Fighting With The Partisans In Yugoslavia

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 261, 23 June 1944, Page 7

Fighting With The Partisans In Yugoslavia

"So I was sent back to Maribor. I did solitary confinement there. Twentyone days." We expressed our horror. Miss X commiserated. The Sergeant’s soft smile, the matter-of-fact way of putting it, as if it warranted neither sympathy nor astonishment, made our feelings seem absurd. Someone asked, "What did you eat?" "One meal a day. A square of bread and a bowl of soup.*I was weak. But they made us work. I wasn’t allowed to speak to anyone, but each day ithey took me out, and other solitary confinement men, and gave us a job. There was a Russian P.O.W. camp about a

mile away, and every day we had to get the Russian dead on stretchers and carry them through the town and bury them. Each One we buried,.a German knelt down and said a nice little prayer. At the end of 21 days I had to be helped to walk by a boy. No "Little Stories" "Well, I escaped again in December, 41, and got back to Yugoslavia. Things were pretty bad then as you remember, and I wondered what to do. I knew there was no way of getting out of Europe. Then I heard of Tito’s little band when I was in Lujbljana and decided to join them. They had about 100 men then." "Can you tell us about Tito himself? Did you see him much? What does he look like?" : Sergeant Denvir had returned to his Teticent mood. A fire of questions became necessary again. "Well, I suppose I can tell you roughly. He’s middling sized, dark, a very forceful sort of chap. Middle aged. A Croatian."

Miss X asked if Sergeant Denvir knew any stories about Tito-any little anecdotes. Surely he was a hero to his people? Did they not tell any little stories about him? "Of course he’s a hero to them." We felt squashed. No little stories. Long pause. The forefinger rubbed at the side of the Sergeant’s head. He. looked at the carpet. "I didn’t see him much. I was in Slovenia." Mr. Y. asked where he had been fighting most of the time, "Austria some of the time. We crossed back. I was in Maribor once. Not in the town-on the

hills outside. We did a job there. That was good." I asked Sergeant Denvir about the men he was with ~--who were they, what they were like, what could he tell me about them? "In what way do you mean exactly?" "Well, what were they in civil life- city people or peasants?" "Doctors and lawyers mostly." "What the Nazis would call ‘intellectuals,’ then?" "Oh, yes. They were intellectuals." "Fairly interesting then?" I thought this would lead somewhere, "Very." Long pause. Try again: "Were the doctors there as doctors or just as men?" "Fighting men first of all, but doctors too. They were very good. Most of them were German-trained." "Any Jews?" "No. Slays." "What did they wear?" asked Miss X. The question earned the gentle smile that we had seen once before. Equipment and Supplies _ "Half were in British

battledress, half in German uniform." We gathered that supplies were received from the British by parachute and heard a little about the equipment, mostly captured fromi the Italians. There was also some artillery, and every time an enemy supply train was destroyed there were acquisitions of further equipment, or food. Miss X asked for details about the food. "It all depends on your actions. Say you attack a German supply train, The _ stuff is divided up among the battalion. In one day you might get half a kilo of bread each." "And meat?" "Say half a cow to a battalion." "How much would you get?" "Same as everyone else." "Yes, but how much?" "Oh, it’s fair enough. You get enough." There was also a kind of local tea, a syrupy brown liquid, made from the leaves of some tree, and occasionally there was German beer. The subject was exhausted. : (continued on next page)

| WITH THE PARTISANS

(continued from previous page) Someone introduced a new one: "You commanded ‘a battalion, didn’t you? Did you just start at the bottom ‘and work up?" "Yes. I started as a machine-gunner." Silence. Dead end. Try again: "Can you tell us some of the tricks they used to play in night manoeuvres?" This earned a little chuckle, but still no little stories. Instead: "Oh, most of our work was done honestly." Trains and tanks had been blown up with British "explosives. Then suddenly the Sergeant began to explain guerrilla tactics,.and went so fast that we were all left in the air. A dissertation on offensive tactics in hilly country was over before we had time for notes. Someone asked, "Where did you sleep at night?" "Usually where the night finds you." That exhausted that subject. Somehow we got on to the fact that raids were made on towns where supplies were being accumulated for the enemy. An agent would be appointed by the Germans to assemble stocks of food from the neighbouring districts, and he would be visited in the night by Partisans. Miss X showed a trace of feminine alarm: "Do you just-just kill him?" Sergeant Denvir smiled once more: "No, he’s handy. He’s usually a Slav, and quite agreeable. He’s glad to show you where all the stuff is." Women-at-Arms Miss X took control for a few moments to ask about members of her own sex. What standing did women have? Did they attain to the higher ranks? "Well, there were none higher than 2IC of a battalion. I remember one girl, she was 25, a nurse." "And she held command just like a man?" "Oh, yes. First rate too. They don’t recognise any differences." "No trouble between men and women?" "No, Any foolishness is punishable by death. I never héard of a case. But it’s the law of the gun for everythingthere are no prisons. Steal a piece of food or a pair of boots and you're put up against the wall." "A girl doesn’t join up for fun then?" "Well, no. But take one girl’s case. Say her brother is with the Partisans. She knows she’ll be deported to Germany when they check up on the names, so she joins up too. Some are wives fighting with their husbands. Not in the usual way, though!" "Corporal Frank" When we asked Sergeant Denvir how much the Partisans knew of New Zealanders, he gave the credit for their high reputation to others. "Some Partisans were in the last war and they knew about the Kiwis. Then the fighting in Greece this time gave them a good name." But as I heard it from Sgt. H. W. Kimber, another New Zealander who passed through Yugoslavia, but was dexterously kept in ignorance of Sergeant Denvir’s true identity, the story was a little different. "Corporal Frank," as Denvir was called, was a man much talked about, a brave man, and a good leader. Sergeant Kimber was a friend of Sergeant Denvir’s, who was with him in camp in New Zealand, and was captured with him in Greece. He passed near to (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) where Denvir was in hospital in Yugoslavia, but because hospitals are very secret (mo one may approach or leave them if snow is on the ground) he was not allowed to meet the famous "Corporal Frank." "Frank," it should be explained, was the name given to Sergeant Denvir when he joined the Partisans. All Partisans have to take assumed names, but records are kept of their true identity for casualty purposes. Sergeant Denvir was given the name Rabel Franz. Rabel was what we would call the surname, and Franz (the equivalent of Frank) comes after it, in the language of the Yugoslavs. Had Sergeant Denvir actually been killed, as he was reported for a while (though his wife in Christchurch refused to believe it) he would not have been lost to memory as some unidentified New. Zealander. Official records were kept. Small points like this added up during our interview to reveal that the Partisans are certainly no rabble, but are a wellorganised military force, though cosmopolitan. They were 100 strong when Sergeant Denvir joined. They are said to be about 260,000 now. In his last action his unit took a town, but while they were in it a 500lb. bomb fell about 25 yards away and Sergeant Denvir’s arm was broken. Men 50 yards away were killed. His explanation is: "I must have had my fingers crossed." But he will not go into further details. If you ask him how one joint of his fingers came to disappear, the subject is changed in a few seconds. It was nearly time for him to go, but there was opportunity for one or two more questions. I decided to get back to the "doctors and lawyers" he had mentioned. "When you weren’t too busy to talk at all, what did you all talk about?" "Actions," said Sergeant Denvir. "Our last actions and our next actions. And the Second Front of course. We were always wondering when that was going *to begin." "And the ‘new world,’ the ‘post-war world,’ did you ever hear them get on’ to that?" Sergeant Denvir started forward and | opened out once more: "Yes, now there’s one peculiar thing. People say the Partisans are in favour of Russia. They’re not. They’re in favour of no one. There’s one thing they’ve made up their minds about for after the war, and that is, they’re not going to have anyone in their country. They won’t have the Russians; they won't have the English . . . And they are not getting any Russian supplies now either." Someone looked at a watch, and Sergeant Denvir remembered his military obligations. He stood up and we reluctantly put him on his way. Pe * xs If this interview and all the other accounts seem to suggest that Sergeant Denvir has nothing to say after all his adventures, that is far from being the case. He has something very forthright to say, which he said to me very firmly, perhaps a little reproachfully, just before he left for Christchurch: "But I don’t think all this war should be written up round individuals, It should be written of the Division as a whole, You’ve got to remember: for every man that makes good, 20 others have got to die, If you write the story of one man, you’re writing it over the ‘bodies, so to speak, of 20 others. There’s only one exception I’d make, and that’s Kippenberger."

A.

A.