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,