37
Saturday 9 September 1944
The column had been marching near blind for five hours when midnight arrived. The moon had waned, and each man navigated by the sound of the footsteps in front. Ralph couldn’t fathom how their Partisan guides knew where they were going. There was so little light that no one could see the column stop when the lead person halted, and everyone fell into each other like dominoes.1 They reached a safe house past Gabrovka just after sunrise. That they walked in some daylight fuelled anxieties. Was it because they were late? Were they in slightly safer territory? Or were they trying to outrun someone?
Ralph got a few hours’ sleep, rose early, and wandered into the farmhouse next to the barn, where the Partisan commander was conversing with the farmer and an RAF officer. All had glasses of slivovica. The officer noted Ralph’s hat. ‘Ah, you must be the Australian!’ he said in German. Ralph took a seat, and a glass was poured. ‘So, you speak German with an Austrian accent?’
‘That’s right, sir.’
‘Capital! What a coincidence.’
‘How’s that, sir?’
‘Well, we need a man to go into Austria for us. We’ll sort you out with papers, funds, and send you over the border to meet some contacts. You’d be perfect!’2
Ralph was aware his mind wasn’t in the best place, but he knew he wasn’t completely crazy. Speaking as an Australian with an Austrian accent was one thing; passing himself off as Austrian would be quite another. ‘There’s one problem, sir. My nerves are shot. I’d crack if I was asked to show my train ticket, never mind questions by the Gestapo. Besides, I haven’t seen my wife in four years. I need to get home.’
The officer looked disappointed; he seemed to have thought he’d found the answer to his prayers. ‘Fair enough, old boy. It was pretty rough of me to put it on you. Though I still think you’d have done a fine job. You might have even foxed the Gauleiter (regional governor)!’3
The whole episode sounds outlandish, but Ralph was not the only escapee whom British intelligence tried to recruit.4 The actual agency that made the offer remains a mystery. MI9 had an agreement with SOE to send joint teams into Austria.5 Wolfsberg was a key target, and if Ralph had accepted, he might have helped to spring fellow prisoners. MI6 was another possibility: they had recently attempted to send agents over the border. One agent, a depressed young Austrian defector, let himself be captured and the attempt failed.6 Reliable replacements were needed.
Either way, Ralph was wise to refuse. The Nazis helped create many resistance cells just to weed out potential enemies, and the following month an OSS mission saw its leader, Lieutenant Taylor, thrown in a Gestapo prison in Vienna. Taylor would survive to the end of the war in the Mauthausen concentration camp.7
Since crossing the Sava, much of the marching the escapees had done had been on hard dirt surfaces rather than soft forest trails. By now their tattered boots were falling to pieces. Most farmers had the equipment to make flying repairs, but only as a stopgap. Inside the shoes, blisters and wounds were worsening. The first rule of Partisan warfare was always to carry a spoon; the second was never to take your shoes off while you were resting within a day of the enemy: as a result, trapped within a sweaty prison, the soles of your feet had no chance to harden. Worse still, marching at night meant nothing to look at to distract from the pain. Sound and physical sensation were all they had. It was strange: here they were in a new part of the country, and they’d hardly seen an inch of Dolenjska by daylight.
Less than fifty kilometres away, the move against the airfield continued. While Ralph talked spies, Schumacher and Buchberger moved out. Taken by surprise, the Partisans near Schmitz and Schumacher slipped away, frustrating attempts to capture or kill them. Buchberger had more success. The combination of Wehrmacht mountain troops and Domobranstvo was ideal. In the forests west of the airstrip, Buchberger stumbled on three Partisan couriers. One was wounded, another escaped, but the third gave up the location of a camp of new Partisan recruits. Buchberger took a small detour to destroy the camp and capture or kill the occupants.8 The Axis column finally encamped at 20.00. They were so close to the airstrip that sentries spotted three planes landing during the night. The aircraft were delivering supplies, and evacuating Partisan wounded and five New Zealander POWs who had escaped from northern Italy.9 Come the morning, the three Axis columns would converge, destroying the airstrip. The escape line would perish with it.
Sunday 10 September 1944
Ralph and the column had again been marching for five hours when midnight arrived. Soon after, they passed the old fortress town of Žužemberk and had an unexpected encounter with the local press. A writer from the regional Partisan paper arrived with an English-speaking female assistant. There was no time to stop, so the interview was walk and talk. Ralph was first up. The questions were pretty standard: ‘Are you from London?’ was the last one. Ralph knew that the words for Australia, Avstralija, and Austria, Avstrija, were similar. ‘No, dear, I’m from Australia. That’s Australia, not Austria.’ Ralph pointed north to the Alps and shook his head to illustrate the point. The reporter’s assistant scribbled it down, then made her way along the column to get more quotes.10 The party continued on, following the Krka river south-south-east. They halted at 06.00, and bunked down at a forest farmhouse near where the river turns east.
At 03.00 Buchberger should have established radio contact with the other columns and begun the assault. Portable radios were notoriously unreliable – mountains, rain, and forests could all interfere with the signal. Failing to establish contact, Buchberger’s commander hesitated. Only after hearing gunfire in the far distance did Buchberger finally advance at 08.00, by which time most of the Partisans had had time to pack up and escape the encirclement. But Buchberger’s vanguard could see the airfield’s staff – a few Allied soldiers and Partisans – loading onto a jeep. A German took a shot at the car. The bullet smashed through the windscreen, but missed the driver, and the jeep took off, smashing its way out of town and joining the comrades fleeing east.11 Nadlesk had fallen, but the men who ran it had escaped.
At 09.30 the escapees were rudely awoken. Normally given the whole day to rest, only a few hours of sleep had been snatched when the escapees were roused by the Dolenjska Partisans, given a dollop of žganci and urged on. A full daytime march was a shock. Bleary-eyed and tired, they saw the southern countryside clearly for the first time. It looked like a postcard of Štajerska in miniature. It had valleys, rivers, and windswept meadows, but the valleys were shallower, the rivers slower, and down south the sun beat harder on the grass. Near the river, apples ripened on the trees, but the fields that should have been overflowing with corn were covered in weeds: the war had not been kind to Dolenjska.
The column crossed the Krka river and continued south-south-east.12 The Partisans were clearly spooked – not since the farmhouse ambush had the escapees been pushed this hard. At 13.00, having marched for fourteen of the last seventeen hours, the Partisans allowed a two-hour rest. The men were near collapse. Most were limping by now, either from huge blisters or ankles twisted during night marches. Anyone who hadn’t already procured a sturdy branch-turned-walking stick soon did. The Partisans moved them on, trying again to set a terrifying pace. But the escapees’ walk had slowed to a crawl. The Partisans, showing little patience, seemed to be leaving them behind. ‘Get them to slow down,’ pleaded Leslie. ‘We’ll never keep up.’
Ralph made several attempts, but the Partisans either didn’t understand or pretended not to. Eventually they relented and slowed the pace, with one Partisan sent to the rear to make sure no one fell behind. Leslie and Ralph took Švejk’s old position and watched from the flanks to do the same. All afternoon and into the evening the march went on, on dirt roads hardened by summer, the surface wrecking what was left of their boots and reflecting the sun’s heat. They saw few signs of life save the occasional elderly villager, so thorough was the region’s devastation. Eventually they came to a long steep hill covered with dense forest.
‘Where are we going?’ Ralph asked the lead Partisan. ‘Why are we moving by day?’
‘We’re going to Semič. We arrive today.’
‘And is that it? Are we going home from there?’
‘I believe so.’
That’d have to do. Ralph needed something to rally the men. ‘How far to Semič?’ he asked.
‘A few hours,’ came the curt reply.
The men lay shattered and sprawled out in the shade of the trees. ‘Listen up, lads!’ barked The Crow. ‘This is it. We’re moving by day because it’s the final stretch. One more push, and we’ll be home free.’ Ralph hoped his stirring words told a true story.
The news seemed not to elicit any emotion. Then one of the men piped up. ‘We’ll be with you, Crow, you slave-driving old bastard!’13 Those still with a sense of humour burst out laughing. They gathered themselves up for one last push.
It took another two hours in the heat to climb the hill. Once at the top, they could see a broad plain with mountains in the distance. Below was what seemed to be a moderate-sized town. Please let this be Semič, Ralph thought. The path down was as steep as the climb up. It took another hour to reach the valley floor.