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Great Daring Moments From History

Khalid Elhassan September 28, 2020 31 min

Josip Broz Tito - World War II — Yugoslav partisans wading across a river. Wikimedia

2. Joining the Anti Fascist Fight

Yugoslav partisans wading across a river. Wikimedia

Stjepan Filipovic was a Croatian, who was born in 1916 in what become Yugoslavia after World War I. He left home at sixteen and became a metalworker. In 1937, he joined the local workers’ movement and became an activist member. Arrested for political activity, Filipovic was sentenced to a year in jail. Imprisonment only served to further radicalize him, and upon his release in 1940, Filipovic joined the Communist Party.

In 1941, Germany invaded and overran Yugoslavia. Filipovic volunteered to join the partisan resistance against the Nazi occupiers, and was posted to a guerrilla unit near Valjevo, in today’s Serbia. Given responsibility for recruitment and for securing arms, he excelled in his duties, showed so much promise, and displayed so much daring, that by year’s end he had risen to command an entire partisan battalion.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.