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