Slavonic and East European Review

SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 920 Furthermore, the reader gains little insight into how Nedić’s administration and Mihailović’s Chetniks fit into the wider history of occupation and collaboration in Hitler’s new Europe. It doesn’t help that key concepts such as ‘collaboration’ are never properly developed and often applied tendentiously and indiscriminately. A more sophisticated approach might have questioned whether ‘collaboration’ is even a useful historiographical category anymore. Surprisingly, none of the chapters directly address the experience of Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia. Those that come closest are Nikica Barić’s useful study of Chetnik cooperation with the Ustasha regime and Mario Jareb’s chapter on the formative months of the Chetnik movement. However, their treatment of the Ustasha anti-Serb campaign of mass murder, deportation and forced assimilation is unsatisfactory: Barić is simply too credulous towards Ustasha sources and rationalizations while Mario Jareb’s sometimes intemperate chapter has a strangely apologetic air and, like a number of other contributions in this volume, seems overly-reliant on some highlycontentious sources. The willingness of Pål Kostø’s chapter on the ‘Jasenovac controversy’, meanwhile, to take Croatian historical revisionist arguments seriously is something which will surely baffle readers in light of the volume’s uncompromising critique of politicized history. They might also be confused after reading Krisztián Ungváry’s chapter about Vojvodina under Hungarian rule which appears to legitimize a number of Hungarian nationalist anti-Serb prejudices. The volume is characterized by some remarkably inelegant and occasionally incomprehensible English as well as numerous factual inaccuracies, inconsistencies and contradictions. While Listhaug argues that, ‘judged meticulouslybyempiricalevidence,muchofwhatgoesforhistoricalrevisionism in Serbia’ does not meet the standard of rigorous historical research (p. 290), this volume’s shortcomings mean that it does not entirely succeed either. Cantemir Institute, University of Oxford Rory Yeomans Williamson,DavidG.ThePolishUnderground1939–1947.CampaignChronicles: Second World War. Pen & Sword Books, Barnsley, 2012. xiv + 242 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. £19.99: $39.99. David G. Williamson’s account of the Polish Underground is truly grand in its sweep. Its most impressive aspect lies in Williamson’s ability to track the history of the Underground from its origins in the wake of the Polish defeat of September 1939 to its collapse two years after the end of the Second World War. He manages to knit together the various strands of organized resistance in its myriad manifestations, providing a fluent and authoritative account of the Underground from the creation of the Union of Armed Combat (ZWZ) through to Freedom and Independence (WiN). REVIEWS 921 One of the most satisfying aspects of Williamson’s account is the fact that it places the Polish Underground within its rightful context — at the mercy of the power politics of the Second World War. This is important, as it is something that is often lost sight of when studying the Underground in its various manifestations; what looked crucial in Warsaw or Lublin was often simply a sideshow in Washington or Moscow. Williamson highlights the fact that allied aid to the Underground was always conditional to Polish priorities overlappingwiththegreateralliedwarstrategy.Forinstance,theBritishSpecial Operations Executive (SOE) saw the Polish Underground as an important part of their work as the Poles provided so much excellent intelligence. This was not a view that was shared by most parts of the British, US and Soviet military establishments, as the work of the Polish Underground was either of limited importance or, in the case of the Soviets, served to threaten their own interests. As Williamson highlights, aid from the British only began in earnest as the front neared pre-war Polish territory in early 1944, whereas what he describes as the ‘honeymoon period’ (p. 128) between AK and Soviet Red Army units on the ground only lasted as long as individual Polish units were of military use to the Soviets. Set against the greater military and political imperatives driving Soviet policy in 1944, Polish help in Lublin or Lwów was either irrelevant or a potential threat. The fact that Williamson is able to present the Underground in all its complexity whilst retaining a coherent narrative is something that a lesser historian may have found difficult. The underground movement that...