Battle of the Sutjeska, 1943: Operation Schwarz and Tito's breakout

In the Yugoslav memory of the Second World War no battle stood higher than the Sutjeska. For the Germans it was Operation Schwarz, the largest of their offensives against the partisans, and it came closer than any other to destroying Tito's main force. That it failed shaped the rest of the war in Yugoslavia.²

Operation Schwarz

In the spring of 1943, after the partisans had escaped the encirclement on the Neretva, the Axis commanders planned another blow. General Alexander Löhr received orders on 3 April for an operation codenamed Schwarz, Black. Its first aim was to destroy the partisan forces around Tito's Supreme Headquarters; its second was to disarm the Chetniks still in the area, who offered no resistance and were in part taken on as guides.³ › Yugoslavia in World War II

The Germans brought in their best mountain troops: the elite 1st Mountain Division from the Eastern Front and the 7th SS Division Prinz Eugen, along with the 118th and the 369th, a division of Croatian conscripts under German officers, plus Italian, Bulgarian and Croatian units. By vojska.net's count 117,300 Axis soldiers faced 19,700 partisans of the Main Operational Group; the Spomenik Database gives 127,000 against 22,000. The partisans had four divisions and, with them, more than 3,500 wounded and sick, most of them in a Central Hospital that had to be carried through the mountains.⁴

The ring closes

The first clashes came on 15 May on the line Bijelo Polje, Mojkovac and Kolašin in Montenegro. Tito had planned to break east toward Kosovo and southern Serbia, but the attack forced him to turn west, back toward Bosnia. The partisans pushed through the waterless plateaus and deep canyons of Durmitor, the Piva and the Tara, a region the author Šimun Zimmermann, who walked some 3,000 kilometers of its trails, describes as one of the wildest in Europe, with more than fifty peaks over 2,000 meters.⁵

At the end of May a British mission parachuted into the encirclement: Captain William F. Stewart and William Deakin, with four others. On 28 May the Supreme Headquarters decided to break out across the Vučevo plateau, the Sutjeska and Zelengora, taking the Central Hospital with them. The 1st Proletarian Division seized Vučevo and held it; Zimmermann notes that the Germans, having almost pushed the partisans off the plateau, halted at nightfall, and the pause let three fresh brigades retake it.⁶

Milinklade and Balinovac

On 3 June the partisans split into two groups. Ten brigades of the 1st and 2nd Proletarian Divisions were to break out northwest across the Sutjeska, while the 3rd Assault and 7th Banija Divisions with the hospital were to go back across the Tara. The plan did not hold, and the narrow corridor from Tjentište over Milinklade toward Zelengora came under constant fire. On 9 June German aircraft bombed the headquarters group at Milinklade. Tito was wounded in the left arm, and Captain Stewart, Tito's escort Đuro Vujović and others were killed, as was Tito's German shepherd Luks.⁷

On 10 June, at Balinovac, Koča Popović threw the 1st Proletarian Division against the German ring without waiting for orders. Zimmermann describes it as a desperate attack in which cooks, grooms and nurses charged with the fighters, catching units of the 369th Division before they had deployed; it lasted five or six minutes. Through the gap, and a second one at Miljevina, the 1st, 2nd and 7th Divisions and the Supreme Headquarters escaped. Tito reprimanded Popović for acting without authority.⁸

The price of the breakout

The group left behind paid for it. The 3rd Assault Division, fighting to save the Central Hospital, broke through only at great cost, and its commander Sava Kovačević was killed on 13 June near the village of Krekovi. Most of the immobile wounded could not be saved. A surviving nurse told Zimmermann that the wounded begged to be killed or taken along, and that the partisans left them weapons and grenades before breaking out. Many were killed by the Germans and, after the Germans had left, by Italian, Chetnik and Bulgarian troops searching the woods.⁹

Both Zimmermann and Nikolić put the partisan dead at over 7,500, more than a third of the force; the memorial at Tjentište holds the remains of over 3,000 fighters. A German report of 20 June 1943 counted 583 Germans killed, 1,760 wounded and 425 missing, with 290 Italians killed. Militarily, Zimmermann concludes, it was a complete partisan defeat; but the Germans did not achieve their aim, the destruction of the partisan core and Tito. After the war Löhr and other German commanders were tried in Belgrade, partly for crimes committed in the battle, and executed in 1947.¹⁰

Legend and memory

General Lüters himself reported that the partisans were excellently organized, ably led and of a morale that inspired astonishment. Within months the Allies had shifted their support to Tito, and in socialist Yugoslavia the Sutjeska became a founding legend. In 1971 a vast monument by Miodrag Živković was unveiled in the Valley of Heroes at Tjentište, and in 1973 the battle became a film with Richard Burton as Tito.¹¹