The Improvised Navy of the Yugoslav Partisans

 

Tito with sailors from the Partisan Navy
(used with permission of the publisher)

Freivogel and Rastelli's Adriatic Naval War is a treasury of superb naval images drawn from private collections, alongside the best-informed text I have ever read on the topic. The sheer amount of small but important details suggests to me that much of the book was put together from local knowledge and oral history. The gathering together of this information is a credit to its authors, but it was not the first time I had heard about the improvised navy of those Extemporisers Extraordinaire, the Yugoslav Partisans.

 

That honour goes to Eastern Approaches (2), the travelogue and war diary of the intrepid British adventurer and friend of Josip Broz Tito, Fitzroy Maclean. Yet not even his gripping chronicle records the very beginnings of the maritime struggle against Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany for Istria, Dalmatia and its coast of a thousand islands. That story began as the wartime innovation of Croatian sailors.

Partisan ships and seamen were continuously at sea in spite of adverse weather and were taking every risk in the face of the Italian and German revenge. At first they were weakly armed and badly equipped, and their results in sinking and capturing enemy vessels were never as high as the numbers 'bagged' by 'inefficient' Allies. But when the war ended the Partisans remained on the scene as the only victors, getting rid of their enemies, allies and political rivals as well. (1)

The old Yugoslavia was a land of mountains, ideal for the guerrilla warfare at which its people had had centuries of practice. The Adriatic with its twisting coastline, headlands, bays and islands offered the same type of warfare on the sea. Much of the reason for Tito's success as a leader in World War 2 came from his ability to unite these various fighting groups, and there are several images in the Adriatic Naval War of him bestowing a communist blessing on the sailors.

Italy had long coveted the beautiful Croatian coast and, when the Croatian Ustasha dictator Ante Pavelić did as he was told and handed it over to Mussolini in May 1941, local men formed the beginnings of the resistance later that same year.

Small rowing, sailing or motor boats were used to maintain communication lines between various groups in coastal and island camps. Italians were always trying to stop these movements with new orders and regulations, but the boats were often 'stolen' by their owners, being returned to the harbour in the morning after a specific action was performed.(1)

Actual attacks against the Italians began in January 1942 and became such a nuisance that Italian ships had to be armed or escorted and sometimes travelled in convoys for protection.

Italy had naval dockyards around the Adriatic at Monfalcone, Trieste and nearby Taranto, so it might reasonably be asked what type of vessels the Croatians could possibly have used against such technology. Fishing villages run the length of the coast and the first boats used were nothing more than their everyday vessels like those below in the Mandracio of Novigrad, which I visited in 2018.

The Partisan's aim was to capture from the enemy as much as they could: stores, food, arms and the vessels themselves. The navy was given official recognition in the coastal town of Podgora around September 1942, a year before the Italian collapse - the Partisan NOVJ Navy, Narodno Oslobodilačka Vojska Jugoslavija, the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia.

From early 1945 this became the Yugoslav Navy. (Not to be confused with the Royal Yugoslav Navy and merchant fleet 1918-1941 or the Navy of the Independent State of Croatia, untimely born and ineffective.) Ninety percent of the Navy of the Yugoslav Partisans was Croatian, but members also came from the other areas of Yugoslavia and even Italy and countries in Eastern Europe.

There were two classifications of vessels, PČ and NB, reflecting the Croatian words for boat, čamac (pronounced chamats), and brod, ship. PČ means Patrolni Čamac or patrol boat and NB means Naoružani Brod or ‘armed ship’. The Adriatic Naval War describes them initially as having ‘at least one 40mm gun’ and they may have had in addition ‘older British 40mm Vickers anti-guns with 20mm Breda and Scotti machine guns.’ However, photos from the book show them having many more. The old fishing boats of the pre-war villages were also reinforced with planks and stone filling. They were slow but nevertheless had impressive success rates against the Italians and later the Germans.

The Adriatic Naval War lists 17 armed Partisan ships (four German and several Italian), and 70 patrol boats (four German). 

For two years from the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, the Partisans received no help from either Russia or Britain and stole arms, ammunition, food, stores and even uniforms from the enemy. They became adept at improvisation. They took the machine guns from crashed aircraft and attached them to the bows of their boats, they stole bombs from under the nose of Italians and dismantled them to reuse the parts. Fitzroy Maclean writes how the Yugoslav Partisans remade railway carriages and engines. (One always feels that they’d have a go at anything.) On Vis they enthusiastically learned how to handle heavy weapons and fly aeroplanes and at the very end of the war, they even stole a miniature submarine from Pula Harbour.

After the Italians abandoned Dalmatia, the Nazis invaded until eventually the only unoccupied island was Vis, the furthest from the coast of Split. It is about an hour and a half by modern fast ferry.

The idea of creating an Allied/Partisan air and naval base on Vis was first floated by Fitzroy Maclean. A small airstrip was constructed where damaged bombers frequently crash-landed from both directions at once. The strip can just be seen at the beginning of this short video. Also visible is Tito’s war cave in which he lived from June to September 1944.

The island of Vis has a noble history dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Officially, it was the only island along the coast that was not invaded by Germany after Italy capitulated to General Eisenhower in September 1943. Practically, however, the Germans had spread themselves too thinly this late in the war, and once Tito declared the fight to retain Vis imperative and the Allies established a base there, many of the islands changed hands frequently.

I  was relieved to discover that the charming port of Komiža where the British and Partisan navies docked during the war is inaccessible to large cruise ships. We caught the ferry from Split to the town of Vis and, once there, hired a car, drove across the island to Komiža, parked outside the town and walked. Alternatively, you can put your own car on the ferry.

Komiža Harbour 2023

Komiža Harbour World War 2
(Used with permission of the Croatian History Museum, Zagreb.)

An excellent book to read about the Allies and Partisans on Vis is ‘Island of Terrible Friends’ by Bill Strutton. Happily, it was not hard to access and I got my copy on an interlibrary loan.

Commando Lieutenant Barton ‘dressed as a peasant and with two Partisans to show him the way, loaded his Sten gun on a mule under a burden of firewood and walked passed a number of German sentries right into the village of Nerežiše on the island of Brać, garrisoned with 200 Germans. One of the Partisans stood guard outside while he knocked on the Commandant’s billet, was admitted, thrust past a screeching woman to a bedroom upstairs, and there, in the faint light of a candle, fired a burst at the German Commandant who, half risen and gaping wordlessly, leaned over and fell. Barton calmly helped himself to the dead commandant’s automatic, his compass, an excellent pair of binoculars and a rifle. [Then] he beat it with his two Jugoslav comrades through a thicket of sentries. (3)

One story I loved occurred when a British doctor expressed his need for an X-ray machine. Upon hearing this, a group of Partisans sailed into Split, held up a local clinic at gun point and demanded the required machine. They then dismantled it and walked out with the pieces under their clothes, got back on board, returned to Vis and reassembled it for the doctor.  

Sources

(1) Freivogel, Z and Rastelli, R Adriatic Naval War 1940-1945 DESPORT INFINITUS 2015

(2) Maclean, Fitzroy Eastern Approaches Jonathon Cape 1949

(3) Strutton, Bill Island of Terrible Friends Hodder and Stroughton 1961.

RUPTURED – Jewish women in Australia reflect on life post-October 7th. Book review.

My avoidance of Holocaust images changed after October 7, when I saw photos and videos taken by the murderous terrorists of their pogrom, of the bodies that had been abused and dismembered and set alight, invoking memories of the crematoria of those photographs long ago. The murders, the rapes, the cruelty – how had this somehow happened again? Ramona Koval

All over the world people are in the streets celebrating Hamas for their ‘just resistance’. I don’t understand. Weren’t we the ones attacked and slaughtered? Irena Zilberman

I recently read My Life As A Jew by retired editor of the Age, Michael Gawenda, published just before the Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023. Although I loved the Yiddish culture Gawenda describes and certainly his insights into the antisemitism of the Australian media, I was left feeling that his attitude to Gaza ran along the same lines as his journalistic community – that Israel is the problem. I guess, as well – and because he is a journalist – that he lacked the three things I believe are essential to understanding the conflict in the Middle East, religion, languages and history. ‘I’m no historian,’ he wrote. ‘And I’m too old to learn a new language.’

I thought about this as I read Ruptured. Our media, our government, our tertiary institutions, the Teachers Federation, the arts and the educated elite, feminists, the new-left, not forgetting the nefarious individuals in my electorate who are attempting to wrest office from our Jewish Federal member by blaming Jews for Hamas’s crimes against its own people – a strategy Hamas has successfully used against Israel for twenty years – have never demonstrated my knowledge of the religion, history and languages of the Middle East. Yet the propaganda campaign based on their ignorance is isolating Jewish Australians in their own cities. In Australia, Muslims outnumber Jews by a factor of ten, and the consequence of this is that politicians consider their chances of re-election before making any decisions about Jews or statements about Israel.

What also concerns me is that in my particularly comfortable, educated suburb, I have not heard what I have read in this book – not any of it, as if we have been packed in cotton wool. Christians with whom I worship every Sunday criticise Israel on the basis of biased media reports, only to watch movies and documentaries about the Holocaust, little realizing that they are players in an identical drama. No one I know seems to be aware of the women in Ruptured whose lives are being ruined by racism. Or is antisemitism merely racism? The historian Edward Flannery called it a secular diabolism, Deborah Lipstadt, a prejudice coming from both the right and the left, and Douglas Murray, a shape-shifting virus.

I understood this as I made my way through the book, and it was a rapid read. Antisemitism isn’t logical, it doesn’t make sense. The point made most frequently in Ruptured is that this latest round of antisemitism exploded on October 8, before the bodies of the Hamas victims had been identified and before Israel had fired a shot in its defence. I read about the doxing of Australian Jewish women, the lost friends, the cancelled talks and Writers’ Festival appearances, hate speech online and off, harassment and career destruction, victims turned into villains, the reawakening of intergenerational trauma. ‘The online food world is rife with anti-Zionist slogans and anti-‘Israhell’ propaganda,’ writes Lisa Goldberg. ‘Some days I feel overwhelmed by the hate circulating in my industry. 

Some of the experiences recorded in the book are just horrifying, and over every story hangs the smell of fear which is the reality of living as a Jew in Australia today.

A further point the stories demonstrate is that while the worst perpetrators may be only a vocal minority, the majority remain silent. It has been said that the reason we all know the famous Christians who shielded Jews in World War 2 is that there were so few of them.

‘In the year following October 7, antisemitic activity in Australia increased by 316 percent.’ 

Ruptured records how this has affected the lives of our Jewish women.

I had already avoided the CBD on Sundays, because it had been captured by loud protestors, marching weekly through the streets, some carrying terror group flags, their faces covered with masks and keffiyehs…Why [do] so many leftists now march with Hamas and Hezbollah supporters? Is this a new thing or have they always supported Islamist terrorism? Ramona Koval

Because of your Jewish identity, you don’t belong in the queer community…I was fifteen and rejected by a community that preached acceptance…My favourite artists, from queer musicians to actors, attended pro-Palestinian protests where chants praising Hamas and urging the demise of my people proliferated.  Noa Gomberg

It takes a thick skin to survive as a female in the media, and I experienced all kinds of sexism and misogyny, but I never experienced hatred for being a Jew. After October 7, all that changed…[It] wasn’t empathy for the Palestinians, it was hatred of Jews…No arguments worked, nothing could make the commenters reflect on their own prejudices. Kerri Sackville

It is this point that should wake Australians up. Whether it’s the Rhineland massacres, the Tsarist pogroms, Hitler’s final solution or the Al Jazeera propaganda machine, it all boils down to Jew hatred in the end, as Siana Einfeld’s harrowing depiction of Darebin Council deliberately turning against its tiny Jewish community early in the war illustrates.

In dark moments I wonder if Israel’s destruction, dressed up in human rights, is the world’s clandestine fetish…When I am not overwhelmed by fear, I marvel at the hate. Lynette Chazan

As a former prisoner of the Iranian regime…I recognised the vocabulary of these fighters as they raped and tortured and murdered on a visceral, instinctive level…Explained it away, justified it, revelled in it…In the streets of my city were IRCG flags and insignia…A handful of so-called friends called to sound out where I stood on ‘the genocide’. When I refused to throw myself headfirst into the rapidly swelling tide…I was dropped and denounced and smeared. Kylie Moore-Gilbert

And just as my comfy suburb was getting used to this new normal, 2025 drew to a close with the Bondi massacre.

Is Antisemitism the Proof for the Existence of God?

‘The deeply anti-religious kernel of Hitler’s antisemitism is not difficult to discover… Jews represented symbolically the demands of a divinely established moral law, which stood in the way of his racial amoralism and his deification of the German State and Volk. His genocidal decision against the Jewish people represented, again symbolically, the annihilation of his moral (Jewish-Christian) conscience, which stood in the way of his grandiose dream of a Thousand Year Reich founded on an apotheosis of the German Volk and as himself as its Fuehrer and Saviour. This view is supported by his remarks about conscience as a Jewiah intervention and the need to get the “Thou shall” and “Thou shall not” out of Aryan blood. Seen in this light, his antisemitism appears in its ultimate essence as a nomophobia , a revolt against the divinely sanctioned moral law or, religiously speaking, as a revolt against God.’

From The Anguish of the Jews by Edward Flannery, 1965 (1).

Antisemitism has been called the world’s oldest hatred, the perplexing persecution of a single small ethnic group throughout history. Hitler proposed it as the solution to all Germany’s problems. Islamists endlessly plot the destruction of Israel to restore the honour of Islam. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russia used Jews as a universal scapegoat, persecuting and murdering thousands. Saint John Chrysostom vilified the Jews in violent words and Voltaire in erudite language. England expelled its Jewish population in the thirteenth century and in the Nazi era put quotas on the number of Jews allowed to take refuge in the British Mandate of Palestine. Britain abstained from voting for the creation of the State of the Israel in the United Nations in 1947 and in the Jewish war of Independence that followed, they armed the Arabs. Shakespeare gave us Shylock to despise the Jews and Dickens created Fagin. Before departing for Jerusalem, the Crusaders of the Rhineland murdered the Jews who lived there. Once in the Holy Land, they slaughtered many more. France expelled its Jews and Austria expelled them, as did Hungary, Portugal, Switzerland and even parts of Italy despite many Popes being sympathetic towards them. The Inquisition, that ultimate expression of Spanish nationalism, permitted the expulsion of over 200,000 Jews. In Europe Jews were forbidden to own land and to join trade guilds, then criticised for finding employment in the few things allowed to them, money and academia.

The sad list goes on or, as Edward Flannery expresses it, ‘the millennia of horrors’. As Hitler’s star rose in pre-war Germany, even the United States was not immune. ‘A sign [was] posted on a road leading to a mountain resort: “1000 feet – too high for Jews.” Another one read: “Gentiles preferred.”’ (3)

Many theories have been proposed to account for antisemitism, but is it proof for the existence of God? As a Christian, I believe it is.

Jesus said, ‘salvation is through the Jews’ (John 4,22) and ‘[Jerusalem] will not see me again until you say, “blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”’ (Matt 23, 39). The missionary Lydia Prince, who spent a large part of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s in Jerusalem, wrote ‘God’s plan of peace and blessing for all nations can never come to completion until both Israel and Jerusalem are restored…he expects us to be his coworkers in bringing this to pass’ (2).

The world doesn’t see it this way, but the world is anti-God. ‘Those who hate you, O God, your enemies, [say] let us cut them off from being a nation, that the name of Israel may be remembered no more’ (Psalm 83:1- 4).

There are countless examples of antisemitism in history which demonstrate that, if your aim is to rid yourself of Jews, then it is also to rid yourself of the Jewish God. To the scholars of the European Enlightenment ‘attempting to devise a truly rational understanding of history, politics, and religion—Jewish thought presented a significant challenge’ (4). Indeed, the very reason for antisemitism follows war in heaven, God’s angels versus Satan’s.

Israel gives birth to the Messiah

‘A woman clothed with the sun and on her head a crown of twelve stars brought forth a male child who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. The dragon, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world, stood before the woman so that he might devour her child, but the child was caught up to God and to his throne.

‘Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down and his angels were thrown down with him. Woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great anger, because he knows that his time is short!

Satan pursues Israel

‘When the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had borne the male child' (Revelation 12).

But ‘a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God is with us.’ (Matt 1, 23). In our pain, in our grief, in the small tortures of daily life Jesus the Jew is there sharing our suffering. Yet Satan would far rather we live our lives in a brand of educated humanism. I have just watched the documentary series Australian Story about an elderly woman who, knowing that she hasn’t much longer to live, wonders who will love the disabled son to whom she has devoted her life.

Outside of Jesus, I don’t have the answer, except to rail against the humanism we live in which encourages the world to live courageously without God, and therefore without the Jews. I’m not very good at theology and psychology and it seems to me an insurmountable difficulty to say that a God who loves you created the Jews that the world hates yet are necessary for its salvation.

What is the point of hating the Jews? Who benefits?

The Jews are God’s people irrespective of their sins, and this says much about the faithfulness of God.

'Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land’ (Ezekial 36, 22-24).

I cannot conclude without considering Arab antisemitism and whether it is appropriate to our argument about the existence of God. Before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Jews and Christians living in Arab lands were referred to as dhimmi meaning ‘protected’. They were, however, subservient to Muslims and were governed by laws that kept them that way. They paid higher taxes. Regarding the actual murder of Jews, there is the much debated quote from the Hadith, ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees and the stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslim, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,’’ and Muhammad’s command to slay those who refused to convert and would not repent.

But the theological question of Arab antisemitism for God doesn’t make an appearance until the Islamic terrorism of our own day. It is important to understand that this is a modern phenomenon.

‘Palestinian Authority elites have built a three-stage case against Jewish existence…As their expert witness, they bring Allah himself who is said to have sent a message through the Prophet Muhammad that killing Jews is a necessary step to bring Resurrection. Stage 1 is characterized by a collective labelling of Jews as the enemies of Allah…Stage 2 teaches that because of their immutable traits, Jews represent an existential danger to all humanity. Stage 3 presents the necessary solution…the annihilation of Jews as legitimate self-defence and a service to God and man’ (5).

If God didn’t exist, would killing a Jew have been a necessary step to welcome the Resurrection? Would such slaughter have been a service to God?

I leave you with these thoughts so that the next time free-to-air television vilifies Israel you will consider their reasons for doing so.

(1) The Anguish of the Jews by Edward Flannery, Macmillan, New York, 1965.

(2) Appointment in Jerusalem, Lydia and Derek Prince, F.H. Revell Co. 1975.

(3) Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, Thomas Nelson, 2010.s

(4) https://thelemur.org/2026/01/05/voltaires-antisemitism-an-adapted-final-paper/

(5) https://www.jstor.org/stable/25834644

Margaret Walker mwalkeristra.com