As a Lightly-Armoured Willys Jeep Crawled Through a Remote Yugoslavian Village, the Two British Soldiers Sensed Something Wasn’t Right – At the Wheel Was ‘Blondie’ Smith of the Long Range Desert Group

As the lightly-armoured Willys jeep crawled through a remote village deep in the Yugoslavian mountains, the two British soldiers riding in her instantly sensed that something wasn’t quite right. At the wheel was ‘Blondie’ Smith of the Long Range Desert Group – that band of reconnaissance specialists who, until recently, had supported the SAS in the North African desert. But now, in the autumn of 1943, the war had shifted to Europe’s underbelly, and Smith, 22 and battle-hardened, was leading a covert mission into Tito’s partisan heartland. Beside him sat his navigator, a wiry sergeant with a map and a Mauser pistol, while in the back bounced crates of explosives and tinned bully beef. The air hummed with tension – not from the engine’s growl, but from the eyes watching from shadowed doorways.

The driver of the jeep was a young woman with dark curls escaping her scarf, her hands steady on the wheel despite the juddering track. She was Mira, one of the fearless partisan women who had joined the British Liaison Mission to Yugoslavia – a secret unit of SOE agents tasked with arming and advising Josip Broz Tito’s communist guerrillas against the Nazi occupation. Mira, 19 and a schoolteacher from Zagreb before the war turned her world to ash, had lost her brother to a Gestapo firing squad. Now, she ferried British supplies through enemy lines, her rifle slung across her back like a schoolbag.

The soldiers’ unease stemmed from the village itself – a cluster of stone houses clinging to the hillside like frightened children. Smoke curled from chimneys, but no children played in the dust, no dogs barked. It was too quiet, the kind of silence that precedes a trap. Smith slowed the jeep, his eyes scanning the treeline where partisans had warned of German patrols. “Mira,” he whispered in broken Serbo-Croatian, “something’s off.” She nodded, her hand drifting to the hidden weapon under her seat – not a grenade or pistol, but an ingenious contraption the British had smuggled in: a silenced Sten gun disguised as a fishing rod, its barrel wrapped in canvas and twine.

Suddenly, rifles cracked from the upper windows. Bullets pinged off the jeep’s thin armour, shattering the windscreen. Smith swerved, the vehicle fishtailing on the gravel as Mira floored it, her foot slamming the accelerator. “Go! Go!” the navigator yelled, returning fire with his Mauser. A German MG42 chattered from a barn, stitching the road behind them. The jeep lurched over a ditch, Mira’s knuckles white on the wheel, her mind flashing to her brother’s last letter: “Fight for the living.”

Smith grabbed the “fishing rod,” yanking the canvas free to reveal the Sten. He fired from the passenger seat, the suppressed rounds whispering death into the ambushers. One German toppled from a window, clutching his throat; another crumpled in the doorway. Mira gunned the engine, the jeep roaring up the hill as bullets whined past. “You saved us,” Smith gasped, reloading. Mira didn’t smile. “No – we save each other.”

They escaped, but the ambush cost them: the navigator took a grazing wound to the arm, and two supply crates were lost to the ravine. Back at the partisan camp, Mira cleaned the Sten with steady hands, her eyes distant. “They come for us because they fear us,” she said. Smith, patching his mate, nodded. “Fearless women with hidden weapons – that’s the Nazis’ worst nightmare.”

Now, 82 years later, the last survivor of that mission – ‘Blondie’ Smith, 103 – breaks his silence from a quiet bungalow in Dorset. “Mira wasn’t just a driver,” he tells the BBC, voice frail but eyes sharp. “She was our weapon. That Sten saved our lives more times than I can count – disguised as a rod, it let us strike from the shadows.”

Smith’s unit, part of Operation Flounced in 1943, delivered 50 tons of arms to Tito’s partisans, who tied down 20 German divisions and shortened the war by six months. Mira, one of 100,000 women in the resistance, survived to become a diplomat. “She taught me courage isn’t loud,” Smith says. “It’s the woman who drives through hell with a fishing rod in her lap.”

As Smith’s memoir Jeep Through the Mountains releases this week, Mira’s story – long classified – emerges. In a world still scarred by war, her hidden weapon reminds us: the quietest fighters often wield the sharpest blades.