Let's start with the positives. Christian Jennings has written a history of the liberation of Trieste, the city at the head of the Adriatic, in early May 1945. Allied and Yugoslav forces found themselves in a race to hold the city, important to each side not only because of its strategic importance, but also because of the new geopolitical realities that the city represented. Although British and American forces on the one side, and the Yugoslav National Liberation Army on the other were those with boots on the ground, other - more distant - forces had a keen interest in the fate of Trieste - the Italian government, Stalin and the Soviet Union, the retreating German forces, irregular forces of Left and Right, and the civilian population (not distant except in terms of their influence over events) all had concerns over the fate of the city. Tito's Yugoslav partisans had initially been friendly with Britain in particular, especially following the direct moral and material assistance they were provided with earlier in the war. But as the war drew to a close, Tito appeared to be moving ever closer to Moscow; and there were fears in many Western quarters that having defeated Nazi Germany, a new conflict could easily break out with Russia. And its most likely flashpoint would be Trieste.

Using a large amount of original research, Jennings has put together a story told, not only through official documents, but also through personal accounts from people of a wide range of different viewpoints who were there. The story starts with Allied forces in a race to reach Trieste and then tells of the interactions with Yugoslav troops - sometimes cordial, sometimes tense and on one occasion, fatal. Eventually, agreements are reached on the boundaries each side should observe, and a military administrator arrives to govern the city until a transfer to civilian rule can be agreed.

Jennings is stronger on the military history than the civilian: we go quickly from an account of CIA activity in the city in 1951 to suddenly an accord being signed in 1954, with little indication of the political and diplomatic negotiations that took place. It might be argued that this isn't entirely Jennings' aim: he set out to tell the military story and that he does. But it isn't the full history of the city.

In the telling of this story, Jennings gives a lot of background. He covers partisan activity in the region, on both the Italian and Yugoslav sides; he includes a history of the war in Yugoslavia to tell the story of the rise of the partisan forces and their leader, Tito. Indeed, although Tito isn't one of the figures Jennings chooses to tell the story through, he is nonetheless one of the leading characters in the story and a lot of space is devoted to his life.

Jennings also taught me new things; that it was the surrender of German forces in northern Italy following back channel negotiations in Switzerland between the British and Americans on one side and the theatre commander of the Waffen SS that led to Stalin's break with the west. The Russians were not kept advised of these negotiations - although Moscow soon became aware of them via NKVD undercover operations in Switzerland - and Stalin saw them as evidence that the British and Americans could not be trusted and harboured intentions hostile to the Soviet Union. In this, Stalin might have had some justification; another new thing for me was the account of Operation Unthinkable, the plan drafted on Churchill's instructions to explore the possibility of launching a pre-emptive attack on Russia in the summer of 1945, created as Stalin's hostility towards his former allies became more evident. (Jennings doesn't make it totally clear that this was a paper exercise rather than a proposal for immediate action.)

Many British officers who worked with Tito in the earlier stages of the Yugoslav campaign saw the tension between Tito's avowed communism and his desire for the Yugoslav people to be the masters of their own fate after victory; the more astute of them could see the seeds of division between Tito and Stalin. Jennings devotes some space to Stalin's actual instructions for Tito's assassination, again something I was not previously aware of.

So there is much in this book that is valuable and worthwhile. But I had problems with it.

The first was the packaging. The jacket illustration, the straplines and the blurbs could make a reader think they were looking at a Cold War historical thriller novel. Once inside, the reader finds a fast-moving text, but I rapidly began to trip over some problems with the style. Jennings repeats himself frequently; an explanation given in one chapter turns up again in the next. Organisations such as SOE (Special Operations Executive) and the OSS (Office for Strategic Services) are referred to frequently as "the British SOE" and "the American OSS" long after a reader can be assumed to have understood that. And half-way through the book, there is an account of the British Foreign Secretary going to a meeting with "Field Marshal Josef Stalin" - even if a reader didn't know who Stalin was at the beginning of the book, they would most likely know who he was by the middle of it, and shouldn't need this spelling out in such detail.

There are failures of research: at one point, Anthony Eden is referred to as "the British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs", which is incorrect. "Commonwealth" was not added to the job title until 1968. There is also very poor sub-editing; the place name "Omsk" appears on one page, mis-spelt in two instances out of the three appearances. It may be a foreign place name, but how hard can it be to spell a four-letter place name correctly?

The sub-editing ought to have also flagged up early on that Jennings appears to be using sentence fragments far too often. Jennings is supposed to be an experienced author and journalist - so why do so many of his sentences have no verbs in them? This makes the work look like flashy pop journalism rather than a serious book of history; frankly, it happens so often, I would almost call it illiterate.

So: a worthwhile book spoilt by atrocious sub-editing and some basic errors in fact-checking, not its subject, but so-called "common knowledge". Plenty of other authors fall into that trap, but it's sad to see this book, which I was looking forward to reading, marred in this way. ( )

The name of Trieste always reminds me of the Spanish word triste--sadness. At the end of WWII, with the Germans in retreat, the valuable Adriatic port city of Trieste was poised in the worst possible place as the Allies jockeyed for power and the Cold War was launched. It's nice to be wanted, but everybody wanted Trieste as the Iron Curtain was coming down, though Italy ultimately ended up with it. That wasn't accomplished without bloodshed and misery for the inhabitants. This is an excellent insight into a forgotten, but important part of wartime and post-war history.

Flashpoint Trieste by Christian Jennings is an historical account of the last days of World War II in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations in northern Italy's city of Trieste involving the confluence of Soviet, Yugoslav, and Allied (British and American) armies seeking a strategic political advantage in what would be known as the Cold War. Jennings, a free-lance British journalist and former French Legionnaire, informs his story through the narratives of twelve men and women from seven countries (to include a Maori officer from New Zeeland, an British from Special Operations Executive, and American OSS officer, a women recently escaped from Auschwitz, among others) realign to thwart to encroaching communist advance in central Europe. ( )

Flashpoint Trieste is a history of a specific place within the grand theater of World War 2 and the Cold War, focused on a turning point right between the two conflicts. As the U.S. and its allies saw the war ending and the new (cold) war with the Soviet Union looming, they moved to take the city of Trieste, a key port between Italy and Yugoslavia, two countries with strong Communist parties. The author covers this conflict in detail from 1945 through the present. He writes in a readable style, like the journalist he is, telling a story, yet it is full of historical detail, clearly based on official records and documentation. For the fan of history, and specifically modern European history, this is an interesting look at an episode that is not well known, but was nevertheless important in its outcome. ( )

Trieste may not have the same impact as other Cold War cities like Berlin, Budapest, or Prague, yet it was one of the anchor points of Churchill's Iron Curtain. It was the first place where the Cold War rivals first clashed. Trieste was a place where Allies and Tito's partisans worked together to fight Nazis and Fascists and shortly after the war American surveillance planes were being shot down. We all know how the Cold War ended.
This book was received through LibraryThing's Early Review Program. ( )