which guaranteed that insomnia was never likely to be a problem to contend with during our stay on Vis. I put Charlie and Kirky on for the first night and spent the hours after midnight wishing I had put myself on, as I listened to torrential rain tippling down. It took very little imagination to picture their helpless exposure on that cold, unprotected site on the hillside and to appreciate the absurdity of either of them even unrolling his sleeping bag. Sleep was an impossibility.
I knew that their misery would have been completed by the awful change in the weather coming on top of their envy at easily hearing the sounds of revelry emanating from ourselves and our Partisan hosts, who had been determined to introduce us without delay to the warmth and fervour of their patriotic songs and dances and to their mysteriously unlimited supply of the island’s vino. It was a memorable night. Certainly, communication was difficult but the early evening had yielded a commissar character called Srdan Serdar whose better than passable English appointed him henceforth as interpreter, counsellor and friend. The nearest our language could approach to the pronunciation of his Christian name was Sirjon, by which he was thereafter known.
Sirjon was something of an enigma. Whilst preaching Communism for all he was worth, he paraded an aloofness of suave superiority over his comarades which stamped ‘class’ over his every gesture. Snobbery might even be near the truth. Probably in his late twenties, Sirjon’s handsome Slav features were enhanced by vanity expressed in a sartorial elegance so un-guerilla like as to suggest the very privilege which Communism’s levelling was held to reject. He wore an immaculate Italian officer’s uniform and resplendent, glistening boots. Despite the slightly niggling nausea that his presence induced, Sirjon was our willing and helpful source of information and our introduction to local customs and to his Partisan colleagues. Suggestions that he was a plant among us were probably true, but I saw nothing sinister in that: life without him at Podselje would have been much less rewarding.
The mixture of ethnic origin and age range, and the high proportion of females that comprised the Partisans with whom we were linked, combined to produce initial surprise among us at the heterogeneous assortment that our new friends obviously were. It shouldn’t have done. Where whole communities had been ejected from their own mainland or island homes, grateful to be alive and united in passionate resolve to destroy the enemy responsible for their dilemma, niceties of recruitment would have been absurd. Capacity to contribute towards the struggle was a matter ultimately influenced in any event by the will to survive. Women could fire a sten gun or throw a grenade as well as most men could; girls and boys could carry messages; old men could cook or perform a hundred and one other supportive tasks. This army was, in truth, a mobile fighting community which could not afford passengers. It added to the admirable family feeling which attended that first welcoming gathering at Podselje.
Their singing, imbued with passion and executed with an obviously inherent feel for harmony and unselfconscious desire for performance, is a memory I shall retain until I die. Sirjon readily complied with my request for the phonetic translation of the words of our own favourites among their songs. Despite our relative vocal inadequacy, within days we were singing ‘Partisani Nasa’, ‘Dalmatinsca’, ‘Domovina’ and others with such proprietary pride as to make our mock marching – exaggerated left-foot stamp – flatteringly compulsive.
Life on Vis was every bit as unusual as one would have expected it to be. The only life-giving properties that the island possessed were grapes, wine and water. The latter was to run out first. Every other basic item of supply – food, clothing, equipment, ammunition, fuel and transport – had to be supplied by sea at night from Italy, by courtesy and courage of the Royal Navy. Similarly, the luxuries of life like mail and my hopes of a NAAFI ration of chocolate, non-vino booze or cigarettes, relied upon the Navy’s availability and capacity, as well as the caring interest and administrative capabilities of our base-wallah’s to supply us from Bari. Not unnaturally, though probably unfairly, we usually felt that those at base were neither caring nor capable. Such cynicism was not without some justification. When the decision to supply the Partisans began to be implemented, a few anomalies arose from a strange application of priorities. Whilst we, ostensibly on operations, were fed on ‘compo’ rations or operational hard tack, the Partisans were to receive fresh food wherever possible. There was one particularly galling example of this absurdity: their supplies of flour yielded appetising bread from the island’s bakery at Vis Town. It cost us cigarettes (when available) to barter for loaves with the Partisans.
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
