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Somewhere Near to History - The Wartime Diaries of Reginald Hibbert, SOE Officer in Albania, 1943-1944 (Hardcover)
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Somewhere Near to History - The Wartime Diaries of Reginald Hibbert, SOE Officer in Albania, 1943-1944 (Hardcover)
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In July 1943, a twenty-one-year-old British officer, Reg Hibbert,
answered a call inviting volunteers for mysterious 'parachute
duties'. The call was part of a recruitment drive by Special
Operations Executive, SOE, to attract likely young officers for
clandestine work in the German-occupied Balkans. By December of
that year, he had been parachuted into the centre of British
efforts to encourage armed resistance in northern Albania. Many of
the British officers sent there sensed that they were part of
history in the making in this remote and extraordinary world where
different groups were both defying the occupying Axis powers and
competing to determine the postwar future of their homeland.
Although strictly forbidden, a few kept diaries of their lives in
the field. Hibbert's is the first of those secret diaries to be
published. It is a personal account of fortitude describing how
those young officers lived embedded with local Partisan
organisations, moving from safe house to safe house, entirely
reliant on the goodwill of the local people whose language they did
not speak. They endured harsh mountain winters and the fierce heat
of Balkan summers. Travelling on foot or horseback through some of
Europe's wildest terrain, their existence was one of constant
uncertainty. Some lost their lives. All were permanently changed by
the experience. The pages of Hibbert's diary are peopled with
figures who are now part of Albania's history and myth, many of
whose lives ended in tragedy or exile after the communist Partisan
victory in 1944. It is also a very human story, recording each day
of Hibbert's life for nearly a year: waiting for planes to drop
supplies and weapons, raising a wolf cub on condensed milk,
drinking the local firewater, tending wounded Partisans and
struggling with sickness. Britain's role in hastening the end of
the old order in Albania and the ensuing communist regime has long
been a matter of controversy. Hibbert's diary provides a rare and
fascinating account of the situation on the ground as it evolved
over the critical months before the German withdrawal.
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