he tried to assist Tito to enter negotiations with the King, who was domiciled in London, as to forming a government. Tito, holding all the cards eventually forced terms he was happy with, and which were signed off by the British and the Russians.

This is MacLeans first book, and for me is well balanced. He does not come across as an egomaniac, he doesn't hunt glory, but he writes very well. It is a well paced book of just over 400 pages, and is very readable. It is a clever book - the first part is pure travel, the relatively unknown areas of Soviet Central Asia; there is the military history; and the pure biography of the man. It crosses the three genres comfortably and well. A really enjoyable read.

Five stars from me, no doubt about it.