Читать книгу Raiding Support Regiment - Dr. G. H. Bennet - Страница 17
ОглавлениеChapter VI
Vis
During the course of the day long voyage, the information was revealed that the ‘other end’ was a Yugoslav island off the coast of Dalmatia called Vis8, which was occupied by a small garrison of Tito’s Partisans.9 It was the only island – perhaps the only populated part of Yugoslavia – not already held by the Germans.10 During the latter part of 1943 the enemy had extended its total mainland occupation of Yugoslavia, invading and taking possession of the other islands in the Dalmatian group, strengthening control of the Adriatic supply seaways and denying the Allies the use of the islands as platforms for any optimistic mainland invasion aspirations of their own.
As the briefing unfolded that day, my zest for adventure began to be overtaken with qualms of repeating recent Mediterranean military history. If, as seemed likely, the enemy could have taken Vis as easily as he had occupied Brac, Korcula, Solta, Hvar, Mljet and the other Dalmatian islands, was he not waiting for the Allies to repeat the folly of Crete, Kos and Leros before swamping the island with his superior military might, in order to collect prizes from the garrison of a poorly supplied Yugoslav brigade of resistance fighters, reinforced with British troops and their valuable equipment? The Germans could actually see Vis from their other island bases and had mainland airfields a mere ten minutes flight away: our logistical links were half a days sailing away in Italy, through seaways where the relative strength of naval power was finely balanced.
The remnants of No. 2 Commando, licking their wounds after a mauling at Anzio, were the first integral British Army unit to arrive on the island, among a plethora of advance parties from Commando and anti-aircraft units, with a mission to defend the islands at all costs. ‘C’ Battery’s hurried presence in its anti-aircraft role reinforced my niggling misgivings. Our knowledge of the significance of the operation was scant, but it would be unfair to attach blame or shame to any party for that. It had taken several courageous, diligent, undercover British military missions, parachuted and then secreted deep into mainland occupied Yugoslavia from 1941 to 1944, for the Army to be sufficiently convinced of the situation to enable them to report to the Prime Minister. We were heading to the assistance of the Yugoslav Partisans, whose leader was a mysterious character called Tito. Partisans to us then meant any resistance fighters – guerrillas in fact. But in Yugoslavia the name ‘Partisans’ served to distinguish Tito’s devoutly Communist band of fanatical fighters from those other Slav opponents of German occupation who were imbued with strong Royalist leanings. Their leader, an ex-regular army officer of the pre-war Yugoslav monarchy, General Draze Mihajlovic, had chosen the name ‘Chetniks’ for his band of followers.
It is probably overly simplistic to state that both factions, whilst seeming to operate from the start with a single common objective, were violently opposed to each other. The British military missions, paradoxically not wholly manned by true military types but liberally sprinkled with men of the Special Operations Executive, had revealed that Partisan/Chetnik differences were not limited to ideology. Both factions were jockeying for position after the war by destroying each other in the second battle (their civil war) before the first battle (for freedom) had been won by the ejection of Nazi occupiers. Pledged to support Yugoslavia, Britain initially infiltrated token material consignments of arms and supplies by nocturnal air and sea-drops to the royalist Chetniks. It was doubts about the effectiveness of their use against the common enemy that had prompted the formation of several British military missions. The missions’ reports justified Churchill’s anxiety. Mihajlovic represented no effective resistance to the German occupiers with whom he shared a mutual antipathy towards Communism. Indeed, frequent instances of collaboration with the enemy were revealed as the Chetniks craftily conserved their resources for the ultimate internal fight for power.
Another dormant, simmering and opportunistic faction of Yugoslavian politics had seized upon Hitler’s invasion as a heaven-sent opportunity towards furtherance of its claims for the separation of Croatia from the state of the South Slavs. As fascist as Hitler or Mussolini, their leader Ante Pavelic had enjoyed for years the protection and patronage of Mussolini within Italy’s frontier, awaiting stroke of good fortune such as Hitler’s invasion had presented. Always reluctant members of the collection of South Slav states which constituted Yugoslavia after the First World War, these radical Croats known as the Ustasi lost no time in pledging support to the invaders, and in currying favour by perpetrating atrocities and injustices against Serbians, in particular, to a degree which made Hitler’s men seem almost angelic.
We knew nothing of all this when LCI 260 stealthily negotiated the last few miles of the voyage, through black Adriatic waters to moor at the sheltered jetty of Komiza – the western port of Vis island – at 23:00 on 21 February 1944. Neither did we know that within 12 hours, Winston Churchill would announce to Parliament that future assistance by the Allies to Yugoslavia would be directed wholly to Tito’s Partisans. It was a purely military decision: to hell with the post-war political implications. If the Partisans were killing Germans, they were the ones worthy of support. To have been otherwise influenced by fears of post-war communism would have made a mockery and a nonsense of Western reliance on, encouragement for and support to the Soviet Union.
My first glimpse of the Partisans, in the minimal amount of artificial light necessarily risked to facilitate unloading the LCI, made me glad they were on our side, and even more glad that they seemed to know that we were on theirs. For a start, they all appeared to be huge, bulkily framed individuals who strangely belied the deprivations of three years of occupation. Their peculiar assortment of uniforms (mostly acquired from captured or killed Italians and Germans), their purposeful demeanour and conspicuous, bristling armoury of pistols, grenades, knives and ammunition, presented a fearsome aspect reminiscent of Hollywood’s version of banditry in the Mexican mountains. But there was a major difference: they were not all male. In our low lit surroundings, only voices distinguished male from female. A surprising revelation!
Only the briefest of nodded instructions were possible as British Navy officers nervously indicated that a rapid discharge of our cargo of armaments and supplies would help their chances of sailing clear of enemy patrolled waters, before daylight’s dawning exposed them in their dash back to the relative safety of the eastern Italian coastline. There was no doubt about our being welcome, however. The Partisans radiated a ready friendship and respect, which required no knowledge of each other’s language for its communication. They set about unloading the ship with a frenzy and energy which was breathtaking, and which soon had the LCI’s crew smiling again and the rest of us wondering and worrying about how we would have managed without Partisan help. In a fraction of the time allowed for the off-loading operation, the jetty was littered with our gear and the vessel was quietly chugging its relieved way into the darkness, leaving us with a strange feeling of being abandoned. Our silent, valedictory waves to the crew and their reciprocation seemed to imply a mutual recognition – though I suspect an exaggeration – of each other’s danger.
Our officers, having been briefed by advance-party colleagues and a Partisan interpreter, had been able to tell us that we were to spend the rest of the night in a schoolroom in Komiza. Morning, we learned, would signal our move over the nearby mountain range onto the island’s central plains which we were to defend. Each man loaded up with as much equipment as he could possibly carry – in addition to his own not inconsiderable personal kit and small arms – and set off in a silent, single-column stagger to follow the Partisan guide, who incidentally carried more than any of us with apparent ease. Our instructions were to maintain silent, visual contact with the man ahead of us so as to avoid losing our way in the veritable maze of haphazard housing. This was a positive discouragement to dallying so that, loaded as we were, not even the cold February night air could neutralise the clinging, sticky sweat of our heavily burdened hike.
The reason for silence escapes me now as much as it did then, because I remember experiencing one of those out-of-place giggling fits born of musical comedy male voice choruses (typical of The Pirates of Penzance or Maid of the Mountains) as fitting the occasion more appropriately. After a few minutes of what seemed like mountaineering, there was no mistaking a bustling, whispering hubbub coming from the rear of the column. I was glad when it caught up with me: even more so at being softly told by one of our officers to halt and rest my load. He passed me and continued up the hill into the night accompanied by a voluble, agitated but unintelligible Partisan who disappeared with him into the alien darkness. After what could only have been a couple of minutes they returned – leading the column down the hill. “Some bloody fool took the wrong turning and was leading us out of town,” came the explanation. Actually, the ‘bloody fool’ was Topper Brown. With his head down he had followed on the heels of a crossing Partisan who was obviously going about his own business and had thus innocently diverted us away from the schoolroom, where puzzled waiting Partisans could only ponder at how a supposedly efficient troop of elite British military forces could find itself childishly lost so soon after its arrival on their tiny outpost of an uncomplicated island. Topper was never quite allowed to live it down.
It was 02:00 before we simmered down, snugly enveloped in our lush sleeping bags on the congested classroom floor, but slumber did not come easily. Poster pictures of Tito and Stalin glared down from every wall, heightening the sense of adventure and stimulating conversation about the unusual nature of our mission. Morning could not come soon enough. Curiosity could only be satisfied with daylight’s revelations. We washed, shaved and breakfasted (on ‘compo’ rations) under the intense gaze of admiring Partisans who jabbered with unintelligible but obvious approval at our arms and equipment and, I suspect, at our mere presence among them. I wondered if they had slept at all. We, in turn, wanted to see their island and, barely able to contain our curiosity, we hastened out individually into the alleyways of Komiza.
There was to be no hanging around for us. I cannot remember how our weaponry and stores were transported to our destination, four or five miles away over the hills and onto the island’s central plain, but we marched on the road. The island’s roads were then little more than dusty tracks, which for the first mile of steep ascent out of Komiza were mere ledges cut out of the rocky hillsides in a series of blind bends devoid of any edge marking or safety barriers. In most places it proved difficult for jeeps to pass in safety. The heavier vehicles, which were to arrive later on the island, created more fear from the likelihood of a precipice-dive ending than the threats of a German invasion. Tracks, which had been good enough for peaceful islanders for hundreds of years, had immediately become dangerously inadequate – or certainly were to do so within a few weeks of the Allied garrison’s consolidation.
It was an exhausting climb, justifying the abandoning of any pretence at orderly marching until the seemingly scooped-out and levelled plateau of cultivated vines had been reached. Even then, our officers had problems in restoring discipline among the moaners, who seemed to imagine that troop-carrying vehicles should have been miraculously produced for our transportation. Aware of our village destination, our leaders were soon able to encourage us to renewed effort by identifying it from their maps. Once it was within sight, the village of Podselje became an easily attainable goal to surprisingly revived, swinging, singing marchers.
With the flash of the magic wand, which in wartime always seemed to arrange these things, billets were found for the near forty of us. Where the displaced occupants of the dwellings had been moved to I never knew. The contours of the hillside arranged our house of three levels to have its entrance on the middle floor, directly from the lane that gave access to the village. The lower floor was a storage place that housed everything necessary for the making and storing of wine. Its double-door garage-type access (which I never saw unlocked) would have opened onto the next lower lane. Ours was the last house of the village on the western side, a fact which contrived to help the Partisans decide that the levelled area just outside the house’s entrance door would be our common meeting place for evening vino-drinking, singing and dancing sessions.
But on that first day of such accord we also had to be reminded why we were there. Gun sites were decided upon, resited and changed again, so that most of the day was spent abortively in roughly levelling areas for our Browning machinegun, its pedestal and ammunition in readiness for the imminent action. News of German aircraft, shipping and troops assembling on the mainland had given every indication of an early attack on Vis. Sited at staggered levels on the hillside, our six guns enjoyed uninterrupted coverage of the whole central plain of the island, most of which was within effective range of the weapons. It meant that from that moment on, each gun would never be unmanned. This presented little difficulty, inconvenience or acrimony during daylight hours, but for the twelve-hour night shift two men had to forsake the relative comfort of their billets and occupy the gun-site in wakeful alertness on a two-hours-on, two-hours-off basis.
There began an arduous era of vigilance which guaranteed that insomnia was never likely to be a problem to contend with during our stay on Vis. I put Charlie and Kirky on for the first night and spent the hours after midnight wishing I had put myself on, as I listened to torrential rain tippling down. It took very little imagination to picture their helpless exposure on that cold, unprotected site on the hillside and to appreciate the absurdity of either of them even unrolling his sleeping bag. Sleep was an impossibility.
I knew that their misery would have been completed by the awful change in the weather coming on top of their envy at easily hearing the sounds of revelry emanating from ourselves and our Partisan hosts, who had been determined to introduce us without delay to the warmth and fervour of their patriotic songs and dances and to their mysteriously unlimited supply of the island’s vino. It was a memorable night. Certainly, communication was difficult but the early evening had yielded a commissar character called Srdan Serdar whose better than passable English appointed him henceforth as interpreter, counsellor and friend. The nearest our language could approach to the pronunciation of his Christian name was Sirjon, by which he was thereafter known.
Sirjon was something of an enigma. Whilst preaching Communism for all he was worth, he paraded an aloofness of suave superiority over his comarades which stamped ‘class’ over his every gesture. Snobbery might even be near the truth. Probably in his late twenties, Sirjon’s handsome Slav features were enhanced by vanity expressed in a sartorial elegance so un-guerilla like as to suggest the very privilege which Communism’s levelling was held to reject. He wore an immaculate Italian officer’s uniform and resplendent, glistening boots. Despite the slightly niggling nausea that his presence induced, Sirjon was our willing and helpful source of information and our introduction to local customs and to his Partisan colleagues. Suggestions that he was a plant among us were probably true, but I saw nothing sinister in that: life without him at Podselje would have been much less rewarding.
The mixture of ethnic origin and age range, and the high proportion of females that comprised the Partisans with whom we were linked, combined to produce initial surprise among us at the heterogeneous assortment that our new friends obviously were. It shouldn’t have done. Where whole communities had been ejected from their own mainland or island homes, grateful to be alive and united in passionate resolve to destroy the enemy responsible for their dilemma, niceties of recruitment would have been absurd. Capacity to contribute towards the struggle was a matter ultimately influenced in any event by the will to survive. Women could fire a sten gun or throw a grenade as well as most men could; girls and boys could carry messages; old men could cook or perform a hundred and one other supportive tasks. This army was, in truth, a mobile fighting community which could not afford passengers. It added to the admirable family feeling which attended that first welcoming gathering at Podselje.
Their singing, imbued with passion and executed with an obviously inherent feel for harmony and unselfconscious desire for performance, is a memory I shall retain until I die. Sirjon readily complied with my request for the phonetic translation of the words of our own favourites among their songs. Despite our relative vocal inadequacy, within days we were singing ‘Partisani Nasa’, ‘Dalmatinsca’, ‘Domovina’ and others with such proprietary pride as to make our mock marching – exaggerated left-foot stamp – flatteringly compulsive.
Life on Vis was every bit as unusual as one would have expected it to be. The only life-giving properties that the island possessed were grapes, wine and water. The latter was to run out first. Every other basic item of supply – food, clothing, equipment, ammunition, fuel and transport – had to be supplied by sea at night from Italy, by courtesy and courage of the Royal Navy. Similarly, the luxuries of life like mail and my hopes of a NAAFI ration of chocolate, non-vino booze or cigarettes, relied upon the Navy’s availability and capacity, as well as the caring interest and administrative capabilities of our base-wallah’s to supply us from Bari. Not unnaturally, though probably unfairly, we usually felt that those at base were neither caring nor capable. Such cynicism was not without some justification. When the decision to supply the Partisans began to be implemented, a few anomalies arose from a strange application of priorities. Whilst we, ostensibly on operations, were fed on ‘compo’ rations or operational hard tack, the Partisans were to receive fresh food wherever possible. There was one particularly galling example of this absurdity: their supplies of flour yielded appetising bread from the island’s bakery at Vis Town. It cost us cigarettes (when available) to barter for loaves with the Partisans.
It was the intermingled presence of females in the Partisan army that posed the most questions. No sexual segregation? It suggested all manner of problems, but Sirjon’s explanation of Tito’s decreed death penalty for both parties for any breach of his strict rules of chastity whilst the enemy was still on Yugoslav soil had sufficient ring of shotgun deterrent about it to make it appear enforceable. Pregnant soldiers were immobile and incapacitated soldiers for a while: babies meant more mouths to feed from already very limited resources. In such highly emotional circumstances temptation must have been difficult to resist, but I learned of few breaches of the rules and certainly did not hear of any executions for the offence.
The immediate practical priority for us was the construction of some protection for the gun and crew from enemy attack, and from the then hostile winter elements. The only building materials available were limestone rocks, dislodged for the planting of vines and the earth-retaining terrace walls built to contain them. Our early pathetic efforts at using them for the construction of dugouts at first puzzled, then amused our Partisan friends. When the consensus seemed to be that we were trying to build a minature ‘koocha’ (house), we were pushed aside in their competitive desire to take over the task. In no time at all the guns were enclosed to an adequate level, and adjacent two-man sleeping hovels were constructed and roofed. They were palaces when compared with those first few nights of total exposure. Camouflage nets concealed the whole from the cameras of enemy observation planes, or so we hoped.
If my diary at this stage enthused about my good fortune in the quality and compatibility of my gun crew, it spares little in self reproach for my consumption of alcohol. Free availability of excellent vino would be my main grounds of mitigation, but self-condemnation at my abuse leaves no doubt about my guilty conscience at the time: I must stop this drinking. These Partisans are great folk but they won’t take any ‘no thank you’. I might add in defence that I drank no more than the rest of us – and certainly much less than did the hardened Partisans – but it was an era of unprecedented imbibing which I appear to have wanted recorded.
When the mail started to catch up with us after a week on Vis, a whole new enthusiasm pervaded the venture despite the frustration of the obvious restrictions which influenced the newsworthiness of our replies. There we were in the most intriguing situation of our war – something to write about at last – but it was wholly forbidden to drop even the remotest hint of our whereabouts! Even the address allocated to us for use by our correspondents (Raiding Forces, advance HQ, Force 133) conveyed nothing. For many months our correspondence merely confirmed our existence, with trite and boring repetition padding out the lines.
The population of Podselje was further swollen at the beginning of March with the arrival of a detachment of 43 Royal Marine Commando, which by its very presence served to dilute the attention which we had received from the Partisans. It did not dilute the vino, but helped to disperse the pressure to consume it. More importantly, it demonstrated the build-up of Allied troops on the island which then totalled two Commando units, a Royal Artillery Light Anti-Aircraft Battery (No. 101), a light Field Ambulance Detachment (No. 151) with a surgical team, a detachment of No. 10 Commando (Serbo-Croat speaking) and a detachment of an American Special Operations Group. Tension began to grow in direct ratio to some reliable reports of German troop concentrations on the mainland, so that practical training had an urgent sense of purpose about it. The more we fired the Browning the more we liked it: the more too that the crew proudly absorbed the praise for its handling. Guard duties became less of a bore or chore when a genuine turnout was anticipated. Only the incessant rain, I felt sure, was keeping the enemy from trying a landing, so that when an island-wide alarm was sounded on the calm night of 14/15 March each of us was pumping his personal reserves of adrenaline ready for action. The Germans didn’t come.
However, whispers had been circulating. The talk was of a Commando reconnaissance party having landed on one of the German-held islands with a raid in prospect. The force that landed on the island of Solta at around midnight on 18/19 March from two LCIs, certainly arrived unnoticed by the German occupiers. Indeed, the ease with which most nocturnal landings could be effected on any of the Dalmatian islands was to become a feature of the series of raids that followed. Great credit for this is due to the co-operation of the Yugoslav villagers. It would have taken divisions of troops to have effectively patrolled those hundreds of miles of coastlines, of which back-of-the-hand knowledge was understandably reserved to the Yugoslav population of those isles. That population became the eyes and ears of the Partisan forces. Nevertheless, the Germans on the islands initially displayed a military naïvety, which suggested that when Himmler was boasting to the world of his knowledge of the strength of the Allied force on Vis (on 11 March 1944) he must have forgotten to tell his local troops. Perhaps it was imagined that we were there for defence only. On Solta, the attackers ought to have been expected.
The reconnaissance party of some few days earlier had produced an exemplary dossier of information, but it had run into a German patrol and had had to leave behind one of its officers, as a wounded prisoner in possession of copious notes and diagrams of nought but military significance. Yet after Colonel Jack Churchill led ashore 180 or so of his No. 2 Commando, together with a similar number of men of the US Special Operations Group who were supported by 47mm guns, medium machine guns and mortars manned by men of the 101st Anti-Aircraft Battery and 43rd Marine Commando, Heavy Weapons Group, they were able to disembark, cross the island and settle into agreed positions around the German-garrisoned village of Grohote without detection. The initial attack, just after dawn, proved to be a total surprise to the enemy whose retaliation was slow and seemingly half-hearted. Their reaction to a loudhailer call to them to surrender to British forces was, however, equally half-hearted, despite the noisily proclaimed threat of an imminent raid on the village by the Royal Air Force from bases in Italy. Perhaps it was a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but when 36 fighter-bombers arrived precisely on time and proceeded to devastate Grohote, it is doubtful who were the most surprised but it terminated the operation. Loudhailer calls enjoyed a better response this time.
The Allied raiders took back to Vis around 100 prisoners, having already buried six victims of the onslaught. Allied casualties were two killed and about twenty wounded. Solta, for the time being, was bereft of Germans. It was an excellent start to raiding which had two important effects. Firstly, it necessitated the enemy’s strengthening of the defences on each of the islands, thus achieving one of the main objectives of Allied presence in Yugoslavia – the tying down of more and better enemy forces in Dalmatia – but secondly, as a consequence, it made future raids that much more difficult and costly for the Allies. If one paused to cogitate on the element of surprise to which the raid on Solta owed its success, perhaps the fifth columnists in our midst would not have imagined that the British could have been so stupid as to hold an Anglo-Yugoslav concert in the schoolroom at Podselje on the same evening that many of the defenders of Vis were stealthily stepping ashore on Solta.
I have to admit though that the concert was a tremendous success, apart from the temporary nuisance of a troublesome minority of RSR drunks who were metaphorically, then literally, carried away. It was the emphatic and ultimate icebreaker in tri-partite relations between Partisans, commandos and RSR in Podselje. What mattered was our singing of ‘Partisani Nasa’ and ‘Dalmatinsca’ in Serbo-Croat and their renderings of ‘Tipperary’ and ‘You are my Sunshine’ in English. The diary is almost emotional: “A fine feeling now exists between ourselves and the Partisans. There’s something wonderful about these folk – I would like to go on fighting with them until we have liberated their country.”
However, this perfect picture was disturbed by an unwelcome development. Someone must have spotted the inequality in the calibre of the gun crews, for on 19 March Charlie Winch was taken away from me, made up to Lance-Bombardier and, in a minor reshuffle, replaced by an Irish lad named Paddy Haden. Charlie strengthened Fred Butcher’s crew – my loss, Fred’s gain – but it was a compensation to see Charles get some deserved promotion. Paddy was a likeable lad, tentatively acquiescent to a point near to characterlessness until he felt the reassurance of acceptance, after which he contributed his fair share of constructive opinions to add to a rare quality of enthusiasm for hard physical graft. Whether his rather droll humour was delayed whilst he settled in or if it naturally matured from contamination by the rest of us I never knew, but he soon emerged as a laconic comic who thereafter regularly amused us with apt examples of a perceptive wit. He immediately raised with me a subject which it was my duty to initiate and on which I usually procrastinated. “You’ll be wanting my next of kin,” he said as he produced a scrap of paper bearing his father’s name and an address in Monastriden, County Sligo. What prophetic instinct prompted his uncharacteristic blundering into a topic as taboo as a soldier’s will leaves me bewildered. Within a year he had been killed.
With Paddy joining us, the crew had a League of Nations look about it: four Scots, one Irish and me. Friendships were developing too, from living in close proximity with other crews. Among the gun commanders, Jimmy Irvine, a sergeant from the same regiment as Topper, Archie and Bert, was almost inevitably drawn towards my bunch. In a praiseworthy attempt to prevent boredom before it set in, the powers decided that some of the flat plain below our gun positions should be cleared of vines and levelled to provide a football pitch. It was a job which was tackled with more enthusiasm than might have been expected, considering the limited tools at our disposal, but it produced an excellent example of teamwork between the Partisans, commandos and RSR, and we found an enhanced camaraderie in toiling together. The resultant, grassless, full-size pitch provided countless hours of pleasure (and sometimes fury), but I also think it clinched somebody’s notion of the potential for building a rough airstrip on Vis.
Royal Air Force advisers had been on the island since January, and early discussions had taken place between Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean and Randolph Churchill about Vis’ secondary potential as an ‘aircraft carrier’. I am convinced that the impressive sight of the rapidly created, level football pitch provided the final nudge for the experts to order the vines’ clearance for a narrow runway of some 1000 yards alongside the island’s only noteworthy road. We played our first football match on the new pitch on 19 March against the Commandos (43RM) who thrashed us 5-2: it was to be a week or two before the air-strip had its christening. Christening with landing planes that is.
On the night of 22/23 March Jerry decided to mark it first and so turned out to bomb it. Either the daily visitor high in the sky in a reconnaissance plane had spotted it with his camera or Sirjon’s ‘five columns’ were at work again. It was the first real air raid on the island and whilst one could expect attention to be given to the two towns of Vis and Komiza, the enemy must have known about our presence on the plateau to justify a few bombs there. I think there were casualties in the towns that night but it was by no means a heavy raid, the nearest bomb to our position falling 1000 yards away. There were probably no more than five or six planes involved. The first real air attack came a few nights later on 27/28 March when Podselje was clearly the target for up to twenty bombers, although the towns copped it too.
It was a terrifying onslaught, about which we could do nothing because the effectiveness of our Brownings was limited to 1000 yards – a fact which infuriated the Partisans who felt we should be blazing away randomly and harmlessly into the night sky, as indeed were they with their small arms, mostly sten guns with a range effective at less than 50 yards. It was the first instance of disharmony between us, about which they were totally irrational. It marked an irreconcilable difference of approach between our ‘whites of their eyes’ training in the economy of ammunition and the unnecessary revelation of our gun positions, as opposed to their principle of blazing away regardless.
Parachute flares had first been dropped to illuminate the target, after which the bombs rained down on the tiny village at will without impediment. I’m told that blanket bombings of cities breeds a fatalism from feelings of dispersal – “I’d have to be really lucky to avoid catching one out of this lot, when there’s so many of them [bombs].” When one is part of a relatively small and specific target, and a helpless, unprotected one at that, even the heathen resorts to the last line of defence – prayers – and so I did. As always in a crisis, some praiseworthy human qualities emerged. For me, the most lasting memory of that night was the work of a man I had barely been aware of before. Ray Fishwick, our seconded medical orderly, had hitherto been a mere name to me. My admiration for his dedication, knowledge and skill bordered on hero worship after that night, as he recruited us and bossed us around as assistants in tending the wounded. Out of it came the discovery of a mutual rapport, and consequently a close friendship, not at all diminished by his hometown being the other side of the Mersey – Wallasey.
Daylight – as it always does – eased our worst fears. Barely a house had escaped some damage but only three or four had disappeared after direct hits. Wisely, most of the occupants had deserted the village when the first bombs exploded, so that although most of the casualties were found on the hillside, their dispersal had prevented the toll which would have resulted from direct hits on overcrowded houses. But it was bad enough. Three RSR men had been killed, as had three Commandos and four Partisans. I have no record of the number wounded but I know that Ray was away for days whilst he helped at the hastily improvised operating theatre in a house near Komiza, which had been converted into a hospital. It is an extraordinary truth that, until the air raid, I had not given a thought to the significant absence of an RSR medical officer. Had I done so, I would firstly have dwelt on how or why he should have been with us when some of the Regiment had already been dropped into Greece to help the guerrillas there, some were still in the Middle East and some at Bari in Italy. Secondly, I would have asked whether we were attached to the 43rd Royal Marine Commando for medical services. I never knew. After the raid I cared not: Sergeant Ray Fishwick was good enough for me. Without being aware of any particular leanings of Ray’s politics, I found myself infuriated at the social system that excluded such a natural doctor from actually being able to be one because his general educational qualifications were deemed inadequate.
If the raid found for me a good friend, it also produced a bitter enemy – or rather, it confirmed one. A diminutive, mouthy Welshman, whom I shall call Thomas, had crossed my path in near conflict since our days at Ramat David. There was never anything that I remembered which justified violence – just a taunting aggression in which he saw fisticuffs as the only solution to any contrived disagreement. Only the certain knowledge that I was being provoked had postponed the bout, but my inner rage at the lout simmered at the mere sight of him. I often think that I would have done mankind a service by killing him that night, as I could easily have done without question amidst the turmoil of the raid; and I came very close to it.
Ray was treating a Partisan girl who lay on the hillside in some terrible distress, with a piece of shrapnel lodged high in her inner thigh. Two male Partisans were at her head comforting her. In response to Ray’s call, I held the leg and the torch whilst he cut the trouser leg away, baring in the process the private parts of the girl’s body. I couldn’t watch; I would like to say wholly on the grounds of decency but I knew too from Ray’s gasp that the wound was not a pleasant sight, and my squeamishness might have rendered me useless. At this point Thomas arrived on the scene and his opportunistic voyeurism produced remarks which would have been disgusting at any time or place. There and then, they were vulgar, inhuman and the antithesis of therapy to the poor girl, whose ignorance of English was no barrier to an embarrassed understanding of the leering tone of the words. I got rid of him, exchanging language that has no place in a narrative intended for my grandchildren, but I knew from the hate in my heart that the showdown was not far away. By then I was looking forward to it.
Two nights later I think I willed it to happen. There had to be a physical resolution: I knew too well that to use my rank to charge him with insolence or insubordination would have solved nothing. He’d had his usual skinful of vino and was being as objectionable as ever in the billet, whilst most of us tried to lapse into the precious sleep which was at such a premium on Vis. Resigned to the conclusion that the time had come, I did not mince words in telling him to ‘shut up’. Darkness could not obscure his instant, belligerent sparring stance at the foot of my palliasse on the floor, as with a sneering taunt he enquired about who was going to shut him up. That apt distortion of Shakespeare’s Henry VI came to mind as a maxim of self-preservation:
“Thrice armed is he who hath his quarrel just – But four times he who gets his blow in fust.”
At the same time as I announced that I was taking on the job (of shutting his mouth) I leaped from my sleeping bag, grabbed him by the ankles, yanked him off his unstable feet and pounced on him. I realised with some relish that here was my first chance to use the lessons of my ‘Tough Tactics’ course a year earlier. I had my arm crooked around his neck in an instant and as I forced his face to the floor I could feel the rest of his frame squirm upwards as his legs frantically crabbed around to bring his body to face the same direction as his head – front down – to avoid having his neck broken. In that position I then levered my body against the floor to apply all the strength of my shoulders in tightening the screw of my right arm, by then reinforced with my left, around his neck. In such a position he was helpless, and I knew I could have killed him in just a few seconds. So did he. Everyone else in the room realised it too and had yanked me away from Thomas before more damage could be done. He was suitably cowed and feigned bewildered drunkenness in submitting to his bed whilst I remember feeling strangely cheated, having decided to embark on the showdown – a rare flash of temper for me – and a callousness to be emulated only once.
There has to be one thing said in Thomas’ favour: he could have reported me and had me busted to the ranks. I sometimes wonder if that might not have been better than his future attitude towards me. His arm-on-shoulder, gesture of friendship was bad enough but his frequently quoted, nauseous “We understand each other, don’t we, Wal?” emphasised the accidental truism of the statement. Fortunately, his belonging to another gun-crew meant that, with irregular guard duties on our respective guns, our only proximity was confined to rarely coinciding nights in the billet. Small mercies.
The air raid proved the inadequacy of our protection in the gun pits. Digging-in was not going to be easy in the rocky hillside so someone suggested requisitioning explosives, which to everyone’s surprise miraculously materialised without delay. Plastic too! The stuff we had trained with in Palestine. The opportunity for putting our demolition training into practice added excitement to necessity, although the juvenile amateurism of our early attempts at blasting out the rock causes me to wince even now. We progressed from ignorance to reasonably deft skills, and then to reckless flippancy as each gun crew gradually reduced its fuse time before evacuating the site prior to the explosion. All the recognised safety rules were broken in a childish frolic which we thought at the time constituted fun. Not only was there inter-gun competition for minimal, last minute, ‘chicken-style’ vacation of one’s own site, but the game gradually extended to suppressing warning of a lit fuse to adjacent crews in anticipation of the fun at seeing them ‘scarper’ in response to one’s frantic five or six second shouted alarm – from a safe distance, of course. Ah! The ignorance – or innocence – or stupidity – of youth!
March 1944 ended on a high note – well, several notes really. The Army Post Office boys seemed to have found us at last. The receipt of seven letters from Anne bridging a couple or three weeks’ correspondence affirmed that letters must have been accumulating. Seven! Seventh heaven, again! Those letters, and others from my parents, brother (Bert), Big Mac, Wally Robinson and George Green, each conveyed concern at the absence of news from me, which tended to neutralise the joy engendered by the receipt of such gems. Circumstances had reduced my normal output but I was bitter to think of the anxiety created through all of my letters having been held up for so long. I regret not having recorded something of the contents of their letters, beyond “he seems to be doing ok” in reference to Mac’s, but I suppose seven passionate letters to a starry-eyed, love-denied young man of 24 did have the unforgivable effect of dumping other news that day into the pit of ordinariness. Nevertheless that day’s mail, coinciding as it did with a short period of stability after months of mobility or imminent mobility, was the spur I needed to motivate the pen again. Without the courage to take on the censor even by hint, however, inspiration was tiresomely dulled by being limited to small talk. Archie, it seemed, had had more success in managing to drop sufficient innocuous clues for an uncle of his to collate and cleverly deduce from them where we were.
Life with the Partisans soon returned to pre-air raid amity. Close friendships began to develop. Kirky, the rascally Scot, became a popular favourite with them for reasons which we never found apparent, unless it was his readiness to have a go at the Serbo-Croat language. Sirjon helped him, but how they communicated in English I shall never know, being consistently unable to understand his Glaswegian dialect myself. Probably due to his diminutive stature the girls almost adopted him, so that in the evening song and dance sessions he was usually supported by one on either side of him in circle-style dances where gender played no part in one’s position in the ring. To those tough, buxom girls that was no problem. I recall one evening when vino had laid him to bed early, news of which would not deter the girls. Unselfconsciously they entered the house, dragged a half-revived Kirky out of bed, clad in only his shirt, and danced around him as usual. The dances that night seemed to have acquired a necessity for more supported leaps in the air than normal, guaranteeing that Kirky’s body landed much sooner than his lighter, and otherwise concealing, shirt. Whoops of enjoyment ensured that no one in the area missed the spectacle.
My particular friend among the Partisans in Podselje turned out to be their storekeeper, Roko. A man about my own age, Roko was the rare instance in the Brigade of being a native of Vis. Indeed, he had lived in Podselje with his aged mother and stunningly beautiful teenaged sister, Milka, until requisitioning of their home had necessitated both mother and sister finding residence in Vis town. Slight of stature, though undoubtedly physically fit, Roko never managed to exude the gladiatorial aggression of most of his colleagues. A possible explanation might be the fact that the enemy had not occupied Vis. Passion for conflict is fed on vengeance. Would not Roko – would not we – have been more hostile protagonists had we lived in enemy-occupied territory, where bestial atrocities committed against our families and friends were the order of the day? Perhaps it was this kindred spirit, this shared understanding which attracted Roko to us, although the reason why my gun-crew was found the most compatible I cannot explain. He tried valiantly to pick up and use as much English as possible, while he probed deeply into our personal circumstances, our way of life at home and ambitions for the future. He seemed to be the only one interested in such matters: that there was any other place in the world beside Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union seemed not to have dawned on the others. I am not sure whether he was particularly good at his job.
On our first visit into Vis town, a couple of miles walk along the twisting downhill road (the alternative was a mile of clambering down the rocky hillside), our prime commitment was to meet Roko’s mother and sister. Language difficulties delayed our discovery of the tiny house, accessed by an alleyway. Conditions were not conducive to prolonged social conversation either, but the sad looking, black-clad old lady greeted Tony and me as a mother would. Caring, concerned and almost alarmist, she managed to convey that the war was still far from won and that we must take care of ourselves for the sake of our loved ones at home, for whom she prayed.
