The “horse’s move” was not enough to checkmate Tito. That was exactly what it was called, Rosselsprung, the special operation which at the end of May 1944 was supposed to lead the Germans to get their hands on Marshal Josip Broz, dead or alive, and inflict a lethal blow on the People’s Liberation Army, resolving one of the key issues strategic on the turbulent Balkan chessboard. Already two Wehrmacht military plans, at the end of 1943, had failed to crush the resistance in Yugoslavia and so in April Adolf Hitler had decided to personally entrust the task of capturing Tito to Major SS Otto Skorzeny, Benito’s false liberator Mussolini from the Campo Imperatore hotel-prison on 12 September 1943, but an authentic hero created by Nazi propaganda, whom the Führer considered to be directly dependent on him for one of those that after the war the Austrian braggart would call in his memoirs “Impossible Missions”.
Skorzeny’s coup is discarded. And him too
For Skorzeny, the Third Reich had created an elite unit of volunteers, the Brandenburgers, a kind of private army within the SS party militia. Skorzeny, faithful to his own myth fueled by minister Joseph Goebbels, had carried out a reconnaissance in Bosnia, where Tito held his headquarters, ascertaining that the Marshal was in a cave above the town of Drvar. The location, according to the information gathered, was well protected from an attack by force, as was the plan of the X Army Corps. Skorzeny proposed to General Lothar Rendulic a coup with German soldiers disguised as partisans, which however was rejected. Indeed, the result was that he too was immediately ousted from the large-scale plan which involved an aerial bombardment followed by the drop of SS paratroopers. It was the British counter-espionage that alerted the Marshal to a German offensive that would have been symbolically unleashed close to his date of birth (25 May, according to false documents found by the Germans who believed them to be real, and even Tito himself had provided multiple variants compared to May 7), but without being able to add anything else. This had led to the strengthening of security measures to protect the headquarters, with the movement of entire partisan units to isolate and keep under control the communication lines leading to Drvar.
The assault of the SS paratroopers after the aerial bombardment
It was the town itself, however, that was dangerously empty of partisan forces. On May 25, after a short but intense bombing that began at 6.30 am, the sky of Drvar was filled with the unmistakable silhouettes of the Junkers Ju-52 trimotors and the blue was dotted with the violet of the parachutes of the 500th SS battalion under the orders of Hauptsturmführer Kurt Rybka , first wave of the assault troops which would be reinforced by airborne units aboard DFS-230 gliders. Meanwhile, the soldiers of the XV Mountain Corps were advancing from the ground, in whose ranks were the Croatians of the independence army and also the Chetniks of Draža Mihalović who were more eager than the Germans to capture or eliminate Tito. Barring the pass, around 16,000 communist partisans, who fought with extreme courage to allow their commander to be saved.
Escaping on a Soviet Dakota towards Bari
The situation in the Drvar cave immediately appeared critical. Only after almost four hours from the attack, and with communications with the units of the Yugoslav People’s Army entrusted to messengers because those via radio had been immediately interrupted, did Tito decide to escape capture by managing to get away with a train that was was prepared in case of emergency towards Jajce, while the battle raged around the town and the headquarters defended by the partisan troops. The Germans, moreover, did not know the exact location of the cave with the headquarters and therefore had invested the entire mountain, having planned to reunite with the ground troops by the evening. With Tito there were his companion Davoranka Paunović, nom de guerre Zdenka, who acted as secretary, and his faithful Alsatian shepherd.
To prevent him from being captured with some appendage to the military operation, it was necessary for him to leave Yugoslavia, awaiting the outcome of the clash and events. On the night between 3 and 4 June, a DC-3 Dakota with the Soviet red star will land in Kupreško polje, piloted by Major Šornikov, who will take it to Bari, where it will stay for two nights before being embarked on the British destroyer Blackmore which will take it to the island of Lissa (Vis) where he will resettle his headquarters, according to his wishes and according to the agreements made during the retreat with the English liaison officers. In Lissa, accompanied by Fitzroy MacLean, he re-established command in a cave where he was joined by Major Randolph Frederick Churchill, son of the Prime Minister, and Captain Evelyn Arthur Waugh.
The uniform trophy captured at a tailor’s house
The battle unleashed with Operation Rosselsprung was resolved with a German tactical success, but with a substantial strategic defeat. Tito had narrowly escaped from their hands, and as a trophy they could only show a uniform of his found in the home of a local tailor who was repairing it. She will be photographed while some smiling paratroopers display her in front of war correspondents as a trophy, and then taken to Vienna together with the captured British and American flags. The sources differ on the cost in human lives. The Germans for the , of which approximately two thousand dead and 1,400 presumed, inflicted on the Yugoslavs; who for their part will claim to have suffered 399 deaths and 479 injuries, attributing no less than two thousand victims in the Drvar area to the bombings and the action of the Germans. Tito, who was actually born on May 7th, will celebrate his birthday on the 25th in memory of the event.