Eastern Approaches (38 page)

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we entered, Tito came forward to meet us. I looked at him carefully, for here, it seemed to me, was one of the keys to our problem. ‘In war,’ Napoleon had said, ‘it is not men, but the man who counts.’

He was of medium height, clean-shaven, with tanned regular features and iron-grey hair. He had a very firm mouth and alert blue eyes. He was wearing a dark semi-military tunic and breeches, without any badges; a neat spotted tie added the only touch of colour. We shook hands and sat down.

How, I wondered, would he compare with the Communists I had encountered in Russia? From the members of the Politburo to the N.K.V.D. spies who followed me about, all had had one thing in common, their terror of responsibility, their reluctance to think for themselves, their blind unquestioning obedience to a Party line dictated by higher authority, the terrible atmosphere of fear and suspicion which pervaded their lives. Was Tito going to be that sort of Communist?

A sentry with a Schmeisser sub-machine gun slung across his back brought a bottle of plum brandy and poured it out. We emptied our glasses. There was a pause.

The first thing, clearly, was to find a common language. This, I found, presented no difficulty. Tito spoke fluent German and Russian, and was also very ready to help me out in my first attempts at Serbo-Croat. After a couple of rounds of plum brandy we were deep in conversation.

One thing struck me immediately: Tito’s readiness to discuss any question on its merits and, if necessary, to take a decision there and then. He seemed perfectly sure of himself; a principal, not a subordinate. To find such assurance, such independence, in a Communist was for me a new experience.

I began by telling him the purpose of my mission. The British Government, I said, had received reports of Partisan resistance and were anxious to help. But they were still without accurate information as to the extent and nature of the Partisan movement. I had now been sent in with a team of military experts to make a full report and advise the Commander-in-Chief how help could best be given.

Tito replied that he was glad to hear this. The Partisans had now been fighting alone and unaided for two years against overwhelming odds. For supplies they had depended on what they captured from the enemy. The Italian capitulation had helped them enormously. But outside help was what they needed most of all. It was true that, from time to time during the past few weeks, an occasional parachute load had been dropped at random, but the small quantity of supplies that had reached them in this way, though gratefully received, was of little practical use when distributed among over 100,000 Partisans.

I explained our difficulties; lack of aircraft; lack of bases nearer than North Africa; the needs of our own forces. Later we hoped to move our bases to Italy. That would be a help. Meanwhile, as a first step towards improving our organization, I suggested that I should have an officer with a wireless set dropped to each of the main Partisan Headquarters throughout the country. These would be in touch with me and in touch with our supply base and could arrange for supplies to be dropped in accordance with a central scheme which he and I could draw up together.

Tito at once agreed to this suggestion. It would, he said, help him and enable us to see for ourselves how the Partisans were fighting in different parts of the country. Then he asked whether we had thought of sending in supplies by sea. Following on the Italian capitulation a week earlier the situation in the coastal areas, which had been occupied by the Italians, was extremely fluid. Indeed, the Partisans were at the moment actually holding the town and harbour of Split, though it was unlikely that they would do so for long. If some shiploads of arms could be run across the Adriatic from Italy and landed at specified points on the Dalmatian coast, it should be possible to transport them back into the interior by one means or another, before the Germans had had time finally to consolidate their position in the areas vacated by
the Italians. In this way, the equivalent of several hundred aeroplane loads of supplies could be brought into the country in a few days.

This possibility seemed worth exploring and I said that I would ask G.H.Q. urgently for their views by signal. We also agreed that our Chiefs of Staff should start work next day on a joint scheme, providing for British or American liaison officers under my command to be attached to all the main Partisan formations and for a system of priorities as between different parts of the country and different types of supplies.

As the night wore on, our talk drifted away from the immediate military problems which we had been discussing, and Tito, whose initial shyness had long since worn off, told me something of his past. The gaps in his narrative I filled in later.

The son of a Croat peasant, he had fought in the First World War in the ranks of the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army. He had been sent to the Russian front, where he was wounded and taken prisoner by the armies of the Tsar. Thus in 1917 at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution he had found himself in Russia. All prisoners of war were set free and he himself volunteered for the newly formed Red Army. He served in it throughout the Civil War. It was his first taste of the new ideas. He returned to his own country a convinced Communist.

The life which now began for Tito, or Josip Broz, to give him his true name, was that of a professional revolutionary, of a loyal servant of the Communist International. Of that he made no secret. In the new kingdom of Jugoslavia, of which he was now a citizen, the Communist Party was declared illegal almost as soon as it was formed, and severely repressive measures taken against its members. And so he spent the next twenty years in and out of prison; in hiding; in exile. Proudly, he showed me a photograph of himself which the Partisans had found in an old police register and which he kept as a memento of this period of his existence.

Then in 1937 a new phase opened in his career. The Communist International were purging the foreign Communist Parties. In Jugoslavia they found that the Party had become badly disorganized and had fallen into grave heresies. A key point in south-eastern Europe was endangered. A reliable, determined man was needed to put matters right. Gorkić, the Secretary-General of the Jugoslav
Communist Party, was liquidated and Josip Broz appointed in his place.

He was a good organizer. In his underground army he made new appointments, allotted new tasks and established a new discipline. He would send for people and tell them what to do. ‘You,’ he said to them, ‘will do this; and you, that,’ in Serbo-Croat, ‘Ti, to; ti, to.’ He did this so often that his friends began to call him Tito. The name stuck. It grew to be more than a nickname. It became a call to action, a rallying point.

The German invasion of Jugoslavia in 1941 was bound to cause some uneasiness in Moscow, despite the Soviet-German Pact. The pundits of the Kremlin still refused to believe in the stories of an impending German attack on the Soviet Union, but they could nevertheless scarcely regard with pleasure the extension of Hitler’s rule to the Slav countries of the Balkans, historically a Russian preserve. Elsewhere Communists all over the world continued to denounce the struggle of Great Britain and her allies against Nazi Germany as the ‘Second Imperialist War’. In occupied Jugoslavia the Communist Party, still underground, appear to have received different instructions from those sent to their comrades in other countries, instructions which were not altogether in accordance with the spirit of the Soviet-German Pact. Even before June 1941, when the German invasion of the Soviet Union turned the ‘Second Imperialist War’ into the ‘Heroic Struggle of Democracy against Fascism’, Tito and the Jugoslav Communists had begun to prepare for resistance to the invader. By the summer of 1941 the first Partisan detachments were operating in Serbia and elsewhere under Tito’s command. At first they consisted of small groups of determined men and women, who had taken to the hills and forests, armed with cudgels and axes, old sporting guns, and anything else they could lay hands on. For all further supplies they depended on what they could capture from the enemy and what the country people would give them.

When the Partisans first entered the field in the summer of 1941, they found another resistance movement in existence: the Četniks, formed round a nucleus of officers and men of the Royal Jugoslav Army, under the leadership of Colonel Draža Mihajlović. They were
in the early days more numerous and better equipped than the Partisans. At no time, however, was their discipline so ruthless or their organization so good.

At first, Jugoslavia had been dazed by the suddenness of the German attack. Now, when the first shock had passed, there returned to the people of Jugoslavia the fierce spirit of resistance for which they have been famous throughout history. The rising which took place in Serbia in the summer of 1941 was essentially a national rising. In it Partisan and Četnik bands fought side by side. It was astonishingly successful. The Germans were taken by surprise. Large areas of country were liberated, the peasants flocking to join the resistance. A unified command and a united effort against the invader seemed possible, indeed probable.

It was in these circumstances that a meeting took place between Tito and Mihajlović in the neighbourhood of Užice. At it some kind of provisional
modus operandi
seems to have been arrived at, although it was not possible to reach full agreement for a unified command. In the operations that followed, however, each side accused the other of treachery, the Partisans, in particular claiming that the Četniks had betrayed their positions to the Germans and had joined in the German attack on them. A further meeting between the two leaders led to no better results. Thereafter clash after clash ensued between them.

Meanwhile, the Germans had had time to collect themselves. The necessary forces were assembled, the liberated areas re-occupied, the guerrillas driven off with heavy losses, and savage reprisals undertaken against the civil population. While surviving Partisans and Četniks licked their wounds in the woods and mountains, the towns and villages of the plain were burned and devastated and thousands of hostages, men, women and children, taken out and shot.

To this and to subsequent disasters Partisans and Četniks reacted differently. In this difference of attitude lies the explanation of much that followed later.

In the eyes of the Četniks the results achieved by their operations could not justify the damage and suffering caused to the civilian population. Their aim was to preserve rather than to destroy. Henceforward they inclined more and more to avoid active operations; soon
some even arrived at mutually advantageous accommodations with the enemy.

The Partisans, on the other hand, with true Communist ruthlessness, refused to let themselves be deterred by any setbacks or any reprisals from accomplishing the tasks which they had set themselves. Their own lives were of no account. As for the civilians, they too were in the firing-line, with the same chance of a hero’s death as they themselves. The more civilians the Germans shot, the more villages they burned, the more enemy convoys the Partisans ambushed, the more bridges they destroyed. It was a hard policy, especially for men operating in their own part of the country, but in the end it was justified by events and justified notably by the unwilling respect which it imposed on the Germans, a respect which no amount of appeasement could ever have inspired.

As we sat talking under the stars, I asked Tito whether now, two years after his original negotiations with Mihajlović, there was any hope of reaching agreement with the Četniks and thus forming a united front against the enemy. He replied immediately that there might be some hope if the Četniks would stop fighting the Partisans and start fighting the Germans and if those of them who had come to terms with the enemy could either be brought to heel or finally disowned. He did not, however, regard such a change of heart as any longer within the bounds of possibility. Two years ago, when he met Mihajlović, he had even been prepared to place himself under the latter’s command, but Mihajlović had sought to impose conditions which he could not accept.

He recalled the scene in the peasant’s cottage near Užice: both parties very much on their guard; he himself, for so many years wanted by the Royal Police, feeling it strange that he should be dealing on equal terms with the Royal Minister of Defence; Mihajlović, very much the professional staff officer, not knowing what to make of this Communist agitator turned soldier, and half believing him to be a Russian; both feeling that the other perhaps had something to offer that was worth having.

In those days, he said, the Četniks had the advantage. Now the Partisans were the stronger and it would be for them to impose their terms.
But in any case he thought the Četniks had become too undisciplined and demoralized from long inaction and had gone too far in their collaboration with the enemy for any real change of heart. Much, too, had happened in the last two years that could not be lightly forgotten.

I asked him whether any Četniks had come over to the Partisans of their own accord. ‘Many,’ he said. ‘Father Vlado will tell you about them.’ And he beckoned to a man with a striking red beard and an unrivalled collection of pistols, bandoliers and hand-grenades strung round him, who seemed to be the life and soul of a little group of officers at the other end of the table. When he had joined us I saw that, in addition to the usual red star, this walking armoury was wearing a gold cross as a cap badge. He was a Serbian Orthodox priest who at the time of the German occupation had collected all the able-bodied parishioners he could find and taken to the woods. He had first joined Mihajlović and had been given command of a Četnik formation. At an early stage, however, he left the Četniks for the Partisans. This, he explained, he had done because he did not get enough fighting with Mihajlović. With the Partisans, on the other hand, he got all the fighting he wanted, while at the same time he ministered to the spiritual needs of the Serbs among Tito’s forces. Many other Četniks, he said, had done the same thing as he had for the same reasons.