The uprising in Montenegro

On the morning of 13 July 1941 insurgent bands attacked Italian carabinieri and gendarmerie posts at many points across Montenegro. That same day Virpazar on Lake Scutari, Čevo and Rijeka Crnojevića slipped from Italian hands, and over the following days the fighting spread across almost the whole country. The uprising, prepared by the communists, outgrew their plans within a few dozen hours. Former officers of the Yugoslav army, Serb nationalists and ordinary peasants from mountain villages, who had rifles at home carried off from the army shattered in April, also took up arms. The spark was a decision taken the day before. On 12 July an assembly convened by the Italians in Cetinje had proclaimed the restoration of an independent Kingdom of Montenegro, which in practice was to be an Italian protectorate.

Some lists state that Montenegro rose against the Axis “soon after the royalists in Serbia had begun their uprising”, and that the “dubious plans of the communists” set off a parallel uprising and a civil war. The sequence was different. In Serbia the first shots were fired on 7 July not by royalists but by communist partisans, while the monarchist Chetniks of Colonel Dragoljub (Draža) Mihailović were at that point deliberately waiting. In Montenegro, too, the uprising was initiated by the Communist Party, although people of quite different views soon joined it. The civil war between communists and nationalists came later, and historians see its causes on both sides.

Montenegro under Italian occupation

Montenegro – an independent principality and, from 1910, a kingdom ruled by the Petrović-Njegoš dynasty – was joined to Serbia in November 1918 by decision of an assembly at Podgorica, and then became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The country split into two camps. The “Whites” (bjelaši) supported union with Serbia, the “Greens” (zelenaši) defended Montenegro’s separate identity and the rights of the deposed King Nicholas I. Their Christmas uprising of 1919 was crushed, but the dispute lasted throughout the interwar period.

In April 1941, during the invasion of Yugoslavia, German troops entered Montenegro from Bosnia and Italian troops from Albania. The Germans soon withdrew and the country fell to Italy. At the Vienna meeting that settled the partition of Yugoslavia, Rome claimed Montenegro but had no clear plan for what to do with it. At the end of April Benito Mussolini installed a civil commissioner in Cetinje, Count Serafino Mazzolini, subordinate to the command of the Italian forces in Albania. The Italians looked for support among the “Greens”, particularly the group of separatists gathered around the lawyer and former deputy Sekula Drljević, which was ready to cooperate with the occupier in return for the restoration of statehood. Dynastic ties mattered too. Queen Elena of Italy, wife of Victor Emmanuel III, was a daughter of Nicholas I and had been born in Cetinje. The Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, envisaged a restored Montenegro as a state linked to Italy by personal union, on the model of Albania, occupied by Italy in 1939.

The occupation quickly alienated the population. The Italians took from Montenegro and attached to Albania the fertile area around Plav and Gusinje, part of Kosovo where Montenegrin colonists had settled, and the saltworks at Ulcinj. Montenegrin settlers were being driven out of Kosovo and out of the Bačka, occupied by Hungary, while Serbs fleeing the Ustaše poured in from Bosnia and Herzegovina. The withdrawal from circulation of banknotes of 500 dinars and above ruined many families. At the same time the country was full of weapons. The Montenegrin “Zeta” Division had briefly attacked Albania in April, and after the capitulation its soldiers went home with their rifles. The Italians also released several hundred Montenegrin officers from captivity, counting on their gratitude.

The communists prepare an uprising

The Communist Party of Yugoslavia had a strong organisation in Montenegro. According to Yugoslav historiography, in July 1941 it had here, including the Bay of Kotor and the Sandžak, about 1,800 members and some 3,000 members of its youth organisation, and since May it had been forming armed “shock groups”. Until June it waited, in line with the Comintern, which since the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact had prescribed regarding the war as a clash of imperialists. Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June changed everything. Moscow called on the communists of occupied Europe to fight in the Wehrmacht’s rear, and on 4 July the Politburo of the KPJ in Belgrade decided to launch an uprising throughout the country.

One of Josip Broz Tito’s closest associates, the thirty-year-old Montenegrin Milovan Đilas, a member of the Politburo, was sent to Montenegro with full powers to direct the struggle. On 8 July, at Stijena Piperska near Podgorica, he convened the party’s regional committee, which decided to move to armed action as soon as possible. The plans envisaged attacks on smaller garrisons and the destruction of roads and communications – in other words, guerrilla warfare. Military matters were handled by General Staff Captain Arso Jovanović, one of the few professional officers in the communist ranks.

The timing was decided by Italian policy. On 12 July, the Orthodox feast of Saints Peter and Paul (Petrovdan), some 65 delegates assembled in Cetinje, in practice selected by the Italian commissioner from among the separatists and people willing to collaborate. Many of those invited did not come, and some left the proceedings once they realised that real independence was not on offer. The assembly adopted by acclamation a declaration annulling the 1918 decision on union with Serbia and the Yugoslav constitution, proclaiming Montenegro a sovereign kingdom and asking the King of Italy to appoint a regent. None of the Petrović-Njegoš family would accept the throne. Nicholas I’s grandson, Prince Michael, then interned by the Germans, told the Italian court’s envoys that he remained loyal to the Yugoslav King Peter II. The Kingdom of Montenegro was thus to exist without a king, under Rome’s protection. During the night of 12–13 July news of the declaration spread across the country. To the “Whites” it was a betrayal of Serbia and Yugoslavia, to many “Greens” a mockery of independence, and to the communists a signal to fight.

The first days

From 13 July partisan bands attacked carabinieri posts and cut roads. In many places whole villages and clans joined the communist groups of a few dozen men. On 15 July at Košćele, on the road from Podgorica to Cetinje, insurgents ambushed and routed a column of lorries carrying an Italian frontier guard battalion that was going to relieve the encircled old capital. According to Yugoslav figures, several dozen Italians were killed, more than a hundred wounded and several hundred taken prisoner. The figures differ from one study to another. On 16 July the insurgents took Andrijevica, and on 17 July, after heavy fighting, Berane, where the commander of the attack, Captain Pavle Đurišić, an officer of nationalist views, fought shoulder to shoulder with the communists. By 20 July Bijelo Polje, Kolašin, Danilovgrad and Žabljak had fallen, Šavnik on 22 July and Grahovo on 24 July. At Bijelo Polje the entire Italian garrison was taken prisoner.

After three weeks the Italians held out only in Cetinje, Podgorica, Nikšić and Pljevlja, partly cut off from the outside world, and in a few places on the coast. Yugoslav historiography states that some 30,000–32,000 people took part in the uprising, which in a country of fewer than 400,000 inhabitants meant most of the men capable of bearing arms outside the towns. Only in the Muslim and Albanian communes of the borderland, annexed to Albania, did the movement find no support. In Rome Ciano was surprised by the scale of the revolt and doubted whether the army would deal with it quickly.

The insurgents were not a uniform force. The communists supplied organisation and political commissars, and on 18 July Đilas set up a command of the people’s liberation detachments of Montenegro, the Boka and the Sandžak. Many detachments, however, were led by former royal officers such as Colonel Bajo Stanišić or Major Đorđije Lašić, who were fighting for Yugoslavia, Serbia and the King, not for revolution. Many insurgents believed that help from “Russia” would arrive any day. From 21 July the communists set up people’s liberation committees in the liberated areas – the germs of a new authority – which even then aroused the nationalists’ distrust.

Pirzio Biroli’s counter-offensive

Rome reacted quickly. On 16 July the chief of the Comando Supremo, General Ugo Cavallero, ordered the commander of the 9th Army in Albania, General Alessandro Pirzio Biroli, to crush the uprising “at any cost”. Pirzio Biroli, a former governor of Amhara province in Italian East Africa, believed that in the Balkans only force counted. At the end of July Mussolini abolished the office of civil commissioner, recalled Mazzolini and gave the general full military and civil authority in Montenegro. The project of a restored kingdom was put aside.

Into a country where in July there had been only the “Messina” Division, five more divisions were sent – “Pusteria”, “Taro”, “Venezia”, “Cacciatori delle Alpi” and “Puglie” – along with Blackshirt legions, cavalry and the Albanian “Skanderbeg” group. Western historians, following Jozo Tomasevich, put the Italian forces at some 67,000–70,000 men; Yugoslav historiography gave about 30,000. The flanks were covered by thousands of volunteers from the Muslim villages of the Sandžak and by Albanian irregulars from the borderland and the area around Đakovica, for whom this was also an opportunity to settle local scores with their Orthodox neighbours.

From the second half of July Italian columns, supported by aircraft and artillery, retook one town after another. The insurgents, emboldened by their first victories, accepted open battle in the field, for which they were not prepared. Đilas was later accused, including within the party leadership itself, of having thrown peasants into frontal battles with a regular army instead of waging guerrilla war. By mid-August the Italians had recovered all the towns and main roads. In his orders Pirzio Biroli warned against “acts of revenge and needless cruelty”, but at the same time instructed his troops to destroy centres of revolt, whole villages included, and to take hostages, so that the entire population would feel threatened with reprisals. In practice dozens of villages were burned, hundreds of people killed, and between 10,000 and 20,000 inhabitants interned in camps in Albania and Italy. For a time Muslim and Albanian irregular bands were able to burn and loot Serb villages with impunity, which deepened the hatred between the borderland communities.

Losses are hard to establish. According to Yugoslav figures, in the fighting from 13 July to 14 August 735 Italian soldiers were killed, about 1,120 wounded and about 2,070 taken prisoner. The same sources give the insurgents’ losses – undoubtedly understated – as 72 killed and 53 wounded, not counting the victims of reprisals. In mid-August some nationalist commanders, including Đurišić and Lašić, concluded local agreements with the Italians: they released prisoners and handed over towns in return for the withdrawal of the Albanians and an end to the burning of villages.

Serbia, Herzegovina and the communists’ plans

Montenegro was not the first place in occupied Yugoslavia where fighting began. At the end of June a spontaneous uprising had broken out in Herzegovina among Serbs defending themselves against massacres carried out by the Ustaše in the Independent State of Croatia. On 7 July, in the village of Bela Crkva near Krupanj in western Serbia, a partisan detachment under Miša Pantić and the commissar Žikica Jovanović Španac called a meeting at a village fair and urged the peasants to fight the Germans. When gendarmes of the collaborationist administration tried to break it up, the partisans opened fire and killed two of them. The communists later regarded that day as the beginning of the uprising in Serbia. Mihailović, who since May had been building a clandestine organisation on Ravna Gora, considered the uprising premature, and only at the end of August, under pressure from his own men, did some of his detachments join the fighting. The Montenegrin uprising was thus the third, not the second, and, as in Serbia, it was started by the communists.

As for the “communists’ plans”, historians point to two motives. The KPJ went into battle at Moscow’s call, to draw Axis forces away from the Eastern Front, and did so only after 22 June. At the same time its leadership linked the fight against the occupier from the outset with the seizure of power and the remaking of the state, and made no secret of it. For many participants in the uprising, however, communists and nationalists alike, simpler reasons mattered more: the defence of their own villages, dislike of the Italians and Albanians, anger at the loss of land, and the sense that the Montenegrins had not laid down their arms of their own free will. Assessments of the whole movement still depend, in the former Yugoslavia, on the political views of those who write about it.

Its place in the war

The July uprising was suppressed within six weeks, but the country was not pacified. The Italians did not re-establish their posts in the mountain villages, and until the end of the occupation they controlled mainly the towns. On 3 October 1941 Montenegro was turned into a military governorate with Pirzio Biroli as governor, and the project of a puppet kingdom was abandoned for good. Drljević, who had hoped to lead an independent state, was sidelined and interned by the Italians in the autumn, and later found refuge in Pavelić’s Croatia.

The insurgents’ common front did not survive the autumn. In the areas they held, the communists began settling accounts with real and supposed “class enemies”. In the autumn Tito recalled Đilas from command in Montenegro, accusing him of military and political errors, and on 1 December 1941 the partisans suffered a heavy defeat attacking the Italian garrison at Pljevlja. The terror that followed was later called “left deviations” by the communists themselves. Former officers began forming their own Chetnik detachments, which from 1942 concluded agreements with the Italians on joint action against the partisans and committed massacres of the Muslim population in the Sandžak. The partisans were driven out of Montenegro for a year, and the uprising against the occupier turned into a civil war in which both sides committed crimes. After the war Pirzio Biroli was placed on the list of war criminals drawn up by the United Nations War Crimes Commission, but he was never brought to trial.

In socialist Yugoslavia 13 July was celebrated as the Day of the Uprising of the People of Montenegro, and propaganda called it the first general uprising in occupied Europe. Today, as Statehood Day, it is the principal holiday of independent Montenegro. It commemorates both the uprising of 1941 and 13 July 1878, when the Congress of Berlin recognised the independence of the Principality of Montenegro. For the course of the Second World War itself, the events of July 1941 mattered more than their brevity might suggest: they showed that the partition of Yugoslavia would bring the Axis no peace in the Balkans, and they tied down tens of thousands of Italian soldiers in Montenegro, who were to remain there until Italy’s surrender in September 1943.