European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

We had a hard time because a plane came to shoot at us,

so we got stuck in the ditch like frogs, surrounded by nettles.

Hard moments.

I told my fellows that were 70-80 meters away and said:

"Shoot there, you shoot and we will walk under the shooting line!"

It was an operation for covering people we wanted to rescue.

They weren't experts, they shot like idiots with the machine guns, they shot a lot,

whereas they were supposed to fire two or three shots and then alternate them

in order to keep the enemy under pressure while we were passing underneath.

Instead, we turned up running with the bullets from machine guns in our back.. These moments ...

The enemies were experts in war, whereas our guys were there but didn't know anything.

For instance, there was "Jack", a friend of mine, who died some time ago,

whose machine gun got stuck one time. So I told one partisan colleague:

"Drop the hand grenade!" and he dropped it without the safety catch, like a stone.

Throwing a hand grenade is not such an easy thing, you must count, you have to ...

You have to be prepared to drop a hand grenade,

you throw it and then you have to get cover, you need protection,

you can't just throw it like that because it goes up like this.

And then you have to estimate the distance, the force you use,

you have to throw it at least twenty or ten meters away, otherwise you get hurt yourself, too.