World War Two and the Partisan Struggle 101
The only ray of light in this bleak picture came on the night of 27 to 28 May
1943, with the arrival of a British mission, parachuted in by the SOE in the
Durmitor area to assess the real strength of the Partisan movement.^275 Tito
considered the mission so important that he delayed his departure from Dur-
mitor, although it was obvious that he urgently needed to leave if he wanted to
escape the enemy’s grip. Because of bad weather, the wait for an SOE airplane
dragged out over three or four fatal days. According to General Terzić, the
Partisans lost seven thousand fighters because of the delayed arrival of two
British agents.^276
The two leaders of Mission Typical, captains Bill Stuart and William (Bill)
Deakin, could not have arrived at a more dangerous but also more favorable
time to get an impression of the value of Tito’s troops. After parachuting in,
they immediately took part in a meeting in which it was decided to try a sally
across Vučevo, Sutjeska, and Zelengora. Tito also ordered the hospital center to
be moved in that direction, but this was easier said than done, since the Parti-
sans had at their disposal only two or three hundred Italian prisoners, who were
utterly exhausted, for the transportation of the more than two thousand sick
and wounded. They also had only around a hundred horses.^277 Food was scarce
and so it was no longer a question of the peaceful acquisition of victuals from
the population, as Tito had ordered at the beginning of the revolt when he
said he would not be at the head of a plundering army.^278 Consequently the
inhabitants of the Piva plateau, already impoverished, began rebelling against
the Partisans and siding with the Chetniks. On 3 June 1943, the Supreme Staff
decided to divide the main operative group into two smaller units and to aban-
don those who were severely wounded, hiding them in the caves and rocks of
Piva Canyon. Days of terror and chaos followed, when in the storm of fight-
ing everything seemed lost. To top it all off, the Germans knew precisely where
Tito was, thanks to the Italian prisoners who managed to escape while trans-
porting the old and frail poet Vladimir Nazor. The Germans launched an
attack on 9 June 1943. As Tito remembers, “They hammered us terribly,
intensely, without interruption, they hammered the same points. They threw
hundred-kilo bombs. And then machine-gun shells started to rain on us. The
Germans were shooting from a mountain about five hundred meters away. I
ordered the commander of the Fourth Brigade (he lost his life) to take this
mountain with his men, because otherwise the brigades could not pass. The
English with us watched him with fear and respect.”^279
In the course of the fighting on 9 June 1943, Tito was wounded in his left
arm while trying to protect his head. His life was saved by his German Shep-
herd, Lux, who covered him when a bomb exploded near a fallen tree where he
and his lover, Zdenka, had tried to find shelter.