Eastern Approaches (58 page)

After we had gone some way, we met a Partisan riding hard in the direction from which we had come. We asked him if he knew what was happening. He said that he had come from a nearby outpost and was on his way to report. The White Russians had blown up their ammunition dump and set fire to their huts and were now evacuating the position.

It was only gradually that the full significance of what we had seen dawned on us. At the places where we stopped to rest, scraps of information reached us, all pointing to one conclusion, and, later, when we set up our aerial and made contact with Bari and with other parts of Jugoslavia, we received still more definite information to the same effect. There could no longer be any doubt about it. The German withdrawal had begun. By a piece of immense good fortune our timing for
RATWEEK
had, it seemed, been perfect. The knowledge filled us with a sense of agreeable anticipation.

O
UR
first day’s march brought us to Bojnik, where I had been landed a week earlier, and the following evening we reached the village where the Commander of the 24th Partisan Division, the formation responsible for the attack on the railway in the Leskovac area, had set up his Headquarters. The Partisan Divisional Staff and Johnny Tregida, my liaison officer with the 24th Division, were living in a rambling white farmhouse opposite the little Orthodox church.

The place was in an uproar. A batch of Bulgar prisoners had just been brought in and were being herded into the courtyard. Dour, swarthy, stocky little men, in dark grey uniforms and German-type steel helmets, they sat or lay about on the ground glumly while the Partisans sorted out the officers from the other ranks. The Bulgar rank and file, the Divisional Commander explained, could sometimes be prevailed upon to join the Partisans, but the officers were for the most part hardened ‘fascists’. Until recently they had taken but few Bulgar prisoners; the Bulgars had fought with a determination and a brutality equal to that of the Germans. Now they no longer showed quite the same reluctance to surrender. I recalled what the German colonel had told us about the Bulgars at Koča’s Headquarters and, remembering that in the First World War Bulgaria had been the first of Germany’s allies to crack, wondered whether something of the kind might not be happening now.

We had our evening meal that night in the Partisan commander’s mess, a merry gathering which included two Orthodox priests with long hair and beards who seemed to have attached themselves to the Division as chaplains. The life and soul of the party was Brko (or ‘Whiskers’) the Chief of Staff, a cheerful character with sandy hair and
a flowing moustache in the best Serbian style. With him we discussed our future movements. He would, he said, take us himself to the Headquarters of the Brigade who were carrying out the main attack on the line north of Leskovac. If we started next morning we should just arrive in time.

It was hot down in the plain,’ and, not relishing the idea of a night indoors in a crowded room, I unrolled my sleeping-bag outside in the yard. But there I was little better off: people stumbled over me; mosquitoes attacked me, while the Bulgars, anxious no doubt as to their prospects of survival, kept up a constant monotonous mumbling.

Next morning we made an early start, though, like most Partisan starts, not quite as early as it was intended to be. Horses had been provided and we set out in fine style. The Chief of Staff’s horse, a rather showy chestnut, was called Draža; he said that he had captured it from the Četniks and that it was called after General Mihajlović. The whole subject of Četniks did not seem to be taken quite so seriously here as in Bosnia. John’s horse and mine had been captured from the Germans.

The route we followed was a roundabout one, designed to avoid enemy concentrations and to make the best use of the plentiful cover provided by the undulating, partly wooded country which lay between us and the railway. At midday we rested under the trees on what might have been an English village green, a source of interest and amusement to a group of tow-haired village children. We did not take very seriously the startling stories of German armoured columns in the immediate neighbourhood with which their parents regaled us.

A little before nightfall, after riding all the afternoon through rolling, park-like country, we came to the tiny hamlet where the Brigade Commander had established himself in preparation for his attack on the line. From the rising ground on which it was situated, the town of Leskovac could be seen, spread out in the valley below, at a distance of not more than a mile or two from where we were. A mile away to the south, fighting was in progress for the possession of a ridge, overlooking our present position, which the Partisans had captured and which the enemy were now seeking to win back. The issue was still in doubt and, as we entered the village, the noise of machine
guns and mortars could be heard, first nearer and then further away. Spasmodically, the sounds of firing continued to reach us during the night.

Next day, the first day of
RATWEEK
, dawned bright and fine. The battle of the night before was over. The enemy had withdrawn, leaving the Partisans in possession of the ridge, and everything was now quiet. The attack on the railway was scheduled for that night. The Partisans were to attack two points to the north and south of Leskovac, blowing up bridges and demolishing as much of the permanent way as possible. Leskovac itself, the seat of a strong German garrison, including, it was rumoured; a good deal of armour, was to be left to the Allied air forces. Apart from the actual damage which an air attack would do to transport and installations, it would, it was hoped, shake the morale of the mixed German and quisling garrison and help to soften them up in preparation for the Partisan operations against the railway that night.

As we sat at breakfast, Sergeant Campbell came running down from the hillside where he had set up his wireless, with a most immediate signal. It was from Bill Elliot. Air reconnaissance, he said, confirmed the presence of a strong concentration of armour and motor transport of all kinds in Leskovac, and it had accordingly been decided to turn the heavy bombers on to it. A force of fifty Fortresses would attack it at eleven-thirty.

We had not expected anything on this scale. It seemed rather like taking a sledge-hammer to crack a walnut. Up to now the ‘Heavies’ had not been so easy to come by, being needed for the really big targets in Austria and northern Italy. But evidently
RATWEEK
was going to be done in style as far as the Allied air forces were concerned.

As the appointed hour approached, we gathered in a little group on the hillside and stood waiting. Seeing that we were watching for something to happen, some peasant women and an old man or two from the village came and joined us, looking out across the valley. A mile or two away we could see the white houses of Leskovac spread out in the warm autumn sunshine. In the trees the birds twittered. From a pond nearby came the occasional croak of a bull-frog. The cornfield buzzed with the hum of innumerable insects. It would
have been hard to conceive of a more tranquil scene. Standing there waiting, I tried to think of the German garrison and tank-crews, and not of the population of small farmers, shopkeepers and railway workers, of the old people, the women and children, who at this moment would be going about their everyday business in the streets.

Eleven-twenty came, and eleven-twenty-five. Still there was nothing. The peasants grew tired of waiting and started to drift away. At eleven-thirty the Chief of Staff consulted the immense turnip of a watch which he wore strapped to his wrist and looked at me inquiringly. I began to wonder whether there had not perhaps been a technical hitch.

Then, almost before we could take it in, it had happened. There was a noise of engines, at first barely audible, then rapidly growing to a roar, and looking up, we saw at a great height row upon row of bombers steadfastly following their appointed course, their polished wings gleaming in the sunlight. The peasants started counting them: six, ten, twenty, thirty, they had never seen so many. Already the Fortresses were over their target — were past it — when, as we watched, the whole of Leskovac seemed to rise bodily into the air in a tornado of dust and smoke and debris, and a great rending noise fell on our ears. When we looked at the sky again, the Forts, still relentlessly following their course, were mere silvery dots in the distance. In a few seconds the noise of their engines had faded and everything round us was quiet again, the silence only broken by the wailing of one of the women; she had, they said, relations in the town. What was left of Leskovac lay enveloped in a pall of smoke; several buildings seemed to be burning fiercely. Even the Partisans seemed subdued.

The rest of that day passed in making a general reconnaissance in preparation for the night’s activities. Nothing was stirring in the plain, and John and I walked down into the valley to a village just outside the town. We found it in an uproar, full of people who had just come out of Leskovac. The civilian casualties had been heavy; but the raid, it seemed, had achieved its object, for there had been direct hits on several buildings occupied by Germans, they had lost
much of their transport and armour, and the morale of the garrison had reached a low ebb, particularly as far as the non-German portion of it was concerned. Many of the Četniks, employed on guard duties, were already on their way out to join the Partisans.

This augured well for the operations that evening and we now set out, while it was still light, to visit the Partisan positions nearest the railway, from which the main attack north of Leskovac would be launched.

We approached the line by a circuitous route, which brought us to the back of a little ridge immediately overlooking the railway. There we left our horses and climbed upwards through a field of Indian corn, which reached well above our heads and provided excellent cover. On top of the ridge we found Partisan outposts established. Crouching beside them, we looked down on the railway a few hundred yards away. An officer gave us some idea of the enemy defences. These consisted of concrete pill-boxes and occasional patrols up and down the line. Suddenly, a machine gun from one of the pill-boxes opened up at an unseen target, and soon there was an answering chatter of automatic weapons all along the line. It looked as though the enemy were expecting trouble. As we mounted our horses and rode off, first one sniper’s bullet and then another went pinging and whining past our heads.

It was to a nearby point low down on the face of the ridge and quite close to the railway that we returned that night after dark. A mile or two away to the south, the sky was lit up by the fires that were still burning in Leskovac. Every now and then a great tongue of flame would go leaping up into the night sky as the blaze got a firmer hold on the little town.

Round us, it was dark and quiet. We took up our position at the foot of the ridge and waited. The flat ground below the ridge was marshy and a mist was rising from it. It was cold waiting. I watched the flames leaping and flickering over the burning town and the thin white swirls of mist drifting up from the marshy ground. As I stood there, it occurred to me that all over Jugoslavia other little parties were at this time attacking or waiting to attack.

Then, suddenly, firing broke out at several places along the line, and
soon on both sides of us bright fountains of tracer bullets were spurting from a dozen different points, while answering fire flew back to meet them. Here and there, the flash and thud of a mortar, breaking in on the chatter of the machine guns, showed where the Partisans were bestowing special attention on a pill-box. The attack had begun.

Under cover of it, the Partisans carrying the loads of explosive now made their way down to the line and laid their charges. Presently they touched them off, and, for a moment, the roar of one explosion after another drowned the lesser sounds of battle. The charges had been laid under a number of small bridges and culverts at intervals along the line. Now, to round off their task, the Partisans set to work tearing up long stretches of the permanent way. Stacked in heaps, the sleepers were set alight and blazed merrily. Someone had found a goods-wagon in a siding, and this too was set on fire and sent flaming down the track towards Leskovac. It would be some time before that particular stretch of the Belgrade-Salonika railway was again open to traffic. The enemy forces in Greece, if they were to get out at all, would have to get out by road or by sea, a hazardous proceeding in either event. If everywhere else the Partisans had done their job as thoroughly as here,
RATWEEK
would have got off to a good start.

From some of the pill-boxes there still came an intermittent trickle of tracer, but several had already been silenced and it was clear that the defence was losing heart. Looking over my shoulder as we made our way back up the ridge before dawn, the last thing I saw was a ring of triumphant Partisans who, with linked hands, were dancing a Serbian
kolo
round one of the fires that was blazing near the line, their black figures outlined against the flames like demons in hell.

For the next day or two we remained in the region of Leskovac, collecting information and passing it back to Balkan Air Force. The Partisan attack on the line south of Leskovac had also been successful and so had our air attacks on a couple of bridges. From Bari and from my officers all over Jugoslavia reports kept coming in of operations successfully carried out both by the Allied air forces and by the Partisans. From Slovenia came news of another important viaduct demolished: the Litija bridge on the Ljubljana-Zagreb railway, a key point on the enemy’s line of retreat. Here the Americans had given
invaluable help. United States Army Air Force Mustangs had ‘softened up’ the target while Jimmy Goodwin, a hefty young American engineer officer who had been attached to us, had played a leading part in the Partisans’ final assault on the ancient castle guarding the bridge — a part for which he was later awarded the Military Cross.

At first the enemy seemed stunned by the suddenness and violence of the onslaught. Then came the inevitable reaction. There was a counter-attack and for some days we were kept more or less constantly on the move.

In the skirmishing which ensued the neighbouring town of Lebane fell into the hands of the Partisans and we attended an impromptu political meeting held on the occasion of its liberation. The principal speaker was a gaunt, rather sad-looking man, suffering from ringworm and wearing steel-rimmed spectacles. This was Stambolić, who up to the time of Koča’s arrival had been Commander of all the Partisans in Serbia.

In his speech he referred in flattering terms to Kara Djordje, the swineherd who had founded the reigning dynasty and who had been born in a village a few miles away. This was cheered to the echo by everyone, including the numerous leading Communists present. As in Russia, even royal, or semi-royal personages could be allowed to enjoy a certain amount of popularity, provided they had lived long enough ago and had been violent enough in their methods.