The Incredible Tito: Man of the Hour (5 page)

“
Oj Sloveni, yosh shte zhivi
—”

“
Oh, Slavs, you still live, you still fight
—”

Once again, the Partisans broke the Nazi spirit. This was more than the Nazi supermen could stand; they had to rest, recuperate, wait for re-enforcements. These were not human beings they fought, but madmen! These South-Slavs had no feelings, no sensibilities! Who else but madmen would fight every mile for two hundred miles of hell, when they knew at the beginning that they were defeated?

So the Nazis paused—but not to let the Partisans escape. South of them, in Herzegovina, was an Italian Fascist division. The Nazi commander radioed to them to intercept the Partisan retreat.

One may speculate upon how bitter Marshal Tito's smile was when he heard about that. This particular Italian division was known as a “Purge Unit.” For months, it had been indulging in the pleasant Fascist sport of murdering civilians. In one case, to prove its toughness to its Gestapo pals, it had wiped out three hundred women and children.

Tito informed his ragged troops that an Italian division was waiting for them. He added that they would take no prisoners. The Partisans attacked, wiping out the Fascist division. Now they had food, warm Italian uniforms, thousands of rifles, machine guns, and artillery. With that, Italian trucks, wagons, supply animals and medical material.

Meanwhile, the Nazi army to the north of the Partisans had rested and increased its strength. Supplies and ammunition were brought up. Col. General Alexander von Loehr flew in from Belgrade, assumed command and almost immediately ordered an attack.

Perhaps he had expected Tito to resume his former tactics and retreat. In that case, he would be brought up by the swollen Neretva River, almost impossible to cross at this time of the year. But instead of retreating, Tito attacked. He launched a terrific artillery barrage with the captured Italian guns. The German attack folded, and for the moment the Nazis were driven back in disorder.

That was the time Tito chose to cross the Neretva River. He had no engineering corps to build a bridge. All the heavy equipment he had captured from the Italians, trucks, tanks, guns, and ammunition would have to be left behind. But he had to cross now, while the Germans were still reeling from the blow he had dealt them.

Everything that could not be carried on a man's back, Tito destroyed. He had over four thousand wounded; they were carried across on rafts. The unwounded crossed over on rafts or waded and swam through the icy waters.

After crossing the river, Marshal Tito marched his army south, through Herzegovina in the direction of Montenegro. They were desperately short of medical supplies; an epidemic of typhus had struck them. Every day, more and more of the wounded died from blood poisoning. Again their food gave out. They marched through a snow-covered, silent land. Houses were burned-out, empty shells. Villages were deserted. Wolves regarded the spectre-like army, sat back on their haunches and howled. There had been no wolves here for a hundred years. This was the part of Yugoslavia that had been generously left by Hitler to the Italians, and the Fascists had outdone the Germans in savagery. The men looked at the landscape, this face of their native land, set their teeth, and remembered.

Then their scouts discovered an Italian garrison, and when word was brought back, the Partisans smiled. They attacked in the night; an Italian brigade was annihilated, and once more the Partisans had food, fresh ammunition, artillery and trucks.

In 1943, much of the 1942 area remained under Partisan control. As there was no established front in this war of movement, all areas are approximate.

The captured trucks and carts were of inestimable value in transportation of the wounded. It was a point of pride with the Partisans that only forty-five of the original four thousand, five hundred sick and wounded were captured by the enemy despite the hazardous march.

With the captured Italian equipment, Tito led his Partisans south, through Montenegro to a quiet valley near the Albanian frontier. A warm and gentle spring was coming to Yugoslavia. For the moment, the Partisans had some respite. The wounded lay in the fields, in the warm sun, gathering strength. Marshal Tito employed that time to re-equip his troops, to contact the other Partisan armies, and to arrange for future concerted action.

THE ALLIES RECOGNIZE TITO

A
POINT should be made here—that the guerrilla bands which Marshal Tito had dispatched southward into Serbia the year before had played havoc with German lines of communication. At the time when the British were sorely pressed at El Alamein in North Africa, Tito had ordered his guerrillas to spare no effort to delay German re-enforcements. The result was that train after train bearing German troops and supplies for Rommel's army was derailed or blown up, and thereby the Yugoslavs became one of the most important factors in the eventual Allied North African victory.

Perhaps this more than anything else convinced the British that Mikhailovich was, if not a traitor and Axis collaborationist, at least a straw man, blown all out of proportion by Yugoslav Government in Exile lies. At any rate, the British were fed up and disgusted with the Government in Exile's incompetence and stupidity. The British contacted Tito and determined to send a military mission to cooperate with him. The mission was landed by parachute on the Piva Plateau in Montenegro.

THE LIBERATION OF BOSNIA

I
N his headquarters on the Piva Plateau, Tito made final preparation for the German attack—which he knew was coming. Vast re-enforcements had been added to the German Army, for this time they were determined to crush the growing Partisan strength. The German force had been increased to seven Nazi divisions; five Italian divisions were added to that, and with them Ustachi Collaborationists. And this time, Mikhailovich had promised full support to the Germans.

The British military mission was astounded at Tito's optimism in the face of the vast array of strength. Here was a force as large as the Eighth Army faced in Africa, larger perhaps, some two hundred thousand enemy troops in all. How did Tito propose to face them with half that number, with no air support and no armor?

Tito had prepared his tactics. To the north of him, in Bosnia, was a strong Partisan army. He would smash through the Germans, draw them out, join with the Bosnian Partisans, swing around, and strike them again and again, where they least expected it.

On May 15th, 1943, the combined German-Italian attack was launched—from all directions. It started with intense aerial bombardment, the usual waves of dive bombers, supplemented this time with hourly high-level bombing. This the Partisans had to take; they were still woefully short of anti-aircraft equipment and entirely without an airforce. Then German artillery was brought up and shells by the thousand were pumped into the Partisan positions.

The Piva Plateau, however, was well situated for defense—high ground, surrounded with canyons and bluff cliffs. For twelve days, the Partisans fought off German attacks, leaving the rocky defiles full of German dead.

Then, in accord with his plan, Tito began the retreat. In a black night, his army crept through a narrow canyon. He might have gotten out of Piva without a fight, had not a Mikhailovich unit gotten wind of the move and laid an ambush for him. As they fought their way through the Chetniks, Tito pointed out to one of the British observers:

“Here is an example of Mikhailovich fighting the invaders.”

For the next four weeks the Partisan Army battled its way northward. Line after line was frantically formed by the Germans to halt the retreat—a retreat which again and again turned into a counter-attack—and each time Marshal Tito broke through. He lost men; his casualties during the defense of Piva and the four-week march were four thousand, but he exacted a toll of twelve thousand from the Germans. The Germans took advantage of the country, the narrow passes, the mountains. They established hundreds of machine gun nests on rocky heights; but the Partisans clawed their way up in the darkness. They took the machine guns with their bare hands and knives, silently, leaping out of the night, turning the hot guns on the defenders. During that battle, a German correspondent reported that the Partisans fought, not like men, but like wild beasts, unafraid of death, appearing suddenly out of the night, attacking and quickly withdrawing.

At that time, two German divisions were employed against the Allies in Sicily; seven German divisions were being cut to ribbons by Tito's Partisans.

At the end of that march, in Bosnia, Tito joined forces with the other large Partisan Army. Together, they turned on the Germans and Italians and launched a fierce counter-attack. This time, it was successful; the Germans were sent reeling back, their proud Wermacht cut to pieces, and the Free Yugoslav radio was able to announce to the world, in July:

“All of Bosnia has been liberated from the invader.”

“ANNIHILATED” PARTISANS SLAUGHTER NAZIS

I
T is almost impossible to describe the condition of Yugoslavia in that summer of 1943. Three times battling armies had fought their way up and across the breadth of the land. A road of graves marked where the armies had marched and fought. Half of the country lay desolate, villages abandoned, burned to the ground, leveled by dive bombers. Thousands of Yugoslavs had been murdered by the Germans and Italians—how many thousands no one knew. Murder had become the Fascist sport.

On the other hand, during this past summer a wave of hope and joy swept through the country. The whole center of the land had been liberated. A great German and Italian army had been decisively defeated. A wave of freedom touched South-Slavs everywhere in the Balkans.

The first evidence of this was a new outbreak of sabotage. Everywhere in Yugoslavia, men and women and even children rose against the invader. The Germans and Italians turned the cities they still held into armed fortresses, in some cases surrounding them with a wall of barbed wire. German trains were derailed, blown up. When the Germans tried defensive methods, such as preceding their trains with a string of sand-carrying gondolas, the Partisans set relays of mines.

And during this time, Partisan strength increased immensely. Whole brigades deserted from Mikhailovich's waning army. Recruits poured in by the hundreds, from the hills, from the cities, from the woods. German and Italian prisoners joined forces with the Partisans, to fight Fascism. German anti-Nazis, escaping across the Austrian frontier, offered to fight in Partisan ranks against Hitlerism. A whole company was formed of German prisoners, and two other companies were formed by Austrian anti-Nazis. While British and American newspapers told their readers that Mikhailovich's army numbered 250,000 men, it had actually shrunk to less than ten thousand. Radio Berlin screamed to the world that the Yugoslav Partisans had been annihilated, while the Partisans, holding the whole of Bosnia, went about the work of reconstruction.

ITALIAN ARMS IN PARTISAN HANDS

T
HE surrender of Italy came as a windfall to the Liberation Front. Marshal Tito knew, with the invasion of Sicily, that sooner or later the battered and consistently defeated Italian Fascist army would have to lay down its arms. He made his preparations accordingly, and when the surrender came, he was ready. Partisan troops or emissaries approached Italian garrisons in all parts of Yugoslavia. In each case, they were given one of three choices, to fight the Partisans, to surrender their arms and supplies and leave Yugoslavia, or to join the Partisans in their fight against the Nazis.

In only a few isolated cases did the Italians resist the Partisans. In Slovenia, for example, six Italian divisions surrendered their arms and were escorted to the Italian border. In Croatia, three Italian brigades went over to the Partisans. In parts of Serbia, Germans reached the Italians first and disarmed them, but there were some instances where the Italians fought off the Germans and joined the Partisans.

Never before had such a quantity of arms and supplies come into Tito's hands. He had enough tanks to equip an entire tank brigade. For the first time, he had an ample supply of antiaircraft guns and heavy artillery. Howitzers, siege guns, and even a few pieces of coastal artillery fell into his hands. Armored cars and an armored train. Locomotives. Great stores of food. Several thousand machine guns. Tommy guns. Millions of rounds of ammunition, and whole dumps of artillery shells.

Tito did not pause or rest on his laurels. With the captured arms and the added recruits, he launched a heavy attack on the Dalmatian coast. Striking hammer blows, he liberated almost all of Dalmatia, and then drove north into Istria. He cleared all of this neck of land except Trieste of the enemy, and in one place smashed across the border into Italy. From there, he swung east-ward and liberated Slovenia. In Slovenia, the people rose to join him, and in a matter of weeks almost all of that province was cleared of Germans. By late September, 1943, two-thirds of Yugoslavia was in the hands of the Liberation Front.