The Incredible Tito: Man of the Hour (3 page)

And then, as suddenly as they arose, the Partisans faded away. They were not yet ready for full-scale warfare. They had accomplished their first objective, to completely disrupt German communications, to capture some arms and ammunition, and to let the people of Yugoslavia know that there were strong forces within the country actively fighting for their freedom.

Immediately after this first uprising, Tito proclaimed a further period of consolidation. His organization was strong enough now for him to make specific plans for an army. How huge a task that was, he well knew. There was neither arms nor ammunition nor leaders for a new Yugoslav Army.

His first duty was to keep the fire of revolt burning, and to build it up slowly as Partisan strength grew. The concentration at the beginning was on arms. Italian guard houses were attacked without respite, and in every case where the Partisans succeeded, uniforms and arms were seized. Six Croatians, armed with four old muskets, held up twenty occupational police and disarmed them. A woman and three men in Slovenia attacked a munitions cache with grenades, home manufactured, and escaped with three thousand cartridges. Peasants lay in waiting for German truck convoys, leaped aboard them as they labored up the steep mountain grades, killed the drivers and guards, and then held the trucks until Communists appeared and drove them to arms depots.

Marshal Tito swiftly outlined plans for five divisions of Partisan troops to operate in Serbia. There was still not enough equipment for seventy-five thousand men, but the military structure, including officers, supply, and liaison, was already being set up.

Tito sent certain organizers south to the little, mountainous Yugoslav state of Montenegro. For many years, Montenegrians have had the reputation of being men who knew the meaning and value of freedom, and were ready to fight for it at the drop of a hat. The Montenegrians were already at the boiling point. Their little country was occupied by Italians—and they felt that would not be too difficult a matter to remedy.

Two exceptionally competent officers of the Yugoslav Regular Army were in Montenegro at the time, Colonel Oravich and Major Arbe Jovanavich. They met with Tito's organizers. Hostile at first, they resented the idea of collaborating with Communists. The Partisans talked with the regular officers, explained to them the structure of the People's Liberation Front, and pointed out what had already been accomplished. Finally, the two army officers agreed to work with the Partisans. Today, Jovanavich is a Partisan major general and the head of Marshal Tito's operational and intelligence commands.

Once the Communists had made common cause with the regular officers, they set about to organize revolt in Montenegro. The peasants were ready, most of them armed, all of them skilled in a knowledge of their craggy hills.

On July 13th, they struck—and the peasant-partisan army swept through Montenegro like a scythe. In a short time, only the three main towns of the province were still held by the Italians, and those three towns were surrounded and under siege.

Meanwhile, other Partisans were kept busy moving caravans out of Montenegro into other parts of Yugoslavia, across rocky mountain trails, avoiding the main roads.

Concurrent with these planned revolts, there were spontaneous uprisings all over Yugoslavia. The Nazis did not take this lying down. Wherever they held towns, they exacted a fearful price for guerrilla activity. They proclaimed to the Yugoslavs that for every dead German they would execute one hundred Yugoslavs, and for every wounded German, they would execute fifty Yugoslavs.

The town of Gorni Milanovats, for example, was said to be aiding the guerrillas. It was surrounded and burned to the ground. Some of the people escaped to the woods. Most of those who were left, some eight hundred women and boys and girls, were murdered by the Germans.

Kraguyavets is a Serbian city, population 16,000. Ten Germans were killed in a skirmish outside the city. The Germans surrounded it, selected four thousand five hundred men and boys, and executed them.

These are only two examples of what was happening all over Yugoslavia. These are not invented atrocity tales; the facts have been proved and substantiated by numerous eye-witness accounts. In Yugoslavia as in Poland and Russia, the Germans went mad—they killed and killed and killed, until the enormity of their murdering became too great for the human mind to comprehend. German soldiers—and this too is proved—in several cases refused to go through with the mass executions; those soldiers were shot on the spot as an example to the others.

In some places the people turned against the guerrillas, blamed them for provoking the German atrocities. But to the everlasting glory of Yugoslav courage, the mass of the population supported the Partisans. Often, whole villages took to the woods, men and women together organizing into Partisan bands.

NAZIS HUNT FOR TITO

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N July, Tito found himself the nominal leader of a nation in revolt against the Nazis—confronted with the enormous job of pulling all the threads together, of turning this loose mass revolution into a concerted campaign that would eventually drive out the Germans and Italians.

During July and August, Tito remained in Belgrade, operating his Communist headquarters under the very noses of the Nazis, spreading farther and farther the influence of the Liberation Front. The Gestapo had some inkling that a man called Tito was at the head of this business; they even managed to obtain an old picture of him, which they blew up into huge posters. Everywhere in the country, these posters began to appear:

WANTED: TITO!

A reward was offered, a reward so huge that it would make a Yugoslav peasant the equivalent of an American millionaire. Yet strangely, although hundreds of Partisans knew Tito personally, no one betrayed him.

He remained at large in Belgrade. In the cafes he would meet Partisans from all over Yugoslavia, issue instructions, receive reports. In a church, he knelt beside a Slovenian priest who was a Partisan leader in that province. He held a staff meeting in an empty warehouse. He wrote orders that left Belgrade in the baskets of peasant women, under the cloaks of churchmen and in the valises of respectable looking salesmen.

By August, his organizational work had progressed tremendously. All of Yugoslavia was now operating under a single command of the Liberation Front—all, that is, except the Chetniks of General Mikhailovich. And at this time, in several cases, Chetniks and Partisans fought the Germans side by side.

By this time, the Partisans had a flag, a five-pointed star. They wore captured German and Italian uniforms and old Yugoslav army uniforms. In all cases, the insignia was removed and a five-pointed star substituted.

Tito stayed in Belgrade until September. Then, the organizational groundwork done, he left the city and met General Mikhailovich.

THE MIKHAILOVICH-CHETNIK MYTH

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INCE the first rumors of guerrilla resistance in Yugoslavia reached the outside world to a time only a few months ago, our newspapers were flooded with romantic tales of the fierce Serbian Chetniks and the gallant deeds they did. Most of this Chetnik legend was untrue; part of it was fostered, encouraged and blown up by the corrupt, decadent, and pitifully incompetent Yugoslav Government in Exile, and by their rather foolish and somewhat pitiful tool, the boy King Peter; the other part of it was created by correspondents who knew little of the Chetniks except that they sounded romantic, and who willingly fell for the propaganda of refugee Yugoslavs.

The Yugoslav Government in Exile created Chetnik and Mikhailovich news; they sent out false communiques. They received secret reports of Partisan battles, and credited these victories to the Chetniks. They filled the papers with their lies, and thereby created an army and a campaign that had no actual existence.

They did all this for a very good reason; they did it because they were terrified at the thought of losing control of a country they had exploited and finally sent to its defeat—and because they knew that the People's Liberation Front wanted a Yugoslav democracy, not a corrupt monarchy or dictatorship.

At no time were more than a small minority of Mikhailovich's army Chetniks, and even then they were none too reliable. Who are these Chetniks? The Chetnik Action, a sort of romantic, semi-terroristic secret military society, began in Serbia early in the nineteen hundreds, ostensibly as liberators of Serbs under Turkish rule. They received unofficial support from the Serbian government. During the next ten years, they discovered that terrorism was more profitable than liberation; nor did they confine their banditry and exhortion to the Turks. Often enough, they took from the Serbs as well.

By 1941, the Chetnik movement was largely a thing of the past. Young men who went in for that sort of thing were unstable romantics or, in many cases, simply not too bright. Old Chetniks lived on their memories, which by now were quite rosy.

When Yugoslavia surrendered, most of the brightly uniformed, boasting Chetniks either dropped out of sight or became Axis collaborationists. Some few, however, did join Mikhailovich.

Historical circumstance threw Colonel Drazha Mikhailovich into a position of power and responsibility, as it did Tito; but unlike Tito, Mikhailovich was neither strong enough nor wise enough to take advantage of circumstance. Nor did he have Tito's driving passion for liberty.

When Yugoslavia was defeated by Germany in the ten-day formal war, the Yugoslav Army fell to pieces. Whole brigades as well as individuals went into the woods and mountains with their arms. These men wanted to fight on; but they were disorganized and they had no one to lead them.

In southwest Yugoslavia, Colonel Mikhailovich was the highest ranking officer, and around him several of these brigades gathered; a few Chetniks, too, joined him. It is estimated that at that time Colonel Mikhailovich had between fifty and seventy-five thousand men under his command. It is doubtful whether at any later date he had many more; and today, certainly, he has only a few thousand men in his ranks.

Mikhailovich is by no means a brilliant man. At the very beginning, in May and early June of 1941, before there was any real organized Partisan resistance in Yugoslavia, Mikhailovich thought he would continue to resist the Germans, and during that time he made several attacks upon them. It was then that the Mikhailovich legend started rolling. But after five or six weeks of active warfare, Mikhailovich discovered that he alone was not resisting the enemy. There was another man, Tito, a Communist. He led a partisan army that was attacking the Nazis and Fascists in every part of the land. And more—the core of Tito's organization was Communist; and these Communists, with other democratic forces in Yugoslavia—Trade-Unionists, Catholic Priests, Peasant Leaders—had proclaimed something they called a People's Liberation Front.

Mikhailovich did not like this. For one thing, he hated Communists; he knew nothing about them, had never made any attempt to learn about them, but he hated them. For another, he did not like the idea of partisan warfare. That was guerrilla fighting; that meant civilians, men and women, bearing arms and fighting the enemy. In Mikhailovich's rigid military mind, there was no place for civilians who bore arms. Another thing Mikhailovich objected to was the People's Liberation Front; he was not too smart, but smart enough to realize that such a thing meant the end of dictatorship and monarchy in Yugoslavia—and Mikhailovich approved of the Yugoslav pre-war brand of dictatorship.

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

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OTHING 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.