Tito and His Comrades

96 World War Two and the Partisan Struggle

Partisans started to transport the wounded and sick across the Neretva on
wooden scaffolding laid on the iron structure of the former bridge. The twenty
thousand Chetniks, mostly peasants forcibly enlisted, were unable to offer
resistance to the Dalmatians and Serbians, who were armed to the teeth. They
took flight, allowing six of Tito’s battalions to cross the Neretva that same
night. By the end of the following week, all the wounded, together with the
bulk of the combat forces, were safe despite heavy losses. They were lucky the
Germans did not follow them into Italian territory, as they were convinced that
the Chetniks would destroy them.^247
At that time Draža Mihailović suffered a heavy defeat that he would never
get over. He invoked the help of the British, who, as Tito and his comrades
suspected, had encouraged him to fight the Partisans. It seems that before the
battle on the Neretva, the BBC broadcast a coded message, which the Partisan
leaders interpreted as approving of Mihailović’s collaboration with the Italians,
the Ustaša, and even the Germans. “This was the largest coalition against the
revolution formed during the war,” wrote Vladimir Dedijer. Once it was clear
that Mihailović had been defeated, the BBC commented sarcastically, quoting
a Serb folk poem: “Military fortune is not decided by glittering arms, but by the
hearts of the heroes.”^248
The Partisans destroyed Mihailović’s plan to unify all the Serbs in Croatia,
Dalmatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina under his command. He abandoned them
to their fate, seeking refuge with the greater part of his forces in Sandžak, and
hoping to preserve at least Serbia from the Partisans.^249 As General Löhr admit-
ted: “These skirmishes are proof of Mihailović’s failings as a military com-
mander.”^250 “During the next critical six weeks,” writes Deakin, “Tito’s forces
concentrated, with impunity, on carrying out the same task the Germans them-
selves had outlined in Operation Schwarz, the liquidation of the Mihailović
movement, and for the same reasons—to control the hinterland of Herzego-
vina and Montenegro in anticipation of an Allied landing.”^251
The epic feats of the Fourth Offensive instilled in the combatants of the
liberation movement some sorely needed pride and discredited the myth of
German superiority. It also compelled the Western powers to consider the Par-
tisans as possible allies.^252 “Tito on the Neretva,” wrote Milovan Djilas, “was
like a tiger in a cage, trying to find the weakest mesh in the net among the
Italians and Chetniks, in order to enlarge it and allow Partisans to jump
through in a furious storm.”^253

The March Negotiations

In order to have free rein with his most dangerous allies, the Chetniks (whom
he considered potential British allies), Tito decided to renew contacts with the