WHY HITLER (AND CHURCHILL) NEEDED BELGRADE

 

‘”On the morning of Palm Sunday, while children slept their innocent sleep and the church bells were ringing for prayer to God, the German aeroplanes without warning let fall a rain of bombs on this historic town”’.

So wrote King Peter of Yugoslavia after the bombing of Belgrade 6^th April 1941. ‘The King went on to describe the terror of the women and children who were machine-gunned as they fled from their homes by low-flying planes.’ (1)

Hitler termed this invasion Operation Strafgericht, a word that in English means Retribution or Punishment. To understand why Hitler labelled it like this, it is necessary first to know something of Belgrade's geography and then something of its history. 

Belgrade lies at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, and the modern visitor taking a stroll down its Sava shoreline passed the boats to the left and the restaurants to the right, can see without difficulty the strategic importance of the city. Anyone who controls Belgrade controls the river traffic from the far east of Europe to its west. In the days before air freight and autobahns this was of vital importance, as the Celts, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Huns, the Slavs, the Bulgars, the Hungarians, the Turks, the Austrians, the Serbs and the Nazis will tell you. 

To the left in this image is the Sava River flowing westwards to Zagreb and Ljubljana. In the distance, the trees run along the shore of the mighty Danube that flows all the way from Romania to Germany. 

 

  

 

The Fort built for the defence of Belgrade sits directly on this confluence, at Stari Grad, the old town, and some sort of military fortress has existed here since Roman times.

An army cannot function without supplies and communication. Belgrade, in its position on the rivers and the railways was nec-essary to Hitler for both. This image from my 1915 World Atlas shows the route of the Danube from Romania through Belgrade to Germany. The oil fields of Romania were the largest in Europe and ess-ential to the Nazi war machine. (4) Later on in the war, the Allies attempted to derail the industry by bombing the oil fields and disrupting the transport system that took it by river to Germany. 

Next, let us take a look at the railways from my 2007 Heinemann Atlas. I took the 24 hour train trip from Athens to Belgrade in 1985, and it is an easy connection from there all the way to Germany. The Germans needed control of the railways to supply their troops in North Africa. Every day 48 trains ran through Belgrade to Athens, there to load their supplies onto ships that crossed the Mediterranean to where Rommel and his army awaited them. (2)

Between the convenient rivers and the convenient railway, it doesn't take much imagination to understand why Hitler wished to punish the Yugoslavs for not rolling out the red carpet. 

Enter the British. 

The British had had connections in Yugoslavia for years before the war, particularly in Belgrade. Significantly, their Intelligence Service had been active during Germany's march towards war in order to monitor and assess the response it was provoking in the Balkans. The Yugoslav regent Prince Paul was something of an Anglophile. Like his nephew, the seventeen-year-old King Peter who was a descendent of Queen Victoria through his mother, Paul had been to school in England. Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia were rich in bauxite, coal, iron ore, lead and zinc, and British mining engineers and businessmen had been working in Yugoslavia before the war. At least one of them, Captain Bill Hudson, fluent in Serbo Croat and allegedly one of Ian Flemming's inspirations for James Bond, was later used as part of Special Operations (7). 

Britain wanted Yugoslavia as an ally.

Although the reasons would change as the war continued, in 1941 Yugoslavia was also the gateway to Greece and of great significance to the British defence of Greece which was to occur that April. 'The important thing, Eden [the British Foreign Secretary] said, was that the Yugoslavs should deny the passage of German troops, especially through the Monastir Gap, which would threaten the Greek flank.' (8)

Under the regency of Prince Paul from 1934, Yugoslavia had maintained a semi-peaceful relationship with Nazi Germany with the aim of not getting involved in war, but in February 1941, Hitler suddenly called upon the Yugoslav Prime Minister and Foreign Minister to throw their lot in with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Japan, and on 25th March Prince Paul signed the Tripartite Pact (5). Two days later on a wave of public indignation, a military coup disposed him, made his nephew Peter the King, and General Dušan Simović of the Yugoslav Air Force the leader of a National Government.

Churchill, needless to say, watched all this with interest. Yugoslavia had "found its soul", he remarked. But 'The Fűhrer had at first refused to believe the news – "I thought," he said later, "that it was a joke."' (5)

We all know what happened next. Hitler lost his famous temper and ordered that Yugoslavia be wiped from the map 'with unmerciful harshness and the military destruction done in lightning-like fashion' (5). Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Italy invaded the country from all sides and dismantled it between them. Naturally, Germany claimed first rights to its natural resources, particularly the bauxite mines in Herzegovina, to the south east of Bosnia, because it needed aluminium for the construction of aeroplanes. 

Nor was this the end. Christie Lawrence in Irregular Adventure recalls later in 1941 seeing half the sky in flames in the rural areas south of Belgrade. It was German terror tactics, the systematic destruction of Serbian villages in response to any show of resistance by the Yugoslavs to the Nazi occupation. ‘The total result of our revolution was that we killed about seven or eight thousand Germans and lost 125,000 men and women shot by them. Three towns and fifty-three villages ...were burned out, and our organization was virtually destroyed.’ (6) 

The question is, what part had Britain played in the Belgrade coup d'etat that had precipitated this disaster and why? (8) 

Britain, of course, had been kept well-informed of the political jostling in Belgrade prior to Prince Paul putting his pen to the poisoned Pact. 'In the six months prior to the coup, the British attitude toward Yugoslavia had changed from accepting Yugoslav benevolent neutrality, to that of pressing the Yugoslavs for more active support in the war against Germany.' (8) Romania with its all-important oil fields had already signed the Pact on 23rd November 1940 after Hungary on 20th November, Slovakia followed on 24th November and lastly Bulgaria on 1st March 1941. Aside from Ustasha-controlled Croatia, already loyal to the Nazis, only Yugoslavia remained. To the British, two things were clear, one, that Prince Paul should not sign the Tripartite Pact with Germany and two, if he did, 'subversive political action' should be placed that ultimately supported the military coup of March 27th.' The British planned to persuade the Yugoslav people and its political parties to exert pressure on Prince Paul and, failing that, to get rid of him. They succeeded only in the latter. They first persuaded several cabinet members to resign in order to destabilize the government, and the final step was to get the Yugoslav military involved in a coup. 

As I read this article (8) I wondered, as I often do with British war history, how much British self-glorification was involved. In any event, whatever they might have been planning bore no fruit. It is true that the Yugoslav military was not prepared for war and collapsed in only eleven days. I have read that Ustasha fifth columnists also had a hand in it (3). Prince Paul, King Peter, General Simović and what would become the Yugoslav Government-in-Exile in Claridge's Hotel London fled the country. The Commando Captain Christie Lawrence who had been captured in Crete, jumped into Serbia from a German train in June 1941. During the twelve months he spent in the country, it seemed to him preindustrial, its remaining leaders confused and bewildered, wanting to help but not knowing what to do. Draža Mihailović, whom everyone had just run off and left, sounded forlorn and Lawrence had not even heard of Tito (6). It wasn't until May 1943 that Churchill parachuted a military party into the country to investigate the Yugoslav Partisans about whom he was beginning to receive rumours. During the Allied Invasion of Sicily in July 1943, the Partisans kept dozens of German Battalions occupied and out of Italy, which pleased Churchill. Of course. 

NOTES

1 - Balkan Essays Hubert Butler, the Irish Pages Press 2016
2 - Glenny, Misha: The Balkans 1804 - 2012 Penguin books 1999
3 - 1941 the Year That Keeps Returning, Slavko Goldstein New York Review BooksNov 05, 2013
4 - Romania's Age Of Oil (rferl.org)
5 - Maclean, Fitzroy: The Heretic: the life and times of Josip Broz-Tito. Harley and Brothers NY, 1957
6 - Christie Laurence Lawrence, Christie Irregular Adventure Faber and Faber 1947
7 - Deakin, FWD: The Embattled Mountain Oxford University Press 1971
8. soe-and-british-involvement-in-the-belgrade-coup-detat-of-march-1941.pdf (cambridge.org) From this article comes the notable quote from Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, "All these Balkan peoples are trash."

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THE POPE AT WAR by David Kertzer - book review

You don’t meet men like Pope Pius XII anymore. Erudite and aristocratic, he was far removed from his proletarian people yet he confessed a quiet ambition to one day be their Pope. Readers of David Kertzer’s book about him are lucky. They have the benefit of knowing that Hitler was evil. For Pius XII, it was as if the truth crept up on him only slowly while he battled the demons that bound him, his fear of communism and his belief that the Roman Catholic Church in Europe must survive.

Elected on the eve of World War 2, Pius XII had previously served as Papal nuncio to Germany. Mussolini’s ambassador to the Vatican wrote that he was ‘the Cardinal preferred by the Germans’ and ‘prone to bend to pressure.’ These two observations create the framework for Kertzer’s book. Between the opening of the Vatican Archives in March 2020 and his publication in 2022, Kertzer completed a vast amount of research, but it is the pace and clarity of his writing that has made the work accessible to a broad audience. For Christians, a distinction must be made between the Roman Catholic Church, which was an ornate, Italian institution, and Jesus Christ who brought the kingdom of heaven to ordinary people. Pius XII wanted to preserve the Italian institution, and I’m not convinced that his scruples and sensitivities made him a Christian I could ever relate to. His was an Italian story with all the drama of Hamlet. So many questions about what was nobler in the mind! So many clerical Polonius’s hiding behind curtains! So many Maglioni’s, Tardini’s, Ciano’s, Montini’s and Pirelli’s. All it lacked was Ophelia, unless you count Clara Petacci, Mussolini’s mistress.

To begin: Pope Pius XII was an experienced diplomat and had frequent opportunities to demonstrate his skills. ‘In August 1939, as he was finalizing plans for invading Poland, Hitler was also engaged in negotiations with Pius XII so secret that not even the German ambassador to the Holy See knew about them.’ (1)  The middle-man was Prince Philipp von Hessen, son-in-law of the King of Italy, and on 11th March 1940 the Pope also met with Hitler’s foreign minister Von Ribbentrop. Pius complained politely about the Nazi suppression of the Catholic Church in Germany and Poland while his Secretary of State, Maglione, was less accommodating. Ribbentrop was not pleased and labelled Maglione an enemy of the Nazis.

The chapters recording the Pope’s failure to react to the German invasion of the Low Countries, the continuing brutality in Poland and the appeals of ordinary Italians to prevent Italy from entering the war, make poignant reading. Kertzer repeats two points, firstly that Pius XII believed the war would be over in a few months following an Axis victory, and secondly that he was intimidated by Mussolini. Indeed, his subservience to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany did not impress the British and the French. ‘The moral prestige of the Papacy began to decline,’ wrote Osborne, Churchill’s envoy to the Vatican. ‘The Holy Father will say nothing for the moment,’ wrote D’Ormesson, his French counterpart, 'and will only…speak publicly to emit some pious and expertly balanced moans. One gets the impression that, for [the Pope], communism is Public Enemy Number One. [He] seems to me above all to be a conservative of a monarchical stamp….[who] seizes every opportunity to show his loyalty to the Fascist government.’ (1)

From the beginning of the Holocaust the Pope received reports of German atrocities against Europe’s Jews, initially from members of his clergy who had witnessed them. Though deeply distressed, he did not respond.

Why not?

‘[Because] it was best not to alienate either Mussolini or the Fűhrer,’ concludes Kertzer. Osborne added, ‘The Pope’s policy of silence and neutrality at all costs is destroying the moral authority of the Vatican.’ A Swiss newspaper reported that, ‘the moral leadership of the Papacy is conditioned by considerations of opportunism and expediency.’ The French, the Americans, ambassadors from Britain, Brazil, Belgium, Poland, the Netherlands, Norway, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and churchmen from the Ukraine, all sent appeals to the Pope to protest about the horrors committed against Jews unfolding in their own countries. ‘It is widely believed,’ begged Roosevelt’s envoy Myron Taylor of the Pope in September 1942, ‘that Your word of condemnation would hearten all others who are working to save these thousands from suffering and death…I should like to know whether the Holy Father has any suggestions as to any practical manner in which the forces of civilized public opinion could be utilized in order to prevent a continuation of these barbarities.’ (1)

A month later the Vatican replied, ‘Up to the present time it has not been possible to verify the accuracy of the…severe measures taken against non-Aryans’ (1). It also expressed its fear that ‘any papal criticism risked provoking a backlash against the church in German occupied Europe’. (1) In September 1943, as Italy was capitulating to the Allies, German troops were pouring over its northern borders to occupy the country as far south as Rome. This invasion marked the end for Italy’s Jews. Separated from their Italian compatriots by the Racial Laws of 1938, to which the Pope had made no protest, their deportation to the Nazi death camps was likewise accomplished in silence.

The Third Reich made a point of reminding all its churches, Protestant and Catholic, that it supported them financially, and the soldiers responsible for the wartime atrocities considered themselves good Christians. After all, in the 1939 census only 1% of Germans declared themselves unbelievers.

What was a Pope to do?

What he did do was to continue to liaise with Germany in order to mitigate suppression of the church and, as Allied bombers commenced pounding Italy’s industrial north, he wrote to Britain and America in an endeavour to spare Italy further suffering. Osborne reported to London, ‘Owing to the fact that His Holiness never made any specific condemnation of the deliberate [German] slaughter of thousands of civilians, he is precluded …from condemning our recent raids on Milan, Genoa and Turin.’ (1) Pius received a similar retort from Roosevelt.

Care should be taken by the reader to differentiate between propaganda and fact. A notable instance was the German and Italian proclamations that the war was rescuing Christian Europe from Bolshevist Russia, the ally of Britain and France. The Allied bombing of Rome did a lot to promote this. The Pope’s fear of communism runs as a thread throughout the book and was richly exploited by the men who intimidated him.

Like The Force of Destiny by Christopher Duggan, another long book about Italy’s depressing modern history, The Pope at War ultimately says to me that Italians should stick to food and culture. To say that they’re good at anything else is to believe their own propaganda. It’s little wonder that so many novels feature Vatican intrigues. Occupying Germans scheming to get the Pope’s approval, Jews hiding in convents, priests who drive them into the arms of the Nazis, a pontiff who says nothing, Allies arguing about who was responsible for bombing Italian heritage while Europe lay in ruins. The Vatican is an opera in itself.

‘Why should we quarrel? [The church] will swallow anything provided they can keep their advantages’                                                                      – Adolf Hitler. (2)



1 – The Pope at War, David Kertzer. Random House New York, 2022.

2 – Balkan Essays, Hubert Butler. The Irish Pages Press 2016.

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HELL HATH NO FURY – the poetry of women Partisans in Yugoslavia 1941 – 1945

‘You who burned my house and killed my child, who shelters

beneath a foreign wing, a traitor who accepts a salary from the

enemy! Did you know that I carry a firearm now? I’ll get you!’ (1)

With the barrel of her gun up his nose, he pleads that he only did what he was ordered to do, but the feeble excuse doesn’t save him.

‘I have a gun always ready,’ she replies with the same mercy he showed her. ‘Aim that bullet into the disgusting fascist! We will obliterate the black blood of fascism forever.' (2) (3)

This female Partisan is well aware that her old mother is sitting at home worrying about her, yet the urge to fight is too strong to resist.

She writes, 'The struggle was difficult, bloody and angry. Everything is broken, falling apart, crumbling. Beside the narrow muddy path you still experience the smell of spilled blood. Yes, many young lives fell, young patriots, heroes. The struggle was an appalling Golgotha and those heroes, mother, were your children. I know that you worry, mother, but I can’t help you now. I still feel that the only place for me is in the brigade. Believe me, mother! The hour is near when I will return to your place for ever, and then surely your wounded heart will stop suffering.' (5)

Still concerned for her mother, she tries to explain how she feels, 'I am a woman fighter, a young partisan. I fight for my people as long as freedom does not prevail. I carry a rifle in my hand, I move boldly forward until the last village is free. Hurry everyone into the struggle, all those homes which are still reluctant to get involved, so that after this war you will experience no shame. When they ask you: "Where were you, comrade?" what will you say?' (6)

But here is a surprise! Her mother responds that she wishes she could be a Partisan nurse. The instant one young soldier recovers from his wound, she knows exactly what to tell him, 'And when his wound eased, I would say to him: “Go, comrade, and keep fighting! Avenge your other friends and don't let the enemy prevail. Don't complain about your young life while one of the bastards remains."' (4)

These women entered World War 2 without illusions. Their country was divided between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and their allies, the Ustasha in Croatia, and Hungary. Owing to the widespread destruction of their villages, they often had no homes to return to. At first, they supported the men as nurses and typists, and continued the same domestic tasks as they had in the villages. Then, early in 1942, at their request, Tito allowed them to bear rifles. 

Many girls joined the Partisans to avenge brothers who had fallen in battle. One such was the Croatian poet Anđelka Martić who, after the war, became a well-known translator and children's author. She wrote to her brother, 'You are no more, but the place in the line of soldiers at which you waited is not empty. Your young sister gladly took your heavy rifle in her tender hands. Now I am walking where you would have been, by the mountain, stifling my pain for you in a blaze of colour. Dream quietly, brother, I know what you wanted. Until the end your faithful rifle will be heard.' (7)

This poem was written in 1943 when Anđelka was 19. Many girls were younger. The British liaison officer to the Partisans, Fitzroy Maclean records a twelve-year-old girl throwing a grenade into a bunker full of Germans, all of whom were killed. She may well have been the girl who wrote this,

'I am a little female partisan ready every hour, so that in the fight I can avenge my dead brothers. One brother still remains to me, and I would give him all of my little heart, although I fall too. I will give my life for our dear people, I am fighting for freedom against the Kraut forces. I will give my life to defend mother, and in this way I will say to my own dear Dad: "Don't, Dad, regret the lives of your darling children. We must all fight to destroy the devil.” Therefore, I go forward into the holy battle to avenge my brothers, because freedom is here, shining at the door.' (8)

Freedom is a constant theme in the women's poetry. Even when they waited by graves, they looked towards freedom, and everywhere they recorded their love of the countryside. To me this reads as if nature was in their hearts and souls, therefore it understood their struggle.  

 'On the graves of our comrades the cyclamens are without number. Their red is everywhere in the forests through which the fighters move. We twitch the gentle stems, we roll up the small flowerets and our thoughts lead us back into a warm childhood. Once we ran in the woods, gathering red cyclamen, our song filled the paths and tracks. But today the forests have become the graves of our fallen comrades, the sons of our land. The scent of cyclamen spreads everywhere. It announces our freedom, and these graves stand as a symbol of victory.' (9)

'A lonely grave in a pine forest. Silence everywhere, only the wind whistles, while with tearful eyes a mother weeps for her son. But the forest trembles! It is ardent, it is quiet. The branches are sobbing, too! Why does your wood disturb the silence on a peaceful day, forest? It is because the trees are telling the story of that dead partisan. The forest is whispering to his mother about our struggle, about our joy when the people win, and about how much her son’s grave is worth.' (10)

I have found no reference to communism in the women's poetry, although there is some hero worship of Tito. From the poems I learned much about the beauty of the land and the connection of its people to it. Basil Davison, another British officer who worked with the Yugoslav Partisans, wrote that they weren't interested in politics, they just wanted their land back.      

'Bend your ear to the ground and listen to the murmur. That it is not the murmur of the wind. It is neither waterfalls nor mountain rapids, nor the moaning in the dense forest of firs. Because it rumbles loudly, vigorously and terribly from the strong walk of the victorious.' (12)

Meanwhile, our Partisan blows the smoke from the barrel of her gun. At her feet, the Nazi lies dead.

'Oh, my rifle, I will never part with you! You will be with me at the end of my wrist until the last day.' (1) She turns to her comrades. 'Through fire and blood, through the persecution of these violent monsters, through concentration camps, harshness and humiliation, you are welcome, women, mothers, our daughters, to your new baptism of fire. You have found yourselves alone at a terrible price, but you have created a new and combative woman.' (11)

Illustration, Zlatko Prica

  

Note: The poems are written almost entirely in rhythmic, rhyming stanzas. To replicate this in an English translation, I would have had to rewrite the poems, which I decided not to do.             

For a complete account of these courageous women, I recommend Women and Yugoslav Partisans by Jelena Batinić, Cambridge University Press, 2015. 

THE POEMS

from PO ŠUMAMA I GORAMA  (Through Forests and Mountains)

Poems of the Fighters of the National War of Liberation, Zagreb 1952

1. A Woman Under Arms by Franjo Mraz

2. Female Partisan on Guard Duty by Slavica Havelka III ćeta I bataljan II brigade 33 rd division

3.The Female Partisan by Gabro Vidović-Buco 1941

4. The Conscientious Mother by Života Čitaković borac, IV batajon “S.O” II. Prolet. brigada

5. To Mother by Verica Gabor, Hospital company, II brigade, XXXIII div.

6. Young Partisan by Ana Langeneker, delegate 1st Brigade 32nd division

7. To My Fallen Brother by Anđelka Martić 1943

8. A Female Partizan by Micika Biškup II. Brig., XXXIII, div.

9. Cyclamen by Anđelka Martić XXI. NO brigada

10. The Lonely Grave by Anđelka Martić

 
11. You Have Arisen by Mileva Jorgić I batajon, XVII. Ud. Brig. XXVIII, div. 

12. Spring by Nada Valenčić 1944

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JASENOVAC CONCENTRATION CAMP AND ISTRIA

Here is my photograph of the Partisan cenotaph in Tar, Istria, the village my mother was born in. Her family name was Mikatović. They had come up from the south coast in the sixteenth century and lived only in this area.

From the cenotaph and JASENOVAC RESEARCH INSTITUTE – Let the Truth Be Known!, I researched the men from Tar and the surrounding Istrian villages who had died at the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp run by the Ustasha during World War 2 on the northern border of Bosnia and Croatia .

In the table below are their names and places of birth:

Tar today has a population of about 900. Aside from Poreć, the other villages mentioned are smaller. If so many men from such small villages so far away, who were neither Serbian, nor Jewish, nor Gypsies, could be slaughtered at Jasenovac, then how much more would the numbers have been swelled by the real targets of the Ustasha: the Serbs, the Jews and the Roma? The extermination rate must have been enormous.

(I think there were probably more names than this because the search engine turned up names that weren’t on the cenotaph.)

I can’t tell you how very sad this knowledge has made me. Istria during World War 2 was a German operational zone. My mother often mentioned riding their bikes and having to get off the road quickly in order to avoid German tanks. Before this, Istria had a history of poverty and famine, yet here were these farmers (and farmer is the most common profession written in their church books) turning into patriots and fighting for their freedom. There was little food during the war. My mother said that all the food went to feeding the Italian army. Often, all they had to eat was potatoes, she said, and the Germans were very cruel.

The cenotaph in the photograph was established in 1953 to honour the anti-fascist Partisans, both Italian and Croatian, and is inscribed in both languages. The historian at nearby Novigrad told me that Mussolini’s dictatorship polarized the village. One side of the street would consider themselves Italian and the other Croatian. Yet after the collapse of Fascist Italy, they fought the Germans together, only for some to perish in a Croatian death camp.

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WINTER BATTLES: BOSNIA 1941

December 1941: Fleeing the German destruction of Užice in Serbia,
Tito and the Partisans crossed the River Drina in winter,

climbed the mountains of Bosnia on the other side, 

and walked through the forests.    

Bosnia Herzegovina is a very mountainous country. In winter it is snow bound.

As someone who has actually driven through Bosnia in the snow, I have difficulty understanding why the Nazis thought that they could successfully invade the country. Even today, the roads seem to be a collection of mule tracks up and down the formidable Dinaric Alps with the addition of a few optimistic motorways. In Eastern Approaches (Jonathon Cape pub. 1949) Fitzroy Maclean writes, 'the Germans, with an elusive enemy, with unreliable allies, and without enough troops of their own to occupy the country effectively, could do little more than garrison the large towns and try to guard the lines of communication between them'.

However, during the war they needed bauxite from the mines near Mostar, the mediaeval capital of Herzegovina, for use in the construction of aeroplanes. Bosnia Herzegovina is also rich in coal, iron ore, zinc and lead. There were two ways to transport coal and ore to Germany. One was along the system of Bosnian narrow-gauge railways built by the Austrians which was extended between the wars to connect the coast to Belgrade, and the other was by sea to Trieste. The railways ran the gauntlet of demolition by the Partisans, and ships in the Adriatic risked being sunk by the Allies. 

The Partisans needed Bosnia to connect with their operational zones in Croatia, Dalmatia, Slovenia and Montenegro. The Nazis waged a series of offensives against them. They were assisted in this by the Italians, the Croatian Ustasha and the Chetniks. The Partisans held up to twenty-eight German divisions in Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia and Montenegro which suited Churchill as the Allied Invasion of Sicily approached.

To understand the creation of the Partisans from a motley collection of local fighters engaged over the centuries in battling Turks, we must go to Bosnia in December 1941.

'Tito and his staff had formed a conception of Partisan warfare which deviated from past Soviet practice...where a Partisan unit was an auxiliary weapon of a regular army...To the Yugoslavs the Partisan units were the army, organized in mobile formations and in territorial defense units.'

from The Embattled Mountain, FWD Deakin, Oxford University Press, 1971.

Between December 1941 and May 1942 Tito formed five Proletarian Brigades of up to 1000 fighters each, as a military striking force under his direct command. By November they had increased to 28.

 Deakin continues, 

'The immediate task of the First Proletarian Brigade [in December 1941] was in ensure the hold of the Partisans over the key strategic areas of East Bosnia.'

The chief difference between these forces and the old local fighters was their mobility. They no longer defended only their home territories. 

'Long before the Allies, the Germans and Italians came to realize that the Partisans constituted a military factor of first rate importance against which a modern army was in many respects powerless.,,During each of [their seven] offensives, the extensive troop movements involved exposed [them] more than ever to the attacks and ambushes of the Partisans.'   

from Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean  

The contrast between the Partisans and the Germans was striking. The Germans in Bosnia were an efficient modern army, often using Alpine troops, with field kitchens and heavy artillery, 'lumbering, snail-like'. The Partisans were organized into small, mobile, lightly armed units who were familiar with the terrain. Much of the reason for the failure of the Germans to subdue the Partisans was their inability to embrace change. Tito told Deakin that the Germans 'had missed the lesson of creating mobile units with special anti-Partisan training. German forward units were always pressing behind the Yugoslavs and could never move with speed in self-contained columns to attack the Partisan forces from the rear. By not winning every grim race for each mountain crest, the German operation failed in its central purpose of annihilating the Yugoslav main operational group.' 

Yet the Germans were supported from the air, as we read in the poem The Bombed Forest by Josip Cazi, a Partisan Political Commissar. Papuk is a mountain in Slavonija in Croatia.

'This morning over Papuk a reconnaissance plane is searching, an ominous buzzard in that dreary first light...Death comes from the air, seeking with fiery claws the heart of the Partisans.'

The forest burns all day. Frightened animals run from the wildfire. 

'But at sunset Partisan songs sweep through it like an inexhaustible fountain. Along the slopes the column of soldiers moves out into the lowlands. They will go into action at night – the cycle of history is still turning. Above Papuk the fires die in the evening.' 

The typical enemy tactic was encirclement, and getting out of the ring was the Partisan aim, as we read in A Partisan Letter by Josip Cazi,

Yesterday, with a fiery partisan sledgehammer, we fought the fascist regiment on Mt Psunj, so hurriedly that I didn’t send you the letter I had written. We penetrated the ring by a stormy impact, blasting the fiery chain in a bloody assault. And while to you, my orphan, I write this letter, our columns on the September roads are singing of victory in the morning sun.

'The ring' is a constant observation in British eyewitness accounts. For example, from Partisan Picture' by Basil Davison (Bedford Books, 1946) at the Battle of the Neretva River, from January to March 1943,

To hold the ring the German Command then made an arrangement with 12,000 of Mihaylovitch's chetniks, commanded by Col. Stanisitch and General Djukanovitch and others, by which the latter would attempt to seal off any further partisan retreat by taking up positions along the left bank of the River Neretva. [The fourth offensive.]

The fifth offensive ended with the breaking of the ring in Montenegro and the escape of Tito and the main formations into Eastern Bosnia. That was in mid-June 1943 [the Battle of the Sutjeska].

An account of the same battle from The Heretic by Fitzroy Maclean (Harper and Brother, NY, 1957), 

'"Now that the ring is completely closed," ran a captured German operation order, "the communists will try to break through. You will ensure that no able-bodied man leaves the ring alive."' 

 'If guerillas are to survive in conditions comparable to those in which the Partisans were fighting,' wrote Fitzroy Maclean in Eastern Approaches, 'they must...deny the enemy a target.' The Partisans did this by 'extricating themselves, fading away, reappearing elsewhere and attacking the enemy where he least expected it.' They did not stand and fight to the last man. We see this 'escape in defeat' in the poem The Battle at Twenty Below Zero. Having sown the seeds of dissent among the local population, they returned later to the same area from which the enemy had driven them out. No author is given, but it was evidently written by one of the brigades in 1945. Gradina is in northwest Bosnia.  

The sun itself is flaming on these clouds,
and on their serene heights, a grey aspect,
but on the people and villages, snows are falling.

The hoarfrost is silent, the chirp of the birds dies.
Until the middle of November its sting has dug in.
But the heart of the people beats like a burning spark.

The column of soldiers steps into the blizzard, the angry ice,
on callused feet, by swift, firm steps.
The bold ones focus on the view in the distance where autumns produce bloody fruits.
In their hearts they carry spring blossoms and their deadly rifles are loaded with freedom.

Hurry! It will be an onslaught in Gradina,
Because Tito’s heart has won the battle of the cold,
An irresistible heart for freedom.

Shh! The soldiers creep on, still on track,
What leads to the bunker? The stone tower?
The shots…the cheers… and the escape in defeat?

Five dead Nazis and three frozen traitors,
Because the stiffs in uniform have no heart.
The thermometer says: twenty below zero.

 In a further post, I will comment on the poems written by and about female Yugoslav Partisans. To close, here is a small sample.   

From A Woman Under Arms by Franjo Mraz

Oh my rifle, I will never part with you!
You will be with me at the end of my wrist until the last day
To protect the paths of freedom along which the conquered are moving.
Tremble, look, listen to the woman warrior, the woman Partisan!

                                                                                     

(Images M Walker 2023. The first three images were taken driving from Belgrade over the Drina to Sarajevo and the last on the motorway from Sarajevo towards the Neretva River and Mostar.)

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TITO'S WAR CAVE

 

‘Despite his experiences at Drvar, Tito had not lost his liking for caves,’ wrote Fitzroy Maclean, Churchill’s liaison officer with the Yugoslav Partisans. Less than a fortnight after his dramatic rescue from a cave near Drvar in Bosnia during Operation Rösselsprung, Tito installed himself in yet another cave halfway up yet another mountain on the island of Vis, three hours south-west of Split on the Croatian coast. At this time, Vis remained the only island in the Adriatic unoccupied by the Nazis.

Tito lived and worked here from 7th June to 19th September 1944.

The plaque reads: "Here, from June to October 1944, were maintained the working parties of the Supreme Command of the Yugoslav Communist Party and other assistants in the War of National Liberation."

The cave looks 117 degrees ESE towards the expanse of Adriatic islands and left towards the World War Two Allied airstrip. The runway is east-west and can easily be seen with the naked eye.

To get to the cave on Mount Hum from the town of Komiža is a 10km drive or 2km as the crow flies. A slim, tortuous road that I suspect was once a donkey track, clings to the side of the mountain and looks directly over the sea, which was a vivid blue the morning we visited. Travelling down slightly, we passed through two villages and finally made a left turn at Borovik which, despite the name, doesn’t seem to be a village at all, then along a very narrow road up the mountain. About two thirds of the way to the top, we parked and walked up a steep winding track a further hundred metres to the cave.

The location is mountain quiet. Wild rosemary and oregano lightly scent the air and dry trees rise to a height of no more than 3 m. The dimensions of the cave are: 4m across the entrance, width 4.5m, depth 9m – a flat floor without a slope - domed ceiling to 4m. Three steps at the back lead to a flat area of 1.5m in depth. Although the steps suggest another room, there is nothing further back.

The cave is in a magnificent position with expansive views over the aerodrome, the Adriatic and the islands heading south down the coast. It looks down into a plunging valley which forms a V on two sides that expands at the bottom left to the airstrip and the sea. “A war cave entrusted to eagles!” I think. A perfect spot.

Grapes and olives are grown in the interior of the island and the rich red soil near the aerodrome, but in the remainder of Vis the soil is poor and supports only dry scrub. Harsh winds and an abundant scattering of limestone add to the impression of barrenness and a stark reminder that a farmer’s life is not as easy here as in the fertile northern plains of Slavonia and Serbia.

The cave is marked by a red dot and A is the airstrip, but don’t let the map fool you. Vis really isn’t very big. The landing area looks far away on the map, but once you’re there it is clear that everything is close to everything else. For a fascinating account of Vis airstrip, see Forgottenairfields europe .

See also: Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean, Jonathon Cape 1949

Photo credit LIFE The Balkans Time Life International 1966.

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JASENOVAC, THE OTHER AUSCHWITZ

To my Fellow Fighters by Anka Poznevija 33^rd Brigade

Yugoslav Partisans 

Comrades, my fighters, this poem testifies to you,

And my heart, which has seen and suffered many hurts, sings to you in thanks.

You rescued me from the concentration camp,

I was stuck there a long time

With thousands of those comrades,

Many fears I survived.

 The camp – the atrocities awe me by that single word,

The camp – full only of hungry skeletons,

The camp – from the smallest children in the grave.

Wire, walls, solitary confinement, dungeons…

A scream, hunger and moaning -

These are the beauties of the camps. 

Those words  - ‘Mother! Water, only give me a drop of water,’

You hear through the night’s silent cavern the supplications of the children,     

But the mother hasn’t water to give him,

She has only poor, powerless arms….

From thirst and grief the babies bite their own arms…

Then everything gets quieter,

Slowly the moaning and the noise fade,

Only the iron bar frantically tightens

The rusted barrier.

Comrades, you got me out of this fearsome horror.

I have no other words than these: comrades, thank you! 

The concentration camps of World War 2 hold a macabre grip over the modern imagination. Books on the topic sell in their millions. Tourists with questionable ethics wield selfie sticks in the death chambers. Of these Nazi camps of horror, Auschwitz remains the best known. 

Recently, however, a discussion with a girl on Goodreads led me to the website of Jasenovac, one of many Ustasha-run death camps and inevitably, when huge numbers and sadistic savagery are involved, the most notorious. Situated in Croatia near the border with Bosnia, Jasenovac was established in 1941 by the Independent State of Croatia, or NDH, a Nazi puppet state run by the Ustasha, the fascist terrorist organization nurtured by Mussolini and put in power over Croatia and Bosnia by Hitler. Its principal victims were the Orthodox Serbs, the Jews, and the Roma people. 

I must be twisted because, once I was on the site, I wacked the family name into the search bar – MIKATOVIĆ – and to my dismay discovered a relative: Paolo Mikatović from Dekovići. My mother was born in Tar in Istria, seven kilometres away. All the Mikatović’s had lived in the same area since the sixteenth century, so poor Paolo must have been a cousin. 

Google images of Dekovići reveal a farming hamlet so modest that it seems to turn its eyes from the camera. I was filled with sadness for its remoteness, its anonymity, and its slim connection with an infamous location. 

Seeking further information about Paolo, I wrote to Poreć, the nearby regional centre. They replied, but couldn’t help me. I knew that there had been a strong Partisan presence in that part of Istria because I took a photo of the Partisan cenotaph in Tar, and the Tar/Varbiga Partisans even have a Facebook page. I can only assume, therefore, that Paolo joined the local anti-fascist fight, was captured by the Ustasha and subsequently imprisoned in Jasenovac. 

I made the villain in Through Forests and Mountains a Ustasha supporter because I needed someone who was psychotic. When you read about the crimes of the Ustasha, psychotic is the only word suitable, and I urge those with an interest in them to read the Balkan Essays of Hubert Butler. 

Butler, an Irish writer who had taught in Croatia, set out to make ‘a study of the Christian crisis’ in Croatia from 1941 to 1945. 

What Christian crisis? 

First, a bit of background. The temptation for Christians under Fascism during the first half of the twentieth century was that no matter how much they disliked Hitler, Mussolini, Franco or the Croatian Ustasha, they always retained their church. Indeed, the Ustasha were very devout Catholics. Theirs was ‘an extraordinary alliance of religion and crime’, writes Butler. Their leaders went to daily Mass and local priests blessed the troops before battle. One renegade priest, Father Ribar, was arrested and killed in Jasenovac for refusing to celebrate High Mass on the anniversary of the founding of the NDH and to sing the ancient hymn of praise Te Deum Laudamus. Communism, by contrast, was the atheistic villain. Communism was feared by the churches. Yet Butler writes that, after the war, the Yugoslav communist authorities were very careful not to lie about their evidence regarding the activities of the church. 

The Christian crisis to which he refers was the mass murder by the Ustasha of their fellow Christians, the Orthodox Serbs. He continues, ‘I think there can be few parallels in European history for the religious massacres in Croatia in 1941 and ‘42 or for the lack of moral courage which Christians have shown in admitting them with honesty’. Four British authors, Hubert Butler, Stella Alexander, Evelyn Waugh, and Fitzroy Maclean, wrote that the Croatian church was sympathetic to the Ustasha, if not actually collaborating with them. A fifth, Marcus Tanner, noted that ‘the clericals were held back from opposing the NDH by their conviction that Croatian independence was a good thing.’ Many saw in the village massacres carried out by the Ustasha an opportunity to make converts of the terrified Orthodox peasants who queued up to be baptised Catholic in the hope of saving their lives. 

I am a Christian so what do I think? 

The French writer Celine Martin, sister of St Therese, noted that her mother had a ‘veritable cult for the church, for the Pope and for the priesthood,’ but Father Harry from St Agatha’s-down-the-road told me that Jesus didn’t come to found a church, he came to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth. Let Jasenovac stand as a salutary lesson for all Christians who justify division and murder between brothers. Jesus told Christians to make peace. 

References:

Marcus Tanner, Croatia, Yale University Press 1997 

Hubert Butler, the Balkan Essays, the Irish Pages Press 2016 

Stella Alexander, the Triple Myth, Cambridge University Press 1987 

Evelyn Waugh quoted in Hebblethwaite, Peter Paul VI the First Modern Pope 

                         Harper Collins 1993. 

Fitzroy Maclean, The Heretic: the life and times of Josip Broz-Tito. 

                         Harley and Brothers NY, 1957 (Published in the UK as Disputed Barricade) 

Celine Martin, the Mother of the Little Flower 

                         Tan Books and Publishers 2005

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