World War Two and the Partisan Struggle 131
monarchy was enough to support Churchill’s worst predictions, corroborated
by the Red Army’s victorious advance in the Balkan and Danube area. It
was clear that Stalin wanted to have a free hand in these territories, without
regard to British interests. The prime minister told Tito openly that his gov-
ernment would oppose the confederation between Yugoslavia, Albania, and
Greece that was being discussed in Moscow. His ideas concerning Yugoslav
ambitions in the northern Adriatic, formally still part of Italy although occu-
pied by the Germans, were quite clear. “He agreed that Istria should be ours,
excluding Trieste,” remembered Tito later. “He did not say that it would be
given to the Italians, he said only that the Allies needed Trieste and Pula [an
important naval base at the tip of Istrian peninsula] for their march toward
Austria.”^425
The Flight from VisIn order to propitiate Churchill, once back in Vis, on 17 August 1944, Tito
published a declaration in which he wrote: “The National Liberation Move-
ment of Yugoslavia is, in its essence, of the people, national and democratic.
Therefore, I repeat again that the leadership of the National Liberation Move-
ment has only one important goal—the struggle against the occupiers and their
slaves, and the creation of a democratic and federal Yugoslavia, and not, as our
enemies say, the affirmation of Communism.”^426 Pressed by Churchill, King
Petar II promulgated a decree at the end of August that recognized Tito as
chief of the armed forces in Yugoslavia and that removed Mihailović, who
rejected the decision, proclaiming that the sovereign had acted under duress,
and ordered a general mobilization. This had no impact, however, in view of
what was happening on the Eastern Front, where, in the two weeks between
23 August and 8 September 1944, the Red Army achieved decisive successes.
At the end of August, in Romania, General Antonescu’s pro-Nazi regime fell,
and King Michael offered the Soviet Union and the Western Allies an armi-
stice; a few days later, the Red Army reached Bucharest. On 5 September, the
Soviet government declared war on Bulgaria, who did not even try to resist
and, with a sudden volte-face, in turn declared war on Germany, yesterday’s
ally. In short, in fifteen days, the Red Army advanced five hundred kilometers,
practically surrounding Serbia from the east and overturning the balance of
power in the Balkans.^427
In Bosnia, the Supreme Staff started to organize special divisions charged
with liberating Serbia once and for all according to Tito’s conviction that in
order to strengthen his power, control of that region was an absolute prior-
ity: “There we have to settle the question of the structure of the state, the