Title: Escape from the Balkans
Description: FOREWORD 
"In the summer of 1941, some weeks after Germany's  attack on Russia, several hundred parachutists were  dropped in the Balkans by Red Army planes to combat  the occupying forces in all the Balkan countries and to  assist in the organization of underground anti-Axis activities. Later in the year I myself saw some of these parachutists at work. I saw them fight and I saw them die.  Their heroism inspired me to write their story and that  story forms part of this book. But they had something  more and rarer than courage: they were animated by a clear and steadfast ideal and for that ideal they fought and  died. These parachutists were not Russians — they were  Bulgarians, Croats, Greeks, Rumanians, Serbs and Slovenes.  They fought — and some of them still fight — together,  and their example has laid the foundations of Balkan  underground unity on revolutionary bases. This underground unity, in my opinion, is the most significant political phenomenon of the war as far as the Balkans and  Southeastern Europe are concerned. It is bound to have —  as indeed present conditions (Spring 1943) in Yugoslavia show — great repercussions throughout the Balkans  and will be one of the most important factors to be reckoned with when peace comes. Unfortunately this unity is  hardly realized or taken into account in Britain and in the  United States, in spite of the great interest that is in evidence in both countries toward the peace problems of  Europe."
Subjects: Bulgarian Personal narratives, World War, 1939-1945
Places: Balkan Peninsula