Tito’s Tactics: Behind Canada’s 2 Peacekeeping Stints in Yugoslavia

The 16,000 Canadian soldiers who served in Yugoslavia during the 1990s were not the first. Canadians had deployed to the war-torn Balkans half a century earlier. Most of the latter were not conventional soldiers and had a very different (and, it may be said, more successful) mission from the peacekeepers who came later. It was their success during World War II that, ironically, led to Canadian troops being drawn back into the Balkan morass five decades later.
Bailey was advised by another Canadian, Capt. William Yull Stuart, who had worked in the Canadian Pacific Railway’s immigration department in the 1930s. Born in Bosnia, Stuart worked as a farmer and miner in Manitoba in the 1920s. He then did business in Prague and other Central European cities, eventually as British vice consul in Zagreb in 1939.
Most Yugoslav immigrants arrived in the 1920s and 1930s, working as fishermen, miners, woodsmen, and trappers. A few had military experience, some as communist battalion members in the Spanish Civil War. Two recruits were already privates in the Canadian Army. Of many more volunteers, about 30 were chosen for the Special Training School (Camp X) near Whitby, Ontario, in the summer of 1942, of whom half were sent to Ramat David near Haifa (in the future Israel) for parachute training, then to the SOE base in Cairo.
Working with his wife (also a doctor) in Britain when the war broke out, Dafoe joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1940 and served with the Eighth Army in North Africa. Then he too was recruited by the SOE and parachuted into eastern Bosnia to link up with a Soviet-trained partisan leader in Croatia, Vladimir Popović, for six intense months.
The SOE’s goal was to back the Yugoslav Partisans, irregular forces fighting against the Nazi German occupation.
The royalist Chetnicks were rightly wary of communist designs after the war.
Tito’s partisan technique was “deliberate use of terror” around Yugoslav villages “to provoke reprisals” from the Germans, and generally use totalitarian methods to “encourage misery and chaos,” forcing homeless peasants into the arms of the waiting communist forces.
To the non-communist Chetniks it did not come naturally to collaborate with communists, and they avoided provoking German reprisals against their own people. Reports that the Chetniks were less effective, disunited, even pro-Nazi, began reaching British ears, turning Winston Churchill to the side of the communist Partisans.
Tito assured the British that his goal was “real” democracy and “real” freedom, while remaining vague about the precise form the post-war government would take.