Abstract: The paper explores two British missions in Serbia between December 1944 and June 1945, unknown until now. The purpose of both missions was to protect British interests by surveying the state of the Trepča mining complex in Kosovo and Metohija once the war operations were over. A majority stake in the Trepča lead-zinc mines was held by the British company Trepca Mines Limited owned by a mining magnate, Sir Alfred Chester Beatty. The two missions unveiled not only the importance of Trepča for the war effort of the Allies (as the need for lead ore had increased), but also the manner in which the new communist authorities in the Democratic Federative Yugoslavia treated the foreign capital in the country. The documents used in the paper are kept by the U.K. National Archives (TNA) in London.

Keywords: Trepča, William Bailey, Josip Broz Tito, Chester Beatty, Yugoslavia, Kosovo and Metohija

Summary

The first attempt to survey the Trepča deposits was led by Colonel William Bailey, principal of the Trade and Industry Division of the Allied Control Commission in Sofia, Bulgaria (British Section). From 1942 to 1944, Bailey, a prominent member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret British intelligence agency, was the head or political advisor of the British Military Mission with the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland, serving at General Dragoljub Mihailović’s headquarters. An extensive report about the mission, classified as a top-secret document, shed a new light on the developments in the city of Niš and its vicinity, in the days after the liberation in 1944, describing also the behavior of senior Partisan officers.

British military and diplomatic representatives in Belgrade maintained interest in the matter, and Josip Broz Tito approved personally a visit by another British mission in January 1945, but it was not accomplished until June the same year. A British engineer, J. Jackson, provided a report on as-is state of the mines Trepča and Zletovo, Macedonia, including the degree of exploitation and the damage caused to the two mines during the war. The author of the report noted that the production had been restarted, and that the complete output was earmarked to cover the USSR war-related needs.