All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [293]
Only when Hitler rejected any deal with the communists did conflict resume between partisans and occupiers. The subsequent bloodbath radicalised much of the population, and enabled Tito to create a mass movement. His followers eventually gained control of large rural areas. But they lacked strength to take important towns or cities until the Red Army arrived in 1944, and they were as committed as the Chetniks to achieving post-war domination. Thirty-five Axis divisions were deployed in Yugoslavia, but few were first-line troops, and this concentration reflected Hitler’s obsessive fear of an Allied landing in the Balkans as much as the need to secure the country against Tito. The partisans’ military achievements were less significant than London allowed itself to believe. From late 1943 onwards, the Allies began to send Tito weapons in quantities far larger than those supplied to any other European resistance movement. But most were used to suppress the Chetniks and secure the country for Tito in 1944–45, rather than to kill Germans.
The struggle in Yugoslavia, where so many enmities overlapped, assumed a murderous character and complexity, of which Tito’s deputy Milovan Djilas cited an example. ‘Covered with orchards and rising from the confluence of two mountain streams, the still undamaged town of Foca seemed to offer charming and peaceful prospects. But the human devastation inside it was immeasurable and inconceivable,’ he wrote. ‘In the spring of 1941 the Ustaše – among them a good number of Moslem toughs – had killed many Serbs. Then the Chetniks … proceeded to slaughter the Moslems. The Ustaše had selected twelve only sons from prominent Serbian families and killed them. While in the village of Miljevina they had slit the throats of Serbs over a vat, apparently so as to fill it with blood instead of fruit pulp. The Chetniks had slaughtered groups of Moslems whom they tied together on the bridge over the Drina and threw into the river. Many of our people saw groups of corpses floating, caught on some rock or log. Some even recognised their own families. Four hundred Serbs and 3,000 Moslems were reported killed in the region of Foca.’
Hapless townspeople and villagers were obliged to endure the presence of partisans living off the land – which meant off their own meagre produce. They saw their valleys turned into battlefields, witnessed the execution of thousands of real and alleged collaborators by one faction or another, together with wholesale slaughters carried out by the Axis occupiers in reprisal for partisan actions. Hatreds were implacable. Almost every community and family suffered loss. Djilas acknowledged the horror of many local people when the communists avenged themselves – for instance, burning the Chetnik village of Ozrinici: ‘Though quite a few of them took joy in the misfortunes of Ozrinici, and understood the military reasons for our action, the peasants simply couldn’t get it into their heads that the communists could act like the invaders and the Chetniks … Harsh communist counter-measures … made the peasants reticent and double-faced: they sided with whoever came along and tried to wriggle out of any risky commitment.’ Even Djilas’s own aunt Mika reproached him: ‘You are fighting for a just cause, but you are harsh and bloody.’
At every halt on the partisans’ interminable marches, they encountered wretchedness: ‘All the villages in the Sutjeska valley had been destroyed. First the Ustaše burned down the Orthodox villages and then the Chetniks burned the Moslem villages. The only houses and people left were in the neighbouring hills. The devastation was all the more horrifying in that here and there a shaky doorframe, a blackened