By the autumn of 1940, the flow of news from London ceased, and Davidson started making-up his own, greatly exaggerating British military might and German and Italian frailties and losses.
[5] Things went from bad to worse, and when the British ambassador (most likely Owen O'Malley) found the sacks of plastic explosives and magnetised metal casings in the embassy basement, he ordered it be thrown away.
The SOE members joined a convoy of over one hundred evacuees led by the British ambassador Sir Ronald Campbell heading slowly towards the Adriatic coast.
[7] Davidson returned to London and spent the next twelve months at the SOE HQ in Baker Street before being posted to the Middle East.
The rumours about an active Partisan resistance movement continued as well as an inexplicable presence of numerous German divisions, desperately needed on the Eastern Front, stuck in parts of the country not known for any recognised opposition.
[13] One SD unit advised another that a strong partisan force was concentrated on the Foča-Kalinovik road and chetniks were being called to reinforce a German operation against them.
It stated that 'Other resisting elements' in Slovenia and Croatia were holding down thirty divisions in areas which are vital to both Italian and German communications - without having received any external aid at all.
[16] It was thanks to Davidson's map that the first two missions of Yugoslav Canadians were successfully parachuted blind into the occupied territory, hoping to stumble across local Partisans on 20 April.
The team prepared the first British Liaison mission and on 26 May six soldiers led by Deakin successfully dropped to the Partisan GHQ at Black Lake in Montenegro.
[17][18][19] Shortly after the landing, Davidson met the battle-hardened partisan leadership around Tito's command table "an affair of rough-hewn planks" where "his counsellors sat on logs ranged on both sides".
In addition to Vlatko Vladimir Velebit who was assigned to work with the British mission, there were Arso Jovanović, Marko Aleksandar Ranković, Veljko Pavle Ilić and Kosta Nađ.
Most communications were done in a "hotch-potch of German and French"[20] None of them had had experience of Anglo-Saxon manners of indifference; small wonder they often found us incomprehensible, took our affectation for indecision, suspected funk in our reluctance, feared sarcasm in our understatement, saw weakness in our admiration, under-rated our intelligence.
[21]Approximately ten days later, Davidson joined Nađ's HQ slow move towards Belgrade so that he could reach Hungarian border.
Steve Markos, a Canadian agent, infiltrated himself successfully via this route, and was able to send "valuable reports about German and Hungarian armies' movements and about factories making war materials" back to Davidson for onward transmission to Cairo.
[23] The Mission had a long way on foot and horseback over the mountainous terrain of central Bosnia, often intersected with river valleys with limited crossings, strongly guarded by enemy troops.
They paused in the village of Maslovare, where they learnt about Italian capitulation, which enabled the partisan movement to expand their territory and strengthen their fighting capability.
Their first major challenge was to cross river Bosna and the key road and railway lines that run alongside it whilst under aerial reconnaissance.
The long journey gave Davidson an opportunity to understand the origins and motivation of the Partisan movement, local attitudes and customs as well as the poverty, illiteracy and communal tensions.
By now, he had met many senior Partisan commanders including Todor Vujasinović Toša, Vladimir Popović and Sulejman Filipović as well as Canadian miners George Diklić and Stevan Serdar who arrived in April 1943 as part of the Operation Hoathley 1.
[25][26] In October, the mission crossed the river Sava and arrived at Sremska Rača, an encircled enclave that a small group of Partisans managed to keep for the time being.
[27]The days were spent in conversation with local fighters, including a senior officer Savo Orović, discussing news, half-truths and rumours which were plentiful.
Their plan to move north across Danube into the Hungarian controlled territory of Bačka suffered a set-back as the enemy offensive, by "Vlasov troops", pushed them onto Jamena, and back across Sava into northern Bosnia.
There, they worked with the commander Danilo Lekić in order to communicate with the British HQ and arrange for further drops of military and medical materiel.
[28] Davidson worked closely with the local Partisan unit, observing the burnt out and heavily damaged villages of Prnjavor, Graboš, Rakovac, Ledinci, Sviloš, Neštin, Susek, Banoštor and others.
[31] We could not know, equally, what beastliness these troops would commit in Racha; but as a matter of principle it was arranged that all the young people, liable to be arrested or raped or shot or simply driven away into Germany for slave labour, should cross Sava in good time and shield behind Lekitch's formations.
There, they organised additional war aid drops as well as personnel reinforcements, Captains Ted Howe and Irwin and a wireless operator, Corporal Wardle.
The corpses of 220 human beings, of which 83 were women and fifty were old men and the remainder children too young to have crossed the Sava in our retreat, were lying about the village, in little heaps in backyards, in the shallowest of graves, hidden under sheaves of maize stalk, or simply abandoned in the road.
They did this in a leaky RAF rescue rubber boat, circular and designed for emergency landings in the sea and "hopelessly impractical when floating free".
On October 17, they flew together out of Srem and further east into Banat behind the Soviet troops and setup the new military and civilian authority led by Ivan Milutinović.