In the quiet suburbs of Solihull, England, where the hum of modern life drowns out echoes of distant thunder, 103-year-old Bernard ‘Bernie’ Smith sits by his window, a faded beret on the table beside him. For eight decades, he’s carried the weight of classified missions like a shadow no one else could see. But on a crisp November morning in 2025, the last surviving member of the Royal Signals Regiment’s covert raiding unit—known only as the “Floating Section”—has chosen to shatter the silence. In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Smith, sharp-eyed and unbowed despite his century-plus, recounts the raw terror and triumphs of fighting Nazis deep in occupied Yugoslavia. Flanked by fearless partisan women who wielded rifles like extensions of their will, he survived ambushes, captures, and betrayals. And in one heart-stopping moment, an ingeniously hidden pistol became the thin line between life and a Gestapo grave. As the world marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day, Smith’s tale isn’t just history—it’s a defiant reminder that some warriors never fade.

Born in 1922 in Birmingham’s industrial heartland, Smith grew up amid the clatter of factories and the specter of economic despair. The son of a steelworker and a seamstress, he left school at 14 to apprentice as an electrician, dreaming of wiring the world one circuit at a time. But when Hitler’s shadow lengthened over Europe in 1939, the lanky teen enlisted in the British Army, volunteering for the Royal Signals—the unsung heroes who kept lines open amid chaos. “I was good with wires, see? Radios, telegraphs—that was my ticket,” Smith recalls, his voice a gravelly Midlands drawl laced with wry humor. By 1942, at 20, he’d honed his skills into expertise, becoming a “floater”: unattached to any fixed battery, dispatched wherever the whispers of war demanded. His path led to the Raiding Support Regiment (RSR), an elite, top-secret outfit formed in 1943 under Lt. Col. Alan Cruickshank. Blending commandos, signals experts, and misfits, the RSR was Churchill’s scalpel—small teams infiltrating enemy lines to sabotage, scout, and signal for air strikes. Officially disbanded in secrecy post-war, its 400-odd members operated from a convent HQ near Bari, Italy, launching hit-and-runs across the Adriatic, Greece, and the Yugoslavian mountains.

Yugoslavia in 1943 was a cauldron of carnage, where Axis forces clashed with Josip Broz Tito’s communist partisans in a brutal guerrilla war. The Nazis, bolstered by Croatian Ustaše fascists, scorched villages and hunted resistors with hellhound efficiency. Into this inferno plunged Smith, parachuted onto the partisan-held island of Vis in the Adriatic Sea, a rocky outpost buzzing with Allied subs and resistance fighters. “Dropped in like a sack of spuds—pitch black, sea crashing below,” he chuckles, fingers tracing an old scar on his forearm from a barbed-wire scrape. From Vis, he ferried to Tito’s mountain HQ in Bosnia, a labyrinth of caves and firs where 20,000 partisans plotted the Axis’s downfall. Smith’s role? Radio operator extraordinaire, threading Morse code through enemy jamming to coordinate bombings and extractions. But signals work was prelude; the real grit came in joint ops with the partisans—fierce, ragtag warriors who bled the Nazis dry through ambushes and sabotage.

And among them? The women. Smith’s eyes light up at the memory of the “beautiful, unbreakable” partisan girls—teenagers and mothers turned avengers, their headscarves hiding grenades, rifles slung over threadbare dresses. “They were lions in skirts,” he says simply. Figures like Mira, the 22-year-old sniper from a razed Croatian village, who could drop a sentry at 300 yards and vanish into the mist. Or Elena, the explosives whiz whose homemade bombs crippled Wehrmacht convoys. These women, comprising up to 10% of Tito’s forces, weren’t footnotes—they were the spine. Smith fought shoulder-to-shoulder with them in the neretva River campaign of early 1943, a grueling 300-mile trek where 12,000 partisans evaded 100,000 Axis troops in one of WWII’s greatest evasions. “We’d huddle in snow-choked gullies, Mira scouting ahead, her eyes like a hawk’s. Nazis everywhere—Ustaše dogs with their black hats, baying for blood. We’d hit supply lines at dawn: I’d signal the RAF for Hellcats, they’d strafe the lot. But it was the girls who saved us time and again—nursing wounds, rigging traps, keeping morale with songs that’d make you weep.”

The partisans’ fight was existential: against not just Germans, but Ustaše atrocities that rivaled Auschwitz in savagery. Smith witnessed the aftermath—villages gutted, civilians strung from barn rafters. “I’d radio it out, but words couldn’t capture the stench of hate,” he admits, pausing as emotion flickers. Yet amid horror, ingenuity bloomed. The RSR’s “floating” ethos meant improvisation: fake radio chatter to lure patrols, silenced Sten guns smuggled in olive crates. But Smith’s defining close call came in a botched raid near Mostar in summer 1943. Detached to link with a partisan cell, his team—Smith, Mira, and three others—ambushed a Ustaše convoy, seizing ammo crates before melting into the pines. Betrayed by a collaborator, they were cornered in a ravine. “Gunfire cracking like whips, bullets chewing the rocks. Mira dropped two, but they swarmed us. I took a graze to the leg—thought that was it.”

Captured and bound for a Zagreb Gestapo cell, Smith faced interrogation by SS Hauptsturmführer Karl Becker, a scar-faced enforcer notorious for “persuading” resistors. Stripped, beaten, and branded a spy, he endured three days of waterboarding and mock executions. “They wanted Tito’s codes, our drop zones. I’d give ’em fairy tales—positions of phantom units,” Smith says, his fist clenching. But escape hinged on a stroke of British cunning: the “hidden weapon” sewn into his uniform by RSR tailors back in Bari. A bespoke .38 Webley revolver, its barrel filed to three inches, stock hollowed for ammo, and the whole concealed in a false hem along his trouser leg. Weighing ounces, it was a ghost gun—undetectable by pat-downs, triggered by a simple thread pull. “Our quartermaster called ’em ‘tailor’s revenge.’ For lads like me, floating solo, it was insurance.”

On the fourth night, as guards slacked with schnapps, Smith yanked the thread. The pistol dropped silently into his palm. Mira, chained nearby, whispered a prayer in Serbo-Croatian. One shot felled the sentry; a second shattered his manacles. “Quiet as a sigh—silencer was just oiled cloth, but it worked.” They overpowered the dozing pair, Mira garroting one with her hairpin, Smith pistol-whipping the other. Slipping into the sewers, they rendezvoused with partisans who smuggled them to Tito’s lines. That hidden Webley didn’t just save Smith—it echoed across ops, with RSR reports crediting similar “concealments” for 20 escapes. “Mira called it my ‘little English dragon.’ She kissed it after—said it breathed fire for the free.”

Post-escape, Smith rejoined the fray, aiding the Adriatic campaign where RSR signals guided naval bombardments that sank U-boats off Dubrovnik. By 1944, as Allies stormed Normandy, his unit shifted to Albania, harrying German retreats. Demobbed in 1945 with an unadorned Mention in Dispatches—”secrecy’s curse,” he quips—Smith returned to civvy street, marrying sweetheart Doris and raising two sons in Solihull. He wired factories by day, coached local football by night, burying war ghosts deep. “Kids asked about scars; I’d say football fouls. Easier than truth.” Doris, who passed in 2018, knew fragments; only now, with sons urging a memoir, does he unburden.

At 103—frail but fierce, mobility scooter his chariot—Smith’s reflections cut sharp. “Those partisan women? Heroes forgotten. They lost homes, kin, but never fire. Mira… she survived, raised a family in Zagreb. We wrote till ’98—last letter said, ‘Fight on, Bernie, in your quiet way.’” He laments youth’s WWII amnesia: “TikTok tanks, not real ones. Tell ’em: Freedom’s no app—it’s blood and wire.” Historians hail his unit’s impact: RSR ops disrupted 50+ Nazi convoys, saved countless Allied lives. As declassification lifts veils—thanks to 2023 archives—Smith’s voice joins a fading chorus. Only 1% of WWII’s 16 million Allied vets remain, per VA stats.

Social media, an alien realm to Smith, buzzes with his story. X (formerly Twitter) threads from @WarHistoryMag rack 50K views: “103yo RSR survivor spills on partisan sisters & sewn-in savior pistol. WWII’s hidden heart.” A GoFundMe for his care hits £20K, fans mailing berets and brandy. “Never thought I’d be the last,” Smith muses, toasting with tea. “But if speaking keeps their fire lit… worth the ache.”

In Solihull’s twilight, Bernie Smith’s tale endures—a warrior’s whisper against oblivion. From Yugoslav peaks to English hearths, it affirms: Some battles echo eternal, hidden pistols or not. As he signs off, “To Mira and the girls: Slava—glory. We won because we dared.”