All Hell Let Loose (76 page)

‘The country was very, very wild indeed,’ wrote Captain Charles Hargreaves, who served among the Serbs as an SOE officer, ‘and there was nothing much in the way of roads. The houses were rather like English Tudor cottages, made of beam and brick, to the extent that when one went through a doorway the ground had been hollowed out and there were rushes or bracken on the floor. The people lived a way of life which vanished in England five hundred years ago … They were very kind, very good – they’d give you anything. Going into one house, we’d been walking for a very long time and we were sat down and two of the daughters came in and removed our boots, washed our feet and dried them with their hair. It was really quite biblical.’

What took place in Yugoslavia during the war years was overwhelmingly an internecine ethnic and political conflict. Neither the Axis cause nor that of the Western Allies commanded much emotional enthusiasm. German atrocities bred hatred, but also achieved their purpose of instilling fear. Many Yugoslavs, desperate to avoid exposing themselves to the occupiers’ wrath, opposed violent acts of resistance. Some 1.2 million perished – approximately matching the war’s combined British, American and French fatalities; but a majority were killed by hostile ethnic or political groups of their fellow countrymen, rather than by the major belligerents.

In the spring of 1941, Hitler bludgeoned Prince Paul into signing the Tripartite Pact, to secure Yugoslavia’s mineral resources and acquiescence in his invasion of Greece. This provoked a violent reaction from Serb nationalists. On 27 March they staged a coup to overthrow the regency and install an anti-Axis government in the name of young King Peter. Hitler, enraged by this supposed betrayal, responded by invading the country on 6 April. The king and government fled, and the Germans achieved an almost bloodless occupation. Hitler set about dismembering the country. Northern Slovenia was incorporated into the Reich. Croatia was granted independence and its fascist Ustaše militia assumed a powerful and bloody role in sustaining Axis control of the country. In May 1941, the Ustaše unleashed a reign of terror designed to cleanse Croatia of its two million Serbs. Meanwhile, Dalmatia and southern Slovenia were ceded to Italy. Macedonia, which was given to Bulgaria, experienced brutalities which turned its people decisively against rule from Sofia. As a result of wholesale ethnic cleansing, only 2,000 of Skopje’s pre-war population of 25,000 Serbs, for instance, remained in the city by the spring of 1942. The whole country was thrown into turmoil, a cycle of repression, sporadic resistance and a struggle for survival by millions of hapless people.

In London, the British welcomed the exiled Yugoslav rulers as heroes, and began to give what little assistance was in their power to the Chetnik resistance movement in Serbia led by royalist Colonel Draža Mihailovi
. Yet in 1943 it became increasingly clear that the Chetniks were more interested in gaining political control of Yugoslavia than in challenging the Axis occupiers. Mihailovi
was persuaded by the ferocity of reprisals – one hundred Yugoslavs shot for each German killed – that it was futile to challenge the Axis at such a cost.

Communists led by the Croatian Josip Broz – ‘Tito’ – appeared to be fighting more actively. Their propaganda was skilfully conducted, to persuade both the Yugoslav people and the Western Allies that they would resist the occupiers as the Chetniks would not; Tito also won support across ethnic divides. ‘The army of Mihailovi
was completely peasant-based and hadn’t got much discipline,’ said a British liaison officer, Robert Wade, ‘whereas Tito’s lot, ruthless though he was, behaved like the Brigade of Guards by comparison. No drilling, but when they were told to keep their distance they kept their distance – they were properly led and you could see the difference.’ Charles Hargreaves agreed: ‘Sometimes [the Chetniks] would be quite prepared to do small things, perhaps to ambush a train or convoy, but nothing very big, nothing that would have involved too much German loss of life … Their main intention was to secure control of the country after the war.’ Major Basil Davidson of SOE, an impassioned supporter of Tito, said cynically: ‘Unfortunately the Chetniks took the view that it was up to us to win the war against the Germans and up to them to win the war inside Yugoslavia against the communists, who had meanwhile formed a much stronger and more effective resistance.’

In December 1943, Churchill shifted his support decisively towards the communist leader, who claimed to have 200,000 men under arms. In this, the prime minister was influenced by some illusions: that Tito’s partisans ‘were not real communists’; that they could be persuaded to forge an accord with King Peter; and that they were single-mindedly committed to the struggle against the Axis. Communist sympathisers in SOE’s Cairo headquarters contributed to this roseate perception; London was ignorant of the fact that for some months in 1943 Tito negotiated with the Germans for a truce which would enable him to crush Mihailovi
, and committed most of his forces to kill Chetniks. Milovan Djilas was among partisan negotiators who spent some days at German headquarters, where officers professed revulsion at the Yugoslavs’ manner of making war. ‘Look what you have done to your own country!’ they exclaimed. ‘A wasteland, cinders! Women are begging in the streets, typhus is raging, children are dying of hunger. And we wish to bring you roads, electricity, hospitals.’

Only when Hitler rejected any deal with the communists did conflict resume between partisans and occupiers. The subsequent bloodbath radicalised much of the population, and enabled Tito to create a mass movement. His followers eventually gained control of large rural areas. But they lacked strength to take important towns or cities until the Red Army arrived in 1944, and they were as committed as the Chetniks to achieving post-war domination. Thirty-five Axis divisions were deployed in Yugoslavia, but few were first-line troops, and this concentration reflected Hitler’s obsessive fear of an Allied landing in the Balkans as much as the need to secure the country against Tito. The partisans’ military achievements were less significant than London allowed itself to believe. From late 1943 onwards, the Allies began to send Tito weapons in quantities far larger than those supplied to any other European resistance movement. But most were used to suppress the Chetniks and secure the country for Tito in 1944–45, rather than to kill Germans.

The struggle in Yugoslavia, where so many enmities overlapped, assumed a murderous character and complexity, of which Tito’s deputy Milovan Djilas cited an example. ‘Covered with orchards and rising from the confluence of two mountain streams, the still undamaged town of Foca seemed to offer charming and peaceful prospects. But the human devastation inside it was immeasurable and inconceivable,’ he wrote. ‘In the spring of 1941 the Ustaše – among them a good number of Moslem toughs – had killed many Serbs. Then the Chetniks … proceeded to slaughter the Moslems. The Ustaše had selected twelve only sons from prominent Serbian families and killed them. While in the village of Miljevina they had slit the throats of Serbs over a vat, apparently so as to fill it with blood instead of fruit pulp. The Chetniks had slaughtered groups of Moslems whom they tied together on the bridge over the Drina and threw into the river. Many of our people saw groups of corpses floating, caught on some rock or log. Some even recognised their own families. Four hundred Serbs and 3,000 Moslems were reported killed in the region of Foca.’

Hapless townspeople and villagers were obliged to endure the presence of partisans living off the land – which meant off their own meagre produce. They saw their valleys turned into battlefields, witnessed the execution of thousands of real and alleged collaborators by one faction or another, together with wholesale slaughters carried out by the Axis occupiers in reprisal for partisan actions. Hatreds were implacable. Almost every community and family suffered loss. Djilas acknowledged the horror of many local people when the communists avenged themselves – for instance, burning the Chetnik village of Ozrinici: ‘Though quite a few of them took joy in the misfortunes of Ozrinici, and understood the military reasons for our action, the peasants simply couldn’t get it into their heads that the communists could act like the invaders and the Chetniks … Harsh communist counter-measures … made the peasants reticent and double-faced: they sided with whoever came along and tried to wriggle out of any risky commitment.’ Even Djilas’s own aunt Mika reproached him: ‘You are fighting for a just cause, but you are harsh and bloody.’

At every halt on the partisans’ interminable marches, they encountered wretchedness: ‘All the villages in the Sutjeska valley had been destroyed. First the Ustaše burned down the Orthodox villages and then the Chetniks burned the Moslem villages. The only houses and people left were in the neighbouring hills. The devastation was all the more horrifying in that here and there a shaky doorframe, a blackened wall or a charred plum tree stuck out of the tall weeds and undergrowth. Though lush greenery swayed in the cool breeze on either side of the swift river, my memories of those days are weighed down with bitterness, hurt and horror.’

In a society in which rival nationalisms, feuds and the cult of vengeance were endemic, by 1944 brutality was institutionalised. All the warring parties shared responsibility for dreadful bloodshed, much of it inflicted upon people whose only crime was to belong to another race or creed. The partisans often accepted into their own ranks captured Chetniks willing to change sides. Djilas was dismayed by the fate of a tall, dark girl who rejected her captors’ advances, saying defiantly, ‘It would be immoral to change one’s views!’ He was impressed by her courage, and saddened to hear that she diminished herself in his eyes by collapsing into trembling sobs at her execution. He consoled himself with the reflection that, while all her group were shot, none was tortured in accordance with the usual custom: ‘The executions were carried out by Montenegrins, who volunteered so as to avenge their comrades killed … The condemned were led away at night, in groups of twenty.’ Both executioners and their victims appeared equally uncomfortable with their role: ‘They couldn’t be told apart, except that some had rifles and stars while others had wire around their wrists … As usual no effort was made to bury them properly; their legs and arms stuck out of the mound. Civil war has little regard for graves, funerals, requiems.’ The partisans were embarrassed only when their accompanying British military mission stumbled upon the ‘spilled brains, smashed faces, contorted bodies’. Tito demanded tetchily, ‘Couldn’t they have done it somewhere else?’