The Incredible Tito: Man of the Hour

by Howard Fast

  An agent of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee contacted Tito, and the Committee provided funds and means for Tito’s return to Yugoslavia. How and where he worked in Yugoslavia in recent years is not clearly known—for obvious reasons. The Communist Party there was underground, and the corrupt, pro-axis Yugoslav government joined the Nazi-inspired Communist witch-hunt. But when that government was overthrown by the officers’ coup and Yugoslavia threw in her lot with Britain, Tito knew that soon his organization would be vitally necessary.

  At that time, Tito was in Slovenia, the northernmost section of Yugoslavia. There he consolidated his forces, drew tighter the strings of the local Communist Party, and, most of all, sought to make common purpose with every democratic and progressive organization.

  Three days after the Yugoslav army had surrendered to the Axis, April Twentieth, 1941, Tito held a meeting with certain Slovenian leaders, Catholic Priests, Trade-Unionists, Peasant Leaders and Communists. They formed the Slovenian Liberation Front, and issued their first proclamation of defiance to Germany:

  “Death to Fascism, liberty to the people!”

  Tito was a Communist; he made no secret of that. But the United Front he organized was not Communist; it included anyone and everyone who hated fascism and was willing to fight the invader. Its purpose was to render all aid to the allies—and to drive the Germans and Italians from Yugoslavia.

  The Liberation Front, or LF, as it came to be known, decided that Tito should go to Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, contact the Communist organization there, and start a movement that would embrace every democratic force in Yugoslavia—a movement that would unite the whole land against the Nazis. In civilian clothes, a revolver in one pocket, Tito left Slovenia for Belgrade.

  There are a hundred stories told of how Tito began the Belgrade center of the Liberation Front. It is said that he sat in a cafe in Belgrade, his hand on the revolver in his pocket, while German armored cars cruised the streets, looking for him.

  Actually, Tito did not start the Liberation Front in Belgrade. When he arrived at Belgrade, a United Front underground organization, formed originally by the Communist Party, but already including progressive Yugoslavs of every political shade, was functioning. Tito knew many key people in the Belgrade section of the Communist Party. He contacted them, and a meeting was arranged. At this meeting was the former Yugoslav Parliamentary President, Ribar, and other national non-Communist leaders. At this meeting, which lasted for hours, Tito constantly reiterated his purpose and the purpose of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia:

  “To drive out the invader and liberate the land!”

  Then and there, the Liberation Front for all of Yugoslavia was formed. Communists and non-Communists shook hands and pledged their lives to their country’s freedom. The slogan, spoken first in Slovenia, was confirmed as a battle cry:

  “Death to Fascism, liberty to the people!”

  A few days later, just two weeks after the Germans had announced the complete conquest of Yugoslavia, the first defiant Liberation Front poster appeared in Belgrade:

  DEATH TO ALL FASCISTS!

  LIBERTY TO THE PEOPLE!

  ORGANIZING PARTISAN BRIGADES

  TITO was an old and experienced fighter. The better part of his life had been spent in the struggle for human freedom and dignity. He never made the mistake of underestimating the enemy. He had seen the German panzers tried out in Spain, called in by Franco to destroy Spanish Republicanism. He had seen those same panzers, somewhat more perfected, knife through Yugoslavia in ten days. He knew how futile and foolish it would be to send his few half-armed guerrillas against them immediately.

  Instead, he set about perfecting his organization, arming it as well as he could, and enlarging it. Wherever they could be reached, local Yugoslav Communist organizations were contacted. They, in turn, reached out and made common purpose with all anti - axis people they could reach. Liaison was perfected. Disguised as travelling men, as peasants, as housewives, Communist organizers, men and women travelled back and forth through the country. Communist branches were strengthened, arms were apportioned in a way to have the most effect, ammunition stretched as far as it could go.

  And then, when the Communists had done all they could do, they waited for the opportune moment to strike. They had hardly completed their preparations when it came. In June, 1941, two months after the defeat of Yugoslavia, the Nazi panzers poured over the Russian frontier. The Stukas smashed at the Russian cities.

  In Yugoslavia, an immediate effect of the Russian invasion was apparent. Needing every German soldier he could lay hands on, and believing that Yugoslavia was completely conquered, Hitler withdrew most of his Nazi garrisons. He left a small but strong holding force—and against that force the Liberation Front struck.

  And for the first time, people outside of the Balkans heard of the Partisan Brigades, and their leader, Marshal Tito.

  WHAT IS A “PARTISAN”?

  SOMETHING should be said here of the origin of the term “Partisan,” and the Partisan method of warfare. Curiously enough, the first Partisan brigades were American, and both the word and the method came in-to being during our revolution.

  Continental farmers, when the occasion arose, would take down their guns, leave their homes, and meet at an appointed spot. Then they would attack a British garrison, or an outpost or a marching column. They would appear suddenly, strike hard and quickly, and then melt away before the enemy could reorganize. When the enemy was in a position to strike back, the Partisans had disappeared, gone back to their homes, ceased to exist as an army.

  That feature, the ability to assemble quickly, strike quickly, and then disappear if the need should arise, is the most striking quality of Partisan bands. You will see how, again and again in the history of Tito’s struggle, this feature was used to full advantage.

  THE PARTISAN BRIGADES STRIKE

  WHEN the news of the Nazi attack on Russia arrived, the Liberation Front acted quickly and skillfully. The first uprisings were led by Communists, and they acted as a signal to anti-Nazis everywhere. At Valjevo, in northern Serbia, the ground had been well prepared. Javonavich, a reporter, killed the first German in Valjevo on July 5th. His detachment swung into action and launched a fullscale attack, with rifles, pistols and grenades on the German guards. Simultaneously, Tito led the Belgrade uprising. A group of young Communists attacked and burned part of the German press. Other Communist groups attacked the telephone building and the station. In Zagreb, the telephone building was successfully stormed and destroyed. In Slovenia, an Italian garrison numbering more than two hundred was attacked and wiped out. In Serbia, eighty truckloads of oil and munitions belonging to the Germans were blown up. Other bands stormed German prisons, and carried off Yugoslav prisoners. One of the prisoners rescued at this time, Alexander Rankovich, is today a part of the Liberation Front government. Stores of precious rifles and grenades were looted; Partisans attacked and killed Germans, afterwards stripping them of uniforms and arms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  NAZIS HUNT FOR TITO

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

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

  WANTED: TITO!

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

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

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

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

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

  THE MIKHAILOVICH-CHETNIK MYTH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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