Boston Globe writing on Albania

BOSTON, April 23 – Alex Beam, a columnist of the Boston Globe Columnist wrote Monday an article paying much attention to Albania as well.
Albania, Ho!
I recently read former Globe and Herald writer Peter Lucas’s new book, “The OSS in World War II in Albania,” from cover to cover, and enjoyed it immensely.
The anti-Nazi struggle in Albania during World War II was a tiny sideshow to the more important partisan campaigns waged in Greece and Yugoslavia. But it had characters galore, for instance former Boston longshoreman Sterling Hayden, who ferried spies across the Adriatic Sea from Italy. Hayden נfresh in my mind because I just rented “The Long Goodbye” נhad enlisted under the name “John Hamilton,” and occasionally left the battlefield for conjugal visits with his bombshell actress wife, Madeleine Carroll . If Lucas mentioned that Hayden won the Silver Star, I missed it.
Also on scene: Anthony Quayle, a young British officer who could recite most of Hamlet while hiding from the SS in ocean caves. Quayle later more or less played himself in the epic movie, “The Guns of Navarone.” The book’s tragic hero is Thomas Stefan, an Albanian-American from Laconia, N.H., who developed a close friendship with the immaculately groomed maquis leader Enver Hoxha, the country’s future Stalinist leader.
Stefan accompanied Hoxha on his “victory parade” into the Albanian capital Tirana, which had been liberated by a partisan commander whom Hoxha later purged. Stefan, a heavy drinker, died homeless in Los Angeles in 1959.
I don’t know what Lucas’s politics are, but this book clearly explains why Albania became a Communist state after the war: because Hoxha and the Communist partisans were the only people willing to risk their lives fighting the Nazis. Lucas ably describes the various national and royalist נbring back King Zog! נfactions wandering around the country, hoping to siphon off American or British support in return for doing nothing.