Tito with sailors from the Partisan Navy (used with permission of the publisher) Freivogel and Rastelli's Adriatic Naval War is a treasury of superb naval images drawn from private collections, alongside the best-informed text I have ever read on the topic. The sheer amount of small but important details suggests to me that much of the book was put together from local knowledge and oral history. The gathering together of this information is a credit to its authors, but it was

‘”On the morning of Palm Sunday, while children slept their innocent sleep and the church bells were ringing for prayer to God, the German aeroplanes without warning let fall a rain of bombs on this historic town”’. So wrote King Peter of Yugoslavia after the bombing of Belgrade 6th April 1941. ‘The King went on to describe the terror of the women and children who were machine-gunned as they fled from their homes by low-flying planes.’ (1) Hitler termed this invasion Operatio

You don’t meet men like Pope Pius XII anymore. Erudite and aristocratic, he was far removed from his proletarian people yet he confessed a quiet ambition to one day be their Pope. Readers of David Kertzer’s book about him are lucky. They have the benefit of knowing that Hitler was evil. For Pius XII, it was as if the truth crept up on him only slowly while he battled the demons that bound him, his fear of communism and his belief that the Roman Catholic Church in Europe must

‘You who burned my house and killed my child, who shelters beneath a foreign wing, a traitor who accepts a salary from the enemy! Did you...

December 1941: Fleeing the German destruction of Užice in Serbia, Tito and the Partisans crossed the River Drina in winter, climbed the mountains of Bosnia on the other side, and walked through the forests. Bosnia Herzegovina is a very mountainous country. In winter it is snow bound. As someone who has driven through Bosnia in the snow, I have difficulty understanding why the Nazis thought that they could successfully invade the country. Even today, the r

Komiža, Vis - port of the Partisan and Allied fleet September 1943 – Fascist Italy capitulates to the Allies. Nazi Germany invades the...

‘Despite his experiences at Drvar, Tito had not lost his liking for caves,’ wrote Fitzroy Maclean, Churchill’s liaison officer with the Yugoslav Partisans. Less than a fortnight after his dramatic rescue from a cave near Drvar in Bosnia during Operation Rösselsprung, Tito installed himself in yet another cave halfway up yet another mountain on the island of Vis, three hours east of Split on the Croatian coast. At this time, Vis remained the only island in the Adriatic unoccup