“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.”
Excerpt from “Raiding Support Regiment: The Diary of a Special Forces Soldier 1943-45” by Walter Jones
“Ben and I had some good times with various battalions. The Fifth Peta Battalion, was our favourite. It was newly out from Egypt and Branko the commandant was a great friend of ours. He was an enormous man, a good six feet four and built in proportion. He always fed us well and it was delightful to sit with him and twenty or so of his boys and girls in the evenings. We sang and drank beneath a brushwood shelter the only illumination an old lamp. They sang for us their Croatian songs and we in return gave them Lancashire ones. They loved “Lassie from Lancashire”.
Another good friend I made, perhaps the best was a boy named Kommel, an artificer in the partisan pack artillery. He often came down to see us and we used to talk of our homes and countries, he had not seen his family since 1939 or even had news of them. Half a mile from us was a partisan hospital and the old doctor too was quite friendly toward us. We often spent an evening with him. He spoke quite good English.
It was quite a job understanding the partisan attitude toward women. They lived with them, worked, fed and slept in the same tents and rooms with them; they fought with them too and died with them. They all were soldiers, men and women. Sex never reared its ugly head.”
Diary entry from May 1944 from Sgt Observer Frederick Sidney Williams, 212 Bty, 111 Fd Regt in his family’s memoirs “Our Fred’s War”.
“Next came No. 111 Field Regiment of the Royal Artillery, with three batteries each of eight 25-pounder gun-howitzers, along with the squat armoured quads that towed the guns, the limbers that carried the shells, and a plethora of jeeps and other wheeled vehicles.
The Gunners brought an immense improvement to the defensive fire-power of Vis. Colonel J. S. Elliott, their commanding officer, ‘A bloody fine soldier’ in Tom Churchill’s assessment, soon became impatient with standing by to resist a German assault. He experimented, to discover whether a 25-pounder gun could be loaded into an LCA (Landing Craft – Assault). He discovered that the gun could not, as he hoped, be simply wheeled up the ramp. It did not fit. It could be made to fit by temporarily removing its wheels and other protuberances, and could be re-assembled after landing. Elliott took his findings to Tom Churchill and offered artillery support for future raids. Churchill accepted with pleasure, adding that he hoped that Elliott’s Gunner boss in Italy would not be too offended by this bending of instructions. Elliott was unconcerned by what his Gunner boss in Italy thought.”
Excerpt from “A Small War in the Balkans – British Military Involvement in Wartime Yugoslavia 1941 – 1945” by Michael McConville