For Country

In a south Italian town last week TIME Correspondent Will Lang talked with Partisans from Yugoslavia, cabled some of their stories:

The Bomb and the Road. A handsome Serb major of 27 was a sergeant pilot in the Air Force when the Germans came, in April 1941. He saved his aged Potez biplane by taking off during a strafing by 25 Messerschmitts and flying to his home in Kraljevo. Ten days later, when the armistice was announced, he joined the new Partisan movement, became the leader of 200 men. His band grew to 1,500. They once attacked a German motor column by rolling an airplane bomb fitted with dynamite blocks and lighted fuses down a mountainside. The bomb blew up 25 trucks, two armored cars, 200 Germans--and the enemy did not try that road again.

The Pioneer. A 24-year-old Dalmatian sailor commanded the Partisans' only warship, the fishing smack Pioneer, whose eight men were armed with four rifles. The Dalmatian told of sighting an Italian coastal convoy one day--15 vessels, strung-out over 15 miles, with a minesweeper at each end of the column. The Pioneer attacked in the middle. The captain of the attacked boat, seeing rifles, surrendered. A Partisan went aboard, ordered the prize to head for a small section of the coast which was held by Partisans. The Pioneer went after the next vessel, applied the same treatment. Two more were taken before one of the minesweepers arrived to shoo the now unarmed Pioneer away.

The Air Force. A 31-year-old captain operated against the Germans with the only warplane the Partisans then had. On his first mission, he was told to bomb a German column crossing the Sava near Jasenovac. As his Potez approached, the enemy unfurled their flag for identification, not believing that the Partisans had any planes. The Captain dropped his bomb, killed 15 Germans, then leaned over to hurl 15 hand grenades. The Germans decided to take no more chances, afterward opened fire on, every Potez biplane they saw. On three successive days they brought down Potezes, all manned by Germans.

The Railroad. A 30-year-old Slovenian private lost his wife and five-year-old son when the Italians came to his town. His mother and sister were sent to forced labor in Germany. The private joined the Liberation Movement. When the Allies invaded Sicily, the Germans were using Trieste as an embarkation point for southern Italy. Each day for a month the private and his fellow Partisans cut the German-controlled railroad from Ljubljana to Trieste. The Germans cut down the forest on either side of the right of way, installed high-tension wires, built pillboxes every 500 yards. But the breaks continued, and all that month the Germans had to march their troops the 60 miles to Trieste.

The Faith. Said Correspondent Lang in conclusion: "The full story of the heroic Partisan resistance to the vastly superior forces of the Germans cannot be told until the end of the war. Even their names are secret. But in these few stories Americans may read the courage, resolution and faith in eventual freedom over which no tyranny may long last."

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