19 December 2007

Belgrade Christmas

Holiday Party at the LaPlante's, Belgrade

The whirl of parties increased in the Serbian capital as the holidays of 1946 approached. It actually was quite bothersome for Evelyn LaPlante, who was just getting her new house in order. She found the diplomatic community stuffy and boring. Her house was quite grand. It had high ceilings, and rich wood paneling that smelled of oil and old wax.

It was thoroughly European, with little concealed knobs that opened up the closets and passages for the servants, who lived downstairs. It was nice to have servants, after living in one room in a boarding house in Texas, where Rene had been stationed briefly after the Japanese threat to the Panama Canal.

It was entirely possible to get used to having a maid, and a cook, and drivers from the embassy pool when you needed them.

Her husband Rene's position made attendance at the endless round of affairs mandatory. She would have preferred a little more time at home, looking after little Annie, or socializing with the nice Yug gal across the street.

She was the daughter of a Yug general, someone her age and who liked to shop and talk.

It was a relief to get back to her house on the hill after the command performances were done. Throw some swing music on the record player, and have the young officers and soldiers from the Attaché Office over to dance and be care-free for a while. The tension in the city was palpable, and it was nice not to have to collect intelligence on all the other guests. All the entertaining was business, after all, getting information to pad out the reports to be typed in the office the next day to be pouched back home.

The diplomats often asked if they could stop by, too, when the official entertaining was done.

I don't know if people were stronger back in the day, or whether they just had a higher tolerance for inconvenience. I know that Evelyn was tough, with spring steel inside her lithe elegant frame, Imagine scooping up your babe in arms and leaving for life behind the Iron Curtain!

Winston Churchill had only proclaimed the existence of the steely barrier in March of 1946, and little Annie, precocious as she was, was just toddling when the word came back from Rene that he had a house in the hills above the old city, and the senior American Military Attaché, General Patridge had signed off on it, and he wanted his little family with him in the capital of Yugoslavia.

The world we remember is divided by the Second War and the Cold One, as if there was nothing between, but the context of the time had its own roiling boil. In 1946, Churchill outlined a cold future. The French were in open war with the Viet Minh, and martial law had been declared in Hanoi. Old China hands were saying that a full-out civil war was inevitable between the Reds and the Chiang's KMT.

A major hotel fire in Louisville was big enough to make the Paris Edition of the Herald Tribune, since it caused widespread panic, and concern about building codes. A member of Parliament in London solemnly announced that the practice of headhunting had resumed in Borneo, on a massive scale. The American Army announced that it was making “revolutionary changes” in he size and armament of American infantry and tank corps.

Army Headquarters in the Munitions Building on the Mall said that it would greatly increase fire-power, shock and maneuverability. The first “shock and awe” revolution in military affairs was part of a huge dislocation within the American military structure; the Air Corps was in mutiny against the Army, and the Navy was nervous about the talk of unification of the services.

Rene LaPlante was just doing his job. Brigadier General Richard Partridge was the closest thing the Army had to an old hand in the Balkans. He had been Military Attaché in Budapest, before the war and the destruction of the old Magyar city. He had spent a tough war, first in North Africa and then on the long slog across France.

He knew something about the harsh Yugoslavian terrain, which had permitted Tito's partisan armies to nip fiercely at the Nazi occupation mercilessly from April 1941 onwards. Yugoslavia was the key to the Balkans, and to Greece, and to the road to Turkey. That is why America was interested, and why Rene LaPlante was constantly alert for signs of what the Communists were up to.

In 1946, Tito was consolidating a new Socialist State, and the famous author Robert Saint John was among those who came to see what was going to be created in the ancient city of the Serbs.

Belgrade had not suffered the fate of Budapest, which had been hammered twice, and left for rubble. There was a long enough history of destruction, though, since Belgrade had been in the way of the Turkish corridor of conquest to Europe. In the process of getting to the gates of Vienna, Suleiman the Magnificent had leveled the place, and then created the second largest city in the Ottoman Empire.

Serbian resistance was periodically crushed, brutally, and the Turks remained for over 350 years. In order to avoid that fate, the regent Crown Prince sided with the inevitable in 1941 and joined the Axis powers in an effort to avoid mass destruction.

It did not work out that way, since the military staged mass protests, which resulted in the bombing of the city by the Luftwaffe. As many as 17,000 citizens were killed, and Belgrade became a Nazi puppet capital.

The city avoided complete destruction, though in reprisal for partisan attacks, the Nazi military governor Franz Bohme rigorously enforced the rule of one hundred, which was the number of Serbs or Jews who would be killed for each German.

The Allies bombed Belgrade in 1944, just before Tito and the Red Army liberated the city. In November of 1945 Tito proclaimed the foundation of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia at the old palace in downtown Belgrade, and the new era began.

An American Major secured the lovely villa on the hills above the town. It was grander than the Ambassador's house, which was a legacy lease reclaimed from the days before the war.

The Major's villa was in the hills, on the slopes that rose to Torlak Hill, the highest point of the city proper. There was a view of the Kalemegdan, the historical core of Belgrade on the right bank of the Danube and Sava rivers. The great bridge, the only one across the blue waters of the Danube, was nearing reconstruction, and Tito had grand plans to erect a New Belgrade on the south and east banks, merging the old city with the smaller towns across the water.

From the villa the Major could see the rail yards near the central train station, and he mentioned that pointedly to Warrant Officer LaPlante when he signed over the lease. It was a useful place for the Attaché office to hand on to. When the borders were open, it was easy to see the trains that came in from Budapest and Vienna, where the Red Army still stood, and the internal trains to Zagreb in the Yugoslavian province of Croatia, and beyond to Ljubljana. Trains also came from the east, when Tito and Stalin's uneasy relationship permitted, from Kiev and Moscow, and Skopje, Thessaloniki and Sofia.

From the villa you could see everything that was on the flatcars behind the engines, and the number of tanks that were on the move.

Rene LaPlante did not tell Evelyn that she was going into the spy business, but that is just the way things worked in Belgrade in that strange year after the Germans were gone for good, and the Russians were right over the hill.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Close Window