"Give Us the Job . . ."

After Tito's Yugoslavia broke from Moscow and the Cominform in 1948, the U.S. poured into the country hundreds of millions in arms and war supplies. But Western observers could not get a look at the results, could only wonder whether Dictator Tito's army, which won its World War II fame as a ragged band of partisans, was able to handle modern weapons and machines. A jape circulated through Western embassies in Belgrade had it that the slogan of the Yugoslav army was: "Give us the job, and we'll finish the tools."

Last week Tito took the wraps off some of his 300,000 troops, and the jest proved just a jest. In Ljubljana gap, the mountain corridor leading from the Hungarian plains to Zagreb, Rijeka and Trieste, a group of military observers and reporters from six NATO nations watched while 65,000 Yugoslavs maneuvered. Spruce and high-spirited, they were divided into an "aggressor" force and a defending force covering Zagreb. They maneuvered with Sherman tanks, trucks, jeeps, 90-mm. guns, U.S.-made F47 fighters (World War II's Thunderbolts) and British Mosquitoes, and they handled them with facility.

One weak spot was a battalion parachute drop; an aggressor cavalry force, led by a saber-swinging commander, was in among the paratroops before they got ready to fight. But on the whole, the foreigners were impressed. Said Sir John Harding, chief of the British Imperial General Staff: "The allied program of giving weapons to Yugoslavia can go ahead." Said Major General Charles Palmer, chief of staff of U.S. Army Field Forces: "They took hold of American equipment in good shape, even though they had some of it only a short time."

Tito himself, driving around the maneuvers area in a U.S. jeep, was pleased with his troops' performance and by Western praise of it. But he nostalgically recalled his tough, resourceful partisan bands of World War II. "There is still a role for partisans in modern war," Tito said. "There are two Yugoslav armies, and one of them is partisan."

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