Who was President Tito? A communist dictator who, against all odds, held the former Yugoslavia together, a partisan leader during the Second World War, a charismatic, but vain, man, says Hilary Green. She explains how she became interested in this man, who played such a large part in the history of the Balkan region.
Until I started work on my recent trilogy of novels set in Yugoslavia in World War ll I had a vague notion of President Tito as a rather forbidding character, a communist dictator. I knew nothing about him as a man, or about the vital part he played in holding together a disparate group of states with very little liking for each other.
Of course, the tragic events that unfolded after his death — the Balkans War — underlined how essential his influence had been, but I still had no understanding of how he had become so important.
Yugoslavia was, from the outset, an artificial construct. It came into existence after the First World War as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes but it was not until 1929 that it was named Yugoslavia by King Alexander l.
It was an uneasy alliance. The different states had very different cultures and interests.
The Serbs worshipped in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and wrote in the cyrillic alphabet, while the Croats were ardent Roman Catholics and wrote in the Latin script and the inhabitants of Montenegro were largely Muslim. Even the language, Serbo-Croat, was a mixture of local dialects standardised by a group of Serbian and Croatian writers in the middle of the 19th century.
In 1934 Alexander was assassinated, leaving his 11-year-old son Peter as his heir. As he was deemed too young to rule his uncle Prince Paul was made regent.
With the outbreak of World War ll Hitler was very keen to get Yugoslavia to accede to the Tripartite Alliance, a mutual defence pact involving Germany, Japan and Italy, which a number of central European countries had already joined. There were a number of important cultural and trade links between Germany and Yugoslavia and Paul was under pressure to agree.
However, many prominent Yugoslavs were pro-British and had no wish to see their country allied to Nazi Germany, so in 1941, aided behind the scenes by agents of the British Special Operations Executive, they carried out a coup and declared the now 17-year-old King Peter old enough to rule. He was ardently pro-British and immediately rejected the pact.
Hitler was so furious at having his plans disrupted that he vowed to destroy Yugoslavia and, on Easter Sunday, 1941, he launched a massive bombing attack on Belgrade. Croatia immediately opened its gates to the invaders and within weeks the Yugoslav army had collapsed and German tanks rolled into Belgrade. King Peter and his court fled into exile in Britain.
It was against this background that Tito came to prominence.
His real name was Josip Broz; no-one seems to know how he came by his nickname. He was born in 1892 in the city of Kumrovec, which was then in the Austro-Hungarian empire. He was drafted into the army and fought with distinction during World War l until he was captured by the Russians.
He spent some time in Russia, where he adopted the philosophy of Communism, and when he returned to what was now Yugoslavia he joined the Communist Party.
At the time the party was banned and he spent some time in prison, where he met some of the men who were to become his close friends and colleagues in the fight against Nazi Germany.
After the German invasion the leaders of the Communist Party met and appointed Tito Supreme Commander of National Liberation Forces and he issued a pamphlet calling for resistance. In September, 1941, he and his colleagues left Belgrade for territory where the local people had already rebelled against the invaders and established what he called the Republic of Uzice.
Meanwhile, another resistance organisation was materialising under the command of General Draza Mihailovic. He had refused to heed the command to surrender and taken to the hills, setting up a guerilla army which adopted the title of Chetniks. He was joined by a number of other army officers and established his headquarters in a remote area around the village of Ravna Gora.
With the two organisations established within a few miles of each other there was an attempt at collaboration, but their aims were so radically different that these efforts were doomed to failure. Tito’s vision was of a unified Yugoslavia under communist rule. Mihailovic wanted a Greater Serbia, cleansed of all ethnic minorities such a Croats and Muslims, and ruled by the King.
They soon came to see each other as a greater threat than the occupying Germans and both were prepared, at times, to cooperate with the enemy in order to defeat each other.
Over the next three years of bitter fighting Tito and his Partisans were driven from Uzice, but wherever he was able to establish a semi-permanent state certain elements were always present. In all liberated territory people’s councils were set up as the civilian administration.
Schools and hospitals were kept open, there were canteens to feed those unable to fend for themselves, the arts and literature were encouraged. In November 1943 the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation was established in the town of Jajce and Tito was given the title of Marshal.
The activities of both groups came to the attention of the British government and the first inclination was to support the Royalists under Mihailovic, but it soon became clear that the Germans regarded Tito’s partisans as the greater threat. So it was decided to send agents to both groups.
These officers soon reported back that Tito’s organisation was far more effective, so it was decided to switch support from the Chetniks to the Partisans. Several missions were sent to Tito’s headquarters, each one more senior than the last. The officers have left detailed accounts of their experiences, which I found invaluable as source material.
In August 1944 Winston Churchill met Tito in Naples and soon afterwards the exiled King Peter called upon all his people to unite under Tito. By the autumn of 1944 Tito’s forces were able to drive the Germans out of Belgrade.
On March 7th 1945 the Provisional Government of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia was established. Elections were held in November, in which Tito’s People’s Front won a massive majority. The format of a unified Yugoslavia under communist rule was to continue until Tito’s death in May 1980.
So what sort of man was Tito? He was undoubtedly a charismatic leader who could inspire great devotion. He had great physical courage. He loved animals. He was a good horseman who always treated his mount with consideration and advised his followers to do the same. He was a man who enjoyed a joke, who enjoyed life’s little luxuries – good wine, good food, a cigar.
He had a temper and could fly into a rage, and he had his share of vanity. At the beginning of the war people who met him noted that his uniform carried no badges of rank, but once he had been declared Marshal he had a special uniform made, which he insisted on wearing for his meeting with Churchill, even in the heat of August in Naples.
Altogether, he comes over as a very human character, and one who undoubtedly inspired great devotion from the people he worked with.
The story of the Partisans and their courageous struggle to unite and free their country is epic, and so little understood in this country. I hope my three novels may have done something to remedy this.
A Call to Home by Holly Green was published on 10 April, 2025. It’s the third book in Hilary Green’s Women of the Resistance series, written under her pen name. The first two were A Call to Courage and A Call to Service.
Further reading:
The Embattled Mountain by FWD Deakin, Faber, 1971.
Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean, Jonathan Cape, 1949, republished by Penguin, 1991
Special Operations Europe by Basil Davidson, Grafton Books, 1987
In Obedience to Instructions by Margaret Pawley, Pen and Sword, 1999
Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia by Richard West, Faber, 1994
Hilary has also written a number of other pieces for Historia:
The Battle of Brunanburh
The triumph of Greek myths and the destruction of a civilisation
International trade in the early Middle Ages
The Trojan Wars: Men or Myths?
Did the American Civil War end in Liverpool?
Stranger than Fiction
You may enjoy these related features:
Family memories of Italy in World War Two by Cristina Loggia
Mussolini meets the World’s Fair by Anika Scott
Don’t mention the war! by Keith Lowe
From Taranto to Pearl Harbor – spies and inspiration by Alan Bardos
Images:
- Josip Broz Tito during the Second Session of AVNOJ in Jajce, 1943: Wikimedia (public domain)
- King Peter II of Yugoslavia, 1944: ©IWM (CM 5648) (IWM Non-Commercial Licence)
- Girls carry portraits of Bulgarian Tsar Boris III and Adolf Hitler among the jubilant crowd in Skopje, April 20, 1941: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Josip Broz Tito in prison, 1928: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Bombed Belgrade and the entry of the occupiers on April 6, 1941: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Marshal Tito stands with his Cabinet Ministers and Supreme Staff at his mountain headquarters in Yugoslavia on 14 May 1944: ©IWM (NA 15129) (IWM Non-Commercial Licence)
- Winston Churchill shakes hands with Marshal Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia in Naples, 1944: ©IWM (NAM 144) (IWM Non-Commercial Licence)
