However, whispers had been circulating. The talk was of a Commando reconnaissance party having landed on one of the German-held islands with a raid in prospect. The force that landed on the island of Solta at around midnight on 18/19 March from two LCIs, certainly arrived unnoticed by the German occupiers. Indeed, the ease with which most nocturnal landings could be effected on any of the Dalmatian islands was to become a feature of the series of raids that followed. Great credit for this is due to the co-operation of the Yugoslav villagers. It would have taken divisions of troops to have effectively patrolled those hundreds of miles of coastlines, of which back-of-the-hand knowledge was understandably reserved to the Yugoslav population of those isles. That population became the eyes and ears of the Partisan forces. Nevertheless, the Germans on the islands initially displayed a military naïvety, which suggested that when Himmler was boasting to the world of his knowledge of the strength of the Allied force on Vis (on 11 March 1944) he must have forgotten to tell his local troops. Perhaps it was imagined that we were there for defence only. On Solta, the attackers ought to have been expected.
The reconnaissance party of some few days earlier had produced an exemplary dossier of information, but it had run into a German patrol and had had to leave behind one of its officers, as a wounded prisoner in possession of copious notes and diagrams of nought but military significance. Yet after Colonel Jack Churchill led ashore 180 or so of his No. 2 Commando, together with a similar number of men of the US Special Operations Group who were supported by 47mm guns, medium machine guns and mortars manned by men of the 101st Anti-Aircraft Battery and 43rd Marine Commando, Heavy Weapons Group, they were able to disembark, cross the island and settle into agreed positions around the German-garrisoned village of Grohote without detection. The initial attack, just after dawn, proved to be a total surprise to the enemy whose retaliation was slow and seemingly half-hearted. Their reaction to a loudhailer call to them to surrender to British forces was, however, equally half-hearted, despite the noisily proclaimed threat of an imminent raid on the village by the Royal Air Force from bases in Italy. Perhaps it was a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but when 36 fighter-bombers arrived precisely on time and proceeded to devastate Grohote, it is doubtful who were the most surprised but it terminated the operation. Loudhailer calls enjoyed a better response this time.
The Allied raiders took back to Vis around 100 prisoners, having already buried six victims of the onslaught. Allied casualties were two killed and about twenty wounded. Solta, for the time being, was bereft of Germans. It was an excellent start to raiding which had two important effects. Firstly, it necessitated the enemy’s strengthening of the defences on each of the islands, thus achieving one of the main objectives of Allied presence in Yugoslavia – the tying down of more and better enemy forces in Dalmatia – but secondly, as a consequence, it made future raids that much more difficult and costly for the Allies. If one paused to cogitate on the element of surprise to which the raid on Solta owed its success, perhaps the fifth columnists in our midst would not have imagined that the British could have been so stupid as to hold an Anglo-Yugoslav concert in the schoolroom at Podselje on the same evening that many of the defenders of Vis were stealthily stepping ashore on Solta.
I have to admit though that the concert was a tremendous success, apart from the temporary nuisance of a troublesome minority of RSR drunks who were metaphorically, then literally, carried away. It was the emphatic and ultimate icebreaker in tri-partite relations between Partisans, commandos and RSR in Podselje. What mattered was our singing of ‘Partisani Nasa’ and ‘Dalmatinsca’ in Serbo-Croat and their renderings of ‘Tipperary’ and ‘You are my Sunshine’ in English. The diary is almost emotional: “A fine feeling now exists between ourselves and the Partisans. There’s something wonderful about these folk – I would like to go on fighting with them until we have liberated their country.”
However, this perfect picture was disturbed by an unwelcome development. Someone must have spotted the inequality in the calibre of the gun crews, for on 19 March Charlie Winch was taken away from me, made up to Lance-Bombardier and, in a minor reshuffle, replaced by an Irish lad named Paddy Haden. Charlie strengthened Fred Butcher’s crew – my loss, Fred’s gain – but it was a compensation to see Charles get some deserved promotion. Paddy was a likeable lad, tentatively acquiescent to a point near to characterlessness until he felt the reassurance of acceptance, after which he contributed his fair share of constructive opinions to add to a rare quality of enthusiasm for hard physical graft. Whether his rather droll humour was delayed whilst he settled in or if it naturally matured from contamination by the rest of us I never knew, but he soon emerged as a laconic comic who thereafter regularly amused us with apt examples of a perceptive wit. He immediately raised with me a subject which it was my duty to initiate and on which I usually procrastinated. “You’ll be wanting my next of kin,” he said as he produced a scrap of paper bearing his father’s name and an address in Monastriden, County Sligo. What prophetic instinct prompted his uncharacteristic blundering into a topic as taboo as a soldier’s will leaves me bewildered. Within a year he had been killed.
With Paddy joining us, the crew had a League of Nations look about it: four Scots, one Irish and me. Friendships were developing too, from living in close proximity with other crews. Among the gun commanders, Jimmy Irvine, a sergeant from the same regiment as Topper, Archie and Bert, was almost inevitably drawn towards my bunch. In a praiseworthy attempt to prevent boredom before it set in, the powers decided that some of the flat plain below our gun positions should be cleared of vines and levelled to provide a football pitch. It was a job which was tackled with more enthusiasm than might have been expected, considering the limited tools at our disposal, but it produced an excellent example of teamwork between the Partisans, commandos and RSR, and we found an enhanced camaraderie in toiling together. The resultant, grassless, full-size pitch provided countless hours of pleasure (and sometimes fury), but I also think it clinched somebody’s notion of the potential for building a rough airstrip on Vis.
Royal Air Force advisers had been on the island since January, and early discussions had taken place between Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean and Randolph Churchill about Vis’ secondary potential as an ‘aircraft carrier’. I am convinced that the impressive sight of the rapidly created, level football pitch provided the final nudge for the experts to order the vines’ clearance for a narrow runway of some 1000 yards alongside the island’s only noteworthy road. We played our first football match on the new pitch on 19 March against the Commandos (43RM) who thrashed us 5-2: it was to be a week or two before the air-strip had its christening. Christening with landing planes that is.
On the night of 22/23 March Jerry decided to mark it first and so turned out to bomb it. Either the daily visitor high in the sky in a reconnaissance plane had spotted it with his camera or Sirjon’s ‘five columns’ were at work again. It was the first real air raid on the island and whilst one could expect attention to be given to the two towns of Vis and Komiza, the enemy must have known about our presence on the plateau to justify a few bombs there. I think there were casualties in the towns that night but it was by no means a heavy raid, the nearest bomb to our position falling 1000 yards away. There were probably no more than five or six planes involved. The first real air attack came a few nights later on 27/28 March when Podselje was clearly the target for up to twenty bombers, although the towns copped it too.
It was a terrifying onslaught, about which we could do nothing because the effectiveness of our Brownings was limited to 1000 yards – a fact which infuriated the Partisans who felt we should be blazing away randomly and harmlessly into the night sky, as indeed were they with their small arms, mostly sten guns with a range effective at less than 50 yards. It was the first instance of disharmony between us, about which they were totally irrational. It marked an irreconcilable difference of approach between our ‘whites of their eyes’ training in the economy of ammunition and the unnecessary revelation of our gun positions, as opposed to their principle of blazing away regardless.
Parachute flares had first been dropped to illuminate the target, after which the bombs rained down on the tiny village at will without impediment. I’m told that blanket bombings of cities breeds a fatalism from feelings of dispersal – “I’d have to be really lucky
