Tito and the Partisans

Tito and the Partisans. Josip Broz (1892–1980) was born near Klanjec in Croatia. He was, from the 1920s, a clandestine communist revolutionary using many pseudonyms, one of which, Tito, he eventually adopted permanently. From 1935 he spent more time in Moscow than elsewhere, working for the Comintern, before being chosen to take over the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ). After almost three years on probation and under investigation, he was fully confirmed in October 1940 as its political secretary, entrusted with the task of reorganizing a party that had come close to being dissolved by the Comintern.

By the time Yugoslavia was attacked in April 1941, Tito had successfully carried out his task, he had selected a team of lieutenants, including Milovan Djilas, and the KPJ had a membership of some 8,000. Uneasy coexistence with the German occupation allowed the party to establish the basic network of its military organization in anticipation of action, so that when Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941 (see BARBAROSSA), and Tito issued his call to arms, he was both responding to an appeal by the Comintern to assist the USSR and seizing the opportunity provided by the war to launch a revolution.

The armed struggle initiated by the KPJ would soon be officially designated the ‘People's Liberation Struggle’, described as a patriotic enterprise against foreign occupation troops and their native auxiliaries, and as a revolutionary undertaking against the forces of domestic and international reaction. In the summer of 1941, as it gradually advanced from sabotage to guerrilla warfare in competition with General Mihailović's Četnik guerrillas who were loyal to the Yugoslav government-in-exile in London, the KPJ called for the liquidation of domestic enemies, in the belief that the Red Army would soon arrive, and that preparations had to be made for a take-over. With several risings, but especially with an upsurge of pro-Allied optimism in Serbia, Russophilia and a reaction against the establishment that had just been defeated helped the KPJ increase its membership to 12,000. The communists' revolutionary sanguine disposition would hold out throughout the year and beyond, in spite of the Comintern telling them that it actually needed the co-operation of all anti-fascist patriots rather than a premature revolution. As military repression turned the popular mood against the communists, both in German-held Serbia and in Italian-held Montenegro, only their ideological projection into the future could keep them in the field.

Nevertheless, the partisans (named after Soviet irregulars), with Tito and the KPJ cadres, had to slip out of Serbia to a remote area of south-eastern Bosnia in the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ (Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, or NDH) where, in January 1942, they set up their headquarters at Foča, restructuring the bands that had been driven out of Serbia and Montenegro. It was there that Tito and his partisans went through their first serious crisis as they shed the illusions that had accompanied the first phase of their struggle.

Serbia and Montenegro had been largely pacified by the end of 1941, but occupation commands realized this would not be so easy in the NDH where Ustaša anti-Serbian terror fanned guerrilla warfare. Worried by the concentration around Foča, which could threaten mines that were important to their war economy and could even spread back to Serbia, through which went important communications, the Germans mounted operations to suppress it. The partisans had to move again, in search of a safer haven in the more variegated countryside of western Bosnia, where the Serbian peasantry had suffered most, and where local partisans had held out against Pavelić's pro-Axis Ustaša forces.

This was when Tito understood that victory and power would not come soon. After more critical warnings from the Comintern, in view of the approaching Anglo-Soviet Treaty of May 1942, the KPJ leadership decided to give up its revolutionary extremism. Meanwhile they had reorganized their militant combatants into ‘proletarian brigades’, as disciplined mobile shock units (which actually contained few proletarians). By June they had disengaged themselves, and set out on their ‘long march’ to the rugged mountainous regions of the NDH where, generally speaking, occupation forces and Ustašas had not been able to eliminate the Serbian insurgents. Thereafter, the revolutionary conflict waged by the communists would gain its own momentum in the civil strife that ravaged partitioned Yugoslavia for the rest of the war. They would benefit from intra-Axis rivalry, and would always surge in the direction of least resistance.

During the summer of 1942, Tito's force of 4,000–5,000 fighters moved westwards along a route that followed the German–Italian demarcation line. In the Serbian pale astride western Bosnia and inner Croatia, not only had partisans held out, but they had gained in prestige among Muslims and Catholic Croats as well as Orthodox Serbs, for they were always on the side of those fighting for their lives. By going there, Tito's proletarian nucleus would overcome the crisis of the KPJ-led movement in the eastern provinces, for the partisans brought hope with them. They were Serbian fighters, but they were also making themselves acceptable to other communities.

That summer, the climate was right for Soviet propaganda to come out in support of the Yugoslav partisans, who now enjoyed several advantages apart from their increased combativeness. Their leadership as well as their intentions were clearly pan-Yugoslav, and going from the Serbian lands in the east to the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ helped to foster the belief that they were not, as the Četniks were, exclusively Serbs, which enabled them to make a start in attracting Croats to the resistance. Axis propaganda also helped the partisans by branding all insurgents ‘communists’. Tito's communications with the Comintern were secret, and it was not known to the outside world that the partisan force had had to flee the consequences of the KPJ's mistakes in some areas, to other areas where options had been reduced to dying or fighting for one's life. The propaganda about the partisans originated to a large extent with the KPJ itself, before it was taken up and adapted in Moscow, to be fed through Comintern channels for Allied and neutral consumption. It gave an enormous boost to their cause, coming as it did when the Allies, anxious to see Yugoslavia both restored and reorganized after the war, were beginning to grant priority to anyone ready to fight.

By taking them out of their Orthodox, Muslim, and Catholic milieux, the KPJ turned the adolescents of the territory it had come to control into members of supranational units, the only ones in the mixed areas whose recruitment was not on an ethnic basis, although political commissars were busy indoctrinating these uprooted peasant youths into another sectarian mould. By the end of the year, they were not territorial units defending their own villages against other militias, but the People's Liberation Army. Tito was its supreme commander, and the original partisans who had come with him from the east formed the cadres of a force that had increased tenfold since June. The meeting of an Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia at Bihac in Western Bosnia, in November, was meant to convey the impression that what was now called the People's Liberation Movement was a broadly-based patriotic grouping rather than an instrument of communist revolution.

The fear of an Allied landing in the Balkans in the spring of 1943 led Hitler to demand another cycle of combined anti-insurgent operations in the NDH. Carried out in January–March, they were a military defeat for Tito, but they did not achieve lasting success, and the partisans' retreat back to the south-east, accompanied by sporadic resistance and much suffering, was presented by their propaganda as a great victory. March 1943 was, nevertheless, the second and the most critical period Tito's movement went through.

The main operative group of some 20,000 combatants under his command, with many more refugees and wounded, was hard-pressed by the increasing tightness of the ring closing in on them. Anxious to free himself in order to destroy Mihailović and the Četniks before the expected British landing, Tito used existing contacts to initiate talks with the German command, and sent high-level delegates to Zagreb. Having stated that their main enemies were the Četniks, whom they denounced as being tolerated by the Italians and linked to the British, they offered to stop harassing Axis forces if the partisans were allowed to return to their homes, or go east to fight the Četniks. The possibility was also envisaged of joint partisan–German action against Anglo-American forces should these land. The consistent line of Tito's high command in early 1943 was to go for a truce with the Axis, followed by a showdown with Mihailović.

The common ground that the Germans in the NDH had with the partisans was their opposition to Mihailović, seen as dangerous in the event of an Allied landing. During the talks, the Germans called a halt to their anti-partisan operations, while Tito issued orders that the struggle against Axis forces be stopped along with sabotage on the Zagreb–Belgrade railway. The truce probably made it easier for the partisans to win a difficult victory over the Četniks who had massed to block their advance across the Neretva valley in Herzegovina, but it also caught Tito off his guard when the talks failed and the Germans resumed their operations, causing heavy losses before the partisans managed to slip back to the relative safety of the uplands of eastern Bosnia.

Hitler had killed the attempt stone dead, but the Comintern was also not pleased when Tito reported, with some economy of truth, that talks had been held for the exchange of prisoners. At the time the USSR was busy demolishing Mihailović's reputation in the west on the grounds of his alleged collaboration, so any leak of what Tito was up to would have been highly embarrassing; and it would not have suited Moscow to give Hitler too much respite in the Balkans while he was trying to recover after Stalingrad.

The partisans still came out on top eventually. Almost destroyed in eastern Yugoslavia in 1941, they were able to surface again in the west by penetrating the desperate struggle of the Serbs to survive the Ustašas' reign of terror. The People's Liberation Movement then developed out of the anarchy of the NDH, as Croats themselves turned away from it. Tito's main mobile force of combatants could be defeated; it always managed to dissolve into the landscape and to regroup, with the help of communist-controlled guerrilla groups throughout the country, of propaganda and, later on, of Allied support.

The situation in Yugoslavia changed dramatically to the partisans' advantage with the collapse of Italy in September 1943. By then the Allies were anxious to engage the Germans on the Yugoslav side of the Adriatic, and had become convinced of the effective superiority of the partisans. Most of those who, in the Italian zone, had been attracted to or neutralized by the Axis, and now wanted to find themselves on the winning side after Italy's surrender in September 1943, threw in their lot with the partisans, who were thus able to recruit and equip (with captured Italian matériel) four divisions of 4,000 men each, and take over much of the coast. A number of Italian troops also joined the partisans and formed the Garibaldi Division.

The Germans soon recovered control of the coast, but at the cost of allowing large areas of Bosnia and of inland Croatia, which had previously been cleared of insurgents, to fall to the partisans again. Having thus recovered, and with Allied help now forthcoming from Italy, the KPJ leadership felt sufficiently strengthened at home and abroad to set up a counter-government. At Jajce in Bosnia, in November 1943, a second session of the Anti-Fascist Council virtually set up a new regime: the exiled monarch and his government were denied any rights, Tito was made marshal and president of a National Committee for the Liberation of Yugoslavia.

He now posed as a statesman, but kept putting off the political settlement the British wanted to make with him, while taking care not to risk losing their military help which he badly needed. ‘England’ remained a bogey, as the partisans were convinced the class enemy there was conspiring to destroy them under the mask of liberation by Allied troops.

By the time the Allies had definitely turned to Tito in the wake of the Teheran conference in November 1943 (see Eureka), German anti-insurgent operations had once again drastically reduced all resistance in Yugoslavia. Tito, whose headquarters had been on the move, was back in western Bosnia, at Drvar, at the beginning of 1944. His movement had grown in the NDH over the winter. The more obvious the coming defeat of the Reich, and the nearer the break-up of the Ustaša state, the greater was the number of Croats who wanted to leave that sinking boat.The People's Liberation Movement offered a way out. Allied support, and the fact that in Croatia the partisans welcomed almost any one who would co-operate with them, caused many people to believe Tito's movement would moderate its com munism.

Making one last effort to clear those territories which they considered to be important of insurgent concentrations, the Germans made a surprise airborne attack on partisan headquarters at Drvar in May 1944. Tito, with his staff, the Allied military missions, and their escort, barely escaped capture, and he lost touch with his forces. Fearing for the co-ordinated control of his movement, the Soviets advised Tito to get out of Yugoslavia to Allied-occupied Bari, in Italy, the HQ of the inter-service Balkan Air Force which was then being formed to support him. He was air-lifted there, then taken by British destroyer to Vis, the only Yugoslav island not to have been retaken by the Germans. It had been turned into a British-protected base through which Allied supplies reached the partisans on the mainland. Large-scale intervention by the western Allies from Italy saved the movement in its third major crisis, but for the first time since he had taken the field two years earlier, Tito was separated from the bulk of his forces.

In order to obtain political, as well as military, recognition from the Allied powers, Tito concluded an agreement that summer with the prime minister of the government-in-exile in which he made a few token temporary concessions. He also went to Italy again, reluctantly, on Soviet advice, to meet Churchill. He could afford some transient concessions, for he already held almost all the cards. Practically, the only serious hurdle left on the KPJ's path to power was Mihailović in Serbia, and Tito turned his energies to conquering that region which was vital to the establishment of a new regime.

In July he began to ask Stalin to help him in the task, complaining that the British were not to be trusted, and eventually requested a meeting to avert the danger of a Serbian-based, western-assisted counter-revolution. Over the summer, operations against Serbia were planned with the Soviet military mission, at the same time as ‘Ratweek’, the British-conceived action to harass the German evacuation from the Balkans through Serbia. This was used by the partisans to push their way against Mihailović's guerrillas, as the Germans proceeded with their orderly retreat. When the Red Army came up to Yugoslavia's eastern border, Tito ‘levanted’ from Vis for his pre-arranged visit to Moscow.

The meeting there resulted in the Soviet decision to provide support with armour and heavy artillery, to arm fourteen partisan divisions, and to help the Bulgars change sides. A joint communiqué gave the impression that the Soviet government had asked Tito's National Committee to allow the Red Army a short cut through Yugoslav territory to Hungary, in exchange for acknowledging the partisans' administration in newly-liberated territories. Tito needed the military help of Soviet troops, and he also needed a Soviet presence so as to be accepted in Serbia. Soviet support duly enabled the partisans to install themselves in the capital earlier than they could have done alone. On 1 November 1944, the impending formation of a united provisional government and of a regency was announced in liberated Belgrade.

After that, and with an army of several hundred thousand well-armed combatants, the KPJ-led People's Liberation Movement really was the only possible solution for the future of Yugoslavia. It could turn westward again to finish off its task of liberating Yugoslavia, and also to increase its territory at the expense of Austria and Italy (including Trieste). On 19 March 1945 the Fourth Yugoslav Army launched its offensive northwards along the coast. Two other Yugoslav Corps (4th and 7th) supported it inland by playing a guerrilla role north of Bihac and Novo Mesto, and the Balkan Air Force gave it logistical and air support, as well as some backing with units of its Land Forces, Adriatic. The partisans were opposed by Croat and German divisions but on 30 April Tito announced that his forces had reached Trieste. However military operations against the Germans would not end until 15 May 1945. Meanwhile, in March, Tito finally formed his provisional government, with 23 communists, two fellow-travellers, and three non-communist politicians who had returned from London, and was granted formal recognition by the Allies. Thereafter these concessions became worthless in the run-up to the general elections for a constituent assembly which would set up a communist regime. Marshal Tito was subsequently prime minister, minister of defence, and supreme commander until 1953, when he was elected to the new office of president of the republic, eventually to become life president.

The occupation provided an ideal situation for the propagation of a radical movement. The partisans fought a revolutionary war in a constantly shifting pattern, and their leadership did so with a political aim. Only as leader of a patriotic resistance could Tito hope to retain the support of his non-communist combatants and followers, but his primary long-term aim was the conquest of power. The concept of ‘national liberation’ was used as an instrument of social revolution and political conquest, in the course of the civil war that raged under a multiple foreign occupation. A physically terrorized, economically deprived, and politically naïve peasantry supplied most of the manpower for that operation.

The communists quickly established an overall unity of strategy, which enabled them to exploit the situation, and practise a variety of tactics, while showing a bold, single, face to the world outside. There was no such unity of purpose among the anti-communists. Tito placed a patriotic movement in the service of world communism, with the object of destroying all forces that opposed the transformation of the war of liberation into a war for the establishment of communist rule. The partisans initially obtained the support of those who had been radicalized by the upheavals of war; thereafter, their successes at home and abroad attracted further support, and they snowballed to victory. The war of the partisans would remain the legitimizing source and inspiration of Tito's regime to his death.

Stevan Pavlowitch

Bibliography

Djilas, M. , Wartime (New York, 1977).
Pavlowitch, S. , Yugoslavia's Great Dictator, Tito—A Reassessment (London, 1992).
Roberts, W. , Tito, Mihailović and the Allies 1941–45 (2nd edn., Durham, NC, 1987).