The Forgotten 500

by Gregory A. Freeman

  Mihailovich had been a war hero in World War I and had achieved the rank of colonel in the Yugoslav army. Like many Serb officers in the army, Mihailovich was known as “a man of the people” who looked out for the peasants in the countryside. He was known throughout the military, and by some leaders abroad, as a brilliant strategist and theoretician, though his outspoken criticism of some military operations earned him official rebukes and even house arrest on more than one occasion. While there were those who differed with him on politics and military strategy, scarcely anyone could fault Mihailovich as a man. He was known by all as a man of great integrity, dignified and controlled at all times, and he consistently displayed an egalitarianism that others of his rank did not always share. Mihailovich always took his meals sitting on the ground with common soldiers, not in more comfortable quarters with officers, and he carried his own knapsack on long marches. This man of the people was always willing to sit down with local people and hear their concerns.

  No matter what else his detractors might have said of Mihailovich, there was no disputing his loyalty to Yugoslavia and its monarchy. When the Germans invaded, Mihailovich led seven officers and twenty-four noncommissioned officers and soldiers who refused to surrender and retreated to the hills. After arriving at Ravna Gora, mountain country in the region of Serbia, on May 8, he started organizing parts of the splintered Yugoslav army into the Yugoslav Army of the Homeland, dedicated to driving the Nazis out of their country but also vehemently opposed to the Communists who were promoting Soviet-style government. In the first year after the fall of Yugoslavia, Mihailovich’s forces didn’t constitute much of a formidable force; he was mostly trying to consolidate the bits and pieces of the Yugoslav army that were still in isolated pockets throughout the country. A major challenge was gaining the trust and cooperation of individual commanders who were accustomed to working independently. Mihailovich had his hands full fighting the Germans, Fascist Italy, the Ustashe Fascists from Croatia, and anyone promoting a Communist future for Yugoslavia. As far as the Allies were concerned, and especially the Americans, Mihailovich was our man in 1941—opposed to both the Germans and the Communists, and having pledged his support to the Allied cause.

  At first Mihailovich and his guerillas were able to concentrate on the German occupiers because he did not seek to directly engage any of the other enemies. In fact, he didn’t seek confrontation even with the Germans on a large scale. Though he was well liked by the Yugoslav people and hailed as a hero by those in the hill country, Mihailovich did not try to incite a mass uprising against the Germans and others occupying their country. After seeing the catastrophic Serb losses in World War I, in which the Kingdom of Serbia lost a quarter of its male population, Mihailovich could not encourage the people of his country to charge German machine guns with their pitchforks and axes. His strategy, instead, was to gather men and materials and create a stronghold in the Serbian hills while he awaited an Allied landing that would liberate Yugoslavia the same way Italy had just been freed from German control. Mihailovich’s plan was to prepare a large army that could be mobilized quickly at the right moment, attacking the Germans and Italians just as the Americans and British were approaching. To that end, he avoided any premature conflicts that could lead to the destruction of his fighting force. In particular, he avoided enlisting the local Serbs in espionage or overt sabotage against the German occupiers because he thought the risk was too great. Having seen almost three thousand civilians executed in the towns of Kraljevo and Kragujevac in October 1941 as reprisals for sabotage against the Germans, Mihailovich took a firm position that he could not expose the people of Yugoslavia to such risk unless the outcome was great enough to justify the inevitable deaths from reprisal. Until he knew the Allies were on the brink of invasion, he thought, it rarely was worth the lives of innocent villagers just to kill a German soldier or blow up a bridge. That conviction led Mihailovich’s forces to concentrate their efforts on delayed sabotage that made reprisals less likely, but it should be noted that Mihailovich found protecting the downed American airmen to be so important that he was willing to risk lives and even see villages massacred rather than give them up.

  The exiled King Peter supported Mihailovich, and the colonel who refused to surrender rose in rank in the exile government, becoming minister of war on January 11, 1942, and then general and deputy commander-in-chief on June 17. That prompted the Time magazine cover, and Mihailovich was lauded the world over for fighting the German war machine from within occupied territory.

  Mihailovich’s position was challenged in June 1941, after the German attack on the Soviet Union, when the Communist movement led by Josip Broz Tito—known as the Partisans—began actively resisting the German and Italian forces in Yugoslavia. A dedicated Communist even before the German invasion, Tito was a member of the outlawed Yugoslav Communist Party in the 1930s and became chairman in 1937. He and his fellow Communists were vehemently anti-Fascist but had been pushing to keep Yugoslavia out of the war until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. With the Soviet Union, the motherland of Communism, under attack, suddenly the Yugoslav Communists felt it was time to fight the Germans occupying their country. Mihailovich wanted nothing to do with Communism, but like the Allies in the West, he didn’t mind if Tito wanted to kill a few Germans. A problem soon arose, however, when Mihailovich realized that Tito was adopting a very different approach from his own. Instead of quietly gathering resources and waiting for the Allies to arrive, Tito was striking out at the German and Italian occupiers like a cuckold with nothing to lose. All-out resistance was Tito’s strategy, and Mihailovich knew it would prompt vicious reprisals from the Germans.

  The reason for the different approaches was crystallized by one of Mihailovich’s senior officers, Lieutenant Colonel Zivan L. Knezevich, who had been chief of the Yugoslav prime minister’s military cabinet and the former Yugoslav military and air attaché in Washington. He noted that Mihailovich’s primary goals were saving the country and its traditions with as few civilian casualties as possible. Tito, he explained, wanted to Sovietize Yugoslavia and establish Communism, and he didn’t care how much Yugoslav blood was shed in the process. “The Communist Partisans wanted immediately to lead the people into an open fight against the forces of occupation although the people were completely bare-handed and the fight could not have benefited anybody,” Knezevich explained soon after the war. Mihailovich “thought that the uprising was premature and that, without any gain in prospect, it would have brought disproportionately great sacrifices. He was not able to convince the Communist Partisans that an open fight could have only one result, namely, the annihilation of the population.”

  Tito’s open opposition prompted reprisals not just in his own territory but throughout Yugoslavia. The Communist actions led to punitive German expeditions in the region of Serbia, where Mihailovich operated, that led to the deaths of seventy-eight thousand Serbians between the ages of sixteen and fifty. And German reprisals weren’t Mihailovich’s only concern. Tito was committing his own crimes against the people of Yugoslavia in his quest for a Communist state.

  In a telegram on February 22, 1943, Mihailovich reported on a recent Tito operation:

  In their flight from the Bihac Republic the Communists forced the entire population to flee with them before the Germans and the Ustashe, in order to protect the Communists from attack. Because of this Communist terror, masses of people are fleeing from Mihac toward Glamoc. As soon as the Germans approach, the Communists abandon these unprotected masses and leave them to the mercy of the Germans and the Ustashe, who massacre them mercilessly. Those who succeed in escaping die in the snow and ice. Between Drvar and Glamoc, there are over five hundred frozen bodies of women and children. All this is more than horrible. That is the fight which the Communists wage, a fight which is directed by foreign propaganda with the aim of systematically annihilating our nation.

  With each such incident, Mihailovich’s resolve grew and the picture became clea
rer to him: The Communists were no better than the Nazis. Though Tito and the Partisan leaders were staunch Communists and planned a Soviet-style postwar government that would gift wrap the Kingdom of Yugoslavia for the Soviet Union, many of those joining the Partisan movement had no such dreams. Some were pro-Communist, but many didn’t care one way or the other. Many joined the Partisan effort because Tito made it clear he was anti-German; he could have been pro-anything and the people who wanted the Germans out wouldn’t have cared. Many Yugoslavs also were directed to one camp or the other purely by geographical proximity. Mihailovich was in the hills where the peasants were his main supporters, and Tito was in the lowlands where city dwellers and others could join his movement. For many, the question was who was going to drive out the Germans, and Tito gave every appearance of doing that more aggressively than Mihailovich.

  The animosity between Mihailovich and Tito also was tied to their ethnic and religious backgrounds, in a country that had a long, bloody history of clashes between rival groups that all called Yugoslavia home. Mihailovich was Serbian and Tito was Croat. The Croats had a deep-seated and long-standing resentment over how the Serbs had dominated the political structure in Yugoslavia for decades, and they saw this conflict as a chance to correct that problem. King Alexander, a Serb, had declared himself the supreme ruler in 1929 and abolished the country’s parliament and constitution. For the next fifteen years, the Croat community seethed and grew ever more resentful that they lived under a Serb dictatorship. Italy, soon to join hands with Nazi Germany, took advantage of the Serb/Croat conflict and supported the Ustashe terrorist organization, which was pushing for an overthrow of the Serb dictatorship. The Ustashe were responsible for the assassination of King Alexander in Marseilles, France, in 1934, which led to the rise of Prince Paul, first cousin of the king. Prince Paul was considered a weak ruler who looked to the British for support and instructions. When King Peter took over from Prince Paul in 1941, he continued to rely on the British and lived in exile in Great Britain during the war.

  The groups’ religious differences only fueled the fires, the Croats adhering to Catholicism and the Serbs belonging to the Orthodox Church. Adding varied loyalties to Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and Democracy to the mix only ensured that the groups would find good reason to shoot at each other eventually.

  The two sides in this civil war hated each other as much as they did the Germans or the Italians, and they both felt fervently—and correctly, it turned out—that the outcome of their conflict would determine the future of Yugoslavia every bit as much as whether the Germans stayed. If Mihailovich prevailed, the country’s future would be monarchist, anti-Communist, and largely democratic. If Tito won, the future Yugoslavia would be Communist, pure and simple. With such sharp contrasts in philosophy, and with the long history of merciless Balkan conflicts influencing their every move, Mihailovich and Tito waged a brutal civil war. When Tito’s men captured Mihailovich territory, they publicly executed anyone even suspected of being sympathetic to the general. Mihailovich’s Chetnik forces followed much the same pattern, though they tended not to be as capricious and put a little more effort into determining who really was a Partisan or Partisan sympathizer before cutting their throats.

  Chapter 9

  Abandoned Ally

  In the early stages of the resistance, Mihailovich and Tito both considered the advantages that could be obtained by combining their forces. But doing so would require one of them to compromise his political beliefs and neither was willing to budge. Better to fight the occupiers separately than give up your commitment to Communism, or your commitment to preserving the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The two sides resisted the Germans in their own ways, with Mihailovich still receiving strong support from the Allies and Tito left to do as he pleased as long as he was undermining the Nazi effort to secure Yugoslavia.

  Though Mihailovich was content to avoid direct confrontation with Tito, the same could not be said for the Communist leader. Tito aggressively attacked Mihailovich’s forces in November 1941, bringing to a head all the differences that had been largely philosophical and theoretical up to that point. From that point forward, both Tito and Mihailovich were forced to divide their attention and their resources, fighting each other for control of Yugoslavia while they fought the Germans so there would be something left to control.

  The growing civil war in Yugoslavia forced the British government’s hand. Sending support to both sides was British policy for a while, but by late 1941, the Allies were beginning to realize that supporting both Tito and Mihailovich would not be productive if they were using the arms and resources against each other and not just the Germans. One or the other had to be the Allies’ man in Yugoslavia, and so the British sent in a field agent named Captain Duane Hudson to investigate the situation. Hudson was an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the British equivalent of the American OSS. This would prove to be the beginning of the end for Mihailovich.

  Communication between the parties consisted mainly of telegrams, radio broadcasts, and the personal reports of agents sent in to meet with Mihailovich, and the records indicate that while the British were annoyed by Mihailovich’s apparent defiance of their orders, he was just as annoyed that they would presume to tell him how to run his insurgency. Hudson spent seven months in Yugoslavia, traveling between Mihailovich’s and Tito’s forces, meeting with both leaders and assessing their commitment to the Allied war effort. When Hudson reported back to his superiors in May 1942, he concluded that Chetnik leaders had collaborated with Italian forces in Montenegro and he confirmed that Mihailovich was taking a passive stance and not actively resisting the German occupation. Though he reported that Mihailovich might be willing to make a secret pact with the Germans or Italians if it would keep Yugoslavia from falling under Communism, he underscored that he thought Mihailovich much preferred an Allied victory. The general and his forces could be counted on to participate in a “grand finale against the Axis” if Allied troops arrived to liberate Yugoslavia, he said. The Chetniks were committed to the Allied cause, Hudson concluded, but they might be more committed to fighting the Communists than the Germans.

  The enemy, on the other hand, clearly saw Mihailovich as a threat. In the latter part of 1941, not long after Yugoslavia fell, the Germans launched Operation Mihailovich to capture or kill the rebel leader. (They were equally interested in capturing or killing Tito.) The concerted effort to stop Mihailovich reportedly came after German leaders finally realized how strong his movement was and how much it was impeding the German invasion. When Hitler was informed in late 1941 that Mihailovich’s guerilla movement had killed one thousand German troops so far, he announced that for every German soldier killed by Mihailovich, one hundred Serbs would be shot. For every German soldier wounded, fifty Serbs would be killed. Any village harboring Mihailovich or his men would be punished severely. Gunshots from any house would result in the home being destroyed and any male over the age of fifteen executed. The Germans carried out these orders ruthlessly, but Mihailovich evaded the German dragnet. On July 20, 1943, the Axis published a proclamation offering a reward of one hundred thousand gold marks for the capture of Mihailovich, dead or alive. Still, no one turned him in.

  Another SOE agent followed Hudson in and returned with essentially the same conclusions about Mihailovich. He also reported that Mihailovich’s forces in Montenegro were dealing arms with the Italians—a major concern for the Allies because it signaled a lack of loyalty to the Allied cause, or at least a lack of discipline within Mihailovich’s forces—but the agent noted that Tito’s Partisans were doing the same thing. Telegrams from Mihailovich to the exiled Yugoslav government indicated that he had ample opportunity to collaborate with the Germans but consistently refused. In a telegram sent from Mihailovich on March 2, 1943, he wrote of several instances in which he and his senior officers had been approached by Germans with offers of cooperation. Mihailovich reported that he consistently refused such offers, replying to one query w
ith, “As long as you are shooting and arresting innocent Serbians and as long as you are in our Homeland there can be no negotiations of any kind.” In another telegram on March 10, 1943, Mihailovich again reiterated his refusal to cooperate with the Germans and this time he voiced suspicions that the offers themselves were part of a plot orchestrated by the Communists and the Axis to discredit him and his National Movement with the Allies:

  The attempts of the enemy to get in contact with me continue. This time the offer came both from the Germans and the Italians together, asking me to get in touch with one of my collaborators at least. This attempt I also refused emphatically and I shall continue to do so in the future. The constant attempts of the enemy to establish contact with me, I am convinced, come from a desire to take advantage of the campaign which is being waged in the Allied countries against the National Movement which is headed by the Central National Committee. I do not exclude the possibility of an intrigue on the part of the Germans and the Italians directed against the National Movement and its integrity. Please, be careful.

  Mihailovich voiced those concerns throughout the war, but the British continued to focus on reports of collaboration with the enemy—mostly from their agents in Yugoslavia. There is reason to believe some of those reports of collaboration were well founded but that they missed the big picture. Some instances of collaboration can be found among many warring factions in any war, especially with a loosely organized guerilla movement, but by and large the evidence supports Mihailovich’s loyalty to the Allied cause. Much of what the Allies considered collaboration really could be more accurately termed “accommodations,” which are common and generally benign agreements between warring factions—pragmatic agreements that did not signal any alliance or any backing down from the overall intent to stop each other’s military. An example would be exchanging prisoners or opposing units deciding not to fight each other at the moment because each needed a respite. While these accommodations were the opposite of what the British wanted from Mihailovich, they still did not represent any lack of allegiance to the West.