YUGOSLAVIA: Every Man a Fighting Man

• Share

All week long banner headlines told of the ferocious battles. Yugoslav television carried filmed reports of the fighting and a somber briefing by a major general on each day's action. One big Zagreb daily put out a special battlefield edition for the troops.

For all its realism, it was not a war but a war game—the largest Yugoslav maneuvers since World War II, involving some 40,000 regular army troops and innumerable armed civilians. The exercise, pointedly called "Freedom '71," was designed as a defiant answer to the summer-long Soviet threats and maneuvers against the Yugoslavs. Moscow was furious with Belgrade for cozying up to Peking. The Russians were also hoping to exploit the ancient regional rivalries and not so ancient economic quarrels that plague Yugoslavia.

In hopes of reducing the centrifugal strains on his country, President Tito last July established a collective presidency and granted considerable autonomy to the country's six republicans and two provinces. It remains to be seen, however, whether the reforms will keep Yugoslavia together once the unifying presence of Tito, 79, is gone—and lately the Soviets have seemed to be looking for an excuse to intervene. Consequently, though Tito and Leonid Brezhnev exchanged conciliatory pledges in Belgrade last month, the Yugoslavs went right ahead with their maneuvers less than two weeks after the Soviet party leader's departure.

New Concept. The main object of the games was to test a new Yugoslav defense concept devised after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In a development that has gone almost totally unnoticed abroad, Yugoslavia has quietly carried out the world's fastest buildup of conventional forces. More than 1,000,000 Yugoslav workers between the ages of 18 and 45 have been organized into a new auxiliary territorial army, supplementing the regular armed forces and fully equipped with heavy infantry, antitank and antiaircraft weaponry. By 1973 the number will grow to 3,000,000, giving the country a militia-style defense force more than twice as big as South Viet Nam's People's Self-Defense Force. The new defense system, borrowing heavily from the example of the Partisans in World War II, is designed to turn practically every Yugoslav into a fighter.

Chalk Talk. Will the plan work? The war games began with enemy air attacks on towns in a large area southwest of Zagreb. Enemy tanks sliced southward from the direction of Hungary, the scene of recent Warsaw Pact maneuvers and an obvious route for possible Soviet invaders.