Albania is small and little known, its history sufficiently confusing and its names sufficiently unpronounceable for us to be funny about it or, worse, to romanticise it. But humour and romance were in short supply for Albanians during the second world war (and after), and there wasn’t much left over for those sent to help them. There was, however, no shortage of intensity.
The Special Operations Executive (SOE) first deployed there in 1941. Albania had been occupied by the Italians in 1939, an annexation recognised by the Chamberlain government. A place of factions, fiefdoms, squalor, privation and harshness, as this comprehensive and understanding account shows, it had the added misfortune to become a footnote to the wider war; important enough to be worth bothering about — if only as another thorn in the Axis underbelly — but not so important as to justify full-scale intervention. Contrast with Greece at the end of the war, into whose bloody civil strife Britain sent 75,000 troops to prevent a communist takeover.
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