Obituary: Sir William Deakin (original) (raw)

From 1949, Sir William (Bill) Deakin, who has died aged 91, helped found and then ran for 18 years St Antony's College, Oxford, new for Oxbridge in that it was dedicated to postgraduate international and regional studies. From the mid-1930s, he had been absorbed into Winston Churchill's industrial-scale production of popular history with a political message. But the defining experience of Deakin's life was his pioneering service as the first British liaison officer to Josip Broz Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia.

The British had long suspected this force to be offering the most substantial resistance to the Axis occupiers in the region, but they also imagined it had neither a coherent command nor any interest in working with them. Dropped by parachute into Montenegro in May 1943 to establish contact, the 29-year-old Captain Deakin joined the epic battle of the partisans' war.

His new comrades were bidding to break out of the German ring of steel by crossing the Tara and Sutjeska canyons into Bosnia, strafed by fighters from the air and dodging Alpine troops as they proceeded in narrow columns through dense forests. Compelled to share in the decision to abandon the wounded if the rest were to live, and wounded by the same shell fragment that hit Tito and killed the other British officer in his party, Deakin forged an emotional bond with the partisans that would never fade.

Deakin and his successor at Tito's new headquarters at Jajce in central Bosnia, Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, convinced Churchill in Cairo at the end of 1943 both that Tito's communist-led forces were highly effective, and that his anti-communist Serb rival, General Draza Mihailovic, was, as a consequence, collaborating with the Axis powers. The subsequent allied decision to abandon Mihailovic and to back Tito to the hilt paid substantial military dividends until the confrontation over Trieste in May 1945, when Tito was compelled to give way to the allies, but appeared wrongheaded thereafter, as he proceeded to impose a Stalinist regime obnoxious even to Stalin himself because of its premature (and autonomous) zealotry.

Recriminations abated after the 1948 Tito-Stalin split, when British wartime policy looked either wise before its time or was credited with producing this cold war triumph. But accusations of communist-influenced treachery and betrayal achieved new currency following Tito's death in 1980, when Serbs embarked upon the wholesale repudiation of the multinational state he bequeathed.

This backlash would produce Slobodan Milosevic and the wars of the 1990s. The rehabilitation of Mihailovic and the castigation of Deakin, Maclean and Churchill became de rigueur for the Serbs' foreign apologists as well - and blighted Deakin's life.

Unlike Maclean, who had consigned his wartime adventures quite literally to history, for Deakin they were still alive, raw and needful of continuing assessment. Disappointed that his 1971 masterpiece, The Embattled Mountain, had neither sold well nor provided definitive answers to new questions, he wrote and rewrote accounts of problematic episodes and draft chapters for a projected life of Tito that never saw the light of day.

Helping Churchill make his case proved easier for Deakin than making his own. In part, this was because he lacked the typists, consultants and late-night, brandy-fuelled Churchillian energy that propelled the four-volume life of Marlborough (1933-38), A History Of The English-Speaking Peoples (1956-58, albeit written before the war) and Nobel-prizewinning The Second World War (six volumes, 1948-54), for which Deakin was drafter-in-chief. But it was also the product of a pronounced diffidence and his feeling that self-defence was somehow undignified. Readers of the beautiful but convoluted Embattled Mountain will have sensed this psychological difficulty.

Deakin was born in London, the son of a Hertfordshire farming family, and was educated at Westminster school and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a first-class degree in modern history in 1934. In 1936 he was elected a fellow of Wadham, remaining so until 1949 despite his long absences. He married his first wife, Margaret Ogilvy, in 1935; they had two sons, who survive him, but the marriage ended in 1940.

Just before the outbreak of war, Deakin joined the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars. In 1941 he was seconded to the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and posted to British Security Coordination in New York. Back in London in 1942, he was set to work for the first time on Yugoslav issues, with a particular remit to look after Slovenia. When he was sent to Cairo, he became enmeshed in the policy struggles over Yugoslavia then being waged not only between SOE and the Foreign Office, but inside both organisations.

Deakin's pro-partisan superiors in Cairo probably calculated that his friendship with the prime minister would advance their cause. They were right, but only because of the ample evidence that he provided. Deakin was evacuated from Jajce at the end of November 1943, just as the partisans were making their bid for postwar power explicit. Neither Deakin nor Maclean hid this fact from Churchill, who none the less subsequently hoped he could at least cajole Tito into taking back the exiled Yugoslav king.

Deakin married an SOE colleague, Livia (Pussy) Stela, in Cairo at the end of 1943. Promoted to colonel, he later worked on Yugoslav matters from SOE's advance base near Bari, in Italy, and, in 1945-46, returned to Yugoslavia as first secretary at the embassy. As an "old partisan" enjoying a measure of respect at the top of the revolutionary regime, he was able to travel widely. His privileged access to both leaders and documents increased as the regime liberalised from the early 1960s.

On his return to Oxford in 1946, Deakin was summoned by Churchill to manage the writing of the war history. The opportunity to establish a new college for postgraduates came as a result of a gift of £1m from an Aden-based French businessman, Antonin Besse. The sum was barely adequate, condemning Deakin to years of fundraising. Despite financial and administrative burdens - and commands to accompany Churchill on his travels - Deakin managed to produce one substantial book, The Brutal Friendship (1962), a study of Italian-German relations during the war.

With St Antony's established - and women admitted in 1962 - Deakin took early retirement from the wardenship in 1968, moving to Le Castellet above Toulon. He chafed occasionally at his beautiful exile, but relished descents on London, where he entertained his friends and presided over colloquia of the British national committee for the history of the second world war. Even as he outlived his contemporaries and beloved sparring partner Pussy, who died in 2001, he retained his curiosity, gaiety and generous habits of sharing both his time and champagne with former students and lifelong friends.

Bill Deakin naturally acquired many honours, from the DSO in 1943 to the Yugoslav partisan Star in 1969 and his knighthood in 1975. In a highly appreciated gesture, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took him and Sir Fitzroy Maclean with her to Tito's funeral in 1980.

· Frederick William Dampier Deakin, academic, soldier and writer, born July 3 1913; died January 22 2005