Acknowledgments; Foreword; Abbreviations; Note on Place-Names; photos; maps; Note on Sources; Notes; Bibliography; Index

   Of all the nations which actively participated in World War II, Albania has most glaringly suffered from the lack of a comprehensive and objective English-language account of its war years. Bernd Fischer of Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne, Indiana has produced a remarkable, erudite, highly readable volume which more than adequately fills that gap while transcending the "nation at war" genre. In addition to a thorough and accessible history of "Old" Albania during the war, Fischer turns his attention to the enlarged "Greater" Albania and offers insights into the complex relationships among Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, and Yugoslavia, insights based on historical events which prove to have considerable, and perhaps unexpected, immediacy in the waning months of the twentieth century.
   Albania, which declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912, owed its continued existence during and immediately after World War I for the most part to weariness and lack of interest on the part of its neighbors, along with President Woodrow Wilson's refusal to recognize the Treaty of London. (That treaty gave Italy much Albanian territory in exchange for Rome's entry into the war on the side of the Allies.) In what can only be described as an isolated and backward corner of Europe barely emerged from the Middle Ages, Prime Minister Ahmet Beg Zogu in the 1920s took the crown in the land of Gegs and Tosks as King Zog I and presided over a kingdom most noted for its blood feuds. Despite lack of industry, perennial food shortages, limited natural resources, and a populace comprised mostly of savage and illiterate tribesmen, Albanian territory was coveted at various times during the inter-war years by Yugoslavia, Greece, and—in particular—Italy.
   Benito Mussolini's post-war Italian government exerted much effort to gain control of Albania by economic means but met with only limited success. By 1937 Count Galeazzo Ciano—Italian foreign minister and Mussolini's son-in-law—had grown interested in bringing Albania fully under the control of Italy. After several schemes of assassination and Italian-sponsored revolt went awry, Ciano turned to Yugoslavia to discreetly suggest partitioning Albania. Although Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Stojadinovic was receptive to Ciano's overtures, Prince Paul opposed the scheme. "'We already have so many Albanians inside our frontiers and they cause us so much trouble,' Prince Paul complained, 'that I have no wish to increase their number.'"
   In March 1939, following Hitler's march into Prague in violation of the Munich Agreement, Mussolini accepted Ciano's plan to issue an ultimatum to Albania demanding in effect that Zog's kingdom become a satellite of Italy. King Zog temporized and sought advice from the American minister. At the beginning of April the army mobilized. "On 5 April, he had appealed to the democracies and on 6 April to the Balkan Entente, all, of course, to no avail."
   On 7 April Italian troops landed at four Italian ports. The small Albanian army, trained and indoctrinated by an Italian military mission, for the most part offered little or no resistance although the British-trained gendarmerie under Abaz Kupi briefly defended Durres.
   Queen Geraldine and her two-day-old son, Crown Prince Leka, fled to Greece by ambulance. "After the queen was safely away, Zog moved to his prime minister's residence and from there broadcast a message to his subjects, urging them to continue to fight until every last drop blood was exhausted. Few Albanians owned radios, so few heard the appeal; even fewer were willing to die for Zog." In the event, the king elected to escape—reputedly on horseback—into exile with much of the Albanian treasury. (According to Geraldine's interviews with the author in 1981, Zog's departure was motivated primarily by Belgrade's decision to prevent Albanian guerillas, assuming any materialized, from using Yugoslavian territory for bases or supply lines.)
   Inept and ill-prepared though the invaders were, there was nothing to stop them. "As Ciano's chief assistant, Filippo Anfuso, who accompanied the count [Ciano] on his flight over the battle zone...put it, 'If only the Albanians had possessed a well-armed fire brigade, they could have driven us back into the Adriatic.'"

   The Italian propaganda machine was thrown into action to mask the blunders. Official accounts reported that the attack would remain in history as a classic masterpiece of efficiency, organization, power, courage, and political sense. Colonel Emilio Canevari, the best known of the military commentators, reported the brilliant attack of nonexistent motorized formations in close contact with the air force, and he explained that all observers were impressed with the clockwork precision of a carefully studied and brilliantly executed plan.
    All of this naturally came as a pleasant surprise to the operational commanders who might have expected court-martials. They were delighted to learn that fascism expected no better of them. Many people were aware of the bungling, however, and Mussolini was forced to make a frank statement to the leadership, explaining that the expedition had nearly failed because the organization and the people at his disposal were so defective. In one sense at least, the bungled invasion did the fascist leadership a great service; it made clear to them how totally unprepared Italy was to fight a major war.

   Meanwhile, the Italian press fabricated the story that Italian troops had been invited to Albania by Zog on the pretext of safeguarding his regime when in fact, so the story went, Zog intended to use them to spearhead a planned Albanian invasion of Yugoslavian Kosovo.
   Under Italy's direction, Albania withdrew from the League of Nations on 14 April 1939. Zog dispatched an appeal which was read to the Council of the League but rejected on procedural grounds. Britain and France, with more important matters at hand than the fate of small, backwards, distant Albania, for misplaced fear of driving Mussolini into Hitler's arms offered remarkably muted protest to the invasion. London quietly accepted the downgrading of its representation in Tirana from embassy to consulate (thereby tacitly recognizing the legitimacy of the new order in Albania, with subsequent wartime repercussions) while the United States withdrew its ambassador entirely.
   By decree, Albania joined Italy in a "personal union" under King Victor Emmanuel III as an "autonomous" possession with its "national freedom, own language, national flag, peace, and justice." Few among the Albanians welcomed the Italians, but sufficient collaborators were found to create an "independent" government subservient to Rome. The first Prime Minister of the new Albania was Shefqet Verlaci "...whose daughter had been jilted by Zog in the 1930s, [and] was determined to see Zog dead, as demanded by traditional Albanian blood feud law." With this friendly regime in place, Mussolini and Ciano set out to "Italian-ize" their new territory, exploit its natural resources, and prepare for the day when Albania could provide homes for up to two million Italian colonists.
   Fischer goes on to discuss in considerable academic detail the structure of the government, constitution, financial and economic issues, education, religion, military affairs, foreign policy, and irredentism.
   The author also shows how Mussolini and Ciano utilized Albania as their platform for the invasion of Greece. Although he incorporates into the account elements of Albanian involvement and reaction to the campaign not generally studied elsewhere, Fischer handles military issues less adroitly than he does other aspects of Albania during the war years; for example, he incorrectly asserts that Italy "took no part" in the subsequent Axis invasion of Yugoslavia.
   Following Germany's successful conclusion of the Italian-initiated war with Greece and the simultaneous Axis conquest of Yugoslavia, the borders of Italian Albania were expanded to include Kosovo and part—but not all—of the other Albanian-inhabited regions bordering Old (pre-1941) Albania. Given repressive Serb policies in Kosovo, most Kosovar Albanians welcomed the Italians and their Albanian brothers, even though those brothers had not welcomed—and for the most part still were not fond of—the Italian occupiers. While the Kosovar Albanians, unwilling to see themselves returned to Serbian domination, proved to be among the staunchest supporters of the Italians (and later the Germans), Greater Albania was a double-edged sword.

   And indeed the annexation of Kosova [Kosovo] was a popular move both in Kosova and in old Albania. Albanian socialist historiograhy admits that 'a section of the population fell victim to this nationalism.' But it was not enough enthusiasm to win any lasting support for the Italians. By the time Kosova was annexed in 1941, the Italians had already lost the battle to win the hearts and minds of the Albanians; in fact, some have suggested that the adventure that ultimately brought Greater Albania about—the Italian invasion of Greece—ruined all that the Italians had done in Albania by contributing to the collapse of the relative stability of the early period of the Italian occupation. In a way, then, the achievement of Albania's territorial dreams directly coincided with the beginning of the end for the Italians. The negative impact of Italian policy vastly outweighed the positive. This is perhaps best illustrated by the steady rise of disenchantment and resistance.

   By late 1940 Albanian armed resistance remained minimal. With the Italian invasion of Greece, the British Foreign Office and SOE concocted a scheme by which Zog would be flown from exile in England to Cairo, then to Istanbul where he would organize and arm a group of Albanian emigres who would be inserted into their homeland by way of Greece and Yugoslavia to attack the occupation army. This plan was criticized and rejected by nearly all concerned with its implementation—except Zog, whose idea it originally was—and it was eventually dropped. Not until the end of 1941 did the first permanent guerilla bands—as opposed to bandits and brigands—make themselves felt.
   However, the real resistance movement would only begin with the advent of the Albanian Communist Party. Fischer traces the first unorganized stirrings of communists in Albania in the 1920s and explains the birth of the Party in November 1941. The first leader of the unified ACP—a well-educated son of a relatively prosperous family who studied in France and taught French in Albania until dismissed by the Italians, at which time he opened a tobacco shop in Tirana—was Enver Hoxha who became synonymous with Albanian resistance and led the country for four decades.
   In September 1942 Hoxha and the ACP organized the broadly-based National Liberation Movement which came immediately under communist control. In reaction, anti-communist forces formed the National Front, a smaller, less successful organization. In May 1943 NLM partisans claimed to have killed 200 Italians in the Battle of Leskovik. By June the NLM numbered some 10,000 fighters. In July, during a five-day engagement at Permet 500 Italians were said to have been killed. The same month the NLM formed the headquarters of the National Liberation Army. The National Front, more concerned with conserving its strength for a post-war struggle with the NLM, could boast few operations and few victories.
   Beginning in 1943, Italian policies in Albania began to unravel. The government of Mustafa Kruja (who had replaced Verlaci at the end of 1941) was forced to resign in January. Subsequently the cabinet of Eqrem Bey Libohova lasted three weeks. In February, Ciano, the grand architect of Italy's Albanian strategy, was forced to resign from Mussolini's government. The next Albanian cabinet, that of Maliq Bushati, also lasted a mere three weeks. The Italian "lieutenant-general" (governor), Francesco Jacomoni, was dismissed and replaced. In May the Bushati government fell and Libohova was appointed for a second time.
   In June 1943 the first SOE operatives, led by Major Neil McLean, reached Albania. Six more missions arrived in July and August, by the end of which time almost twenty tons of weapons and supplies had been dropped, mostly to Hoxha's NLM/NLA partisans. With the assistance of the British missions, the first brigade-sized partisan force had been trained and equipped by August.
   Hoxha's ACP in the guise of the NLM in July 1943 forged an agreement with the National Front for a coalition front and a provisional government, but the accords were never ratified and the brief cooperation between the two groups collapsed immediately, paving the way for increased competition and eventual civil war.
   At the time Mussolini was deposed in July, governmental stability in Albania lessened dramatically. On 8 September Italy left the war—with 7-8 garrison divisions, amounting to some 100,000 troops, remaining in Albania—and the next morning three German divisions occupied Albania against little resistance by the partisans or the Italians. Most of the Italians were promptly disarmed. A few managed to escape by sea. Approximately 15,000 surrendered to the partisans resulting in large quantities of weapons and equipment being seized by guerillas, especially the NLM/NLA. The Germans evacuated the bulk of the troops they disarmed, while the Allies also managed to evacuate many of the Italians who surrendered to the partisans; both groups of evacuees traveled to Italy. Fischer estimates that at the end of the war there remained "at large" in Albania over 20,000 former Italian soldiers, ragged and starving.
   The Germans established a new "national committee" which duly issued a decree of Albanian independence (with wording approved by the German representative) and formed a new national government including members of the National Front anti-communist resistance movement, a group that heretofore had played little part on the battlefield. The new government declared Albania "free, neutral, and independent." More than pro-German, Prime Minister Rexhep Mitrovica and the majority of his ministers could be clearly identified as anti-communist nationalists. "Mitrovic's program was reasonably progressive. Margaret Hasluck, who advised SOE in Cairo, was moved to exclaim that 'the lines of government policy would meet with our warm approval if we were not at war with the country whose armed forces now occupy Albania.'"
   More so than the Italians, the Germans exploited Albanian resources such as zinc, lead, magnesium, and quantities of oil, with Albanian chrome in particular proving to be essential to German war industries.
   In general the Germans and the German-installed "independent" government were considerably better supported in Albania than the Italians, but the level of resistance activity continued to grow at an accelerating pace. The National Front, however, fragmented completely and for the most part its local leaders chose to cease their already limited resistance activities and collaborate with the occupiers. One communist-allied splinter group under Abaz Kupi (commander of the Durres gendarmerie which resisted the Italian invasion) parted with the NLM and moved to a pro-Zog stance and non-belligerence; until almost the very end Kupi offered himself to the British as an anti-communist alternative to the NLM although he consistently refused to commit himself to combat operations against the Germans and thoroughly compromised himself on their behalf. With the arrival of the Germans, it seems, the entire resistance movement grew more splintered and less effective. Like Kupi, most groups were eventually co-opted to one degree or another by the Germans, leaving only the communist NLM/NLA to carry on the fight. Indeed, the German policy was to demonstrate to all other political groups in Albania that the only effective alternative to communism was to support the Germans. By late 1943 civil war raged between the NLM/NLA and non-communist nationalist forces, the latter increasingly fighting with German military support. According to chief British Liaison Officer Brigadier E. F. "Trotsky" Davies, the entire Albanian resistance was "incredibly narrow-minded, bigoted, biased, stupid and touchy."
   German anti-partisan operations, beginning in earnest in November 1943, were also more effective than Italian tactics. Large areas were wiped clean, at least temporarily, and Enver Hoxha and the NLM council were "nearly wiped out" before escaping from the German net. By January 1944 the British military mission to the partisans was also seriously disrupted.
   In the spring of 1944 there was a resurgence of NLM/NLA partisan strength and activity, leading to a renewed German offensive conducted in this case by reinforcements from Greece (where they had already gained experience in anti-partisan operations). Due to increased strength, training, and equipment for the partisans, this offensive was less successful than earlier German efforts. It was also during this time that the NLM became the National Liberation Front.
   In June Prime Minister Mitrovica resigned as his country slipped into chaos. The next government was formed by the Zogist Fiqri Dine as the Germans realized the last hope of staving off total collapse in Albania was to rely on the old-line, anti-communist, traditional power groups. Dine resigned in August as the pressure of internal politics, partisan successes against the Germans and their Albanian auxiliaries, and international developments proved the end was near for German occupation. The final puppet government was headed by Ibrahim Bicaku: "...he was...entirely without political instincts and quite incompetent."
   In October the Germans began evacuating Albania. With them went frightened collaborators and others afraid of the NLF/NLA. The Bicaku government resigned. On 29 October Hoxha's partisans launched an attack on Tirana with RAF support. The battle raged for two weeks before the Germans were able to break out of the encirclement and withdraw to the north. "Bicaku, impractical to the end, could not decide which of his opera records to take with him: he delayed too long and was taken[,]...tried and executed by the Stalinist government."
   As the Germans fled, Hoxha established a provisional government with himself at its head. On 28 November 1944 he entered Tirana, firmly in control of most of Albania. Hoxha and his new government moved promptly to tighten their grip by dealing with collaborators, war criminals, and non-communists. "While figures vary, the number of victims executed or imprisoned during those early years was certainly in the thousands." Before the war had ended Hoxha was already instituting land "reform", nationalizing Albania's tiny industrial base, destroying the remnants of the middle class, repressing religious figures, and re-making the nation into an isolated and backward corner of Europe barely emerged from the Middle Ages.

   Despite initial widespread [international] complacency, Zog and the Albanian people seem to have been the last victims of appeasement, for the West drew something of a line at this point. A few days after the invasion, President Franklin Roosevelt made his first serious intervention into European politics by inviting Hitler and Mussolini to give assurances that they would not attack a list of twenty-nine countries for ten years. More important, Britain and France immediately moved to guarantee Greece and Romania against aggression. In Athens the British ambassador delivered to the Greek government unconditional guarantees that London would not allow any part of Greece to be taken by the Italians.
   Ten days later the British announced the introduction of compulsory military training, a move that seemed to mark a fundamental change in London's foreign policy. Soon after this significant development, London signed a pact with Ankara. In a sense, then, events in Albania marked an important stage in the process by which a coalition gradually developed to destroy fascism. It can be argued that Albania's sacrifice was not in vain, although the Albanians would probably not have been consoled by the knowledge.

   Fischer's book is full of scholarly material presented in an accessible, occasionally breezy style punctuated with quotes from the principals and droll, entertaining asides contributed by the author. While his analysis is thorough and serious, Fischer maintains a certain bemused attitude toward the subject, and—given the huge cast of colorful characters—how could he not?

• Zog—the dissolute monarch against whom more than 300 blood feuds were outstanding

• Archbishop Vissarion—dismissed by Zog, of all people, due to "scandalous behavior"

• Foreign Minister Xhemil Bey Dino—forced to resign as ambassador to the United Kingdom after his lover committed suicide on the steps of the Albanian embassy

• Queen Geraldine—whose larger-than-life recollections of Zog in the interviews for her authorized biography in the 1980s are often at odds with the official record

• Maharren Bajraktari—a tribal leader who "shot his way out of the meeting" after being informed he could either join the partisans or die

• Prime Minister Ibrahim Bicaku—captured by the partisans in Tirana while he tried to decide which opera records to take with him into exile

   This is a fascinating book about an obscure nation, a "Land of the Eagles" with such an exotic cast of characters and such a complex story it seems almost like a crazed sort of medieval fantasy time-warped into the middle of the twentieth century. Evocative photos. A pithy conclusion (which could stand alone for anyone desiring the super-condensed version of Albania's war years). Fully footnoted. A thorough index. An educational bibliographic essay and an extensive bibliography. Albania at War is a marvelous model of how scholarly research and thoughtful, academic writing can inform, entertain, and even bring the fading years of a distant land brilliantly alive. Highly recommended as one of the most important WWII-related titles published this year.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Purdue University Press.
   Thanks to Purdue for providing this review copy.