"This 'heroic' aspect of the Partisan struggle, deeply inspiring to scholars-turned-soldiers like Deakin, reads well on the page. But in practice of waging a politico-military campaign over the length and breadth of Yugoslavia brought untold suffering to its peoples. Their history was already one of bitter and violent rivalry, which the war had reawoken. In the north leaders of the Catholic Croats had taken advantage of Italian sponsorship to unleash a campaign of expulsion, forced conversion, and extermination against the Orthodox Serbs. Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina took a hand in the civil war also, while in the south the Serbs of Kosovo were attacked by their Albanian neighbors. The Chetniks, for their part, contested authority in the Serb lands with the Partisans, with whom they had failed to agree a join strategy, but did not open war with the German occupiers lest that provoke reprisals. Tito hardened his heart against reprisals; indeed, he saw Axis atrocities as a spur to recruitment. He deliberately drew the Germans after him in seven so-called 'offensives' that left the countryside through which his Partisans marched a wasteland. The villagers had either to follow the Partisans 'into the woods' (a traditional description of the whereabouts of resisters to the Turks) or stay and await reprisals. Kardelji, Tito's deputy, was emphatic about the desirability of confronting the uncommitted with such a dilemma: 'Some commanders are afraid of reprisals and that fear prevents the mobilisation of villages. I consider the reprisals will have the useful result of throwing Croatian villages on the side of Serb villages. In war we must not be frightened of the destruction of whole villages. Terror will bring about armed action.' Kardelji's analysis was correct."