AT the beginning of February we moved from Serkvishte through the dripping woods to Racha, intending to make it our winter headquarters until the snow should have lifted and cover be more generous in the Frushka Gora.

We had waited, before putting it into effect, only until our sixth brigade should have taken the village of Morovitch, an enemy strong­hold on the Bosut river. Once Morovitch was ours we possessed the whole of the Woods of Bosut, and had good water frontiers between us and the enemy. This meant we should not be surprised.

When I first returned to the Woods of Bosut after my journey to the Danube Morovitch had not yet fallen, and Serkvishte was there­fore safer for the staff, since it could be reached only by a maze of woodland paths now ankle-deep in mud; but as soon as sixth brigade had taken Morovitch and thus held all the possible crossings of the Studva and Bosut rivers we could put our plan into effect, and move to the greater comfort—indeed, practically speaking, the luxury—of Racha. That did a little to solve one of our constant problems, the efficient execution of staff work. No matter how enthusiastic and insensitive he may be, no man can really sit down and think clearly and put his thoughts on paper (or encipher them) if he is wet, cold, cramped into an overcrowded shed, working on his knees, constantly interrupted and never alone. There was a strong case for moving from the utter inconvenience of Serkvishte; and we could not know then how dearly Racha would pay for its hospitality.

In Racha nothing had changed since I had last seen it at the beginning of December. The two crossed roads that made up the village pattern were still rivers of mud with causeways of maize stalks set across them every hundred yards or so; the few geese the village possessed paddled and clucked in gutter canals that were deep in water. No-one's feet were dry for weeks on end. Racha had not then suffered directly from the war to any great extent—that omission was shortly to be rectified—but there hung about these low-lying villages of Bosut an atmosphere of desolation and depres­sion that affected us all.

"That's not Srem," they said snobbishly in the Frushka Gora. "That's Bosnia." Bosnia meant backwardness and poverty; going to Bosnia had always been an expedition into foreign parts; and this wartime emigration to the Mayevitsa was unheard-of, unparalleled in history, revolutionary for the people of Srem. Racha was the last point of civilization; beyond Racha anything might happen. They sang:—

Kad su dosli do vode Do te rijeke Save:

Vidili su Majevica,

Brda joj se plave. , . .

When they came down as far as the water, the volunteers sang, as far as the River Sava, they could see the hills of the Mayevitsa, blue hills in the distance. They went up over the Sava towards those blue hills with all the triumph and excitement of pioneers. Never before had they been so far from home.

We stayed in Racha for a month, the whole of February; and the weather was snow and rain and wretchedness. No parachute supplies had reached us for over two months, and there was little prospect of any until the spring. The few planeloads we might have had in February were denied us by the weather; and even when once or twice planes tried to reach us, we with the fires lit upon the ground could only hear the hum of their engines above the overcast, and they in the air could not see our fires. We would stand out in the snow for hours on end around a fire that Steve with inhuman skill had managed to kindle, lighting up at half-past ten and tramp­ing back to bed at two, wet and shivering, angry, disappointed.

In the morning I would wireless: "Planes heard over our fires zero one-thirty hours. Confirm."

And base would confirm, trying to be cheerful: "Sorry, no fires seen."

Once or twice there were false alarms when we were not expecting aircraft; then we would run out across the mud and snow and shuffle with matches and a little petrol until the fires were going; but the plane would pass over or not be heard again, and Steve would say: "I guess that's a jerry." And Stanley would curse it; and I would explain to Slobodan that we had been mistaken. And Slobodan, that grey old man, would pick his teeth and shrug his shoulders, and try not to show his disappointment. Once I mistook Steve's snoring for the hum of aircraft engines, and we were all out in the mud, staring upwards and listening in the silence before I realized the mistake.

This was a poor state of affairs; but it reflected very well the great psychological difficulties of these long-range liaison operations. After much experience in the Balkans it was shown that men should not be allowed to remain inside for more than six months, because after that length of time they were necessarily out of the picture of possibilities at base; and in Italy, later, the period was reduced (as, given the short distances concerned and the relative ease of evacua­tion through the lines, it could be) to four months. Apart from that, and the obvious reduction of efficiency entailed when men inside were working to a false conception of resources available to support them, it was found that long periods of isolation tended to play upon the nerves and upset the sense of balance that was so essential to the work.

"Joes are all bats, anyway," as someone wisely said. Immersed in the tactical details of their own area, a knowledge of which was essential to the avoidance of capture by the enemy, men would lose sight of the general situation in the country, see in refusal to send them supplies a plot against their own efficiency, lose their sense of humour, bombard Base with accusations of unfaimess. It was easy to understand why this should be. Liaison officers were not combat elements: it was their job to stay alive and avoid cap­ture, to arrange for supplies, to collect intelligence. When times were bad, and the formations they were with were driven from one position to the next, and men walked barefoot in winter, and casual­ties went without the most elementary of medical supplies, or when ammunition lacked and automatics were too few, the only way in which liaison officers could justify their existence was by the arrange­ment of supplies. When supplies did not come (often because they could not come) we suffered from a sense of helplessness that was bitterly disappointing. Only the most efficient of base organizations, staffed if possible by men who had done the work inside and knew its conditions for themselves, and staffed strongly enough to enable individual treatment of each mission, could bridge the gap between Base and the field; and it is not surprising, given the rapid expansion which the base organizations for the Balkans had to undergo once the Theatre Commander was convinced of their value and new squadrons of transport aircraft could be allocated to the work, that a liaison officer came sometimes to feel himself neglected.

Later on, when air evacuation became a common affair and periods of field service shorter, there was less heart-burning; by that time, however Base had expanded from a few enthusiasts who longed only for a chance of field work themselves to amorphous and anonymous collections of men who did not always have that ambition, and whose horizon seemed too frequently to be limited to the four walls of their office. "How simple it would all be," was a common sentiment, "if there was nobody in the field at all." But they, too, were learning a new branch of warfare; and it could hardly be expected that no mistakes would be made. By the end of the war we knew exactly how it should be done, both at Base and in the field; but then the knowledge was too late to be really useful.

If it was difficult for "Joes" to understand the lack or complete-absence of supplies, it was quite impossible for the partisans to do so... The weather was an obvious excuse, and often it was genuine; but it was hard to adduce the weather when the B.B.C. could report at the same time that great bomber formations were over some part or other of the Reich. They put it down to political hostility, and reassured themselves that the Russians would be different; and the Russians, luckily for them, were never called upon to show that this belief might be wrong. Slobodan, it was true, was an extreme case;

if we had dropped him the moon he would still have looked sour and asked for the sun. The others at least tried to understand.

In Racha we were comfortable. Stanley and Steve and the wire­less set lived in the backroom of one cottage, and I lived in another; the staff had three rooms, as well as separate offices for the intelligence, supply, wireless, and ancillary offices; Zhika and his wife and the choir had two rooms at the other end of the village; and what with one thing and another we could spread ourselves a little.

But for one reason or another—and our intelligence, it is true, was not altogether reassuring—we seemed to become aware of im­pending disaster. Perhaps my memory of this owes something to the impression of what happened afterwards. Perhaps it was simply that Racha was a miserable place at the best of times, and doubly so in the middle of winter. We did not talk about this. The village appeared to be quite happy, even if they had been a little apprehen­sive when we first returned to them; and then they were such perennial optimists that nothing could shake them. Sometimes we were even quite gay. One of my party, a stout-hearted Hungarian whom we called "Mr. Wood" and whose fifty years had not deflected him from the joy of parachute jumping, was expert with a violin; he would borrow Zhikitse's and play to us in the snug stuffiness of our wireless room of an evening—Viennese songs and extravagant sentimentalities, Mozart, Stanley's two favourites, which were "Danny Boy" and "Trees," flimsy things like "Csak egy kis Lany van a Vilagban" that I remembered from Budapest of long ago, Serbian tunes that Zhika taught him. In one tremendous session we instructed Zhika and his choir on the tune and text of "God Save the King," Mr. Wood providing an arrangement that was later to prove highly successful, with phonetic text that began as I remember: "God sev ar noble kin. God sev ar gresus kin. God sev ze kin...." Mr. Wood's particular duty was wireless operator (his mission a special one), and at first Stanley had disliked him, seeing in him a patronizing interloper, but later they grew to respect each other's peculiar virtues, and they would gossip in a corner over wireless technicalities:

"Now then, now then, Mr. Wood, don't keep him waiting! Send something——"

"Yes, yes, I do. I send——" click, click, click....

"Well, if he can't hear you, change your frequency. Go on, change the bloody thing. He won't wait all day——"

"Wait, wait, I send——" click, click, click....

"Here, give it me. Come on, give over——" "How can ... it is ... no, no, I do not send——" Mr. Wood's modest stock of English would give out. Stanley would take over with a fury of morse on the key. He matched unsparing determina­tion with utter impatience; but transmitting conditions that February were frightful, our charging engine had long since gone out of com­mission so that we were obliged to send accumulators for charging across the Sava to Bijeljina, half a day away, and it was only his embittered obstinacy that kept us on the air.

On February 23rd the staff celebrated the 26th anniversary of the Red Army with a meeting at which long speeches were made. General Sava talked for hours, having done the thing properly and looked up all the references; but Zhika and the choir lightened the evening with thunderous choruses, and Zhika sung an apotheosis to the peasant's rifle and knapsack:

Seljachka torba, nema govora,

To nam je nashe vojske komora;

Ona nam hrani svakog dana

Junachka vojsku partisana:

Ona je nama i mama i tata

Na njoj je teret chitavog rata—

O pushka moja i torbo ti:

Vi chete bitku dobiti ...

Altogether it was happier than when I had first arrived; this time they knew that the Allies were on their side, and had seen the ample proof of this. Only that day the B.B.C.—Londonski Radio—had broadcast a speech made by Mr. Churchill in the House of Commons the day before; a triumphant speech that was a fitting part of the great and decisive support that Mr. Churchill had given, and was to continue to give, to our liaison with the national liberation move­ment in Jugoslavia.

"On the other side of the Adriatic," he had said, " a magnificent resistance to the German invaders is in full and violent progress.... In Jugoslavia, in spite of the most ferocious and murderous cruelties and reprisals perpetrated by the Germans both against hostages and the village populations, including women and children" —shades of what was to happen in Racha—"the partisans have the upper hand. The Germans hold the principal towns and try to keep the railways working. They can march their columns hither and thither about the country. They own the ground they stand on, but nothing else. All the rest belongs to the valiant partisans. German losses have been heavy.... These forces are at this moment holding in check no fewer than fourteen out of the twenty German divisions in the Balkan Peninsula.... Every effort in our power will be made to aid and sustain Marshal Tito and his gallant bands...."

Small wonder that the choir could now thunder out "God sev ze Kin"; that everyone shouted "Long live Churchill!"—and even, modestly at the end after the briefest of speeches, "Long live the Major!" And although supplies to this area were nil at that time, nevertheless wonders had been worked in other parts of the country where the big formations were in action, and in January a record total of 2,116 tons were sent in by sea and air. It is true that the greater part of these supplies never reached the mainland but were used for the defence of the island of Vis; still, the airlift was con­siderable in comparison with the meagreness of previous months. Supplies now were reaching even the new formations in Serbia, odreds which had grown up during the sixth offensive into brigades and were firmly ensconced in the mountains of Goliya and Yastrebats; and liaison was now securely made with the movement in Central Macedonia, where airborne supplies were also arriving for the first time. The movement as a whole had come of age.

A few days later, too, the first Soviet military mission was flown in to Tito's headquarters from our base in southern Italy; and, aptly enough, away to the east on the main front Marshal Zhukoff broke through on a hundred-mile sector west of Shepetovka-Vinitsa-Volochinsk, pushing up to the railway that linked Lvoff with War­saw. On the Black Sea the Red Army took Odessa. Another big advance had also been made in the north where Narva and Pskoff were threatened and the Germans reduced to a deep salient at Vitebsk; it was said that the Finns were wavering. In Milan the Italian workers were striking as they had never done for twenty-five years. In Algiers the French were trying their first war criminals. We were living in portentous days.

Towards the end of February our intelligence indicated that the enemy might be preparing to drive us from the Woods of Bosut. Fresh troops had been noted in the large holding garrisons along the railway, soldiers in German uniform with a new sort of head-dress, a field-grey fez, that no-one had seen before. It seemed that they belonged to a newly-formed German division composed largely of Bosnian rank-and-file with German officers. Anything might be expected of them. "We could not know, of course, that the enemy was making his preparations for the seventh offensive, and that he was determined to occupy again the Sava and the plain of Semberija so that the units in the Mayevitsa could be crushed between the columns closing on each other.

We could not know, equally, what beastliness these troops would commit in Racha; but as a matter of principle it was arranged that all the young people, liable to be arrested or raped or shot or simply driven away into Germany for slave labour, should cross the Sava in good time and shield behind Lekitch's formations. The enemy might burn a few houses, but the old people could not be dangerous or useful to him and he might be expected to let them be. In any case there were no two ways about this: the old people had to stay. The village was their whole life; and they could not leave it.

Those days seem very sad as I look back on them. Rain fell for days on end, and the mud was deeper and deeper in the roads. My old landlady's three geese puddled about in it and were the only beings that seemed happy and at ease. She and her husband, an aged couple well past their sixty years, and poor, having little stock and less land, clung to life with trembling eagerness: and when I said good-bye, on that last sad evening, they looked at me as con­demned prisoners must when one of their number is suddenly reprieved. They were old and poor and wretched; and they saw that they might be going to die.

"The Fascists are coming, they say?"

"No, no," I lied.

"Ah, my God, perhaps we shan't be here when you come back." They sat there in their rags and their poverty, old and grey-haired, their whole stock a two-roomed cottage, three geese, a horse, a cow, some hens, two or three acres of land. And this seemed to be the last and final equation. On one side of it there was the need to make war, the solid value of speeches in the House of Commons, the achievement of victories and the hope of a new world; and on the other side of it there was the people that stood beneath the structure of all that sound and fury, two peasants in rags and poverty, and three geese, and a horse, and the fear of death.

Along the street Steve and Stanley were packing up the wireless gear and saying good-bye. Their old woman's husband had died some years before, leaving her with two daughters; and the two daughters would come across the Sava with us. One of them was always singing in those last days the saddest song of all, an old Serbian song that the partisans had taken over as a national anthem:

Hej Sloveni! Josh te zhivi Duh nash djedova:

Dok sa narod srtse bije

Njihovih sinova....

It was almost as if she knew of the disaster that was coming to Racha.

They waved to us as we went out of the village, standing in silent groups around their cottage doors and murmuring only a little between themselves. Their young people were going with us, and they were pleased. An old man who used to be odbornik shook me by the hand as I went by.

"Haidi, haidi! " he said. "Come back soon." We crossed the Sava after midnight, and in silence. German advanced patrols were in action with Sixth Brigade at Morovitch and Batrovtsi; and it was unlikely that the brigade would try to hold on after dawn, for they were threatened also from the west where the rivers would not cover them.

Having horses and pack transport we used the main ferry beyond the broken Sava bridge. This was a large open raft with wooden railings that its crew moved from one side of the river to the other by hauling on two wires fixed on either bank, and running through sheaves on the raft. The night was cold. The moon, though waning, was still strong enough to give us a good light. We crowded on to the ferry in silence, and the wires began to ripple and slip through the sheaves as we slid across the river. Some of Zhika's boys began to sing, a magnificent booming bass undertone, a song called "Banda Udarala." But the ferry captain shut them up, being understood to say that "he'd driven this bloody ferry for five months, and no-body'd ever dared to sing on it before." We crossed in cold silence.

Once across the Sava there was a pause, and we breathed again. Sixth Brigade had been in action all that night at the bridges on the Studva (not blowing them because we should need them later ourselves), and then had pulled out, crossing the Sava themselves during the early hours of the following dawn, cutting it as fine as they possibly could. It was learned that the enemy had come into Racha and Bosut and Grk and the other villages of the riverside woods during the course of the next day; but he was clearly not yet prepared to attempt a crossing of the Sava that he knew he would have to fight for. We understood afterwards that the units which had entered the riverside villages were somewhat in advance of their schedule, and were waiting for their flanking formations to reach the phase-line. Some days later our outposts along the south bank saw columns of smoke rising from behind the screen of trees. Racha was burning.

We halted with the wireless sets in Brodats, a village some three miles south of the Sava in the plain of Semberija, and waited upon events. Although we now began to guess the probable dimensions of the coming offensive there were as yet no concrete signs for us to measure by.

In Brodats we were again comfortable, living with an old woman and her two handsome daughters. The officers' school for Area Voivodina was established in Brodats at that time, so that we had Hribar, its commandant, for good company. He used to come to supper with us in the evenings, and flirt with the handsome daughters and sing "Santa Lucia" and Dalmatian lullabies. We were there for a week.

The Germans crossed the Sava at half-past four on the morning of March 11th. I can remember that perfectly well because I had been up all night receiving parachute supplies from two Halifaxes, and Kolya was there, and General Sava, and Hribar, and Maxim the commissar, and it seemed from the few containers we had opened that the Brens we had ordered, or a few of them at least, had come at last. I went to bed at four o'clock, tired and fairly satisfied. Outside they were bumping about with the containers. A few minutes later I woke up and the bumping was still going on, only this time it was a different bumping, farther away and more muffled.

This time it was not containers. It was mortars. After that we were marching for days. This was the preface to the seventh offensive. German 13 S.S. Division—so-called Bosansko-Hertsegovachka Dobrovoljachka Divisija—crossed south over the Sava at Racha and at several other points upstream, and broke out in great strength from their bridge­head at Brtchko; at the same time other troops (I think part of "Prinz Eugen" S.S.) came over the Drina from Serbia at Zvomik and points downstream, sweeping across the plain and taking Bijeljina without resistance. Other units attacked eastwards from the Bosna Valley and along the Sprecha, linking up with the numerous garrison of Tuzla, and striking east and north-east.

I came up with Lekitch and the rest of the staff of 16 and 36 divisions in the foothills a few miles south of Koray. He was immensely pleased with the tenacity of his units holding the line Koray-Chelitch; in so doing they effectively prevented the enemy from linking up across the Mayevitsa with another enemy column held up north of Tuzla, and in this position, if they could get hold of fresh stocks of ammunition, they might hold on indefinitely or at least until the further designs of the enemy became clear. It boiled down to a question of small arms and mortar ammuition. The divisions had been faily well stocked before the enemy drive began; but defensive fighting was notoriously expensive in ammunition and at the rate they were now firing it off they would be reduced to skeleton rations before many days were out. Skeleton rations meant retreat. And retreat meant that the Mayevitsa would fall to the enemy, and 16 and 36 Divisions would have to march back on the Konjuh hills south of Tuzla, thus infinitely complicating the situation for 3 Corps, now itself heavily engaged from three directions. It was vitally important to hold the Mayevitsa; it was therefore necessary that we should have ammunition.

Lekitch was far too well-informed of possibilities to get excited about this. We sat in his Moslem cottage and talked it over. The weather was fine; and it seemed to me that our chances were good, for base had lately advised that more aircraft were now available. On the other hand, we had had nothing to speak of for months and months. I had now been inside for nearly seven months and was no longer able to predict with any confidence what Base might or might not think fit to do.

"That's the position," Lekitch said, smiling as if it were rather a joke: "quarter of a million rounds of .792 and as much heavy

mortar bomb as you can manage."

"Pity Slobodan didn't tell me before."

"Perhaps: but nothing's come for a long time. He may have thought it wasn't worth asking."

"Well, I'll try."

"Of course. We'll manage somehow whatever happens. We always do. See what you can get."

Kosta's chief of staff came up from the south that afternoon and reported heavy fighting in the hills to the south of Tuzla. He wanted air support in the form of bombing of supposed enemy concentra­tions. It was clear that this was the most serious attempt the enemy had yet made to clear Eastern Bosnia, and that he was committing considerable bodies of troops. Inter-communication between divisional and lesser staffs would become difficult, since local chetnik groups—five or fifteen men at a time—would now dig up their rifles and begin sniping at our couriers. At home in England bien-pensant ladies and gentlemen would be earnestly discussing the value of the chetniks and the wrongs done by the British to General Mihaylovitch of blessed memory; here in the Mayevitsa the partisans were busy with one and a half German divisions, and chetniks sniped their couriers and their wounded. The comparison seemed particularly painful in those days. Would they in England ever understand? Or was it simply that they preferred to shut their eyes to the truth?

The weather kept up as if we were performing a peacetime tattoo and the sun must shine for the benefit of the spectators. The nights were fine and the moon favourable for dropping supplies. The days passed and ammunition grew shorter than ever. The enemy had Chelitch but Koray still held; it had fallen and then been retaken by hand-to-hand assault. Then Base began at last to react, prodded perhaps by signals from the central mission at Tito's headquarters. By the 28th of the month we had taken in 150,000 rounds as well as a good deal of mortar bomb and a number of Brens. Jubilation ranged from Lekitch to the last volunteer on the front. It had come in the nick of time. Fantastic stories began to circulate of the effi­ciency of Brens and British ammunition. It was said that a partisan machine-gunner would shout across to the enemy: "Here's some British bullets for you! " And the enemy, being a Moslem from Hertsegovina, would shout back: "Well, it's going to rain. They won't drop you anything to-night."

Those were days of triumph. The battle went on back and forth across the Mayevitsa with bad losses on both sides, but worse on the enemy's; nothing he could do, bringing up all the howitzers he could find in Brtchko, was good enough to push our formations out of their coherent line or destroy their morale. With dive-bombing support, as in the old days, he might have succeeded; but it seemed that he had no aircraft to commit. All he sent over was a two-seater Henschel which used to fly about and drop leaflets and open up with its machine-gun on anyone who was silly enough to stand and stare up at it, or else ladle out pocketfuls of anti-personnel bombs, zooming a few hundred feet above the ground, fired at by everything our chaps could bring to bear.

The aircraft, indeed, were all on our side. We did not get the bombing support that we needed; but we did get the supplies. Night after night they came over and dropped all round our fires, using Dakotas now for the first time instead of the less manageable four-engined Halifaxes and Liberators. The loads were completed with sacks of clothing and boots which were dropped without parachutes;

and these free drops were thought to be a great joke. We would stand in the darkness near the fires, and the sacks would come walloping on the ground one after the other. (Several months later we were to have a man killed by a sackful of boots dropped free.) And on April 3rd, wonder of wonders, a lovely sunlit day with the snow brilliant on the peak of Yelitsa and a blue sky above us, we heard a new kind of noise, a deep roaring in the sky that had not been heard before. At first we could see nothing. Then we saw, high up and far away to the south, thin trails of white smoke combed across the sky; and then, at the head of these trails of smoke, little black specks in the sky. They were the long-range bombers from southern Italy, and they were heading north.

The excitement was terrific. Everyone stopped work and rushed out to look at them. Binoculars were in huge demand.

"Here, Zhikitse, where are they? Where are they, I can't see a thing!"

"There, over there. High up. Ten. No, fifteen. No, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one ... Oh-h-h! hundreds of them.... Look, look!"

It went on for half an hour. No-one had ever seen so many air­craft before. The greatest impression was made by the fighter escort, twin-fuselaged Lightnings shining and twisting like silver fish in a sky-reflecting pool around the dense Fortress and Liberator' formations, schooled like swimming carp.

"Eh! druzhe Major, druzhe Major, what an air force!"

Nothing could have done more for morale, partisan and non-combatant alike.

Things indeed were moving fast. On March and the Germans made formal their long-standing virtual occupation of Hungary, moving in large numbers of troops and replacing the government of Kallay, which they suspected of wishing to contract out of the war, by a group of their own puppets headed by Doeme Sztojaj. This was a pensioned general of the Hungarian Army who had been for long Ambassador in Berlin, and, as such, the unofficial channel by which the pro-German General Staff in Budapest kept the Wehr-macht informed of what was going on in Hungary. The Odred in the Frushka Gora, which I had provided with a wireless set for inter-communication with the Voivodina Staff, informed us that long columns of German transport were moving northwards across Srem. Odred wirelessed that they were sitting above the main road that led from Irig to Petrovaradin across the Frushka Gora and counting the troops as they went by. They said that these troops had tried to cross north over the Danube by the bridge at Erdut, fifty miles upstream, but had been refused permission by the local Hungarian frontier guards. It seemed that at least token resistance had taken place in some parts of Hungary.

In other ways, however, the position was far from favourable. Whilst it was highly satisfactory that 16 and 36 Divisions had denied Mayevitsa to the enemy, the fact remained that we whose business lay in the Voivodina were effectively bottled up in Bosnia. Between us and Srem lay the plain of Semberija, and for the moment this plain was packed with enemy troops, chetnik spies, a terrified population. The fault was ours in that we had not foreseen the size of the enemy's intention; and even at the end of March we still thought that we could get back across the Sava without much trouble. Advance parties did in fact succeed.

A few days later my long-awaited reinforcements arrived, Captains Howe and Irwin and a wireless operator, Corporal Wardle. They brought with them another 50,000 rounds and sundry other acceptable stores. Not least, from my point of view, they brought me seven letters from my wife. Life took on an altogether new complexion.

It was more than ever necessary to get back into Srem. Condi­tions were now ripe for a considerable development of the movement m the whole Voivodina, and supplies would be needed that must now be dropped direct to the Frushka Gora; also the situation to the

enemy's; nothing he could do, bringing up all the howitzers he could find in Brtchko, was good enough to push our formations out of their coherent line or destroy their morale. With dive-bombing support, as in the old days, he might have succeeded; but it seemed that he had no aircraft to commit. All he sent over was a two-seater Henschel which used to fly about and drop leaflets and open up with its machine-gun on anyone who was silly enough to stand and stare up at it, or else ladle out pocketfuls of anti-personnel bombs, zooming a few hundred feet above the ground, fired at by everything our chaps could bring to bear.

The aircraft, indeed, were all on our side. We did not get the bombing support that we needed; but we did get the supplies. Night after night they came over and dropped all round our fires, using Dakotas now for the first time instead of the less manageable four-engined Halifaxes and Liberators. The loads were completed with sacks of clothing and boots which were dropped without parachutes;

and these free drops were thought to be a great joke. We would stand in the darkness near the fires, and the sacks would come walloping on the ground one after the other. (Several months later we were to have a man killed by a sackful of boots dropped free.) And on April 3rd, wonder of wonders, a lovely sunlit day with the snow brilliant on the peak of Yelitsa and a blue sky above us, we heard a new kind of noise, a deep roaring in the sky that had not been heard before. At first we could see nothing. Then we saw, high up and far away to the south, thin trails of white smoke combed across the sky; and then, at the head of these trails of smoke, little black specks in the sky. They were the long-range bombers from southern Italy, and they were heading north.

The excitement was terrific. Everyone stopped work and rushed out to look at them. Binoculars were in huge demand.

"Here, Zhikitse, where are they? Where are they, I can't see a thing!"

"There, over there. High up. Ten. No, fifteen. No, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one ... Oh-h-h! hundreds of them.... Look, look!"

It went on for half an hour. No-one had ever seen so many air­craft before. The greatest impression was made by the fighter escort, twin-fuselaged Lightnings shining and twisting like silver fish in a sky-reflecting pool around the dense Fortress and Liberator' formations, schooled like swimming carp.

"Eh! druzhe Major, druzhe Major, what an air force 1"

RETREAT IQ7

Nothing could have done more for morale, partisan and non-combatant alike.

Things indeed were moving fast. On March aznd the Germans made formal their long-standing virtual occupation of Hungary, moving in large numbers of troops and replacing the government of Kallay, which they suspected of wishing to contract out of the war, by a group of their own puppets headed by Doeme Sztojaj. This was a pensioned general of the Hungarian Army who had been for long Ambassador in Berlin, and, as such, the unofficial channel by which the pro-German General Staff in Budapest kept the Wehr-macht informed of what was going on in Hungary. The Odred in the Frushka Gora, which I had provided with a wireless set for inter-communication with the Voivodina Staff, informed us that long columns of German transport were moving northwards across Srem. Odred wirelessed that they were sitting above the main road that led from Irig to Petrovaradin across the Frushka Gora and counting the troops as they went by. They said that these troops had tried to cross north over the Danube by the bridge at Erdut, fifty miles upstream, but had been refused permission by the local Hungarian frontier guards. It seemed that at least token resistance had taken place in some parts of Hungary.

In other ways, however, the position was far from favourable. Whilst it was highly satisfactory that 16 and 36 Divisions had denied Mayevitsa to the enemy, the fact remained that we whose business lay in the Voivodina were effectively bottled up in Bosnia. Between us and Srem lay the plain of Semberija, and for the moment this plain was packed with enemy troops, chetnik spies, a terrified population. The fault was ours in that we had not foreseen the size of the enemy's intention; and even at the end of March we still thought that we could get back across the Sava without much trouble. Advance parties did in fact succeed.

A few days later my long-awaited reinforcements arrived, Captains Howe and Irwin and a wireless operator. Corporal Wardle. They brought with them another 50,000 rounds and sundry other acceptable stores. Not least, from my point of view, they brought me seven letters from my wife. Life took on an altogether new complexion.

It was more than ever necessary to get back into Srem. Condi­tions were now ripe for a considerable development of the movement m the whole Voivodina, and supplies would be needed that must now be dropped direct to the Frushka Gora; also the situation to the north of the Danube, as much by the German occupation of Hungary as by new Russian gains on the Ukranian front, would have improved. On April 4th the whole body of us, staff and all, set out for the Sava, leaving only Basil Irwin and Wardle and Steve to maintain liaison with Lekitch and ensure that stores continued to reach the Mayevitsa. Half-way through the night our long column was turned back with the news that enemy guards were thick along the south bank, apparently expecting on our part an attempt to cross. With chetnik groups now established in most villages of the plain it was suicide to go further. Later on the staff was to make three or four more attempts to get across into Srem; but it was never to prove possible. Traffic over the Sava in this area had been stopped for good; and only at the end of the war, over a year later, would it be resumed.

We did not realize that yet, though, and thought that if it were impossible for a large slow-moving column to get through, it might still be possible for a few of us, unencumbered with wireless gear and moving fast, to avoid detection and get over the Sava in the course of the night.

It was decided that Kolya at least should have a try, the others waiting until conditions were a little better. I decided to go with Kolya.