17
Colin Cargill’s death in February 1942 was a small part of a crushing of the Italian offensive that winter. By the time John Denvir recovered from the exhaustion that had taken him out of action, he was one of only 700 Partisans still fighting.1 The Italian Army was determined to hunt him and the other survivors down, but they seemed unable to succeed. When the Italians pursued, the Partisans always managed to break or sneak out.* Sometimes Partisans vanished from inside an encirclement. After one such incident, Italian soldiers masked their failure by burning homes and reporting a ‘conquest of the battlefield’.2 Unable to deliver the killing blow, the Italians took their frustration out on the people of Ljubljana. On 23 February they fenced off Ljubljana with thirty-three kilometres of barbed wire. Italian commanders took hostages, systematically torturing and violating prisoners. One general complained about the latter – not because he objected on principle, but because he thought sexual violence damaged Italian prestige.3 One in four Ljubljana residents were searched, and nearly 1,000 were arrested.4
They were the first to be sent to Italy’s new concentration camps. One of the most notorious was Rab, an island in the Adriatic where thousands would starve to death in hellish conditions. But this did not stop the rebellion. Next, the 2nd Army enacted Plan Primavera (Spring Plan). Through January to April, they pulled all their forces back to just twelve garrisons. Effectively, they gave up and left the majority of Ljubljana Province to the Partisans. Slovenian soil was liberated. The Partisans tasted a strategic victory for the first time.
Success came at a terrible cost. As few Partisans had military training, they suffered staggering losses. One Catholic socialist described under-equipped ‘Sunday trippers’ wandering into the woods after mass.5 Those Sunday trippers had seen their homes burned and their friends murdered. Many, Colin among them, had been killed because locals identified them to the Italians. There were scores to settle.
What transpired was a rampage that would stain the resistance forever. It took place in the same villages that had borne the brunt of winter fighting. Partisans went house to house, murdering those who had helped the Italians, and sometimes their families too. The Kiwi Partisan John Denvir saw one such execution: a villager who’d given testimony that led to the deaths of two teenage boys serving with the Partisans. He was shot, and his house ransacked, leaving his widow wailing over her husband’s corpse that her spouse had only given up the boys because he had had an Italian gun to his head.6
The fight continued, and John found himself in a position of command. He led a company of mounted infantry for the Ljubo Šercer Battalion, which was named after a Partisan killed that winter. John became a legendary figure: ‘Corporal Frank’ (an anglicization of his Partisan name), the POW who became a Partisan. Still encamped at Mount Krim, and perilously close to three enlarged Italian garrisons, he attacked wherever possible, luring the Italians on hopeless pursuits.7 He also learned that, without heavy weapons and serious training, attacking garrisons was foolhardy, so the battalion’s attention switched instead to convoys. On 5 May 1942 John and the Battalion ambushed an Italian mechanized column, with the Italians taking over 100 casualties in bitter forest fighting.8 Such attacks were the only way for the Partisans to stay armed – their weapons stores had been totally depleted.9
John was present for another stunning victory soon after, one driven by moral necessity. On 24 June Italian troops had begun sweeping Ljubljana again, arresting every male university student, ex-army officer, unemployed male, and anyone from the lands annexed by Italy after the First World War. Many fled the city, but a quarter of the population was detained, thirty-one people killed, and 2,500 dispatched to concentration camps.10 For those arrested, a bleak future awaited, unless the Partisans could save them. On 28 June 1942 a train carrying 600 people departed Ljubljana, bound for a concentration camp. With the help of friendly railwaymen and their signal lights, the train was halted. Partisans opened fire on the guards’ compartment, while others rushed forward to break the padlocks on the passenger carriages. The train arrived at its destination the next day, but it did not carry a single Slovenian passenger.11
Sadly, these victories too were marred. Criminal actions by Partisans were rarely punished if the perpetrator was a member of the Communist Party. One such man was John’s battalion commissar, Mirko Fric Novak. Mirko had such a vile reputation that Partisans from another unit threatened to kill him.12 He picked out and killed a dozen perceived ‘enemies of the people’ from those liberated on the train.13 Other Partisans committed crimes of ethnic hatred. A few dozen Roma from several families travelled through the village of Iška, which was held by John’s battalion comrades in the 1st and 5th Companies. To the north, Roma were being sent to Nazi extermination camps; to the south, many took up arms to escape the same fate.* At Iška, none of this mattered: over fifty men, women, and children were butchered, and their bodies were dumped in the forest. A Partisan bulletin called the slaughter a victory over an ‘organised gypsy spy and robber gang’.14
It was a thin line between rebellion and chaos. The independence and determination of individual units has given the Partisans early successes. Though their numbers had swelled to some 2,500 fighters, the Partisans were vulnerable; they had no clear strategic plan, and indulged infighting and atrocities. There were many incompetent or cruel officers. Units were small, poorly coordinated, and too close to Ljubljana and large Italian garrisons to ever plan and recuperate safely. This was the analysis of Commander Stane (real name: Franc Rozman), a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and one of the Partisans’ best commanders. He reorganized the forces under his command, with several battalions merging into a single brigade, although he was reprimanded for this unauthorized initiative.15 The commander himself was embarking on an expedition, one that, if successful, could liberate Ralph and the other POWs. With 500 Partisans, Commander Stane was planning to cross the mighty Sava river into Nazi-controlled territory and make for Štajerska. The Germans reinforced the border and repelled multiple attacks by Stane’s forces, so he was compelled to go on a long march via Gorenjska. And by the time they arrived in mid-1942, only 120 of his Partisans were alive.16 The few other Partisans in the region were scattered and weak, as was the OF underground, relentlessly hunted by the Gestapo.
The Germans killed the Partisans they captured in publicly announced mass executions in Maribor and Celje. Ralph saw the death notices and didn’t know what to make of them – the Germans spoke not of dead Partisans or rebels, but of ‘Communist bandits’ or ‘bandit gangs’. The condemned were encouraged to write a final, uncensored letter to their loved ones as a perverse intimidation of friends and relatives. One young man wrote:
Dear Mother,
I love you, I love you, I love you, and Karla and Hansi . . . Dear Hans, don’t forget me, I am thinking about you. Please greet Pop when you see him next. I am thinking of you, of my darlings, my dears. Mum I am so much yours, yours. Mum, Mum, I thank you for all that you have done for me. You are my everything, my everything, poor Mother. I would have so dearly liked to have given you some pleasant times in the autumn of your life. Unfortunately it will not be possible. I love you, I love you. I embrace you all and think about you all right to the end.
Your Erich.17
Although many paid a terrible price for resistance, the Partisans had one great triumph. Frightened of the possibility of full-scale Partisan-led revolt, Himmler’s mass deportations had ended.* However, under the rule of the Reich, young Slovenian men faced a more urgent problem: the Wehrmacht draft. Before, few would risk themselves and their families to fight and probably die as Partisans. But it became a more attractive option when the alternative was dying in Russia for Hitler. That summer, a few brave young boys left their homes and went to join Stane’s Štajerska Partisans.18 Striking opportunistically, Stane’s forces kept their attacks small. They always stayed on the move, attacking lone trucks, cars, and high-ranking Nazis. Reinforcements arrived from all over the Reich and succeeded in mauling, but not destroying, the Partisans. Partisan battalions were split up, moved, and would begin again in a new area. Soon the war would come close to Ralph, to the mountain range south-west of Maribor: Pohorje.