Tito tested cars for Austro-Daimler before he led Yugoslavia
Long before he defied Stalin, Josip Broz was a locksmith's apprentice who drifted across central Europe repairing bicycles, working at Škoda and Benz, and test-driving cars near Vienna. He fenced, danced, and became perhaps the Austro-Hungarian army's youngest sergeant major, a record he later played down.
Broz was born on 7 May 1892 in Kumrovec, in Croatia's Zagorje region, then within Austria-Hungary, to a Croat father and a Slovene mother. He spent much of his early childhood with his grandparents in Podsreda and came back speaking Slovene better than Croatian. He managed four years of primary school, failing one grade, and remained a poor speller all his life. In 1907 his father hoped to send him to America but could not afford the fare, so at 15 he walked into an apprenticeship with a Czech locksmith in Sisak and began selling a socialist newspaper.
Qualified in 1910, he joined the metalworkers' union in Zagreb and then roamed in search of work: Ljubljana, Trieste, Kamnik, Bohemia, where he joined a successful strike, Plzeň, Munich, Mannheim and finally Vienna. At Wiener Neustadt he worked for Austro-Daimler, often testing cars, and picked up German and passable Czech. Conscripted in 1913, he learned to ski, trained as an NCO in Budapest, made sergeant major at 22 and came second in the army's fencing championship.
His war record was more complicated than his later story. He was briefly jailed for sedition in 1914, and he never mentioned that his regiment fought against Serbia before moving to Galicia. Army files found in 1980 showed he had been recommended for a gallantry award after his scouts captured 80 Russian soldiers; comrades considered him loyal to the emperor. Badly wounded and captured in March 1915, he spent 13 months in a Volga hospital, learning Russian from Tolstoy and Turgenev brought by two schoolgirls. He then took part in the Russian Revolution and civil war.
Back home in 1920 he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, leading it from 1939. His Partisans, often regarded as occupied Europe's most effective resistance, took power with Allied backing. As prime minister and then president for life, he broke with Stalin in 1948, promoted workers' self-management, co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement and collected 98 foreign decorations. Critics call his rule authoritarian; admirers, benevolent. He died on 4 May 1980, and twelve years later Yugoslavia broke apart.
Source: Josip Broz Tito
