“ANNIHILATED” PARTISANS SLAUGHTER NAZIS

IT is almost impossible to describe the condition of Yugoslavia in that summer of 1943. Three times battling armies had fought their way up and across the breadth of the land. A road of graves marked where the armies had marched and fought. Half of the country lay desolate, villages abandoned, burned to the ground, leveled by dive bombers. Thousands of Yugoslavs had been murdered by the Germans and Italians—how many thousands no one knew. Murder had become the Fascist sport.

On the other hand, during this past summer a wave of hope and joy swept through the country. The whole center of the land had been liberated. A great German and Italian army had been decisively defeated. A wave of freedom touched South-Slavs everywhere in the Balkans.

The first evidence of this was a new outbreak of sabotage. Everywhere in Yugoslavia, men and women and even children rose against the invader. The Germans and Italians turned the cities they still held into armed fortresses, in some cases surrounding them with a wall of barbed wire. German trains were derailed, blown up. When the Germans tried defensive methods, such as preceding their trains with a string of sand-carrying gondolas, the Partisans set relays of mines.

And during this time, Partisan strength increased immensely. Whole brigades deserted from Mikhailovich’s waning army. Recruits poured in by the hundreds, from the hills, from the cities, from the woods. German and Italian prisoners joined forces with the Partisans, to fight Fascism. German anti-Nazis, escaping across the Austrian frontier, offered to fight in Partisan ranks against Hitlerism. A whole company was formed of German prisoners, and two other companies were formed by Austrian anti-Nazis. While British and American newspapers told their readers that Mikhailovich’s army numbered 250,000 men, it had actually shrunk to less than ten thousand. Radio Berlin screamed to the world that the Yugoslav Partisans had been annihilated, while the Partisans, holding the whole of Bosnia, went about the work of reconstruction.