One of Churchill’s most celebrated wartime initiatives was the creation in 1940 of SOE (Special Operations Executive), with a mandate to “set Europe ablaze”. SOE has ever since been enfolded in a mantle of glamour and romance. It attracted into its ranks some of the most exotic spirits bearing arms for the allied cause. Its operations in Albania, for instance, engaged the attentions of upmarket professional soldiers such as “Billy” McLean and David Smiley, adventurers of whom Peter Kemp was only the most notable, together with amateurs including the actor Anthony Quayle, the headmaster of Dulwich College, and a subsequent chairman of the Financial Times.

Their hardships make an Albanian posting sound like a rather more taxing version of Scott’s trip to the Pole, with Nazis and infinitely treacherous locals thrown in. “How pleased I shall be to return to civilisation again,” a British officer confided to his diary. “To be among people one can trust . . . and not to be surrounded by dirt, filth and bad manners . . . It is not as if one was doing anything useful here or could so. There is so little charity among these people that they cannot believe anyone would come all this way just to help them. . . They are boastful and vain with nothing to be boastful or vain about. They have no courage, no consistency and no sense of honour.”

That is among the milder verdicts recorded in Roderick Bailey’s exemplary history. He has interviewed survivors and combed archives and published sources in several countries. He has also exploited recently declassified SOE files to produce the most comprehensive account we are ever likely to get of Britain’s unhappy dabblings in this corner of the Balkans slightly smaller than Wales. “The Albanians are lazy, liars and thieves,” wrote Jerry Field, another SOE officer on the spot. “[We] hate the country and hate the people.”

Churchill’s concept of raising revolt in occupied Europe was born of the desperate circumstances of 1940, and was always profoundly flawed. It was extremely hard for a civilian population to take effective action against occupying armies as ruthless as those of Hitler. It remains highly debatable whether the military achievements of European resistance, aided by SOE, justified the price paid by local populations, who endured reprisals on a frightful scale.

Only in Yugoslavia did guerillas impose a serious strategic burden on Hitler. And there, as everywhere else in the Balkans, the British found themselves entangled in a political imbroglio. Communists were the most energetic enemies of the Germans. By 1944, when the British were at last in a position to supply them with weapons in quantity, the partisans were much more interested in using these to suppress local monarchists and nationalists than in promoting allied victory, far less democracy thereafter.

This was notably true of Albania, a wretchedly poor and savage country. Most of its inhabitants were preoccupied with the struggle for existence. The British missions that began to descend from the skies in 1943 were conspicuous enough to provoke the Germans into launching punitive forays during which villages were burnt and the countryside pillaged wholesale, but not remotely strong enough to succour the Albanian people.

British laments about the selfishness of the locals provide a running theme in Bailey’s pages. A cynical critic might suggest, however, that the young blades who carried out SOE’s picaresque and piratical exploits were staking only their lives, about which they were notably insouciant. Their cosy homes back in Britain were invulnerable to the consequences of their feats of derring-do. Meanwhile, the mud huts of the Albanian peasantry lay in the midst of the battlefield.

Enthusiasts among SOE teams on the ground urged their headquarters in Cairo that if only sufficient arms could be dropped to the Albanians they would be inspired to play a more active part in the war. Others were less sanguine. John Hibberdine, a 23-year-old solicitor’s clerk who kept a diary of his experiences in late 1943, wrote: “I am sceptical about this, as the attitude of the people to anything connected with the war is one of extreme disinterest except where it directly benefits themselves. And they have long since made up their minds that the disadvantages of being on the wrong side of the Germans outweigh any advantage that may accrue to them through supporting the British.”

Parachute drops were pillaged wholesale by the locals, who appropriated gold sovereigns and officers’ personal kit, weapons and food. They looted even the bodies of British airmen whose planes crashed attempting to bring supplies to them. Especially in winter, SOE’s men suffered appallingly. Several died of disease, as well as those killed by enemy action. Smiley’s group became fond of a mule whom they christened Fanny Hasluck, in honour of the astonishing elderly woman academic who for some time presided over SOE’s Albanian operations. Once back in Cairo, Smiley signalled his successor, Alan Hare, to inquire after the mule’s welfare in the icy mountains. He received the laconic reply: “Have eaten Fanny.”

In Albania, as in Greece and Yugoslavia, when the Germans at last withdrew, the communist partisans used the weapons provided by the British to seek political control of the country. Only in Greece were they frustrated, by British regular troops. Albania fell into the hands of Enver Hoxha, who maintained his ruthless regime for two generations thereafter. During the cold war, an attempt was made to mount resistance to Hoxha, using some old SOE hands seconded to Britain’s SIS (Secret Intelligence Service). This met with no more success than the 1943-44 ventures, and cost the lives of the unfortunate Albanians recruited by SIS.

Bailey’s accomplished account makes grim reading. He is exceptionally good on nuances. He sketches the disparate and implausible personal backgrounds of the British officers and men who fought in Albania. He dismisses the long-held view that Hoxha’s victory was brought about by the machinations of British communists in SOE.

Essentially, the book paints a portrait of failure, only marginally redeemed by a few effective acts of sabotage, and modest losses inflicted on the Germans by the partisans. Maybe the attempt “to set Europe ablaze” had to be made, but in Albania there was precious little tinder to catch light.

The wildest province: SOE in the Land of the Eagle by Roderick Bailey
Cape £25 pp415

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy