A balance sheet of partisan operations in Russia, then, would have to be based on an equation including many incommensurate, and immeasurable, factors.26 From a purely military point of view it is not certain whether the effects (and the losses incurred) were worth the effort.27 The same resources, used in a different way, might have produced greater gains. Nor does one know whether the intelligence provided to the Soviet general staff by the partisans was of crucial importance. Partisan brigades were not needed for the collection and transmission of military intelligence; this could be done by individuals.
The decision to wage partisan warfare in the German rear was only partly motivated by military considerations; political reasons were assuredly more telling. Stalin's views on its value in general had changed more than once; having been one of its early advocates during the civil war, he later took a dim view of its military significance. In the 1930s the civil war partisans were systematically denigrated, together with other old Bolsheviks, and many came to grief in the great purges. Still, Stalin believed that if Russia were attacked, partisan warfare could do no possible harm and might do some good. Perhaps he was already concerned with the more distant future, the postwar period and the restoration of the image of omnipotence and the omnipresence of Soviet state and party organs.28 And in this respect the partisan movement could play a very important part indeed.
Yugoslavia
To the Russians, the creation of partisan units was an auxiliary weapon of the regular army to carry out certain tasks behind enemy lines; to the Yugoslavs the partisans were the army.29 The Yugoslav partisans fought alone and their achievements earned them the admiration of friends and enemies alike. "I wish we had in Germany a few dozen Titos," Himmler said in one of his secret speeches in 1944, "a man with such a strong heart and such good nerves; he has really earned the title of marshal."30 The fight of the Yugoslav partisans is indeed in many respects unique; a mere handful of dedicated Communists, with little experience of tactics and none of strategy, they succeeded against all odds in building up a military force of considerable potency. During the critical period of their struggle they received no outside help. The Russians provided advice of doubtful value, but nothing else; the Western Allies sent substantial military assistance, but only after the partisans had emerged as the leading resistance force in Southeast Europe.
Partisan warfare in Yugoslavia has been fully documented, yet to some of the main questions there still are no ready answers.31 Outwardly, Communism had been little in evidence in Yugoslavia in the interwar period, but there was a fairly strong Communist tradition going back to the early 1920s. The Communist party, illegal for most of the time, had been steeled in the underground struggle; hundreds of its members had fought in the Spanish Civil War. The Yugoslav establishment, on the other hand, the monarchy and its political supporters, had been discredited by the military defeat of April 1941. Yugoslavia was a house divided against itself—between Croat chauvinists, Serbian nationalists and Montenegrin fanatics, between Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians and the Muslims. The Communists, paradoxically, were almost the only political force which could provide a platform for all nationalities. The cadres of the party were almost entirely urban, with a heavy preponderance of intellectuals and students; Tito and Rankovic apart, there were hardly any leaders of working-class origin.
How, one wonders, could urban intellectuals not only make common cause with the villagers, but transform themselves into highly effective mountain fighters, the most militant in the struggle against the invader? It is true that many of them were only one generation removed from village life, that they were young and enthusiastic. It is also true that in Serbia and Montenegro there was a strong pro-Russian tradition. The partisans benefited from the systematic extermination of Serbs by Ante Pavelic, the Poglavnik (leader) of the new Croatian state; of those who survived, many fled and joined Tito's forces. All these facts help to explain the partisans* success, but they do not provide a conclusive answer. The partisans made mistakes as well, more perhaps in the political than in the military field. The Russians were horrified by the political extremism of their overzealous Yugoslav comrades. In Montenegro and Slovenia, in the middle of the war, partisan leaders gave orders to assassinate local patriots because their attitude to the Communist party was not sufficiently enthusiastic.32 This policy was discontinued after Tito had reprimanded them.
The achievements of the Yugoslav partisans cannot begin to be satisfactorily explained without reference to the men who led them. In Tito they had a great political and military leader, imperturbable, a man of iron will, a true believer yet not a fanatic, a civilian with an uncanny military instinct. Yet Tito alone would have been able to accomplish little but for the presence of younger men of great capacity, a Kardelj and a Djilas, a Ribar and a Popovic, willing to accept his authority, yet able to act independently. For once intellectuals were also men of action; the partisans were not only more intelligent than their opponents, they were also tougher.
The Yugoslav revolt began with a call for a general insurrection by the Communist party in July 1941; the appeal had some effect in Serbia and Montenegro, none at all in Croatia, But the Germans and their local collaborators suppressed the revolt without difficulty. On 16 September Tito left his hiding place in Belgrade and went to the mountains to assume leadership of a more intensive struggle; a decision had been taken previously by the party executive to convert itself into the general staff of a guerrilla army and to create operational bases in certain parts of the country from which the enemy would have to be evicted.33
By September 1941 Tito's supporters numbered about fifteen thousand but many of them were without arms; Colonel Mikhailovich, who had organized a resistance group in the mountains even before the Nazi invasion of Russia, had some five thousand followers at the time. The menace of the "bandits" was thought by the Germans to be sufficiently serious by then to warrant a major offensive against them; in a matter of days in late November 1941 three German divisions cleared Serbia, and the partisans had to escape to Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Yugoslav partisan history, as in China, the enemy offensives are the great milestones; the Yugoslavs counted seven, the Chinese six (up to the Sian incident in 1937). The second German offensive was of no great import, but the third, carried out mainly by Italians and Croats, compelled Tito to withdraw even farther to the south. Montenegro had the great advantage of being virtually inaccessible, but it was also exceedingly poor and supplies were almost impossible to obtain and in June 1942 Tito decided to march north again, where he occupied a fairly large area in the heart of Yugoslavia, including the towns of Jajce and Bihac. The fourth and fifth enemy offensives (operation "White," January-March 1943, and operation "Black," May-June 1943) were successful inasmuch as Tito lost about half of his troops, but, as on previous occasions, he once more broke out from the enemy encirclement. When Italy surrendered in September 1943, his forces were back in Bosnia, disarmed some ten Italian divisions and seized great quantities of arms and supplies. By the end of 1943 Tito's partisan army numbered almost three hundred thousand according to Yugoslav sources; two hundred thousand according to others. These forces were not, however, all concentrated in one region; besides Tito's own army, major partisan units were fighting from Slovenia in the north to Macedonia and Montenegro in the south.
Early on in the war Tito had realized that the strength of the partisan movement lay in its dispersal, that the establishment of one compact front would be more than dangerous.34 He had told his comrades in Montenegro in November 1941 that given the conditions, partisan warfare was the best means of getting a popular uprising underway, aware of course as long ago as then that the tactics of guerilla war alone would not be suitable for large-scale offensive operations aimed at the liberation of vast stretches of territory; hence his later decision to form larger mobile units (brigades) which were not tied to any specific locality. But these did not replace the guerilla units, which continued to operate in Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. Even
in November 1942, after fifty thousand square kilometers had already been liberated, Tito insisted that the guerrilla tactics used previously — meaning the harassment of the enemy's supply lines, the destruction of his bases and so on — must still remain integral to the overall struggle of the Popular Army.35 By the late summer of 1942 Tito's partisans had become an "operative problem" for the Germans.36
One year later, in November 1943, the German High Command determined that a "Soviet State" had come into being behind its lines, and new major antipartisan operation was decided upon, with the object of clearing eastern Bosnia, and above all the Dalmatian coast.37 This was a matter of utmost consequence to the Germans, because the partisans' presence could have opened the road to Allied landings. So operations Kugelblitz and Adler were set in motion. Adler succeeded, but Kugelblitz was a failure; Tito again broke through the enemy lines without undue hazard. Paradoxically, the last German offensive in May 1944 (Rösselsprung), in which relatively small German units were parachuted near Tito's headquarters, was the most nearly destructive; a German battalion almost seized Tito and his staff. Six thousand partisans were killed at the cost of only a few Germans. But by that time the Allies were in a position to provide more effective air support to the partisans, and the German columns had to withdraw, their basic mission, save for the casualties inflicted, in no wav fulfilled.
Mikhailovich's Chetniks continued to exist but played no significant role in the war against the Germans, he having meantime, through various intermediaries including the Belgrade puppet government, concluded an armistice with the Germans and the Italians. The Mikhailovich tragedy was, to some extent, the fault of the partisans. Mikhailovich certainly was no collaborator or traitor in the strictly accepted sense of either word; he could, after all, have stayed in Belgrade in 1941 in the first place instead of leading a far less comfortable existence in the mountains. In November-December 1941 the two factions — his and Tito's — negotiated the coordination of their activities; Tito claims that he even offered Mikhailovich the supreme command. But Mikhailovich prepared himself for a long war; he thought partisan activism misplaced and in any case deeply distrusted the Communists. His attitude was shared by other Serbian officers; it is one of the ironies of history that Kosta Pecanac, who had been the principal guerrilla leader behind the German lines in World War I, and who served for a time in 1941 under Mikhailovich, was among the first Chetniks to make peace with the Germans. A Serb, a conservative and a regular army officer, Mikhailovich was suspicious of all non-Serbian Yugoslavs; the Croat Tito was in his opinion a mere "jailbird." At his trial he said that he was not a politician but a military man; he certainly lacked the Communist ability to mobilize the masses. The Royal Yugoslav government in exile had appointed him minister of war in 1942, but as his forces disintegrated, he lost his official position (June 1944). He managed to evade the Communists for about a year after the war had ended, but was captured in March 1946 and sentenced to death.38
While they forged their guerrilla units into an army, the partisans made similar progress on the political front. At a meeting in Bihac in November 1942, the Anti-Fascist Council of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) was established, superseding the Movement for National Liberation ("We are now setting up something like a government," Tito wrote to Dimitrov, the general secretary of the Comintern in Moscow).39 A few non-Communist politicians belonged to AVNOJ but this was mere window-dressing, for all effective power was in the hands of the Communists. Partisan discipline had been strict from the very beginning; with the establishment of a quasi-state, their units increasingly resembled those of a regular army. Ranks and decorations were formally introduced, several generals were appointed, and in November 1944 Tito was made Marshal of Yugoslavia.
The partisans did not lack money during their campaigns; in the early days of the war they had commandeered considerable sums from provincial banks. It was far more difficult to get arms and for a long while the partisans depended on those taken from the enemy or manufactured in their own small factories. The first Allied emissaries visited Tito's headquarters in 1942, but a permanent British mission was not installed until 1943 and there were no Russians in the partisan headquarters until late in the war.
At the Teheran Conference it was decided that the Allies should give Tito full support and, from then on, the partisans received more or less what they needed from British and American bases. This help was important, but it was no longer decisive. To the great disappointment of the partisans, no Russian supplies were forthcoming until the very end of the war.
Yugoslavia is one of the few cases in history in which a partisan movement liberated a country and seized power largely without outside help. It is, of course, true that but for their military involvement in Russia and on other fronts, the Germans could have crushed the partisans with the greatest of ease, just as the Chinese Red Armies could not have won their war but for Japan's many preoccupations elsewhere. But this does not detract from the partisans' achievements. As in China, it was essentially a peasant army led by middle-class rebels, mainly intellectuals.40 But it was not a peasant war, land was not redistributed while the fighting continued. Again as in China, the government which emerged after the war was the wartime general staff of the partisan movement. The partisan experience enormously strengthened the self-confidence of the Yugoslav leaders; unlike the other Communist governments, they had not been imposed by the Russians but had attained power through their own efforts. They were not a satellite and this made for growing strains in their relations with the Soviet Union, culminating in Tito's break with Stalin in 1948. Seen in a wider perspective, it could be argued that Communism would have prevailed in Yugoslavia even had there been no partisan movement, because it had been decided between the Allies that this was to be part of the Soviet sphere of influence. It is quite likely, furthermore, that, sooner or later, Yugoslavia would have opted for national Communism; Rumania after all did so, despite having been "liberated" by a foreign army. Inside Yugoslavia the partisans emerged as the "new class" described by Djilas in his books; their mental makeup and their intellectual outlook differed in some respects from that of the Communist elites in other East European countries and this has had its impact on Yugoslav domestic and foreign politics since 1945. Much of the partisan tradition has worn off with the years, but some still persists, and for this, among all the other reasons, Yugoslavia remains a "special case."
The Slovak Rising
The two major East European risings outside the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia ended in disaster. The initiative for the Slovak revolt came from Lieutenant-Colonel Golian who acted both as chief of staff of the local puppet government and as the representative of the Czechoslovak government in exile. He had conspired with fellow officers during the spring and early summer of 1944; in one rapid action the whole Slovak army was to open the road to the Soviet army. He coordinated his plan with the Communists who had at the time around fifteen hundred partisans in the Slovak mountains. Golian and the regular army officers intended to carry out the operation in late September or October to coincide with the assumed date of the Soviet army's new offensive. The Slovak Communist leadership agreed in principle with this timing, sharing the fear that should the rising start prematurely, it would be quickly smothered by a few German divisions. The Czech Communists in Moscow and the Soviet High Command, on the other hand, preferred an earlier date and were anyway more interested in partisan activities than in regular army participation. Substantial Ukrainian partisan units were parachuted into Slovakia in late July; in August they launched a general insurrection, thus forcing Golian's hand. It cannot be established unequivocally whether the partisan leaders acted on their own initiative, or whether they had explicit instructions from Moscow to pre-empt a non-Communist rising.41 At first the Germans hesitated; they were not as yet certain about the extent of the revolt and could ill afford to divert troops from the Eastern front. However, on 28 August a German military mission was stopped in transit in the north of Slovakia and its
members killed. The day after, Tiso, the puppet president of Slovakia, announced that German forces had been "invited" to suppress the partisans; within twenty-four hours the first Wehrmacht units entered Slovak territory.
Guerrilla Warfare Page 30