Josip Broz Tito, commander of the Yugoslav Partisans, was the only allied leader to be wounded in battle.
F.W. Deakin, was one of the British officers with the Mission to the Yugoslav Partisans. This is his recounting of the event that happened on June 9th 1943 during the Battle of Sutjeska:
*"The enemy planes, a motley circus of Dorniers, Henschels, Stukas, and weird flying machines, caught us at dawn in the glades of birch trees just below the summit of Ozren.
In low continuous sweeps along the Sutjeska valley they sought to close the crossing to the second group ofthe Yugoslav force now trapped between the Piva and the river line just behind us.
But the aircraft had also spotted and identied our concentration of figures among the trees on the crests of the surrounding hills to the west of the German strongpoint at the village of Tjentiste.
A sinister game was imposed upon those of us caught on the heights. The planes, in low dives, criss-crossed the wood in straight patterns, leaving in each run a neat path of bombs and, at times, the smaller fry tossing grenades from their cockpits.
One could only dodge among the birch trees, seeking cover in an instinctive variety of postures: now rigid against a tree trunk; now crouched among the shattered branches.
On such a bombing run, a group of us was cornered. I had just time to shout to Stuart: ‘Take cover; they are using explosive bullets.” As the explosions darted through the trees, we scattered in the tight space around us: Bill Stuart and a group of officers in one direction; Tito, the commander of his Escort Battalion, and myself in another.
The remaining members of the British mission and the Yugoslav Staff dispersed amid the trees. As the last bomb of one stick blew up a few feet from us, Tito, several of his men, and myself found ourselves heaped in a shallow depression in the ground. We pulled ourselves out and sought fresh cover from the following wave, but we were not unscathed.
One of the commanders of the Escort Battalion and several of his men lay dead; Tito, wounded by a bomb splinter in the shoulder, lay under the body of his Alsatian dog, who had thrown himself across his master at the second of the explosion; and I hobbled out, my left boot blown away, and limping with a slight leg wound."*
Tito found the dog that saved his life in the town of Prozor, back in July 15th 1942, two days after the town was liberated from Italians.
Tito named the dog Lux.
Lux never left his side for almost a year, untill it was killed by German planes.
After Lux’s death Tito got a new German shepherd named Tiger. Two dogs are often mixed up.
