Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (36 page)

Early on the Germans learned that the insurgents could escape through gaps in the formations leading the drives and shoots, so they added another tactic in which those on the edge of an encirclement stayed in place while
JAGDKOMMANDO
teams drove wedges into the enemy positions, like putting a stick in a beehive. As the insurgents fled, they were cut down or captured by the forces still waiting in position at the perimeter.
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To varying degrees, all these tactics worked, though the notion of encirclement followed by select wedges driving inward may have been the most effective. But no single enveloping maneuver ever trapped more than a relatively small portion of Tito’s widely dispersed forces. His way of organizing the resistance had inoculated it against such methods. His partisans suffered losses in these fights—but so did the Germans and their allies. And always some of the insurgents escaped, sharing their growing knowledge of how to outfox the hunters with others in the resistance.

By 1943 the tide began to turn against the occupiers. Not only did Tito’s dispersion of forces enable him to slip the Germans’ heavy punches, but his troops’ presence throughout the country proved a boon to recruitment. And as his numbers rose, the Axis forces were being seriously depleted by Italy’s signing of an armistice with the Allies in September. Italian troops stopped fighting the Yugoslavs, and large numbers of them went over to Tito, naming themselves the Garibaldi Division of the resistance forces.

The Germans now began making systematic use of perhaps their most powerful irregular warfare innovation: pseudo gangs. Pioneered in fighting against the Russian partisans, these were small units—platoon-sized, usually, some few dozen soldiers in each—that dressed like resistance fighters and patrolled around in efforts to locate Tito’s units. When they succeeded in doing so, either they ambushed the partisans or called in regular troops and aircraft to pummel them.

The overall effectiveness of these units was enhanced by their employment of local collaborators who could speak correct dialect and help carry off the deception that these hunter-killers were just fellow fighters from another nearby unit. Their record in Russia and the Balkans—and the subsequent adoption of this technique by the British—led the irregular warfare expert Otto Heilbrunn to conclude: “If pseudo gangs can possibly be formed, they must be formed, in every antiguerrilla war.”
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But even the success of such skillful operations by pseudo gangs and commandos was not enough to overcome a partisan movement that was now too large to be crippled by such small-scale strikes. In the wake of the Italian collapse, Tito’s partisans were further strengthened when the Big Three Allied leaders—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—meeting in Tehran from late November to early December, made a clear choice to drop their support for Mihailovich. In practical terms this meant that Tito would now begin receiving arms, equipment, and intelligence from the Allies.

In this regard Churchill followed through most consistently, guided by the insights and advice of his representative to Tito, Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean—whom, some say, was Ian Fleming’s model for James Bond. But Churchill’s own son Randolph parachuted in to fight with the partisans as well, and Churchill himself made sure to maintain a cordial correspondence with Tito.

Overall the British effort was exemplary if not materially decisive during the remainder of the war in Yugoslavia. Certainly it outshone the Russian contributions, as Stalin remained concentrated on defeating the main German army and was reluctant to build up local forces in areas that he intended to become Soviet spheres of influence. So, in a most ironic turn, the Communist-led partisans in Yugoslavia, headed by an NKVD operative, were largely spurned by Moscow while the Western supporters of the exiled king provided increasing amounts of material support.

Despite all these adverse developments and their own declining resources, the Germans were not finished. They fought on, partly due to Hitler’s reluctance to give ground anywhere on the edges of his tottering empire, partly because Balkan bauxite, oil, and other needed resources for the war effort came from or passed through Yugoslavia. In the final phase of the war, the Germans used all their existing tactical methods, and introduced yet one more—an airborne commando strike—that very nearly gave them victory over Tito in May 1944. They also made a point of increasing their efforts to exploit ethnic tensions, fomenting the killing of Serbs by Croats and Slovenes, and vice versa. Indeed, the deep-rooted civil strife that would destroy Yugoslavia fifty years later was nurtured by the Germans in this last phase of their war against Tito.

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By the spring of 1944 it was clear that the second front Stalin had wanted for three years would soon be opened in Western Europe. German units began to be redeployed to the west, where eventually a force of sixty divisions was amassed to oppose the Allied landing in France, more than half of them under the command of Rommel. Now Tito and his lieutenants began to feel an easing of the pressure that they had been under for years, and they were enjoying the ample supplies sent by the British and Americans. Yugoslav partisans had even linked up with elements of the British Special Boat Service that were now operating in the Adriatic Sea, which gave them a whole new capability for mischief. It appeared that a highly favorable endgame was unfolding.

But the Germans still had some important pieces of their own in play. In late May 1944 they undertook a final strike against Tito that was their most innovative of all: Operation
ROESSELSPRUNG
(Knight’s Move). Unlike their earlier offensives, in this one the Germans used a very small number of elite troops, not more than a few battalions in size, that were dropped in stealthily by parachute near Tito’s headquarters in Drvar. They struck like a thunderclap, though the partisans inflicted severe casualties on the Germans’ first wave. A wild series of firefights ensued in which several thousand partisans were killed. Overall German losses were minimal. Tito himself was very nearly captured, barely making good his escape, as Walter Roberts has related these events, by “climbing up a dry run cut by a mountain waterfall.”
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Shaken by these events, and still pursued by German follow-on forces, Tito agreed to be temporarily evacuated across the Adriatic to Bari in liberated Italy. He stayed only briefly before returning to direct the fight, but he accomplished much. To counter remaining German threats from the air, a Balkan Air Force was created on June 1, just a week after the near-fatal raid on Tito’s headquarters. As Fitzroy Maclean notes, the BAF consisted of about five hundred combat aircraft, nearly half of them fighters, which precluded any future airborne operations by the Germans.
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Now their “knight’s moves” were over, and with them any hope for quelling the insurgency. With the simultaneous success of the Normandy invasion in the west and the great Soviet summer offensive in the east, the Germans had far more serious difficulties to deal with than those posed by Tito in the Balkans.

In the fall of 1944 Tito became a “Marshal of Yugoslavia.” He continued to enjoy a cordial relationship with Churchill and increasing supplies from the Western allies. As the war neared its end, even the Russians provided assistance, slowing their drive toward Berlin and redirecting forces to a more southerly axis of advance. Stalin now wished to thwart any British or American moves to achieve and sustain influence in the Balkans, or possibly even in Central Europe.

Despite this growing attention from Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, Tito remained his own man, winning the war to free his country on his own terms. As Walter Laqueur has concluded: “Yugoslavia is one of the few cases in history in which a partisan movement liberated a country and seized power largely without outside help.”
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This sense of self-accomplishment would play a significant role in enabling Tito to keep Yugoslavia from becoming a Soviet satellite in the postwar years. Further, having achieved their own victory was to prove a key element in Yugoslav foreign policy in the postwar period, as Tito strove to steer a course independent of the wishes of the opposing sides in the Cold War.

Fitzroy Maclean, in his biography of Tito, called him a “heretic” for so defying Stalin and the Soviet Union. Tito’s lieutenant, Milovan Djilas, saw something different: the successful insurgency had forged what he called a “new class” that would pursue communism on its own terms, free of outside controlling interests. Whatever the influence of “heresy” or social innovation, one can also see the continuing play of nationalism in Tito’s policies during this period. The idea of nationhood had driven the politics of the Balkans for a long time. Indeed, it was nationalist sentiment that had much to do with the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, touching off World War I. Some thirty years later, Tito believed it his greatest mission to assert the unity and independence of a distinct, free-thinking and -acting Yugoslav nation.

He followed this course by a variety of means. First, immediately after the war ended, he demanded that all Allied military forces—American, British, and Russian—leave the country. This accomplished, Tito then called for national elections in which the people were to decide what form of government they wanted. It was a vote won overwhelmingly by the communists, which resulted in the king’s abdication and Tito’s becoming prime minister of the republic. Soon after, Mihailovich, now a fugitive, was captured, tried, and executed.

The matter of governance and any internal challenge to his regime settled, Tito next tried to reduce interethnic tensions by moving people about, outside their home provinces, and encouraging the intermixing of ethnic subgroups. In this manner he blended nationalist fervor with his belief in the classic Marxist formulation that class trumps ethnicity. During his lifetime, it was a formula that worked.

The early postwar years proved a heady time for Tito, who had now succeeded as both warlord and statesman. His long run of luck may have impelled him to test its limits, leading him into confrontations with both East and West. His aggressive stance toward territories on the Italian border, the city of Trieste in particular, led to a number of dangerous incidents, including the shooting down of several American transport aircraft. Eventually forced to back away there, he next supported a communist insurgency in Greece, one that Stalin had already abandoned. The Greek guerrillas were defeated, and Tito’s attempt to control events in Albania also backfired. By now the Soviets were just as angry with him as were the Western allies. Tensions with Stalin grew over Tito’s uncontrolled actions, so much so that several attempts were made to assassinate him. All were thwarted, and Tito sent a curt note to Stalin advising him to stop sending assassins or else he would send one of his own—and wouldn’t need to send another.
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It is tempting to psychoanalyze Tito’s behavior at this point, drawing a connection between his risk-taking as a statesman and his inveterate philandering. His first wife left him when he was in prison during the late 1920s, and after her came a long series of paramours and wives. His second wife was said to have left after coming home to find him in bed with a mistress. Other reports suggest that his serial affairs may have reflected his reactions to wives who tried to control him too closely—just as he bridled at any international attempts to constrain his rule of Yugoslavia or, for that matter, his foreign policy.

But Tito eventually settled down with one woman, Jovanka, a Serbian peasant thirty years his junior whom he married in 1952, just a year before Stalin’s death. He stayed with her for more than twenty-five years. She had joined the partisans during the war and nursed Tito back to health after serious surgery. They separated shortly before his death, but he made clear to all those around him that he still loved her.
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This domestic stability seemed to accompany less confrontational foreign policies. Tito graciously ended his drive to control Trieste soon after his marriage to Jovanka, and went out of his way to conciliate with Moscow. He was even willing to sacrifice his friendship with Milovan Djilas—one of his most gifted lieutenants during the war and a leading Yugoslav intellectual—by disgracing him when, as his biographer Richard West noted, his anti-Soviet writings “were embarrassing Tito in his attempts to improve relations with Stalin’s successors.”
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Whether his growing reasonableness was the product of a happy home life or simply the dynamics of power politics at the time, Tito became a leading voice for a calm, steady stewardship of world affairs during the
nuclear-tipped Cold War era. He helped form and lead the movement of so-called nonaligned states, establishing a particularly warm relationship with Haile Selassie, the ruler of Ethiopia who had marched with Orde Wingate to fight for his country’s freedom. Tito also kept in touch and visited with Winston Churchill, whom he described as “a great man. He is, of course, our enemy and has always been the enemy of communism, but he is an enemy one must respect.”
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At home Tito’s emphasis on cultivating a broad national rather than a narrow ethnic identity held his country together and fostered prosperity under his concept of “market socialism.” But the nationalities problem was never very far below the surface. Serb-Croat tensions continued to simmer, and both of these antagonists harbored grievances aimed at the Bosnian Muslims. Against these forces of discord, Tito responded with his many repeated calls for “brotherhood and unity” throughout the country.