The Slovene Partisans, Part 3

From Maribor to Trieste

This is the third and final post about the Opapa’s time with the Slovene Partisans. Today, I’m focusing on military history, and the role that Opapa played in the ongoing battles in northern Yugoslavia. I’m also trying to track more specifically where Opapa was, and where he traveled.

Here is what we know from Opapa’s autobiography draft:

For the rest of the duration of our stay, we were with the partisans.  Germans were retreating from Greece and trying to secure their communication lines against the partisans working in the area and trying to cut off their rail and road transportation.  So we were under severe attack.  A brigade that started out with maybe 350 or 400 men, at that point, when we joined them, was down to about 60 or 70 or 80.  And that kind of struggle for survival lasted, in fact, until VE Day.

As Opapa’s description indicates, by 1945, the Partisans had regained control over much of Slovenia, but they were still bitterly fighting the Germans, who were retreating from Greece through Yugoslavia.

Slovenia was, in fact, one of the last “frontiers” of World War II. The Partisan liberation of Ljubljana, for example, was announced after the surrender of the Nazis in Germany. The last major conflict in Slovenia, the Battle of Poljana, happened the following week, from May 14-15, 1945.

So, where was Opapa during this time? Here is what I know:

• On February 7, 1945, when Opapa parachuted into Slovenia, he landed near Maribor, which was - unfortunately - the German/Ustashe headquarters.

• In May 1945, after VE day, he had made his way back to Trieste and then Duino in north-eastern Italy.

Here is a map of these two places, showing the area that Opapa would have traveled through between February and May.

The map above is from Franklin Lindsay’s book, Beacons in the Night, and you can also see — in dotted lines — the route that Franklin traveled in winter 1944/5. These offer some information on Partisan travel routes that Opapa may also have traversed.

When Opapa landed near Maribor, he wrote that he immediately started climbing a mountain as fast as possible because he was pretty sure that Maribor was controlled by the Ustashe and Germans (he was right).

Looking at the map, Opapa was probably climbing the Pohorje mountains, which are just south of Maribor. This is how Opapa described his ascent into the mountains:

At first, nobody knew anything about the partisans, but the higher we got -- and the language we spoke was German and most of those people in that area, since it used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, did speak it, especially the older people so as we got higher and higher, they seemed to know more and more about the partisans.  

As Opapa likely knew, during the German occupation, many of the Partisan forces were based in the mountains. They used their remote bases to carry out guerrilla warfare against German troops.

The Pohorje mountains had been a Partisan stronghold the previous year, in summer 1944. Partisans were using the Pohorje as a base to undermine the Germans by blowing up bridges, disrupting communications, and occasionally engaging in direct conflict with German forces.¹

But in December 1944, the Germans launched an offensive in the region and they were able to regain control over the Pohorje mountains. For two months, Allied and Partisan forces were not able to enter the region, and the Partisans who survived had to retreat to higher ground during the coldest part of the winter.²

When Opapa landed in February 1945, the Partisans were just starting to regain a foothold in the region, and the Partisans he found had been through a hellish winter. This helps to explain Opapa’s comment, above, that the band he joined had “started out with maybe 350 or 400 men,” but was “was down to about 60 or 70 or 80.” It’s a sobering statistic: the majority of the Partisan brigade that Opapa found had been killed during the German winter offensive of 1944.

Despite the misery and death, these were the Partisans who were - when Opapa arrived - having a party in the mountains. Here is Opapa’s description:

The next scene that I would never forget was what greeted me when we arrived at the partisan brigade. A brass band was playing, there was dancing -- a party!  It surpised me that the partisan's felt so safe. But I concluded that keeping spirits up was as important as caution.

The next day, Opapa reported that he was “instructed to follow a partisan courier who led [him]…to a Tito Yugoslav partisan brigades operating in that area.” It’s not clear if this second brigade was still in the Pohorje, or whether it was in a nearby region. But Opapa got to see the Partisan “courier” system firsthand.

The courier system was a set of the interlocking communication channels that the Partisans used to transport information, supplies, and people from Partisan headquarters to the remote outposts on the frontier. According to Franklin Lindsay, it was “among the best of the Partisans’ major organizational achievements.” Opapa agreed, and wrote this about the Partisan courier system:

“The courier service operated throughout the occupation; you could mail a letter from the U.S. to Nazi-occupied Slovenia and eventually it would be delivered.”

The courier system helped Opapa moved away from German-dominated Maribor to join a Partisan brigade elsewhere in Stajerska (Styria). From February to May, the Partisan forces in Stajerska (Styria) continued to gain ground against the Germans, but it was a long, bloody process. In Opapa’s citation for the Bronze Star, it specifies that he participated in three major battles:

During this period, Second Lieutenant Gerbner participated in three major military conflicts with the enemy and in numerous other minor skirmishes.

What military conflicts could those have been?

I’ve been trying to find a list of official battles during this three-month period, but it seems that while there were many, many military conflicts, none have been written about and classified as a “battle” that has gotten discrete attention.

I think this is partly due to the fact that by 1945, the Slovene Partisans were really fighting two battles, and there is a lot of disagreement about what, exactly, was happening in the region. On the one hand, they were fighting the Germans as they retreated through Yugoslavia. But at the same time, Tito and the Partisans were also turning their attention to defeating the Chetniks (see previous post) and the Home Guard (or White Guard), an anti-Partisan, fascist militia operating in Slovenia.

In any case, after VE Day, Opapa wrote that “we changed places with the Germans -- we went on the roads, the Germans went up to the hills because they did not want to surrender to the partisans, who fought the Germans furiously.”

Soon thereafter, Opapa made it back to Italy, where he had two days of rest before he was sent on another mission, this one to newly-defeated Austria.

1. Lindsay, Beacon in the Night, ch. 5

2. Lindsay, Beacon in the Night, pp. 424-431