THAT was what a Slovenian peasant said to Tito at his headquarters at Foca, an aging man who had suffered a great deal, who had walked three hundred miles to unite his little guerrilla band with the Yugoslav Partisan Army of Liberation. Tito’s answer was to give him arms, ammunition, and food, and send him back with a political instructor who would coordinate the operations of his band with the whole partisan movement. This peasant’s name was Peter Narovich; whether he is alive or dead today, his band operates as part of that Yugoslav Partisan Army which is currently engaging fifteen Nazi divisions in a full scale war. And this peasant is only one of a thousand local Yugoslav leaders who were organized into a brave and effective army by this same Tito.
Who is Tito, this mystery man of the Balkans? Not for decades has there been so romantic, so mysterious a figure. Where is he from? For what does he fight? What is the magic in his name that has united a whole nation—the first Nazi-conquered nation to rise in revolt and liberate the majority of its territory from the invader?
To answer these questions, to tell the full story of Marshal Tito, we must go back to the morning of April 6, 1941. That day was Palm Sunday, and that morning, Yugoslavia was still at peace. In Belgrade, the country’s capital, the church bells rang, calling the people to prayer.
It was a warm and lovely spring day. Yet if you had looked closely at the faces of the people, you would have seen behind the smiles and the calm, a shadow of an impending catastrophe. They went about their duties; they acted as if all was normal—because they were a proud people, and in a way, happy.
But all was not normal. Only a few days before, young officers of the Yugoslav Army had engineered a coup which threw out of the government the pro-Hitler crowd. A nation which had been prepared to collaborate with the hated Nazis, suddenly set its face against them, proclaimed its independence, its freedom, and its sympathy with beleaguered England.
But it was a nation unprepared for war. Though the people were proud and happy at the stand their nation had taken, they knew well enough what faced them. For one thing, Yugoslavia was a small country—fourteen million population. Its army held some of the best fighting men in Europe, but the weapons were out of date; they had only a handful of anti-tank guns, almost no tanks, little artillery, almost no motor vehicles, and a small, obsolete airforce. In addition, the leadership of the army, the older and high-ranking officers, were twenty years behind in their military thinking. Axis propaganda had divided the country; the Quislings and the Fifth Column were already preparing to betray their nation.
So on that Palm Sunday morning, the people of Belgrade knew that they faced disaster. For all of that, they were filled with a curious sense of power and pride. In the churches, their voices rang louder and more manfully than in many years before. And the priests smiled, half-happily, half-sorrowfully, as they gave the people their benediction.
And then, a few hours later, what they had been expecting came; and it came as it had come to Rotterdam, to Madrid, to London, and to Leningrad. It came in the form of wave after wave of Stukas, savagely and murderously smashing Yugoslavia’s most beautiful and largest city to bits. It came against an unprotected people, against women and children who died in the streets that Palm Sunday
Let us say that in Yugoslavia there was this difference. The people chose that way; they knew what was coming. They knew they didn’t have a ghost of a chance. They knew that their army was both brave and unarmed. When their proudly uniformed leaders surrendered at the first opportunity, the people cursed and wept, but fought on. They fought practically with their bare hands. As the panzers raced through their green valleys, they fought them with rifle and pistol, as futilely as the Poles had fought.
Nothing stopped the German advance. No minefields had been laid. The few anti-tank guns would not work. Artillery ammunition was defective. The fifth column had done its work thoroughly and effectively, and the German armies cut through the country like cheese.
In ten days, it was over. In ten days over one hundred of the one hundred and thirty odd generals of the Yugoslav Army had surrendered. In ten days, the chief of staff and the minister of war signed an order of capitulation. The government bolted for what planes were left, in a wild scramble to get out of the country. The people wept and cursed and fought on.
But organized resistance was over. Peasants came back to their farms, dug holes, wrapped their rifles in oily rags, and hid them. Divisions, cut to pieces, formed into small bands, and retreated into the woods. But nothing was coordinated, and no real resistance was left. For the moment, Yugoslavia was conquered. The world knew that yet another country, stunned, broken and bleeding, had surrendered to Hitler.
And then, where the fire had been so thoroughly extinguished, a small flame flickered up. Two weeks after the country had surrendered, in the capital, Belgrade, a poster appeared, plastered on a wall in the central square. The poster said:
GERMANS!
WE GIVE YOU SOLEMN
WARNING
LEAVE YUGOSLAVIA
DEATH TO ALL FASCISTS!
LIBERTY TO THE PEOPLE!
That was the poster, proud, defiant, almost pathetic, yet within an hour every Yugoslav in the city knew about it. They whispered the slogan to one another on the street, in the stores, in the shops, in the factories. They shouted it in their homes. It gave them courage just to hear it—just to repeat it. Men and women prayed and wept and laughed—for the first time in weeks.
And that same day, a messenger went into the mountains, contacted the first of the little bands of soldiers who had escaped after the surrender, and said:
“I bring you greetings from the People’s Liberation Front, and from our commander, Tito!”
Tito! The name had a romantic and mysterious ring to it; it was the sort of name Yugoslavs liked. It was unafraid. It almost gave a man strength just to say the name—Tito!