165 AIRBORNE RAID ON TITO'S HEADQUARTERS.pdf

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770306 154103
No. 165
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NUMBER 165
© Copyright
After the Battle
2014
Editor: Karel Margry
Editor-in-Chief: Winston G. Ramsey
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CONTENTS
OPERATION ‘RÖSSELSPRUNG’
The Airborne Raid on Tito’s Headquarters 2
UNITED KINGDOM
Britain’s First World War Defences
39
IT HAPPENED HERE
The Exploits of an Aussie Bomber Crew 50
Front Cover:
On May 25, 1944, German
Fallschirmjäger carried out a surprise airborne
assault on the town of Drvar in northern
Bosnia with mission to capture Field-Marshal
Tito
(inset top right),
whose command post
was in a cave just outside the town
(arrowed).
They failed to catch Tito but did hit
upon one of his uniforms
(bottom right).
Back Cover:
Denis Kelly with his son Denis Jr
at the Bomber Command Memorial in London
(see story page 50). Denis went on 30
operations over Europe before being shot down
on the night of July 18/19, 1944. See also:
www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2014/s4019723.htm
Acknowledgements:
For assistance with the
‘Rösselsprung’ story, the Editor would like to
thank Brigadier-General Wayne D. Eyre of the
Canadian Army; Charles D. Melson, chief histo-
rian at the US Marine Corps University; Lui-
tenant-Kolonel Erik Jellema of the Dutch Army;
Indira Rapi of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Mine
Action Center; Helmuth Schultz, glider pilot
veteran of LLG1; Dieter Heckmann and Robert
Heeren. For their invaluable help during his
stay in Drvar, he would like to thank Mayor Ste-
vica Lukac of Drvar; local historian Nikola
Bosnic; Teresa Rowan; Zeljko Djilas, and Ivana
Bosnic. For her help with the Britain’s First
World War Defences story, he thanks Amy
Adams of the Royal Engineers Library and
Museum at Chatham.
Photo Credit Abbreviations:
IWM —Imperial
War Museum; SMCH —Slovenian Museum
of Contemporary History, Ljubljana.
Josip Broz-Tito was born in 1892 in the village of Kumrovec in Croatia. A metal worker by
training, at an early age he joined the labour movement and the socialist party. Con-
scripted into the Austrian-Hungarian Army in 1913, he served with distinction during the
First World War but was seriously wounded and captured by the Imperial Russians in
1915. He spent a year in a Russian hospital before being transferred to a work camp in the
Ural Mountains. Making his way to St Petersburg, he participated in the 1917 Bolshevist
Revolution and later joined a Red Guard unit in Omsk. Upon his return home in 1920,
Broz found himself in the newly established Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where he joined the
Communist Party of Yugoslavia. In 1928, by then secretary of the party’s Zagreb branch,
he was arrested for illegal communist activities and sentenced to five years in prison.
After his release, he lived incognito and assumed a number of noms de guerre, among
them ‘Walter’ and ‘Tito’. In 1934 he went to Vienna, where the party’s Central Committee
had sought refuge, and was appointed to become a member. The following year he went
to the Soviet Union to work for the Comintern, also joining the Soviet Communist Party
and the NKVD secret police. Sent back to Yugoslavia in 1937 to purge the still-outlawed
Communist Party there, he became its Secretary-General. When the Axis countries
invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Communists initially kept a low profile but in June
1941, after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Tito took to the hills, organising the
partisan movement and engaging in guerrilla warfare against the occupying forces.
By 1944, his Army of National Liberation had grown to well over 300,000.
Tito’s headquarters was located at Drvar, a small wood-logging town in northern
Bosnia. With a pre-war population of 3,000 most people worked in the town’s
cellulose factory.
2
IWM NA15131
On May 25, 1944, the German army in Nazi-occupied Yugo-
slavia launched Operation ‘Rösselsprung’ (Knight’s Move in
chess), a major offensive against the elusive partisan army in
northern Bosnia. As part of this undertaking, SS-Fallschirm-
jäger-Bataillon 500 executed a surprise airborne attack by para-
chute and glider on the town of Drvar in an attempt to capture
or kill Field-Marshal Tito and wipe out his Supreme Headquar-
ters. Although the SS paratroop battalion made a successful
assault landing and captured the town, they failed to find Tito,
who narrowly managed to make good his escape from his
command post. Soon encircled by superior partisan forces who
rushed to the scene in fierce counter-attack, the German air-
borne force had to fight for its life before being finally rescued
by ground units the following morning.
OPERATION ‘RÖSSELSPRUNG’
THE AIRBORNE RAID ON TITO’S HEADQUARTERS
In April 1941, Nazi Germany together
with its allies Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria
invaded and occupied the Kingdom of
Yugoslavia. The country was then parti-
tioned amongst the victors: an extremely
Fascist puppet regime, the Ustashe under
Ante Pavelic, was set up in Croatia, and Ger-
man, Italian and Rumanian troops were sta-
tioned in the rest of the country.
Resistance against foreign occupation soon
sprang up in the form of two guerrilla move-
ments. One were the Chetniks, the Royalist
and mostly Serbian guerrillas under Colonel
Draza Mihailovic, an officer of the pre-war
Yugoslav Army. The other were the Parti-
sans, the Communist and pan-Slavic fighters
under their charismatic leader Josip Broz-
Tito, the secretary-general of the Yugoslav
Communist Party. The two movements had
completely different strategies and aims.
Mihailovic’s approach was to mostly abide his
time in the mountains to await an Allied inva-
sion after which his troops would come out to
restore the Serb monarchy. Tito’s strategy
was to strike at the Germans whenever and
wherever he could, regardless of the risks or
the inevitable reprisals, and, once victorious,
to create a Communist-led people’s republic
of Yugoslavia. The political divergence
quickly led to internal strife. The Chetniks,
who had initially been fighting the Germans,
soon changed their focus to destroying the
Partisans and the struggle quickly devolved
into a state of civil war. In their fervour to
annihilate the Partisans, the Chetniks even
engaged in secret or open collaboration with
the Germans and Italians and with the Croat
Ustashe.
The Western Allies, notably Britain, ini-
tially supported Mihailovic, sending in
weapons, supplies and money to the Chet-
niks. However, after agents of the Special
Operations Executive (SOE) parachuted
into Yugoslavia reported in early 1943 that
Tito’s partisans were doing most of the fight-
ing against the Germans, Britain changed
sides and the bulk of the support thereafter
went to the Communists.
In the three years since 1941, the Axis
armies launched six big offensives aimed at
encircling and destroying the growing parti-
san army. However, each time Tito, his staff
and large bodies of partisans managed to
escape from every trap and all efforts to
annihilate them came to nothing. On the
contrary, when Italy capitulated in Septem-
ber 1943, the partisans captured huge
amounts of arms and equipment from the
Italian divisions stranded in Yugoslavia,
enabling them to set up several new divisions
of what was by then known as the National
Liberation Army of Yugoslavia (NOVJ).
By Karel Margry
By the spring of 1944 the NOVJ had
grown to more than 300,000 men, organised
in 11 army corps with 39 divisions and
several independent brigades. While the
German forces held the towns and cities with
strong garrisons and guarded the major
roads and railways, the partisans were
masters of large tracts of the rugged and
mountainous countryside, which in effect
could be seen as ‘liberated territory’.
With the faltering of Unternehmen
‘Schwarz’ (the Sixth Offensive, as the parti-
sans called it) during the winter of 1943-44,
the German High Command began to realise
that it was losing the initiative in Yugoslavia.
The Anglo-American advance in Italy and
the Soviet advance in the East were forcing
the Wehrmacht to withdraw divisions from
the Balkans: two had already gone to Italy in
early spring and four had been sent to
occupy Hungary in March. Since further
attempts to annihilate the partisans by large-
scale attacks were clearly out of the question,
an alternative plan was devised: a bold stroke
at its centre might paralyse the partisan lead-
ership, thus restoring the initiative to the
Germans, and might even kill or capture Tito
and his staff as well.
3
SMCH
ERFNOU
Left:
Tito’s command post at Drvar was in a natural cave just
outside the town. It lay well hidden up in a cleft in the rock
face.
Right:
A wooden cabin had been built directly in front of
THE SEARCH FOR TITO
The idea for an action against Tito’s head-
quarters had been the subject of several ear-
lier plans, notably with the Division Bran-
denburg, the special forces division formed
by the German Abwehr (military intelli-
gence) for commando and covert operations.
In the late summer of 1943, the division
had set up a small special unit in Vienna.
Known as Einheit Kirchner, after its com-
mander, Oberleutnant Wolfram Kirchner, its
special purpose was to gather intelligence
and develop plans for an operation against
Tito’s headquarters. In October, having com-
pleted its training, the platoon-size unit was
sent to Banja Luka in northern Bosnia,
beginning operations under direct command
of division headquarters. When in December
another, similar Brandenburg unit under
Hauptmann Boeckl arrived in Banja Luka
from Greece, the two were merged into one,
the cave entrance. This served as workspace for Tito and the
members of his General Staff, the cavern itself being mainly
used as shelter during the frequent Axis air attacks on Drvar.
uniforms and fitted out with parachutes, to
be dropped from an aircraft near Jajce.
Ostensibly killed by malfunctioning chutes,
one was to carry a letter addressed to Tito
personally, which on opening would explode
and, hopefully, kill the partisan leader. Nei-
ther plan materialised because, before they
could be carried out, counter-partisan action
by regular German forces under Operation
‘Schwarz’ forced Tito to move his headquar-
ters in early January 1944.
At the end of February, Hauptmann
Boeckl was relieved of his post and suc-
ceeded by Major Ernst Benesch. He rapidly
expanded the unit to one of battalion size.
Einheit Benesch, as it was now known, con-
tinued its search for Tito’s headquarters.
About this time, they learned that Tito had
moved his command post to Drvar, a small
rural industrial town in western Bosnia about
90 kilometres south-west of Banja Luka.
with Boeckl taking command. He divided the
unit into two platoons, one under himself,
the other under Kirchner.
In gathering intelligence, the unit made
good use of the local Chetnik leaders, Uros
Drenovic and Lazo Tesanovic, whose men
knew how to move through partisan-con-
trolled areas relatively freely, had good con-
tacts with anti-Communist peasants, and
could investigate the whereabouts of Tito’s
command centre relatively unnoticed.
In late 1943, after the unit learned that
Tito had moved his headquarters to the town
of Jajce in central Bosnia, they developed
two plans for an action against it. One called
for a nightly surprise raid, to be carried out
by men of the unit together with Chetnik
fighters, all dressed up in partisan uniforms,
with the idea to kidnap or eliminate Tito.
Another called for two corpses (murdered
prisoners of war), dressed in British military
IWM NA15114
Armed sentries from the Supreme Headquarters’ Escort Battal-
ion guarded the command post.
4
The same view today. The cabin is not the original but a post-
war replica.
ATB
IWM NA15113
Right:
On May 4, 1944, a party of four Allied
war reporters had arrived in Drvar to publi-
cise Tito and the little-known struggle of
the partisans to the Western world. They
had been flown in to the partisan airstrip
at Bosanski Petrovac. Here three of them
— (L-R) John Talbot of Reuters, represent-
ing the combined British Press (leaning
against the tree); Stoyan Pribichevich of
Fortune
and
Time
magazines (a Croat-born
American citizen) for the American Press,
and Chief Petty Officer ‘Gene’ Fowler (a US
Army cine cameraman) — are interviewing
Vladislav Ribnikar, Tito’s Minister of Infor-
mation, with the help of a female inter-
preter. The picture was taken by the fourth
man, photographer Sergeant Max Slade of
the British Army Film and Photo Unit.
Soon after, this location was confirmed by
wireless intelligence. In early 1942, the Ober-
befehlshaber Süd-Ost (German Comman-
der-in-Chief South-East) had assigned the
German commander in Bosnia a special
wireless monitoring platoon. Commanded by
Hauptmann Wollny, and made up of expert
personnel from Nachrichten-Aufklärungs-
Abteilung 4 stationed at Saloniki in northern
Greece, its task was to intercept and decrypt
enemy radio traffic. In the summer of 1943
the whole Abteilung, including Wollny’s pla-
toon, was sent to Belgrade and within a few
months they were able to listen in on the
majority of the partisans’ radio traffic. Deci-
phering the enemy messages was not so diffi-
cult but identifying the location of their
headquarters was more problematic due to
the extreme mobility of the guerrillas. How-
ever, in late February 1944, using cross-bear-
ings from several receiving stations, Wollny’s
unit managed to pinpoint Tito’s headquar-
ters to the town of Drvar.
A decisive role in the search for Tito’s HQ
was played by the Abwehr’s regular sub-
branches, notably its Abteilung I (espionage)
and Abteilung II (counter-espionage). Since
a re-organisation in August 1943, both
departments had representing agencies at
all levels of army command on the Balkans:
at Heeresgruppe F there were Front-
Aufklärungs-Kommandos 111 and 201;
subordinate to them on army level, attached
to 2. Panzer-Armee headquarters, were
Führender Front-Aufklärungs-Trupp 176
and Front-Aufklärungs-Trupp 216, the latter
stationed at Sisak. Working together with the
Ic (chief intelligence officer) at their respec-
tive headquarters, these units assembled and
collated all the intelligence on enemy troop
strength and locations gathered from
espionage, wireless monitoring and Sicher-
heitsdienst, Geheime Feldpolizei and Feld-
kommandantur sources. It was they who
finally determined in early March that Tito’s
HQ was definitely at Drvar.
Final confirmation came in mid-May,
when the Abwehr intercepted a cable from
the Yugoslav military attaché in Washington
to his Royal Army counterpart in Cairo
giving the location of Tito’s HQ at Drvar.
SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, the
man who had snatched Italian Duce Benito
Mussolini from the Gran Sasso in September
Right:
On May 14, 1944, Slade pictured Tito
with his Cabinet Ministers and Supreme
Staff at the cabin. In the front row (L-R) are
Vladislav Ribnikar (Minister of Informa-
tion), Colonel Filipovic, Edvard Kardelj
(member of the Central Committee of the
Yugoslav Communist Party and one of
Tito’s closest confidants) and Tito. In the
back row (L-R) are Major-General Arso
Jovanovic (Chief-of-Staff), Radonja (Tito’s
secretary), Rodoljub Colakovic (Secretary
of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National
Liberation of Yugoslavia), Edvard Kocbek
(Minister of Education, a non-Communist)
and Lieutenant-General Sreten Zujovic.
Tito’s dog Tiger in the foreground.
5
1943 (see
After the Battle
No. 22), was for a
short time also involved in the search for
Tito. Ordered by Hitler and the Oberkom-
mando der Wehrmacht (OKW — German
Armed Forces High Command) to find and
capture Tito, he flew to Belgrade in mid-
April but found Abwehr intelligence reports
there inaccurate and contradictory. Deciding
to find out for himself, he drove to Zagreb
and, with the help of men from his SS-
Jagdverband Süd-Ost (the section of his spe-
cial forces unit stationed in Bosnia), eventu-
ally learned around mid-May that Tito was in
Drvar. Skorzeny wanted to kidnap or kill Tito
in a small, stealthy commando-type operation
and sent his adjutant, SS-Hauptsturmführer
Adrian von Fölkersam, to headquarters of
the XV. Gebirgs-Armeekorps in Banja Luka
to inform General der Infanterie Ernst von
Leyser of his scheme. The latter was already
developing his own plans, and probably did
not like SS interference anyway, and gave
Fölkersam a cold shoulder. Skorzeny, who
thought any large-scale operation in Bosnia
stood no chance of success because its secu-
rity would always be compromised by loose
talking, thereupon withdrew from the mission
and had no further part in it.
THE PARTISAN FORCES IN DRVAR
The small town of Drvar had been chosen
as partisan headquarters for the excellent
tactical reason that approach to it was diffi-
cult. The town, which earned a living from a
large saw-mill and cellulose factory, lay in a
wide green valley with the Jasenovac Moun-
tains rising steeply to the north and high
steep wooded hills surrounding it on all other
sides. Entry was limited to three roads
through defiles that could be easily blocked.
The Unac river flowed just north of the town,
forming a further barrier where a strong
defence could be put up. Of an original pre-
war population of 3,000, by early 1944 only
some 200 remained, most others having fled
from the German bombings of the town.
When Tito and his staff arrived in Drvar
on January 22, they initially set up headquar-
ters in a house in the town. However, fearing
a German air attack, they soon moved to a
safer place, a natural cave located in a cleft in
the escarpment just north of the town. It was
just across the Unac river from the town,
some 15 metres high up in a wooded ravine,
with a narrow flight of stone steps cut out
from the rock leading up to it. The cave had
a narrow entrance but there were wider
IWM NA15129
IWM NA15105

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