The Incredible Tito: Man of the Hour

by Howard Fast

  So within five weeks after he had commenced resistance, Mikhailovich gave orders for his men to fight the Partisans in preference to the Axis. Bitter clashes took place, actual battles in which Mikhailovich’s men attacked the Partisans and often murdered the Partisan prisoners they took. And at this development, Adolf Hitler and Company smiled and rubbed their hands gleefully. How convenient it was to have Mikhailovich destroy Yugoslavs for them.

  Fortunately, not all of Mikhailovich’s men were as blind and stupid as he. His own son fought under Tito, and whole brigades of his men deserted to Partisan command. Perhaps it was this latter development as much as anything else that made him reply to Tito’s earnest messages and agree to a meeting in October, 1941.

  MIKHAILOVICH BETRAYS YUGOSLAVIA

  NOTHING came of their first meeting. For hours Tito argued, and to all his arguments Mikhailovich gave the same replies: “I will not collaborate with Communists. I will not collaborate with Croats, who are the enemies of Serbia.”

  Actually, there had been a fifth column recruited out of the lowest elements of Croatia, but these were the sworn enemies of the Croatian Partisans. Tito argued; he pointed out that in the Partisan ranks were Serbs and Slovenes as well as Croatians, men and women from every Yugoslav province. He pointed out that the Partisans desired only one thing, the liberation of their nation. He pointed out the bitter and horrible consequences of civil war; but Mikhailovich remained adamant, and the first meeting failed.

  In that same month, there was a second meeting between Tito and Mikhailovich, and this time Mikhailovich agreed to cease fighting the Partisans—for a price. It is difficult to say whether Mikhailovich came to this meeting determined to betray Tito, or whether he simply took advantage of the opportunity later.

  However that was, here are the circumstances. By now, late in October, Marshal Tito had a powerful striking force, not too large as yet, not yet ready to fight a pitched battle with strong German forces and come out on top, but powerful and well armed. His headquarters was at Uzice, a town in central Yugoslavia between Serbia and Bosnia. There he had assembled a respectable store of rifles and machine guns; he had some captured armored cars, a few tanks and some artillery. In the town’s bank vault, he had established a crude factory for reloading cartridges and manufacturing certain small-arm ammunition.

  It was here that he met Mikhailovich the second time. Mikhailovich knew that the Partisans had captured large stores of arms. His own men were falling away; his new recruits were half armed. So he made this proposal:

  He would cease hostilities against Tito. In exchange, Tito would supply him with five thousand rifles, half a million cartridges, and a large amount of money. When Tito heard this proposal, he bit his lips and nodded. If it had to be this way, then it had to be this way. Five thousand rifles to Mikhailovich would mean five thousand less for the Partisans, but unity was what they stood for. If five thousand rifles and a money bribe would buy unity, then Mikhailovich should have them.

  Mikhailovich’s men carried away the rifles and ammunition; and then, a few weeks later returned with them—only this time to attack Tito’s Uzice headquarters. It was as bald, as grotesque a betrayal as any the Axis had perpetrated; it was a preview of what Mikhailovich would attempt later.

  Perhaps Tito had expected the betrayal. At any rate, the Partisans beat off the Chetnik attack, and late in November, 1941, Tito once again proposed to Mikhailovich that they meet and discuss cooperation instead of civil war. Perhaps with his tongue still in his cheek, Mikhailovich agreed. Tito sent Colonel Dedier to Chachak to meet Mikhailovich and reason with him. While these discussions were going on, Tito received word that a large German force, four full divisions, was advancing on Uzice.

  Tito telephoned Dedier and impressed on him that their only hope of withstanding the German attack was to effect a combination of Mikhailovich and Partisan forces.

  When Mikhailovich heard this, he shrugged and shook his head. Bluntly, he said that it was no use—his force was hardly able to resist the German attack.

  “But the Partisans will fight,” Dedier pleaded. “Don’t you understand?”

  “I understand that it would be folly to resist the Germans,” Mikhailovich smiled.

  THE PARTISANS FIGHT—AND GROW

  FORTUNATELY, this piece of business came to light through an English captain, an officer attached to Mikhailovich by the British, who happened to be at Tito’s headquarters when the German attack started. It began a chain of circumstances that resulted in a British withdrawal of support from Mikhailovich and a transfer of support and liaison to Tito’s Partisans.

  That day, the Stukas struck at Uzice. Wave after wave peeled off over the little town and grimly shattered building after building into rubble. With a grim face, Tito watched his headquarters being destroyed, his men being killed as they fired at the Stukas with rifles and pistols. A little later, the German tanks hurtled into the devastation the Stukas had left. Tito was one of the last to leave the town, the British officer with him.

  Late that night, a battered, weary group of Partisan officers gathered at Zlatiber, some twenty miles distant from shattered Uzice. Tito and the British officer were the last to arrive. Their car had been strafed and destroyed. They had lain in a ditch, and then walked almost all of the twenty miles on foot. When Tito’s discouraged officers asked him, “What now?” he answered:

  “We start again. They’ll give us no peace now. They understand that we arc an army.”

  Actually, the disaster was not as bad as it might have been. The Partisans managed to bring most of their arms out of Uzice. Also, the bulk of their army was intact. Tito and his officers decided to move southwest into the wild mountains of Herzegovina, establish headquarters at Foca, and build their strength to a point where they could conduct an active offensive against the Germans. Five brigades of troops were singled out to accompany Tito and form the nucleus of the new army. The rest of the Partisans were divided into small guerrilla bands, and ordered to go south into Serbia, harass the enemy, cut communications, and in general seek support from the Serbians.

  Foca continued to be Tito’s headquarters until May, 1942. Here, he and his staff whipped the new army into shape. Already, they constituted some of the hardest and most experienced troops in the world; by May, they were in shape to match strength with the Germans.

  Meanwhile, the Partisan movement gathered strength in every part of Yugoslavia. In east Bosnia, a young guerrilla leader, Principe, the nephew of the man who had assassinated the Archduke of Austria in 1914, had formed and was leading a smaller but well trained Partisan Army. Another Partisan group functioned in Slovenia, and in Serbia, the Partisans gained in strength day by day. In every case, when the Germans attacked a Partisan group, it was like attacking a bank of mist. The Partisans fought as long as it was profitable—and then melted away into the hills and forests.

  At the beginning of June, 1942, a year after he first began operations, Marshal Tito tested the strength of his main army against a full-fledged German offensive. The Nazis attacked him in Bosnia. His army withstood the German attack, and in places organized their own counter-offensive and drove back the Nazis. Bringing up more strength, the Germans cut off every avenue of escape.

  Tito’s food was running low. He gathered his men, launched a heavy attack against one section of the German line, and broke through. His army, although almost without mechanization of any sort, moved with incredible speed. Before the Germans fully realized that he was out of their trap, Tito swung on their flank and attacked them from the rear. The attack was unanticipated and completely successful. The Germans had considered the Partisan Army trapped; and it was their experience that trapped armies surrendered. This one didn’t. It lashed out at them and sent them reeling. Tito gave them no rest. He attacked again, routing them and cutting the important Sarajevo-Mostar railroad.

  His liaison reported a powerful force of Krajina Partisans on his left flank, separated from him by almost a division of
German troops. Tito marched his men twenty miles through the night, attacked the Germans at dawn, routed them, and effected a junction with the Krajina Partisans.

  The men were their own supply column. They took food and ammunition from the German dead. The augmented force now drove north through Bosnia in the direction of Croatia. Garrison after garrison of German and Italian troops were surrounded, attacked and destroyed. By August, all of North Bosnia was liberated, cleansed of Fascist troops. The slogan, DEATH TO ALL FASCISTS! LIBERTY TO THE PEOPLE! ran like fire through Yugoslavia.

  As Tito’s army fought its way north, it gained in strength. In Bosnia, he was re-enforced by thousands of Bosnian Partisans. Hardly resting, he launched a new campaign into Croatia, and again he was joined by thousands of fresh troops, Croatian Partisans this time. As if in answer to Tom Paine’s battle cry of the American Revolution, the country and the city came forth as one man to support him.

  During the Croatian campaign, Tito’s force swept north almost to the Hungarian border, and there they were joined by a detachment of Hungarian anti-fascist guerrillas. From Croatia, they crossed into Slovenia, pursuing their campaign of liberation almost to the German border.

  By the end of 1942, the Yugoslav Liberation Front Radio was able to announce to the world that half of Yugoslavia had been liberated from the Fascists and was now under the control of Partisan forces.

  A miracle had come to pass, in a sense as great a miracle as that of Russia. A tiny country, conquered in ten days by the Nazis, had risen in its anger and driven the invader from half its land.

  And throughout the democratic world, people, reading about the Partisan exploits, began to speak a magic and romantic name—Tito!

  UNITED FRONT FOR LIBERTY

  IN the late fall of 1942, in the town of Bihach, in the northwestern corner of Bosnia, a democratic Yugoslav assembly met. It called itself by a long and unwieldy name, “The Anti-Fascist Assembly for the People’s Liberation in Yugoslavia.” It included Communists, democratic leaders, trade unionists, peasant leaders, and churchmen. It met openly and proudly in liberated territory.

  It did not presume to say that it constituted the government of Yugoslavia; it was a temporary parliament for the freed areas of Yugoslavia. Along with this, the loose, Partisan structure of the Liberation Front began to reorganize itself as a regular military force. In Tito’s brilliant and triumphant march to the north, he had taken the opportune historical moment for uniting the guerrilla bands into a regular army. Regiments and divisions were formed, and officers were appointed to lead them. Elements from all of Yugoslavia were brought into the new army.

  Tito placed the accent now on unity. In spite of the fact that Mikhailovich’s Serbian army was attacking the Partisans at every opportunity, more and more Serbs joined the Liberation Front movement. A collaborationist group of the worst Croatian elements, the Ustachi, was working with the Italians and murdering patriotic Croats by the thousand; in several cases, Serbs combined with the Croats to fight these traitors.

  One of the first acts of the new parliament in liberated Yugoslavia was to organize schools, to care for and educate the thousands of children orphaned and made homeless by the war. Medical training was instituted as well as intensive agriculture and certain necessary manufactures.

  The respite, however, was not very long. The Germans realized well enough that Yugoslavia was one of the most dangerous cracks in Fortress Europa. So long as even a part of the country remained in Partisan hands, that could some day be a jumping off spot for an invasion. In addition, the Partisan threat immobilized some ten German divisions that could be put to better use on the Russian front, where they were sorely needed.

  So in January of 1943, the Germans determined to put an end to the Partisan threat, once and for all. They mustered overwhelming aerial support; they selected four of their crack divisions, with Italian and Ustachi support, and they arranged for a simultaneous supporting attack by Mikhailovich. Their target was Bihach.

  At this point, Tito made a brilliant and daring decision. In his victorious campaign of the year before, success had come with the help of two important factors—the endurance of his men and their knowledge of the rugged Yugoslav country. So long as he fought a war of quick movement, he could take deadly toll of the Germans yet keep his own force intact. If, however, he chose a definite line to hold and slugged it out with the Germans, they could continue to bring up re-enforcements until they had cut all avenues of escape, and then, with their strong air support, they could eventually destroy the entire Partisan Army.

  With this in mind, he detached from his army the First Bosnian Corps and the First Croatian Corps, one hundred thousand men in all. They were to follow the accepted Partisan procedure. When the German attack came, they were to lash back and then break up and disappear into the woods and the hills. When the Germans had passed by, they were to re-assemble and cut to ribbons the German lines of communication, destroying at the same time whatever garrisons the Germans left behind in an effort to pacify the northern half of the country.

  Tito himself was to be the bait for this plan. With him, he would keep five of his best divisions. They would place themselves directly in the path of the German attack, and they would hold the enemy at bay until the Germans began flanking movements. Then Tito and his army would retreat southward toward Serbia. That was as far as Tito could plan ahead; if he was successful, he would draw the German army out of Croatia—

  THE PARTISANS’ “VALLEY FORGE”

  TITO’S five divisions bore the full brunt of that initial German attack. His men fought like tigers, clinging to every inch of the ground under a murderous hail of bombs and shells. Then, slowly, fighting a rearguard action day and night, they began to retreat south-ward. They carried their wounded with them, knowing that the Germans took no prisoners but murdered every wounded or unwounded Partisan they could lay hands on.

  C. L. Sulzberger, New York Times correspondent, points out that aside from Valley Forge, American history has no parallel to this magnificent retreat. And indeed, when the full story of this war is told, this strategic retreat of Marshal Tito may emerge as its most courageous incident.

  During the month of February, Tito led his army almost due south through the Bosnian mountains. Day and night, they were bombed by the Germans; day and night, the Partisan rearguard counter-attacked. This was no beaten sheep to be caught and led to the shearing; this was a savage wolf that turned again and again, showing its fangs. The Partisans left a trail of blood in the snow-covered hills, but they also left German dead to mark every mile they travelled.

  It was a bad winter. Snow and sleet and snow again—and through it, slogging on, the ragged, savage Partisan Army marched. Their food gave out, and there was no food to be found in this wild land. They boiled bark and chewed it. They killed their pack animals and ate them. And again and again, they turned on the Germans and fought them off.

  To Tito and his Partisans, life became a constant unending nightmare. Half starved, they saw visions, smelled non-existent food. Yet their courage did not give way. Following behind them, again and again, the Nazis heard their wild, triumphant song:

  “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 bee
n 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.