MARSHAL TITO

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 79, 13 January 1944, Page 3

MARSHAL TITO

MYSTERY MAN OF YUGOSLAVIA REVOLUTIONARY OR HEROIC REBEL? The story 0 f Josip Broz, better known as Tito, Marshal of the Jugoslav Army of National Liberation, is published in the “Sunday Observer.” A working man from Croatia, commanding a revolutionary army of 200,000, he is defying the might of the German army. Tito is 53. He is married and has two sons; his 20’s were spent in war, civil war, and prison camps; his 30’s in conspiracy and in prison; the Spanish war consumed a large part of his 40’s, and in his 50’s he has come to be recognised as one of the greatest figures of the second world war. No anecdotes are known about Tito. No word of his has become public property. His private life is commonplace, and even in public life there is not a single episode which he does not share with thousands. But while thousands fall to the left and right of him, he survives. Here is a man who put himself at the disposal of history, and history has burned and battered him into greatness. He was born in a poor man’s home in Zagorje district, near Zagreb. His father was a Croat, his mother a Czech. The boy grew up amid the national social discontent of the Slavonic provinces of the old Austria-Hungary. When in 1914 he was sent to the Russian front as a private his heart was on the side of defeat for Austria, which meant to him freedom, equality, and progress for his people, the southern Slavs. DESERTED TO RUSSIANS Accordingly, in 1915, he, like so many thousands of Slavonic Austrian soldiers, deserted to the Russians. Two years in Russian prison camps followed until the 1917 revolution set him free, only to engulf him again. Like so many other former prisoners of war in the ensuing civil war, he found himself with the Red Army. He returned in 1921 to his own transformed country. With what feelings he returned can only be judged by his deeds. It can hardly be wrong if it is assumed that the Nationalist revolution of the peoples of the old AustriaHungary, with its ideals of national equality, and the Socialist revolution of Russia, with its early aims of land for the peasants and industries for the workers, merged for Tito into one equalitarian libertarian Jacobite ideal. For this ideal Tito had become used to daring, suffering, and fighting. It was bound to bring him into conflict with the new Jugoslav State, of which he was now a citizen. As a Croat he found that he had only exchanged Magyar for Serb masters. As a worker he was still labouring under the old system he had helped to overthrow in Russia. Tito became a Croat Labour leader, and his trade union, the metal workers, was soon one of the most radical. In 1923 he was accused of having been involved in a Communist conspiracy, and was sentenced to five years’ hard labour. Balkan prisons are not pleasant, and five years in any prison might break any man. It did not break Tito, but taught him caution. He ceased to be ardent and daring, and became a hard-bitten, circumspect, underground worker. His release from prison almost coincided with the establishment of an open dictatorship in Jugoslavia. For the next seven years he disappeared from sight. It is said that it was during that period that he assumed the name of Tito. Whatever he did during that period he must have gained considerable standing in the revolutionary underground, for in the next great crisis, the Spanish War, he emerged for the first time as a leader. PART IN SPANISH WAR The history of the International Brigade is still unwritten, but when it is Tito will be seen as one of the men who organised the improvised revolutionary corps of ardent volunteers from all countries, which for two years sustained Spanish democracy. During the crisis in the defence of Madrid in November, 1936, thousands of men from Eastern and Central Europe suddenly converged on Spain almost overnight and formed thmselves into effective fighting units, which for a time turned the tide of the war. It seemed a miracle. Tito was one of the men who worked that miracle. He was in charge of the underground traffic through Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and France, whereby thousands of volunteers went to the Spanish front. It was all done secretly from changing headquarters at which Tito functioned. His name never appeared in print, and it is still uncertain what role he played in the actual fighting. Still half-dimmed by the secrecy which inevitably surrounds much of his career ,Tito, nevertheless, to-day stands out as a great European figure in his own right. An uncompromising figure, hunted and hardened, and cast without doubt in the heroic mould of a military improviser of genius, Tito has now risen to a rank where his statesmanship will be tested. On this will depend whether he will go down in history as a great creative revolutionary, o~ only into legend as a heroic rebel guerrilla leader.