Free The Incredible Tito: Man of the Hour by Howard Fast Page B

want to. And he told me you fight for that. I fight for that too. My people fight for that. If that makes a Communist, then I am as much a Communist as Tito. I went back to my people and spoke to them—and they sent me to you, so that we could join you—”

YUGOSLAVIA’S BITTER SURRENDER
    T HAT 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