Eastern Approaches

by Fitzroy MacLean

  After he had gone, we stripped off our dusty sweat-soaked clothes and, running down the steps, jumped into the sea. It was late enough in the year for the water to be cold and its chill refreshed us. Soon we were swimming far out into the narrow straits, scarcely a mile wide, which divide Korčula from the Pelješac peninsula. In front of us, as we swam, the high, dark hills of Pelješac ran steeply down to the sea, the fishermen’s cottages clustering by the water’s edge. As we watched some fishing boats put out from the shore. A few miles to the south, where the peninsula joins the mainland, we knew that the Germans were beginning their advance along it. Looking back, we could see the whole town of Korčula spread out round the harbour, the old churches, houses and palaces golden in the morning sunlight.

  We swam till we were tired. Then we came in and dried ourselves and put on the clean shirts which each of us had kept rolled up in his pack against just such an occasion as this. An enormous and delicious meal, half breakfast and half luncheon, was waiting for us: fish, eggs, meat, cheese, coffee, fruit, Dalmatian wine, Maraschino from Zara as well as all kinds of luxuries left behind by the Italians in their flight. The cook, it seemed, had worked in one of the royal palaces. He might well have done. We certainly did justice to his cooking.

  When we had finished eating, we lay down on our beds and fell deeply and dreamlessly asleep.

  I was awakened, sooner than I would have liked, by the rustle of the Padre’s robe and by the slapping of his sandals on the stone floor. Grudgingly, I struggled back to consciousness. Outside a little Italian staff car was waiting, its exhaust puffing impatiently. The skipper was there too, and the garrison commander. We were off on a tour of the island.

  My recollections of that afternoon are confused. It began at I suppose two with a vin d’honneur and a snack with the oldest inhabitant of the next village (a process, which, as we found to our cost, was to be repeated at every other village and township in the island). It ended with a municipal dinner and a dance in the early hours of the following morning. It had the same nightmarish and exhausting quality as the last frantic days of an election campaign, with, in addition, a fantastic comic-opera character all of its own.

  At each village, after we had swallowed the inevitable vin d’honneur and snack, we inspected the local Partisan detachment. At our first stopping-place we had greatly admired the detachment Commander, a magnificent figure of a man with fierce black moustaches, mounted on a fine black horse.

  We were no less impressed by the handsome appearance and military bearing of the detachment Commander at the next village, also a typical Dalmatian and equally well mounted, though his horse, perhaps, did not seem quite so fresh or so full of spirit as the first we had seen. When, after we had visited the oldest inhabitant, we looked round for him to say goodbye, he was strangely enough, no longer there.

  At our next halt, once again, the local detachment and with it its Commander was there to greet us. This time we looked closely at the Commander. His horse’s flanks, we noticed with some surprise, were heaving and flecked with foam as if it had just had a hard gallop.

  And then, that curving neck, that flowing mane and tail, those magnificent moustaches — surely it was more than a resemblance But in his eye there was no flicker of recognition as he saluted and shook hands, and so, once again we congratulated him on the smartness of his detachment and then turned tactfully away, leaving him to gallop on ahead on his charger — the only one on the island — and place himself at the head of his troops in readiness for our arrival at the next village along the line.

  His must have been, I think, an engaging character, a mixture of southern panache, rustic guile, and a childlike desire to please. I was never able to find out what became of him in the fierce fighting that was soon to sweep over Korčula.

  Other isolated incidents remain ineradicably impressed on my memory. I remember being pelted with flowers by some nuns. I remember noticing that, in contrast to the Roman Catholic clergy on the mainland, here the priests in most of the villages on Korčula seemed to be leading lights in the Partisan Movement. I remember visiting a hand-grenade factory; and a hospital where a man was having his leg cut off by a German-Jewish doctor; and a printing press where nothing in particular was happening. I have a vivid recollection of making several speeches in Serbo-Croat, one from a balcony. I shall also always remember meeting Sergeant Duncan, from whom we had somehow got separated, coming round the island in the opposite direction on a triumphal tour of his own, standing up in a lorry, swaying slightly and loudly acclaimed by the crowd. Finally I have hazy memories of the dance at a village called Blato which rounded off our day’s entertainment and which was dramatically interrupted by the explosion of a small red Italian hand-grenade which became detached from one of the girls’ belts as she whirled round the barn in which it was being held.

  That night we slept very soundly.

  During the days that followed our chief concern was with our wireless. We had had no contact since Livno. Mechanically the set seemed in order, but clearly something was radically wrong. Try as we would, Cairo remained deaf to our tappings, and we seemed to be able to pick up nothing of theirs.

  This was a serious matter. I had undertaken to send the Navy detailed landing instructions for their motor launch. They had agreed in principle to come to Korčula, and were due to make the attempt any day now, but would they in fact risk one of their light craft so near the enemy coast without an explicit assurance that all was well? Worse still, the absence of any message from us would probably be taken to mean that I had never reached Korčula, or that it was now in enemy hands. Anxiously we tried heightening the aerial, fiddling with the crystal, taking the whole set up to the top of a nearby hill. Nothing did any good. There was also the question of the King still weighing heavily on my mind.

  The only hope was to try to send a Partisan courier through to Jajce with instructions that my message should be relayed from there. But that might take weeks. Resignedly we copied out the signal on a sheet of paper, leaving it in cipher in case it should fall into the hands of the enemy. I addressed it to Vivian Street, and that night we watched the courier start off by boat for the mainland. Until I had had an answer one way or the other I myself was bound to stay where I was, for otherwise the M.L. might arrive and find no one there to meet it. I accordingly settled down to wait.

  The days went by, fine and bright. Our wireless remained obstinately silent. There was no news of the courier. The fighting on Pelješac seemed to have bogged down. From time to time excited Partisans came running in to tell us that our ship had been sighted or had arrived at one of the other islands, or had been sunk and was now floating off the island bottom upwards. On investigation none of these stories were found to have the slightest foundation, but they relieved the tedium of waiting.

  For some time it had almost seemed as if the Germans had wind of our intentions or at any rate of my presence on the island.

  Once I had occasion to visit a neighbouring islet. It was so near that it had seemed unnecessary to take the usual precaution of waiting for darkness. The Partisans placed at my dispsoal a magnificent speedboat, resplendent with glistening white paint and shining brass, the relic of some pre-war millionaire holiday-maker. From the stern a large Partisan flag fluttered gaily in the breeze. Behind us, as we roared out of Korčula harbour, an immense foaming wake surged up and sped in ripples towards the shore. For a moment I wondered if all this was wise. Only for a moment. Then I knew it was not. Above the roar of our own engines another, only too familiar sound had reached my ears. As I looked round to see where it came from, a large three-engined German flying boat, flying very slowly and so low that I could see the rear-gunner’s face, came suddenly over the brow of the nearest hill. Our steersman took immediate and spectacular evasive action, thereby rendering us even more embarrassingly conspicuous than we were already. Turning over in my mind the possibility of a quick dive over the side, I watched the rear-gunner anxiously to see how he was reacting. A
pparently he was not interested, thinking perhaps that only Ustaše or other Axis sympathizers would circulate by day in such a showy craft. Or else he had left his ammunition at home. In any case he did not attack us, but continued peaceably on his way towards the main harbour, where, we heard afterwards, he scared the life out of our cook by skimming past our house at what is known by the R.A.F. as ‘nought feet’ and peering in at the windows. It was hard to avoid the conclusion that the enemy was looking for somebody or something.

  A few days later we had further confirmation of this. I had climbed to the top of the hill that overlooked the harbour and was looking across towards the mainland when suddenly out of the sun there came with a roar a dozen Stukas. There was no mistaking those disagreeably tilted wings, that wasp-like undercarriage. In other theatres, perhaps, the Stuka had had its day, but for us, in our kind of warfare, without fighter support or anti-aircraft defences, it had kept all its old terror.

  They took their preliminary run high over the harbour and out to sea again. But immediately they turned and came back and, as I watched, their leader peeled off from the formation, and, with the sunlight flashing on his wings, came screaming downwards past where I was standing, to send his bomb crashing amidst the shipping in the harbour. Almost at sea level, he pulled out of his dive and turned back out to sea, as the next and then a third and a fourth Stuka after him followed him down. Soon high columns of water were twisting up into the air from all over the harbour, matched by clouds of dust and rubble from the shore. Then, as quickly as they had come, the raiders were gone and silence followed, broken only by shouts for help and the wailing of frightened children which rose from the town at my feet. Korčula had had its first experience of aerial warfare.

  The days passed. And still there were no signs of the Navy. The wireless was dead and no message had come from the mainland, where the military situation seemed to be deteriorating. I was out of touch both with G.H.Q. Middle East and with Tito.

  I decided to give them another twenty-four hours and then, if nothing happened, to start back for Jajce.

  That night I was wakened at about two by a confused shouting outside the house. My first thought was that the Germans had landed from the mainland. Then, as I was reaching for my pack and my automatic in preparation for a quick move, our Partisan guard burst excitedly into the house, followed by three naval officers and David Satow, the latest addition to my staff. One of the sailors I recognized as Sandy Glenn, an old friend with a number of adventurous exploits to his credit in the less orthodox branches of naval warfare. The Navy had arrived.

  I was delighted to see Sandy, the more so as I had reason to know that he was not supposed to be there at all. But that was not likely to deter him. Nothing could have been more deceptive than his mild, even slightly owlish appearance, as he peered at you benignly from behind a large pair of round spectacles. In fact he possessed gifts of determination and ingenuity which enabled him to get the best of almost any staff officer — enemy or Allied — however obstructive. From now onwards he was never to be far away from us. His next assignment was in enemy-occupied Albania where he lived mysteriously in a cave looking out over the Adriatic and waited upon by a retinue of Italian prisoners. Thence he emerged to rescue an aircraft load of American hospital nurses whose pilot had lost his way and crash landed in the interior, after which they were smuggled down to the coast by the Partisans under the noses of the Germans, marching for days in high-heeled shoes and silk stockings. Finally, towards the end of the war, he was to be dropped by parachute on the banks of the Danube, with the task of blowing up barges, or something of the kind, for which he was awarded a much-deserved bar to his D.S.C.

  Sandy and his friends had, it appeared, taken a chance that Korčula was still in Partisan hands. Having brought their M.L. into a cove on the other side of the island they had then made their way across country to where I was living. I gave them some rakija and we discussed what to do next. They had brought several tons of arms and supplies for the Partisans and these needed to be unloaded. It was also essential to ensure that the M.L. was properly camouflaged against air reconnaissance before daylight.

  Fortunately, the cove which they had picked was admirably suited for both purposes, with high, wooded sides and a path running down to the water’s edge, by which the supplies could be got away, so that a move was not necessary. The Partisans were wildly excited at this impromptu naval visit. We collected as many of them as possible and started work unloading the M.L. and camouflaging her up. By dawn the last case of ammunition had been carried on shore and camouflage nets, all stuck about with leaves and branches, had been ingeniously stretched over the M.L. and from her side to the shore, so as to break up her outline. From the top of the nearest hill, whither we retired to survey our handiwork, she might have been part of the island.

  We were not a moment too soon.

  As I stood on the deck of the M.L., looking out from under the bowers and trellises of the camouflage, the beat of aircraft engines fell once again on our ears and two little black ‘hedge-hoppers’ — Fieseler Storchs — came poking inquisitively over the hill. But the M.L.’s camouflage was too good for them and they flew away without noticing us and did not come back. It was tempting to think what a shock we could have given them, had we chosen, by suddenly opening up at close range with the M.L.’s Oerlikon.

  They had scarcely gone when the Partisan brigade commander arrived from Pelješac. Things, it seemed, were going very badly indeed in his sector. German reinforcements were pouring in and according to his latest information the enemy were collecting a regular invasion fleet of small craft at the mouth of the Neretva for purposes which were all too clear. Unless we could do something to help, the Partisans would be swept off Pelješac and the way would lie open for a German invasion of the islands. Thus, our new-found supply channel was likely to be shut before we had had time to use it.

  Bogdan, the Brigade Commander, was generally a merry little man, but that morning he had a worried look and his long moustaches drooped dismally. I took him on board the M.L. and his eyes, accustomed to the bare hillside, opened wide at the shaded lights and polished brass and mahogany of the chart-house. Then, as maps were produced, the strangeness of it all was forgotten and he was soon completely absorbed in his task of explaining the position and showing us how he thought we could best help.

  By now I was accustomed to Partisan demands for air support, which in general showed little comprehension of what could and could not be done from the air and bore but little relation to reality. But this time it looked as though, if the R.A.F. could only spare the aircraft, we might really be able to give decisive tactical support. There was also a chance that the Navy might be able to help, though not, as Bogdan seemed to expect, then and there by means of our one and only M.L.

  Sitting down at the cabin table, I wrote out two signals to which I gave the highest priority I could. The first was to Air Vice-Marshal Coningham, who was commanding the old Desert Air Force in Italy, explaining the position and asking him if he could spare some aircraft from the battle in Italy to attack the German troop concentrations at Mostar and Metković, their advanced positions on Pelješac and their invasion barges at the mouth of the Neretva. I added that, to be of any use, the help would have to come at once.

  The second signal was to the Flag Officer Taranto, or F.O.T.A., as he was called, suggesting that, if he could spare some M.T.B.s, they would be well employed patrolling off the mouth of the Neretva, in case the enemy should decide to try a landing.

  The M.L. had instructions to keep the strictest wireless silence as long as she was in enemy waters, but we had decided that she should leave again at nightfall, and her captain promised to send off my signals as soon as he got out to sea. Bogdan seemed impressed by so much activity. The galley was out of commission, but we gave him some bully and biscuits and he went off back to his hard-pressed men, much more cheerful than he had come and clearly hoping for great things. I only hoped that my signal
s would have some effect.

  The M.L. left that night and next day we, too, having established contact with the Navy, started to prepare for our return journey. It took some time to plan our journey and make the necessary arrangements for it, and, before we finally left, we had the satisfaction of seeing a number of Spitfires flash overhead in the direction of Pelješac and the mainland and of hearing a little later that they had played havoc with the enemy’s preparations for a big attack. The Navy, too, came up to scratch and patrolled so successfully that, for the time being, nothing more was heard of the enemy’s invasion fleet. By the time I left, the German advance on Pelješac had been temporarily checked and the Partisans were holding their own.

  But this temporary tactical success had not solved the much bigger, strategical problem. Everything showed that the intention of the enemy was, first to consolidate their hold on Dalmatia and the coast, and then to push across to the islands. They would use whatever forces they considered necessary to achieve this purpose, and, in an encounter of this kind they were clearly in a position to bear down the Partisans by sheer weight of numbers and armament. For the Partisans to make a stand, either on the coast or on the islands, for them to attempt, in other words, to hold fixed positions would be to flout the first principle of guerrilla warfare, and, to my mind, could only end in disaster.

  On the other hand, if we lost the islands, we should be losing a very valuable asset. The secure possession of even one of them would provide a link with the outside world, a kind of advanced supply base, from which, even without a firm foothold on the coast, it should be possible, by judicious gun-running, to send a steady trickle of supplies over to the mainland and up into the interior. It might well be possible, if we could somehow manage to hold an island, to use it as a base from which M.T.B.s could raid enemy coastal traffic and shipping up and down the Adriatic. The first M.L. had after all shown the way and the success of her venture would, I felt, serve to reassure the Navy and encourage them to experiment further. Perhaps, though at that early stage the thought seemed almost fantastic, we might be able to find, somewhere among the crags and woods and olive groves, a flat strip from which fighter aircraft from Italy might operate, thereby greatly extending their range.