Eastern Approaches (41 page)

But it was perhaps in the character of their leaders that resided the ultimate reason for the Partisans’ success. These leaders were Communists. In guerrilla war, ideas matter more than material resources. Few ideas equal Communism in strength, in persistence, in insidiousness,
in its power over the individual. Their Communist leaders furnished the Partisans with the singleness of purpose, the ruthless determination, the merciless discipline, without which they could not have survived, still less succeeded, in their object. They possessed themselves and inspired in those about them a spirit of absolute devotion which led them to count as nothing either their own lives or the lives of others; they neither gave nor expected quarter. They endowed the Movement with an oracle: the Party line. They brought it a ready-made intelligence system, a well-tried, widespread, old-established underground network. To what had started as a war they gave the character of a revolution. Finally — and this was perhaps their most notable achievement — they succeeded in inducing their followers to forget the old internecine feuds and hatreds and, by throwing together Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins and the rest in the fight against the common enemy, produced within their own ranks a new sense of national unity.

By 1943, the Partisans numbered, so far as it was possible to ascertain, about 150,000, perhaps more. This force, composed of formations of varying strength, was distributed over the whole of Jugoslavia, being based for the most part in the mountains and forests. Each Partisan formation had its own Headquarters, and these subordinate headquarters were directly or indirectly responsible to Tito’s General Headquarters, which thus exercised effective operational control over the whole force. Communications were by wireless, use being made of captured enemy sets, or by couriers who travelled precariously from one part of the country to another across the intervening enemy lines.

The war waged by the Partisans was a strange one. There was no fixed front. Fighting for the most part with small arms only and limited stocks of ammunition, against a well-trained, well-armed, well-equipped, well-supplied and motorized enemy, supported by armour, artillery and aircraft, it was necessary for them to avoid pitched battles in which they would inevitably have come off worst. If they were to succeed, it was essential that they should retain the initiative themselves, and not allow it to pass into the hands of their opponents. Their aim must be to attack the enemy where he presented the richest target, where he was weakest, and, above all, where he least expected it. It
was equally important that, having attained their purpose, they should not linger but should fade once again into the background of hills and woods, where pursuit could not reach them. This necessitated a high degree of mobility. Their human resources, like their material resources, were precious. Any engagement in which enemy losses did not outnumber their own losses by at least five to one the Partisans reckoned a defeat.

If guerrillas are to survive in conditions comparable to those in which the Partisans were fighting, they must at all costs deny the enemy a target at which he can strike back. As their numbers and the scale of their activities increased, this became harder. They had to resist the temptation to follow up and consolidate their successes. All gains had to be regarded as temporary. Villages and small towns captured by sudden attacks had to be abandoned again when the enemy counter-attacked in force. For the Partisans to allow themselves to be forced into the role of a beleaguered garrison would have been a fatal mistake, as individual Commanders were to learn on occasion by bitter experience. And so towns and villages changed hands time after time with their inhabitants, and each time became more battered and lost more inhabitants in the process.

For the support which they gave the Partisans the population suffered atrociously. In addition to famine and want, which swept the ravaged country, the Germans, the Italians, the Bulgars and the various local Quislings inflicted savage reprisals on the people of the country in revenge for the damage done by the Partisans. But neither the Partisans nor their civilian supporters allowed anything to deter them from resistance to the enemy. And, in fact, the enemy, by their barbarity, defeated their own object, for such were the hatred and bitterness that it engendered, that the violence and intensity of the national resistance were redoubled.

Long before the Allies, the Germans and Italians came to realize that the Partisans constituted a military factor of first-rate importance against which a modern army was in many respects powerless. In the course of three years they launched against them no less than seven full-scale offensives, each employing upwards of ten divisions with supporting arms. Once or twice large forces of Partisans came near
to being surrounded and wiped out. Enemy aircraft, against which they had no protection whatever, played an important part, seeking out their positions and pinning them down while additional land forces were brought up to deal with them. But, each time they succeeded in extricating themselves, fading away, reappearing elsewhere and attacking the enemy where he least expected it. During each of these offensives, the extensive troop movements involved exposed the enemy more than ever to the attacks and ambushes of the Partisans. Thus these offensives failed in their object, and the Partisans, though tired, hungry and poorly equipped, continued their resistance undismayed. Meanwhile, the Germans, with an elusive enemy, with unreliable allies and without enough troops of their own to occupy the country effectively, could do little more than garrison the large towns and try to guard the lines of communication between them. And, merely to do this, they were using a dozen or more precious divisions which they could with advantage have employed on other fronts.

In the areas temporarily held by them the Partisans set up a provisional administration. This was based on a People’s Anti-Fascist Front or Coalition under Communist leadership, the political and administrative unit being the Odbor or Council which corresponded roughly to the Russian Soviet. Liaison between the Partisan civil and military authorities was maintained by Political Commissars who also cared for the ideological welfare of the troops. In order not to alienate non-Communists in the Movement and amongst the civilian population, a relatively moderate line was followed, the Communists being careful not to dwell more than necessary on their ultimate aims and to avoid controversial topics. But everywhere the key posts were held by Party Members, and policy was in practice dictated by them. Everywhere, too, I found Communist propagandists hard at work preaching the gospel, bringing waverers into line.

Of actual Soviet Russian intervention and control there was no sign. No official Soviet representative had as yet reached the Partisans, though wireless contact of a sort seemed to have been established with the Soviet Union. But with a Moscow-trained Communist of Tito’s calibre at the head of the Movement, there was clearly no need for
day to day instructions to be issued from Moscow. Indeed, with the familiar Communist jargon on everyone’s lips, the same old Party slogans scrawled on every wall and red star, hammer and sickle on the cap badges of the Partisans, ‘an observer familiar with the Soviet Union might’, I wrote in one of my earliest reports, ‘imagine himself in one of the Republics of the Union’.

Gradually, too, we learned something of the situation in the rest of the country. Where large areas were constantly changing hands, this was not difficult.

Bosnia, where we now found ourselves, was part of the independent State of Croatia. Nominally this was a kingdom, but its King, the Italian Duke of Spoleto, had wisely omitted to take up his appointment and power was in the hands of Ante Pavelić and his Ustaše, supported by the Wehrmacht. The form of government was a dictatorship on Fascist or Nazi lines, with Pavelić in the role of Poglavnik or Führer and the Ustaše as his Praetorian guards. In addition to the Ustaše, who formed units of their own corresponding to Hitler’s S.S., the new Croat State boasted its own army and air force, both under German operational control. These were more lukewarm in their loyalty to Pavelić and deserters from them came over to the Partisans in large numbers.

Pavelić’s accession to power had been followed by a reign of terror unprecedented even in the Balkans. He had a lot of old scores to settle. There were widespread massacres and atrocities; Serbs, first of all, especially in Bosnia, where there was a large Serb population; then, to please his Nazi masters, Jews; and, finally, where he could catch them, Communists and Communist sympathizers. Racial and political persecution was accompanied by equally ferocious religious persecution. The Ustaše were fervent Roman Catholics. Now that they were at last in a position to do so, they set about liquidating the Greek Orthodox Church in their domains. Orthodox villages were sacked and pillaged and their inhabitants massacred; old and young, men, women and children alike. Orthodox clergy were tortured and killed, Orthodox churches were desecrated and destroyed, or burned down with the screaming congregation inside them (an Ustaše speciality, this). The Bosnian Moslems, equally fanatical and organized in special units
by Pavelić and the Germans, helped by the Mufti of Jerusalem, joined in with gusto and a refined cruelty all of their own, delighted at the opportunity of massacring Christians of whatever denomination. At last the Croats were getting their own back for twenty years of Serb domination.

In Serbia the Germans kept most of the power in their own hands. The German puppet government was headed by General Nedić, formerly Chief of Staff of the Royal Jugoslav Army, a considerably milder character than Pavelić, who took the line that in accepting office and collaborating with the Germans, he was acting in the best interests of the Serbian people. This did not, however, prevent him and his Government from acquiescing in the confinement of large numbers of Serbs in concentration camps, the massacre of Serbian hostages and in all the other usual accompaniments of a Nazi occupation. A more actively pro-Nazi part was played by Ljotić, the Serb Fascist leader, and by the Serb Volunteer Corps, which largely consisted of his supporters and whose principal task was the suppression of the Partisans.

Of most interest to us were the Četniks. Theirs was essentially a Serb movement. From the start the main strength of the Četnik Movement was in Serbia, though Četniks were also active in Bosnia, Dalmatia and Montenegro. They derived their name from the Serb
četas
or companies which had fought the Turks in the Middle Ages. Their leader, Draža Mihajlović, was a Serb, a regular officer of the Royal Jugoslav Army who after its capitulation had taken to the woods with such of his men as he could gather round him with the intention of organizing resistance to the invader.

So much we knew. What followed during the summer of 1941 was less clear. Četniks and Partisans had, it seemed, fought side by side against the Germans in Serbia. Then there were mutual accusations of treachery (I had heard Tito’s version) and by the end of 1941 they were fighting against each other. The combined onslaught of Germans and Četniks proved too much for the Partisans, and early in 1942 they were driven out of Serbia with heavy losses, to lick their wounds in the mountains of Bosnia and Montenegro.

The way in which the situation now developed was truly Balkan in its complexity. Mihajlović by all accounts continued to hate the
Germans and to hope for an Allied victory and the eventual liberation of his country. But the Četniks could not fight the Partisans and Germans simultaneously. From now onwards their attitude towards the Germans became increasingly passive, while they redoubled their efforts to crush the Partisans.

The motives underlying this policy were not far to seek. In their early encounters with the Germans, the Četniks, like the Partisans, had suffered heavy casualties; their operations had also led to savage enemy reprisals against the civilian population. They lacked the ruthless determination of the Communist-led Partisans, and this had discouraged them. They had also received over the wireless messages from the Royal Jugoslav Government in exile and from the Allied High Command telling them to hold their hand. Henceforward their aim became to preserve rather than to destroy; to keep alive the flame of Serb patriotism, as their ancestors had done under the Turkish occupation, in order that at some future period, after the Allied victory to which they looked forward, they might restore the old Serb-dominated Jugoslavia, which had meant so much to them.

But to be able to do this, they must first eliminate the Communist-led Partisans whose revolutionary tendencies clearly constituted a dangerous obstacle to the restoration of the old order, while their presumed allegiance to Moscow represented a threat to Jugoslav independence. What had started as a war of resistance became in a very short time a civil war, in which, needless to say, the Partisans gave as good as they got.

The Germans were well pleased. Nothing could suit them better than for the Četniks to stop fighting them and turn all their energies against the Partisans, whose stubborn, savage resistance was already beginning to cause them serious embarrassment. A tacit agreement grew up by which Germans and Četniks left each other alone and concentrated on putting down the Partisans.

It was the start of the slippery slope which leads to collaboration; collaboration from motives which were understandable, patriotic even, but nevertheless collaboration. What was more natural than that units fighting against a common enemy should co-ordinate their operations? Some Četnik Commanders went further still and attached
liaison officers to German and Italian Headquarters, accepting German and Italian liaison officers in return. Some placed themselves and their troops under German and Italian command, allowed themselves to be supplied and equipped by them.

Who was being fooled and who was getting the best of it? The Germans, who had succeeded in neutralizing what had started as a resistance movement? Or the Četniks, who were actually being armed by an enemy, against whom they hoped one day to rise? It was all in the best Balkan tradition. Had not Miloš Obrenović alternately fought the Turks and acted as their Viceroy? Had he not sent to Constantinople the severed head of his fellow-liberator, Kara Djordje?